3 ms·

Interestingly, I was at Google during I think the very end of its golden years (2011-2016). I loved it and when I heard about how sclerotic it had gotten was pr

Interestingly, I was at Google during I think the very end of its golden years (2011-2016). I loved it and when I heard about how sclerotic it had gotten was pretty surprised. Looking back, IMO the seeds of its downfall had already been planted by the time I was there, including the culture of blameless postmortems. There was this idea that any problem—any outage or whatever —reflected not stupidity on the part of the perpetrator (Google hires the smartest people after all) but a process failure. Blameless postmortems avoided blame by ending with a process recommendation. I’ve worked at startups since, and I do think that creating an environment where people are comfortable taking risks is just a fundamentally hard culture problem, and you don’t even have to be big to have it (though it doesn’t help). I’ve seen 15-person startups where engineers wouldn’t fix something because “I’m just an engineer and this is really a product decision” while the PM says “we need to get the engineers together in a meeting and come to a consensus on this.” IMO Google’s hack of giving people space to take risks by letting them pass off failure as a process problem did sort of work, to their credit, until they got to where it sounds like they are now, where you can’t do anything without being accused of bypassing “good process,” which means going to endless lengths to get everyone’s opinions and placating everyone who disagrees with you. It seems like at Meta they solved the problem by regarding failure as good and just. At my current company, to do something risky, you have to write a design doc and have a comment period, and then you’re free to do whatever the doc proposes. Idk what other approaches there are—I’d pay to read a book about it, though.

pocketsand 2y ago
For what it’s worth, in most cases, an organization that overly focuses on process is superior to one with a naive individualism that throws employees under the bus by default.
ZaoLahma 2y ago
It seems this is a common problem with larger organizations, that everything turns (corrupts) into a process. I've even seen processes for following processes. To make the problem worse, nobody dares to remove from a process as that would mean they would be accountable for the consequences of the "missing steps", and at the same time adding to a process is almost always safe - another step in a process to clarify or verify can't really fail and having contributed to the process work in a process driven organization looks fantastic on your yearly review. So we get more and more processes that are perpetually growing in scope. The long term damage that heavy processes do, what I've seen first hand, is extreme stagnation. Even simple and straight forward improvements are avoided if it means that you need to produce ridiculous documentation that nobody will ever need, or seek approval from a (very busy) group of people who contribute nothing other than checking that you followed the processes.
- hinkley 2y ago
  When I remove steps I brag about it. I don’t know or recall if I ever consciously reasoned that as trying to normalize that activity, but that is certainly what I’m doing. Shorter processes in clock time matter more than step count, but it’s hard to do one without the other.
hinkley 2y ago
I think I’m pretty good at Five Whys, for two reasons. One, I have enough of a chess player’s mind where I can see at about the third Why that someone is steering us toward a toothless solution and steer us toward a better one. But the other one is that blameless doesn’t mean we don’t talk about the person who fucked up. The entire point of the NTSB’s version of the process is to get pilots and ground crew to be vulnerable. To explain how they pushed the wrong button or signed off on a maintenance deferment or whatever. I was tired, I got asked tangential questions during a critical moment. I misinterpreted the text, etc. I’m neurodivergent. I spend way too much of my day analyzing my errors. But the way my brain works on a Tuesday is the way everyone else’s works in the middle of a high stress situation. For me it still feels like a bad Tuesday. The tools and steps I build for keeping me from looking stupid also work for the team, once they give them a chance. And during Five Why’s I just have to say the quiet parts out loud, and I can speculate rather well on whether other people had similar experiences.

pocketsand 2y ago

For what it’s worth, in most cases, an organization that overly focuses on process is superior to one with a naive individualism that throws employees under the bus by default.

ZaoLahma 2y ago

It seems this is a common problem with larger organizations, that everything turns (corrupts) into a process. I've even seen processes for following processes. To make the problem worse, nobody dares to remove from a process as that would mean they would be accountable for the consequences of the "missing steps", and at the same time adding to a process is almost always safe - another step in a process to clarify or verify can't really fail and having contributed to the process work in a process driven organization looks fantastic on your yearly review. So we get more and more processes that are perpetually growing in scope. The long term damage that heavy processes do, what I've seen first hand, is extreme stagnation. Even simple and straight forward improvements are avoided if it means that you need to produce ridiculous documentation that nobody will ever need, or seek approval from a (very busy) group of people who contribute nothing other than checking that you followed the processes.

hinkley 2y ago
When I remove steps I brag about it. I don’t know or recall if I ever consciously reasoned that as trying to normalize that activity, but that is certainly what I’m doing. Shorter processes in clock time matter more than step count, but it’s hard to do one without the other.

hinkley 2y ago

I think I’m pretty good at Five Whys, for two reasons. One, I have enough of a chess player’s mind where I can see at about the third Why that someone is steering us toward a toothless solution and steer us toward a better one. But the other one is that blameless doesn’t mean we don’t talk about the person who fucked up. The entire point of the NTSB’s version of the process is to get pilots and ground crew to be vulnerable. To explain how they pushed the wrong button or signed off on a maintenance deferment or whatever. I was tired, I got asked tangential questions during a critical moment. I misinterpreted the text, etc. I’m neurodivergent. I spend way too much of my day analyzing my errors. But the way my brain works on a Tuesday is the way everyone else’s works in the middle of a high stress situation. For me it still feels like a bad Tuesday. The tools and steps I build for keeping me from looking stupid also work for the team, once they give them a chance. And during Five Why’s I just have to say the quiet parts out loud, and I can speculate rather well on whether other people had similar experiences.