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Good points in pg's essay: * CEO/founder should engage directly at multiple levels rather than only interact with the company through their direct reports. (S

Good points in pg's essay: * CEO/founder should engage directly at multiple levels rather than only interact with the company through their direct reports. (Same applies at every management level, btw) * Delegation is good, and it should happen in proportion with trust. * The dominant culture at many tech companies is flawed and sub-optimal. Bad points: * "Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides". The two supporting points could both be true: "VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world." However, it does not follow that the only option left is "Steve Jobs Style." * "an annual retreat for [...] the 100 most important people"... I have trouble envisioning an effective org chart with lots of people at the top who would not also be in the "top 100" list. If your department heads are not your most skilled operators, then... maybe that's a good problem to fix. * Assuming that the skills and intuition that make a founder successful will 100% apply to the very different job of being the chief of a 2000-person tribe. We should not assume that. On average, everyone has an equal chance of needing to learn something new to succeed in a new situation-- founders included. Don't let pg's founder flattery go to your head.

CityOfThrowaway 2y ago
There are many very good reasons why the top 100 most valuable people would not be the department heads. Cracked engineers, designers, growth people, AEs... the best ICs shouldn't necessarily be in management positions. Yet, the CEO should neither be air-gapped from those people nor managing their work/career on a day to day basis.
- boredtofears 2y ago
  I don't think there's any reason to believe IC's who follow the "cracked engineer" manifesto would be in the top percentile. It's basically a guideline to make people more manageable and has little to do with engineering talent.
  - CityOfThrowaway 2y ago
    I have no idea what you're talking about. Cracked is just slang for insanely talented, ergo...
    - boredtofears 2y ago
      I've only heard the term in reference to https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto
      - taormina 2y ago
        Which is the same thing. You've also heard them called rockstars or x10 before. They are referring to the same folks, but calling them "easy to manage" is a hilarious statement.
        boredtofears 2y ago
        Characteristics like "Stay optimistic at all times", "Make people feel excited and energized", and "Behave in a completely authentic way" are not really things I associated with rockstar/10x engineers (which is also a complete BS label for different reasons).
    - nberkman 2y ago
      "Crack", not "cracked". "Crack": adj., first-rate; excellent: a crack shot. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack "Cracked": no such meaning https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked
      - ywain 2y ago
        Urban Dictionary might be a better place for recent internet slang: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
- hluska 2y ago
  I like this comment because I think it does a good job of demonstrating four kinds of important people. You have people who are most important to a: - a project. - a problem. - the organization. And I think we can divide organization into internal and external. When you divide like that, you’ll usually end up with four very different lists with some overlap at an upper management level. None of the four areas are more important than others. If your software problem has a month long outage, that’s a huge problem. But that’s different from if you only have two months of runway left or if nobody has cleaned your office in a month. And since the problems are different, the people involved should be different too. Then you’ll end up with a lot of different hierarchies of most important people depending on what lens you’re looking through.
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  The top 100 people also include low level employees who know the day-to-day reality and won’t bullshit you the way mid-level managers will. And no: all the people who are going to respond to this and say the problem is to hire good, honest, no BS managers, good luck with that. It’s like saying the way to make money in the stock market is to buy low and sell high.
- eapressoandcats 2y ago
  It’s less a question of if they should be managers and more whether there should be formal title recognition. Many companies have “distinguished engineer” positions or similar, and those people are often involved in high level conversations. In Jobs’ case, his personality was probably strong enough that didn’t matter but broadly it can be helpful to officially say, “this person is important even though they don’t manage anyone”. It helps with fairness so that people don’t have to seek out the “secret” ways of being important, and it can accelerate decision making in the absence of someone like Steve Jobs
jmb99 2y ago
My company of ~1600 currently does annual retreats with 90-110ish people. All of the C suite and their direct reports, but also a good number of engineers and other ICs, as well as some “line-level” managers, and 10 people who have been identified as “up and comers” (usually ICs relatively early in their careers, but not exclusively - over the last decade, probably 30-40% have been managers of some sort who were well into their careers but identified as key people in the organization for a number of reasons). Many of the people at the retreat last year were happy exactly where they were, because they were contributing the project/team/company/etc exactly how they wanted to be. This was especially true of the senior engineers in attendance. Just because you’re a top performer, it does not follow that you also want to be a top-level executive.
- maxnevermind 2y ago
  A side question. > ...Just because you’re a top performer... Do you just trust performance reviews for finding them? My experience in BigTech that those can't be always trusted. It seems getting good reviews is a skill and some people are better at it while some others might not even care about ratings at all.
  - jmb99 2y ago
    I don’t think “performance reviews” in the traditional sense are a silver bullet for finding the sorts of employees to invite to such a retreat. They’re good for finding “top performers” (by definition - you define what performance looks like, score your employees on it, and the ones with the highest score are your “top performers”). I personally don’t think that’s particularly useful, and it’s almost completely useless from the perspective of trying to find up-and-coming employees, or insightful employees, or whoever else is most useful to the company at such a retreat. Finding “true” top performers requires much more effort than your average mid-large company wants to spend. You need a collaborative effort between individual contributors, line managers, VPs, and the C-suite to get a good idea of who the most important people in the company are. And part of that is politics (making sure that everyone knows who you are and why you’re important) - there’s always a chance that a super critical person slips under the radar. As an engineer I can tell you who the most important people in my section of the org chart are off-hand, in order of importance. As in, people without whom my org would fail, or at least flounder. Some of them are engineers, some of them are sales/business liaison, some of them are “management” (but frequently do a hell of a lot more than “just” manage). I don’t think a traditional performance review would identify all of them as being mission-critical, but it would probably identify them all as performing at least as expected for their roles. I know at least one fairly critical junior engineer[0] that maybe isn’t the fastest or most efficient worker, but is learning fast and could easily be a top-tier engineer with the right support and growth opportunities. Fortunately my company did identify this and has given them a number of opportunities (including an invite to the retreat, among many others), but a standard performance review would probably score them as “adequate” or whatever other mid-tier. The way this happened for us is frequent “skip-level” meetings, 1-1 or 1-many, as well as quarterly team retreats with all members (up to the VP) present. This allows 3 levels of employees to all interact, and if you keep on top of this as a senior manager or VP (with either an engineering background or an open mind, which all people in this scenario have) it becomes fairly straightforward to find these people. It’s not a formula, or a set of rules/identifiers, or even some guidelines that are followed, which makes it tricky to make this “fair” - it relies on everyone involved having good judgement. [0] I know “critical junior engineer” doesn’t sound great, but it’s what happens when you have a rag-tag team of engineers building a product from the ground up with minimal support from the rest of the company (and thus few resources), and then hit it big and suddenly have a largely successful product on your hands that was written by essentially 4 people. Each one of those 4 people are non-overlapping domain experts, and it just so happens that 3 of them are senior engineers and 1 is a junior. Over the last 6 months this has been improving, but a year ago, it literally was 1 critical junior engineer who was the only person who knew about 20% of the product.
kragen 2y ago
> If your department heads are not your most skilled operators, then... maybe that's a good problem to fix. department heads spend all their time organizing groups of people. if organizing people better is your company's competitive advantage, then sure, putting your best people in those seats is probably best. but if your company's competitive advantage is that it makes better optical instruments, produces gasoline more cheaply, demolishes buildings more safely, or makes better-tasting food—you'd better let your best operators spend a lot of their time grinding mirrors, operating refineries, annotating floor plans, or cooking. if they spend all their time organizing people, your company will lose its competitive advantage

CityOfThrowaway 2y ago

There are many very good reasons why the top 100 most valuable people would not be the department heads. Cracked engineers, designers, growth people, AEs... the best ICs shouldn't necessarily be in management positions. Yet, the CEO should neither be air-gapped from those people nor managing their work/career on a day to day basis.

boredtofears 2y ago
I don't think there's any reason to believe IC's who follow the "cracked engineer" manifesto would be in the top percentile. It's basically a guideline to make people more manageable and has little to do with engineering talent.
- CityOfThrowaway 2y ago
  I have no idea what you're talking about. Cracked is just slang for insanely talented, ergo...
  - boredtofears 2y ago
    I've only heard the term in reference to https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto
    - taormina 2y ago
      Which is the same thing. You've also heard them called rockstars or x10 before. They are referring to the same folks, but calling them "easy to manage" is a hilarious statement.
      - boredtofears 2y ago
        Characteristics like "Stay optimistic at all times", "Make people feel excited and energized", and "Behave in a completely authentic way" are not really things I associated with rockstar/10x engineers (which is also a complete BS label for different reasons).
  - nberkman 2y ago
    "Crack", not "cracked". "Crack": adj., first-rate; excellent: a crack shot. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack "Cracked": no such meaning https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked
    - ywain 2y ago
      Urban Dictionary might be a better place for recent internet slang: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
hluska 2y ago
I like this comment because I think it does a good job of demonstrating four kinds of important people. You have people who are most important to a: - a project. - a problem. - the organization. And I think we can divide organization into internal and external. When you divide like that, you’ll usually end up with four very different lists with some overlap at an upper management level. None of the four areas are more important than others. If your software problem has a month long outage, that’s a huge problem. But that’s different from if you only have two months of runway left or if nobody has cleaned your office in a month. And since the problems are different, the people involved should be different too. Then you’ll end up with a lot of different hierarchies of most important people depending on what lens you’re looking through.
BenFranklin100 2y ago
The top 100 people also include low level employees who know the day-to-day reality and won’t bullshit you the way mid-level managers will. And no: all the people who are going to respond to this and say the problem is to hire good, honest, no BS managers, good luck with that. It’s like saying the way to make money in the stock market is to buy low and sell high.
eapressoandcats 2y ago
It’s less a question of if they should be managers and more whether there should be formal title recognition. Many companies have “distinguished engineer” positions or similar, and those people are often involved in high level conversations. In Jobs’ case, his personality was probably strong enough that didn’t matter but broadly it can be helpful to officially say, “this person is important even though they don’t manage anyone”. It helps with fairness so that people don’t have to seek out the “secret” ways of being important, and it can accelerate decision making in the absence of someone like Steve Jobs

jmb99 2y ago

My company of ~1600 currently does annual retreats with 90-110ish people. All of the C suite and their direct reports, but also a good number of engineers and other ICs, as well as some “line-level” managers, and 10 people who have been identified as “up and comers” (usually ICs relatively early in their careers, but not exclusively - over the last decade, probably 30-40% have been managers of some sort who were well into their careers but identified as key people in the organization for a number of reasons). Many of the people at the retreat last year were happy exactly where they were, because they were contributing the project/team/company/etc exactly how they wanted to be. This was especially true of the senior engineers in attendance. Just because you’re a top performer, it does not follow that you also want to be a top-level executive.

maxnevermind 2y ago
A side question. > ...Just because you’re a top performer... Do you just trust performance reviews for finding them? My experience in BigTech that those can't be always trusted. It seems getting good reviews is a skill and some people are better at it while some others might not even care about ratings at all.
- jmb99 2y ago
  I don’t think “performance reviews” in the traditional sense are a silver bullet for finding the sorts of employees to invite to such a retreat. They’re good for finding “top performers” (by definition - you define what performance looks like, score your employees on it, and the ones with the highest score are your “top performers”). I personally don’t think that’s particularly useful, and it’s almost completely useless from the perspective of trying to find up-and-coming employees, or insightful employees, or whoever else is most useful to the company at such a retreat. Finding “true” top performers requires much more effort than your average mid-large company wants to spend. You need a collaborative effort between individual contributors, line managers, VPs, and the C-suite to get a good idea of who the most important people in the company are. And part of that is politics (making sure that everyone knows who you are and why you’re important) - there’s always a chance that a super critical person slips under the radar. As an engineer I can tell you who the most important people in my section of the org chart are off-hand, in order of importance. As in, people without whom my org would fail, or at least flounder. Some of them are engineers, some of them are sales/business liaison, some of them are “management” (but frequently do a hell of a lot more than “just” manage). I don’t think a traditional performance review would identify all of them as being mission-critical, but it would probably identify them all as performing at least as expected for their roles. I know at least one fairly critical junior engineer[0] that maybe isn’t the fastest or most efficient worker, but is learning fast and could easily be a top-tier engineer with the right support and growth opportunities. Fortunately my company did identify this and has given them a number of opportunities (including an invite to the retreat, among many others), but a standard performance review would probably score them as “adequate” or whatever other mid-tier. The way this happened for us is frequent “skip-level” meetings, 1-1 or 1-many, as well as quarterly team retreats with all members (up to the VP) present. This allows 3 levels of employees to all interact, and if you keep on top of this as a senior manager or VP (with either an engineering background or an open mind, which all people in this scenario have) it becomes fairly straightforward to find these people. It’s not a formula, or a set of rules/identifiers, or even some guidelines that are followed, which makes it tricky to make this “fair” - it relies on everyone involved having good judgement. [0] I know “critical junior engineer” doesn’t sound great, but it’s what happens when you have a rag-tag team of engineers building a product from the ground up with minimal support from the rest of the company (and thus few resources), and then hit it big and suddenly have a largely successful product on your hands that was written by essentially 4 people. Each one of those 4 people are non-overlapping domain experts, and it just so happens that 3 of them are senior engineers and 1 is a junior. Over the last 6 months this has been improving, but a year ago, it literally was 1 critical junior engineer who was the only person who knew about 20% of the product.

kragen 2y ago

> If your department heads are not your most skilled operators, then... maybe that's a good problem to fix. department heads spend all their time organizing groups of people. if organizing people better is your company's competitive advantage, then sure, putting your best people in those seats is probably best. but if your company's competitive advantage is that it makes better optical instruments, produces gasoline more cheaply, demolishes buildings more safely, or makes better-tasting food—you'd better let your best operators spend a lot of their time grinding mirrors, operating refineries, annotating floor plans, or cooking. if they spend all their time organizing people, your company will lose its competitive advantage