6 ms·
The Ask
- gjvc 4mo agoQUESTION / REQUEST / REQUIREMENT -- all nouns. Not "Ask". "Ask" is a verb.
- aswegs8 4mo agoAsk is a noun
- gjvc 4mo agoand you are a fool
- aswegs8 4mo agono, u ask noun [ C usually singular ] uk/ɑːsk/ us /æsk/ ask noun [C usually singular] (REQUEST) the act of asking someone to do something or give you something such as money: The message came with "an ask", meaning users were asked to do something upon receiving it. make the ask He was an aggressive fundraiser who worked the phones fanatically and had no hesitation about making the ask.
- jeremyjh 4mo ago"The Ask" is in widespread usage as a noun.
- gjvc 4mo agothat does not in any way make it correct
- jeremyjh 4mo agoThat is absolutely the only requirement for it to be correct. Words are defined by the way people use them, and that can change over time. A dictionary is a record, not a rulebook.
- electrondood 4mo agoIt's only a certain subset of the population that speaks like this. It's pompous and ridiculous. Are the two syllables in the word "request" one too many for people working in Product?
- jeremyjh 4mo agoMost people only use a subset of language, and a lot of language is used only by a small subset of people. "The Ask" is in mainstream usage - or at least known to - the target audience of TFA, which may not include you.
- gjvc 4mo agoare you high / in wonderland? “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.” ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/alice/glass06.htm http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/alice/glass06.htm
- greekrich92 4mo agoThe nouning of verbs is a very annoying type of corpo speak
- throw0101c 4mo ago“Verbing weirds language.” — Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
- JSR_FDED 4mo agoThis is either very profound or not at all. Can’t figure out which.
- jaggederest 4mo agoI think much of this kind of management faffery might be like advertising - I know half is useless, but I'll be damned if I can figure out which half.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoHalf useless, half unnecessary.
- whowasmark 4mo agoWe never found out who Mark was. Or what the problem with Rachel was. Or what and why behind and ahead of the pressure to meet either were in place. So going with not at all. They've literally described their job as having too much cruft that could have been partially solved by the non-existence of their role.
- aswegs8 4mo agoWell at least it led to you finally creating an account on HN. Welcome!
- randallsquared 4mo agoIf they aren't doing this role, then each of the 10 people they directly manage will end up doing 20% of it, and there will be another 30% that no one does and causes large but untraceable-to-this-absence issues in a year.
- leokennis 4mo agoApart from the tone which is not my cup of tea either, I think what these types of articles/advice try to convey is that we (the working population) are still the monkeys we were thousands of years ago. Sometimes we do stuff well because we like the other monkey we're doing it with. Sometimes we do stuff badly because we are an angry monkey. Sometimes we do the right thing but we cannot really explain why. We can sort of predict what the future will be like but not really well. Management is pretending to "execute programs" and "align value chains" and "strategize on market trends" because the suits they wear are very expensive. But the reality is that they are also monkeys, who try to manage the emotions and urges and pitfalls of other monkeys by guiding interactions between the monkeys. This kind of slightly wooly, slightly look-at-me-being-business-y kind of writing feels to me like selling your "I'm a monkey who can sometimes make other monkeys interact more effectively" as some cold hard logical skill.
- subygan 4mo agoI hate middle management as much as the next guy. but in this case, specifically. who are these career people thinking about orgs and their movement in years? especially in a job economy where employees are expected to be laid off despite "staggering profits". It feels completely orthogonal to the environment I exist in. is there room for lifers in big orgs? without getting the boot or worrying about the boot?
- jimbokun 4mo agoRelationship oriented workers keep their network as they move from job to job. Never know who you might be able to help or be helped by in the future.
- busterarm 4mo agoI'm in a big org and while we had a lot of COVID-related turnover, before and after COVID our average engineer tenure went from ~1.6 years to something like 6-7. I'm at the upper end of my part of the org at 8+ (one at 9, one at 11 one at 13). Only like 3 people in my group are below 6. I would like to move on but also given the current climate that seems ludicrous. People I talk to in similar places are in the same boat. Hiring is frozen, there's not enough people to manage everything we have, and everyone remaining is hanging on for dear life.
- chipsrafferty 4mo agoWell, nobody said lifers. But you can't really get a management job without already having management experience. You typically have to be promoted internally, not just go look for a management job elsewhere with no experience.
- jdw64 4mo agoHow did you start freelancing? -> The Ask: I want to become a Korea-based freelancer securing work from the US
- 1123581321 4mo agoI liked this, although it seemed like there were unusual typos/missing words for Rands in a couple of places. Is this a book draft? It's a good exercise to mentally go around the a meeting room and think about what each person wants from it. Given Rands' job, he obviously starts thinking about it earlier, and for longer, but even a few minutes while everyone's settling in and chit-chatting can make a difference in how you participate.
- danjl 4mo agoHarsh take: AI should replace most middle management. It is the easiest part of an organization to replace. The people making things should mostly communicate about company strategy, cross-team issues, and job requirements with an AI. There should be a handful of high-level strategy on top of the AI. The AI should have access to all the documents for the company. The middle management should be put in a spaceship along with HR and sent off to another planet so the people who build things can just get stuff done. This will never happen.
- cweagans 4mo agoI have a theory. How close does the following describe you? * You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role * Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management. * You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests. Humor me, please. I'll explain after.
- LPisGood 4mo agoFor the sake of moving this along, that describes me perfectly. Please, continue.
- motoxpro 4mo agoManagement advocates for AI because see ICs as commodities that just need to be coordinated to "do the thing." In this situation, remove the mid-managers, replace the ICs with AI, and use AI to enable them to coordinate the "workers." They forget that organizations exist to organize human output, which requires nuance, empathy, and communication. ICs advocate for AI because they believe they are "doing the most valuable work." A rational AI would see that and let them do it. In this situation, remove the mid management, replace HR/marketing/sales/etc with AI and use AI to enable them to figure out what to build and they build twice as fast. They forget that the "rational" choice might not be what is best for them, their project, or their career. Each one rebuts this with the way the system has failed them (managers feel that workers do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward, ICs feel like they can do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward)
- corndoge 4mo agoSeems like a good use of time
- cik 4mo agoI've been enjoying Rands for what feels like 2 decades now. Spot on, over and over again. Great advice few newbies, great reminders for people who have been there before - just generally great. I take this as generally focusing on the what ask (and hence give) becomes. But it reminds me of the business classic Theory of Constraints. To me the laserlike focus, or attempt to get to singular clarity is the point; in this highlight we're seeing the notion of software skills rather then a data-based approach, as it's a soft problem. Both matter. I appreciate this reminder.
- singingtoday 4mo agoSomething about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
- whowasmark 4mo agoLook up the organizational chart meme. Look at Amazon's chart. You'll know what's off.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoIt's the writing of someone who has been writing articles like this for decades now, instead of your average blogger or journalist. Just enjoy the difference.
- gradstudent 4mo agoCan confirm! I've been reading Rands for 20 years now
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoI love how he went back and updated some of his older but still relevant writings, like https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/ https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/.
- ikari_pl 4mo agoTo me, as a non-native speaker it feels like a series of interruptions and focus changes with no natural flow. Hard to follow.
- sdevonoes 4mo agoVery. Short. Sentences. That’s AI
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoAI is trained on but more importantly prompted to write in that style. It's not just annoying⸻it's a choice.
- terabytest 4mo agoThe atrocious writing style makes it at least obvious this wasn’t written by AI. Silver linings.
- w10-1 4mo agoFor a senior manager, the main problem is organizational blinders: people not seeing the direct route (through fear, ambition, loyalty, etc.) Senior people get to ask the cross-cutting questions that others can't (and let the chips fall). For line managers, they are deluged with impossible, specific asks and they have no real way of knowing if the team will be able to perform, or be happy to. They survive by maintaining fictions and blinders, and staying just ahead in chips. I think he's underselling to say it's instinct; in law it's called ripeness, waiting for when something really needs to be addressed, and then ideally just reflect that in a way people can take on instead of taking control. The senior's job is not to intervene unless necessary, and even then to prefer activating others. So I feel it's a project manager mindset to always be tallying asks; while a senior manager is really tracking issues and capabilities on a different timescale, doing the prep to build the capability to address the issue when it's ripe.
- sarabande 4mo agoThis is extremely difficult to read. Can someone summarize the point?
- aswegs8 4mo agoI had the same instinct. Was about to copy paste it into ChatGPT to summarize. But powered through it. tl;dr: your job as a senior manager is to listen to people
- redelbee 4mo agoI understand the following isn’t the point of this piece and yet I still can’t help wondering: How much better off we would all be if “senior management” stopped playing these games to get things done and instead spent most of that time really considering the things getting done and whether they are ultimately good for individuals and society at large. We don’t need another product from the “fruit company” and we certainly don’t need most of what our collective work is making today. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love and crave the experience of working with other people to make things. And I cannot for the life of me understand why seemingly intelligent and talented people like Rands would fritter away their lives and those of others in such trivial pursuits in many cases, and downright evil doings in others. Here I am, worrying about how I am going to afford housing after a divorce, and I’m reading insightful leadership advice from an author who has seemingly spent their career building this leadership expertise at one company that makes the most insanely technologically advanced gambling distraction devices imaginable, another company that makes war and mass surveillance products seemingly out of a corporate strategy to profit from human suffering, and the least objectionable company that only made the most distracting communication-platform-cum-torture-device when it convinced us all email wasn’t fast enough to get things done™ and that now embodies an actual AI hallucination as a company strategy. Why can we not have good leaders in making a society where divorce doesn’t threaten basic human needs? Or maybe one where healthcare is a given? Food being widely available? Instead we band together and create more than $5 trillion worth of “value” in three companies that make absolutely nothing of worth to real human needs. And then we read about the games played inside those companies by humans who could be using their skills for anything else useful and we come here to argue about the merits of middle management. What are we doing? How did we get here? Can any leadership help us work together to dismantle the horrors we’ve created to make room for making things that address real needs?
- dnnddidiej 4mo agoYou need socialism. That is not a snark. I am serious. It is getting rarer in the world. Even the "left" is very capitalist.
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- nottorp 4mo agoInteresting reaction to Rands' style. Does going throuh all that "AI" slop daily makes people unable to tolerate any other kind of style? Is "it was AI generated" a replacement for "I don't like his style"?
- LeftHandPath 4mo agoOne of the rare articles that distills a lot of abstract experience into something clear and actionable. Reminds me of Spolsky's more famous blog posts on software engineering.
- clueless 4mo agoThis is unrelated to this article, but I see such simple titles posted on HN often and given how many articles I read per day on HN, I don't know if it's worth me reading or not until I click it. I wish we had a feature on HN that semantically defined who the intended audience for an article is, specially for such opaque titles. Something like the following (used gemini for this): Here are the 1-2 tags defining the intended audience for each article on the front page: Five frontier LLMs disagree on 67% of 1k real-world fact-check claims Tags: AI Researchers, Machine Learning Engineers YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos Tags: Digital Content Creators, General Tech Consumers A Eureka machine that thinks like nature and explores what AI cannot Tags: Computer Scientists, AI Researchers AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes Tags: Linux Users, Hardware Engineers I analysed 20 years of my chats Tags: Data Enthusiasts, Hobbyist Programmers I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit Tags: Tech Entrepreneurs, Product Managers Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave Tags: Gamers, Creative Coders AI sticker shock hits corporate America Tags: Corporate Executives, IT Managers SimCity 3k in 4k (2025) Tags: Retro Gamers, Game Developers Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter Tags: Programming Historians, Language Enthusiasts What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications Tags: Mobile Developers, Privacy Advocates Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act Tags: E-commerce Professionals, Tech Policy Analysts Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin Tags: Software Engineers, Web Developers I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum) Tags: Network Enthusiasts, Maker/DIY Community More Whimsical OEIS Sequences Tags: Mathematicians, Recreational Math Enthusiasts Libwce: The entropy layer of a wavelet codec, on its own Tags: Compression Engineers, Systems Programmers The Ask (the article you previously asked about) Tags: Engineering Managers, Tech Leaders Seeing Around Corners Using Smartphone-Grade Lidar Tags: Computer Vision Researchers, Optics Engineers Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle Tags: Hardware Hackers, Rust Developers DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode Tags: Search Engine Marketers, Privacy Advocates Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025) Tags: AI Prompt Engineers, NLP Researchers Go: Support for Generic Methods Tags: Go Developers, Systems Programmers Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife Tags: System Administrators, CLI Power Users FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home Tags: General Audience, Intelligence Buffs RamAIn (YC W26) Is Hiring Tags: Job Seekers, AI Engineers Warm up your MacBook (2019) Tags: Mac Users, Hardware Hobbyists Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests (GitHub) Tags: DevOps Engineers, Software Developers A New Typst Template for Pandoc (2025) Tags: Academic Writers, Technical Writers Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference Tags: Neuroscientists, Psychology Researchers Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term Tags: Tech Finance Enthusiasts, General Tech Consumers
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- TomMasz 4mo agoIt's interesting to see things from a senior manager's viewpoint, especially in comparison to what I experienced as a mid-level manager. But it's funny to see that they also end up in meetings that seem to have no reason to happen. We all laugh at "this meeting could have been an email", yet we experience it on regular basis and that's just how things are done.
- settsu 4mo agoSo, cynically, (and I say this with no disrespect intended to the author directly): a screed about how to continue justifying your existence as a—ostensibly "good"—middle manager (using, as its basis, one of the most nausea-inducing jargon terms to ever claw its way out the semi-sentient Dunning–Kruger ooze that is corporate-speak.) And, to be clear, I do actually think a good middle manager is beneficial, if most commonly in the way of any necessary evil, as a very effective grease for the oft poorly meshing cogs of business. Not unlike the fresh breeze of an actually effective project manager or personable AND productive engineer.
- everdrive 4mo agoThere was already a word for an "ask" -- it was called a request. "Ask" is a useless neologism.
- quite-sfwd 4mo agoThe use is to signal you are part of the club that is understands that all meetings have a request. And they're not always explicit.
- electrondood 4mo ago[dead]
- hammock 4mo agoThis comment was a good learning for me.
- HotGarbage 4mo agoNever forget Rands was in Jerkcity (now Bonequest) and had them retroactively replace his character with atandt: https://web.archive.org/web/20170918052437/http://www.jerkcity.com/jerkcity715.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170918052437/http://www.jerkci... https://bonequest.com/715 https://bonequest.com/715 https://web.archive.org/web/20170918052444/http://www.jerkcity.com/jerkcity712.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170918052444/http://www.jerkci... https://bonequest.com/712 https://bonequest.com/712
- cma256 4mo agoI assume based on the content of these comics you'd like to punish him. You don't have to carry this weight. Let it go. It's been 25 years.
- HotGarbage 4mo agoNah, he just needs to own it.
- juliushuijnk 4mo agoPurely about the words 'The ask'. I'm not a native English speaker, but have been reading and sometimes speaking English for decades. For me 'the ask' feels strange. It sounds like it's just a verb made into a noun, like saying 'the sing' or 'the eat'. "I had an eat" "Three asks". What would make someone want to write 'the ask' and not 'request' or even just 'question'? How is it different?
- appplication 4mo agoIn this case, ask is a noun, synonym for a request. “My only ask is that you tell me before you leave”
- ricardobeat 4mo agoDespite being proper english, it has not been part of common language in the past centuries - except for corporate culture, where it probably took of around the 90s. For most people it sounds just as alien as circle back, synergies and not having the bandwidth for X.
- xboxnolifes 4mo agoIts different because corporate workers will bend over backwards to do anything except speak normally in a corporate context. Because, for whatever reason, thats what corporate culture has developed into.
- allenu 4mo agoIt's a common way to phrase a request in the corporate world. It's a bit more of a concrete and explicit than a simple request, something that can be written down in bullet points in a meeting notes summary or an email. I hate it too (and others like "learnings" when "lessons" would suffice), but I see the purpose it serves. Asking a team "What's the ask?" is a way of explicitly asking what the concrete requests are which can be documented and followed up on (i.e. "circle back"), whereas just asking for "requests" is more like asking for preferences, which may not be binding, or a vague direction to go for planning.