Comment by benreesman
1 year ago
This is a reasonably good if somewhat depressing blog post about how to do well in the performance cycle at a big company. Now part of that is shipping product, but that’s pretty clearly of secondary concern for the author.
It sounds to me like this person is good at getting paid no matter how it goes for the shareholders or the rest of the team.
When I worked at a big company I did a lot of mentoring and the dissonance between what people I mentored thought was the "right thing to do" and what it seemed like the organization wanted them to do (enforced via performance reviews or other mechanisms) was a huge hurdle for new engineers. Especially early in your career you're just one engineer in a huge org and most people eventually decide it's easier to go with the flow than fight against it (or they leave) but it was a struggle for people to get there.
This post seems the logical conclusion of that. Why spend your time and stress doing work that your boss doesn't appreciate? Just give them what they want, it's their job to align that with greater organizational goals.
All this being said I did not love working at a big company, partially for these exact reasons.
Not sure if / who am I quoting, but this thought isn't my for sure: the more layers of management the company has, the more times the incentives are inverted between the planning at the very top and the implementation at the very bottom.
It does often feel like Chinese whispers to the people at the very bottom: the orders make no sense whatsoever due to the distortion coming from the middle management. And, I totally agree with your assessment that OP sounds kind of sarcastic about the whole thing. Also the way they phrase it suggests it: it's not even what your boss wants, it's what's going to make your boss happy (if the boss is an idiot, they might want things that will end up making them feel sad, but that only makes your job harder as now you should also anticipate what would actually make them feel happy rather than dully following their advice.)
I think you’re describing any person’s life within a larger social construct.
I don’t see how you can achieve any meaningful goal without collaborating with people in power.
> I don’t see how you can achieve any meaningful goal without collaborating with people in power.
Depends on how you define meaningful. Raising happy & healthy kids, helping someone in need etc, can be meaningful to many people, but don't require 'collaborating with people in power'.
But it does. At the very least, you need to keep paying off the people in power and do everything within the framework of their rules, otherwise you’re in trouble
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> but don't require 'collaborating with people in power'.
You missed this qualifier: "person’s life within a larger social construct."
I did not get that from TFA. I interpreted it as "know your customers and communicate with them". This applies to everything in life. It's especially relevant in big companies because it's easy to forget that you are forgettable.
I mean, if by "customers" you mean "the important people at your company".
> Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship.
> If you ship something users hate and makes no money, but your leadership team is happy, you still shipped. You can feel any way you like about that, but it’s true. If you don’t like it, you should probably go work for companies that really care how happy their users are.
> I mean, if by "customers" you mean "the important people at your company".
I think that's exactly OP's (and TFA's) point: If you're working in most medium sized to large sized companies, just look at your org chart. Your manager, their manager, their manager's manager, and so on up to the CEO: Those are your customers. They are the ones that decide your comp, they are the ones that set your priorities and goals, they are the ones who are ultimately accountable when you fail or succeed. Your job is to deliver what they want. It's definitely a hard pill to swallow if you still have that idealistic view that you're working for end users.
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I mean, being misaligned with company leadership is a great way to loose your job. I worked at a medium sized company which is known for having a good culture. Everyone was kind & helpful, there was loads of autonomy, never any kind of layoffs.
At some point, a team I worked closely with got unexpectedly fired. The entire team, including manager, just gone one day. Not for financial reasons, but because they were “not performing well.” (There were multiple people on the team who had consistently good performance reviews.)
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why that happened. Obviously if that could happen to them (fired despite good feedback), it could happen to anyone.
As far as I could tell, it’s because the CEO or CTO didn’t think the type of work they were doing was worth doing, and also didn’t think they were making a difference.
It’s good to be a self-starter, to advocate for best practices, and to keep users in mind. But at the end of the day, if that doesn’t fit into what your bosses expect from you, you’re done.
That’s why it’s important to communicate with stakeholders. Your boss needs to understand why spending time on preventative maintenance pays dividends on the long run. You can’t spend 75% of your time on stuff that doesn't look productive (which is subjective) and also not be proactive in being on the same page as your stakeholders about what’s important. At some point, they’ll get confused about what you’re actually doing day to day, and your job’s on the line.
> As far as I could tell, it’s because the CEO or CTO didn’t think the type of work they were doing was worth doing, and also didn’t think they were making a difference.
So the CEO/CTO weren't able to express their concerns and priorities and instead just fired the whole team?
If, as you say, there were no financial reasons, then the team could've been re-purposed to do more meaningful (at least in CEO/CTO eyes) work.
You are coming from a rational position with the focus on optimization. Large organizations are not rational, and rarely optimal.
Executive backlogs are so deep that purposefully re-fitting whole team to another job will never end up on the top list. You might see sometimes organization will rehire a whole new team with exact same skillset, and set them to do similar tasks. It happens because execs know how to setup things from scratch quickly, but running a re-fit is a custom project that requires problem solving and large amount of exec drive, and exec resources are extremely scarce and expensive.
From the outside this will seem totally irrational and suboptimal, not to mention unfair. But that's how large orgs operate.
IME working as a team in large companies is dangerously entrepreneurial. What I mean is that there is loose guidance on what needs solving and then it's up to you to figure out how to solve using what you have. If you stray from the original problem too far, you'd better be good at explaining why. It's dangerous because there's a lot of autonomy with the illusion of security.
Keep the original problem in mind always. Keep your head up looking out for competitor teams who might be solving your problem. Know them, align with them.
If you show up on an exec budget spreadsheet and the exec can't defend your value, then you're toast (or transferred).
Now imagine, the product being 50 % income generator at start, but a liability generator of support cost in the long run. Means, you launch the product and its success kills you over time as a bloated giant. All we ever had todo, to be more succesfull, was sell more of the product... famous last words
do you have an example of this scenario? I mean reading it, sounds true but then support is mostly determined by the company's willingness to support (outside of some legal requirements) and so I find it actually difficult to imagine where selling more of the product is a great income generator but the support actually kills you (destroys company) in the long run.
In software at least support costs can be decreased by fixing bugs or identifying high support low value features.
So - I would like to see a company that actually got killed by support costs but was doing good from product sales.
I think most social media counts as such, with the specific example in my head of Twitter only making a profit two years before Musk bought it, cut it to the bone, and increased its legal troubles.
Income starts off proportional to number of users and how much they use it.
Support depends on how many people are anywhere between unpleasant and unlawful.
"Unpleasant" is like weeds, if you're not keeping up they take over and keeping up becomes harder.
"Unlawful" can suddenly get a lot more complex when other legal jurisdictions notice you and (sometimes with or without changing the law because of you) remind you that anyone operating in their jurisdiction must follow their laws and not whichever one you put in your T&C — constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech in one country can be constitutionally unlawful speech in another.
> It sounds to me like this person is good at getting paid no matter how it goes for the shareholders or the rest of the team
The trouble is that your personal influence is remarkably small in most workplaces. Ultimately, you can't change much, and what you can change takes a lot of effort. It often requires being bullish, which can introduce risk to your job.
Sometimes, the choices are as follows: either have the big idea in mind and always strive for the best, sacrificing your mental health, making enemies, and potentially losing your job. Or, keeping your head down and following orders, being a perfect little sailor leading your ship towards the iceberg.
He is probably good at getting paid and getting credit for what he does, but he would need to be good at it to do any good for any other stakeholder, even more than he would need it to be a happy parasite inside the company. We don't know from the text if he cares about benefitting other stakeholders; I would bet that he cares more than average or he would not openly admit various unsavory facts about how things actually work - there's nothing in it for him to be open about it and the typical bigco parasite is unlikely to be open about these things and instead will repeat the party line about the place being a perfect meritocracy.