Comment by imgabe
4 days ago
Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.
A well known CEO noted that in a failing organization he was trying to devise a turn around plan for that everyone in the organization invariably blamed... the other teams! Not a one said "our team is responsible for our failure".
The engineers blamed product, the product people blamed sales, etc.
He said he provided this suggestion, "You are of course right (it's the other groups fault, and it might have been so), but what can you do, in your group, as part of a solution we all work towards to help fix this?"
So yeah, it is the other guys fault. But what you can you do to help fix it?
Classic CEO. "How can you, the powerless IC, fix an organisational problem? No, I mean without me having to do anything meaningful or risky"
Not at all.
The CEO in question publicly declared his own job would be forfeit within a year if he didn't meet goals that were in the recent past history of the company, absolutely impossible.
He met and exceeded those goals.
The IC isn't powerless with good management.
6 replies →
This is such a low effort learned-helplessness response. Look, there are good CEOs and bad CEOs, I'm not here to defend them, but one thing you have to understand is that CEO action is an extremely blunt instrument. Of all the problems in an org, the vast majority can not be directly solved by the CEO, they can just sort of broadly steer the culture in the right direction, but folks down the chain need to solve problems at their own level. Of course there are tradeoffs in an organization and so not every problem can be solved, but if folks who understand the details can't propose any kind of solution that doesn't A) require CEO action or B) every other person to act exactly the way they propose, then they're not really helping.
I understand there's a lot of toxic environments where it's not worth trying to improve things, but a blanket statement pointing at CEOs en masse as the root of all problems is just as stupid and reductive as CEOs who don't do anything to empower ICs and learn from the front-line expertise.
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Sure, that's great if you all work for the same organization and everyone involved asked themselves that and they all benefited from the organization's overall success.
But that is not the case here. That is not how bike lanes or many other things get built. The engineer is a consultant that works for one independent company. The contractor is a different independent company. The client is another company or a government entity. Possibly the client involves several different entities with competing demands and priorities.
And "success" for the engineer doesn't really mean building a good thing. It means a happy client who will come back for repeat business.
How does this problem get fixed? Well, eventually someone hits that curb and breaks their neck and sues the city. Then the city hires an engineer to create design standards that they include in future contracts when they build new bike lanes.
There are two groups of people: blamers and doers. For example, people will often blame local government for issues such as not disposing of fly tipping garbage quick enough, but they will not do much to clean up the pavements with sofas or fridges around their house – a man with a van can often drive over these large bits of garbage to a recycling centre for like $30/£30 an hour. Sometimes people will say government is spending money poorly, but they will not have participated in any of the consultations the government did on the matter, even if they were online or accepted mail-in comments. And in workplaces, they will often blame other departments without having put in elementary effort to resolve the issues with them. Sometimes people will blame government services for collapsing – there are certainly many YouTubers that constantly moan about how bad public transit is in many regions of the US, but few will donate to groups and politicians that genuinely want to replan public transit. Few will campaign for them, which can be done online in the fraction of a time it takes to produce a video.
If an org gets taken over by the blamer culture, it is doomed. These people will make no attempt at fixing problems, even when that would sometimes take 5 minutes and an email, but they will moan. And they will blame, and sometimes they'll blame the person suggesting an easy and workable course of action to resolve the problems.
Interestingly, sometimes resolving the problem takes less effort than sustained moaning, and certainly less mental strain. And still, people who tend towards the blamer group will blame and moan. Though I make no insinuation that moaning doesn't have any other benefits (such as YouTube video revenue, virtue signalling, and similar) – it is clearly appealing to one of the two groups I mentioned.
> Interestingly, sometimes resolving the problem takes less effort than sustained moaning, and certainly less mental strain.
That would involve actually doing some kind of work that people doing the complaining would like to avoid in the first place, because it's "someone else's responsibility to get it right!".
The irony is that the CEO is essentially blaming the employees in this case without listening and figuring out what the actual problem is.
Definitely a cultural problem where any sort of flaw is punished. We definitely need to root that out if we are to come together.