Comment by ismailmaj
13 days ago
I see your point, this reminded me of the incompetent/malicious section.
Yes, leadership could do the right thing, but the right thing is difficult to measure by shareholders and can only grasped by shareholders until it is too late (Disney for example), but why would they?
I agree, people are not malicious but the system currently selects for people that ignore the difficult to measure right thing to do (in SWE it’s doing the grunt platform work that no one will appreciate) and skip to things that are rewarded (cool feature tm that users hate by gives a cool slide to the CEO), it might seem like people can do both but it’s not in practice due to having limited energy.
Also stream of thought answer, but I feel like we are back to the trust thing, the right thing to do is impossible to measure, so we can only hope they do it because they care about doing the right thing, but incentives punishes them and makes them scarce at the top and the only solution is to go back to a high trust society (maybe like Japan where CEOs care and the incentives are set so people are often doing the right thing).
Intersting you mention Japan. The accounting scandal I mentioned was in Japan! So again, no hard rules.
I suppose my biggest takeaway, is that all I know right now, is every time I was given a dysfunctional department to look after it got better very quickly, both according to staff, colleagues and my seniors. I don't know exactly why, and would love an outside observer, but I have my theories. I'm loath to put bits of it out there because you get a couple of categories of negative response.
1) 'That is just obvious'. All of my best work ever was obvious to everyone afterwards!
2) You are naive. It would never work in x company. You give people too much credit etc.
Yet here I am, unexpectedly at home feeling ill, with 100% confidence that everyone in my extended team is coping just fine, doing as much work as if I was there, and getting along with each other. The only message I got today was one asking how I am. Meanwhile my colleague mangers will be answering emails while on holiday, because their world would fall apart without them.
Again, this is why an outside observer would be so useful, they could testify to the results as well as the methodology.
What I'm getting from you is that, given competence (and here it's a manager being able to make himself dispensable) things "work out".
I tend to agree but I have a feeling that it takes a certain number of bad apples min-maxing KPIs to destroy the system.
When the manager evaluates you based on how many lines of code you submitted because the VP decided that the teams with the most code submitted deserve a bigger bonus, then you stop doing the rational thing and start playing the game, it may be possible for the middle manager to play around a bad VP but from an IC level it's rarely worth it, you might invest your small political capital only to be burned afterwards.
I've seen way too often in my career benevolent IC ignoring the politics, getting things done only to be last to be recognized when it's clear things would be falling apart without them. Even worse, doing the right thing might keep/hide the dysfunctional system for longer.
Sorry for being overly negative, I like the theory but failure points while rare are common enough for me to have seen them a few times, if things are not rotten it probably holds water.