Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

1) Promote based on tenure. If they found your company first, they're a priori more dedicated and therefore better qualified to lead.

2) Promote into/within people management roles based on their skill as an individual contributor. E.g. the better the programmer, the better they will be at managing programmers.

3) Create a set of company values vague enough to be meaningless. Enforce them selectively and only when convenient.

4) In the name of inclusiveness, expand meeting invitations to anyone who could possibly be affected by anything talked about. Refer to them as stakeholders. Be sure to include anyone whose job is unrelated but may be interested or have an opinion.

5) All goals should be subjective. The subjective meaning of the goal should change based on timing, external factors, mood, or self-confidence. If you aren't happy, someone (else) is doing something wrong and you should immediately switch directions. This is especially important in hiring.

6) In all meetings (see 4), require consensus.

7) Set individual performance metrics based on effort. Strong indicators:

- Individual sends emails late at night

- You see individual in the office late at night/early in the morning

- Individual speaks frequently in meetings

- Individual always seems so busy

8) Hire based on pedigree, especially from names you know. If they did not attend the Tier 1 school (Stanford), they're probably not an A player.

Recruit from companies with entirely different problems from your own. For example, if you're a small startup, target executives at Google so they can make you into Google. If you're a large company, acquihire small startups to inject agility and hunger.

Great list.

Some general commentary: companies don't get this way because people are stupid. They get this way because people hyper-optimize for their own self-interests. Everything on this list is a way to show off, suck up, or CYA, all of which occurs because people want to stay employed and get promoted, and they implicitly optimize for more immediate, local rewards like positive social feedback from the colleagues they see on a daily basis.

Abstract and macro-level concepts are difficult to grasp and people have soft, differing opinions on them. However, people who work with you daily will come to "know" that you're a super hard worker if you're sending out emails at 4am. Including the company's Controller in a database schema design meeting not only gives you a chance to demonstrate your know-how to someone else in the organization, but also wins points for being careful, considerate, and cautious.

When promotion time comes, the less-visible heads-down coder who's been working hard and churning out bugfixes gets a lot less credit than his more boisterous, gregarious counterpart, who's been more focused on grooming personal biases in his favor than actually plugging in commits.

In theory a good corporate leader is supposed to make sure this kind of stuff doesn't happen, but they're only human, so really 99% of people operate this way.

What it translates to is that if you want to be a successful employee, remember ABC: Always Be Campaigning. Your primary job duty is popularity.

That is why focusing on the performance of the team is probably a better idea.

> For example, if you're a small startup, target executives at Google so they can make you into Google.

That is a warning in Robert Townsend's book 'Up the Organization'. He mentioned small corporations didn't become large corporations by acting like them. Beware of hiring enterprise level managers.

Sometimes I think this is even true for larger companies, See Atari post acquisition,Apple post Jobs 1.0. And Microsoft Ballmer era.

This is scarily accurate for Japanese companies.

Well done. Corollary to #4: expand email "To" field to anyone who could possibly be affected by anything talked about.

4(c). Make sure to include company@ in the BCC field of every email you send, just in case your email affects someone you don't know.

Better tick that "high-priority" flag too. Your message is more important because it is from you.

And make sure you turn on the read-notifications. Nothing makes clearer just how important your message is than that - besides, nobody can claim to not have read your email because you'll know they did :-)

I had to check and see if you work(ed) at my previous company.

Stop reading management advice mumbo jumbo, treat others with respect and be thoughtful in your actions.

Lots of people in the technology industry and corporate environments are too focused on performance metric dick measuring contests and moving up in the pecking order.

All I know about someone who went to a "Tier 1" school without talking to them is that they wasted their youth doing whatever nonsense you need to do to get into said school.

I agree that this is the natural answer to "How do I run a good company?" I used to believe there were places where this type of management was possible. I think it's still possible with really small companies, but I don't believe that it will ever be that way with a company of more than 15 employees anymore. People are political creatures and unfortunately, the selfish actions of a few require the rest to act in their own selfish interests if they're not going to get destroyed by someone playing by a less noble set of rules. The net effect is that all but the most naive understand that self-preservation is the name of the game and that the company or team's efficiency is a secondary concern (if it shows up on the radar at all).

The funniest thing about this is that the people who are hired to prevent political ambition and malfeasance from affecting the company's output are often the heaviest polluters.

My original comment got voted into oblivion, so maybe I'm hitting the pipe on this topic. :)

That said, I've worked in really large organizations with plenty of weird bureaucratic artifacts which nonetheless treated people with integrity and respect. Good leadership who embraces that idea and low tolerance for bad behavior is the "secret".

In my observation, the level of nastiness and bureaucratic battlefield bravery is inversely proportional to the stakes at hand. People will murder each other over a 2% raise, but not lift a finger while an obviously bad decision puts the entire company at risk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com