What do executives do, anyway? (2019) | Hacker News Reader

What do executives do, anyway? (2019)

apenwarr.ca

73 pointswheresvic433 comments

(2019)

Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21088425

> An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in their reporting hierarchy... even if they work on nothing else. That job seems impossible.

I don't understand this starting point. The job of an executive is not to micro-manage every transitive report. Who said it was? Where did the author get that idea from? That's why you have a hierarchy.

That is only the intro paragraph. Author proceeds to formulate a legitimate question "How can anyone make any important decision in a company that large?" and then summarizes a possible answer from a book (High Output Management, by Andy Grove [first published 1989]).

Its called middle management, the backbone (or bane) of any bigger comnpany. Guys up there have no clue about average joe the coder/doer/whatever, maybe a vague view on distribution of teams. Anyway if you don't earn cash to the company, you are just a necessary cost (which state is to be evaluated often)

> Guys up there have no clue about average joe the coder/doer/whatever

They also don't have the full picture. They have their own agenda, which is usually taking _more_ managers under them, to inflate their own importance. All the while paying lip service to the overall company strategy.

When CEOs get frustrated that the wheels are not turning in the right direction (or fast enough), middle management is usually the reason. Lower management (and leaf) will be trying to implement whatever distorted message filtered through the ranks.

Yes. And middle management suffers from "too many degrees of freedom" in their decision making. They're trying to paper over the gap from their teams, to the executive suite. Without contact with the customer nor the board/investors (call it 'reality'), they can have too many solutions because, not enough data.

Some respond by retrenching - trying for the biggest budget and the fewest deliverables, so their stats look good. Which is ironically the worst possible outcome for everybody.

The point is having a guy in a suit directing 8000 people is silly.

Use a ship as an example. The crew is there to execute tasks. The cook cooks, the engineers keep the engines running. The Captain is the ultimate authority and is ultimately accountable.

He doesn’t peel the potatoes, but the sets the direction for where the ship is going and is responsible for the process of feeding his sailors.

Who is the article arguing against? Who said the leader should be individually directing or peeling potatoes? Nobody said that.

It’s like writing an article saying ‘sheep aren’t supposed to live under water’. Yes, but I mean why are you saying this everyone already agrees with this who do you think you’re arguing against.

It’s a rhetorical argument.

This stuff isn’t easy, which is why millions of people have read about Andy Groves fictional egg sandwich company over 30 years. Every day brilliant people get promoted and become awful executives.

> At the meeting, the two leads will present the one, correct decision that they have agreed upon.

Um... what happens if the two leads can't agree?

I've had this happen to me multiple times in my career: I was one of the "two leads". My counterpart was an idiot. Completely uninformed and unwilling to listen to reason, but willing to go to the mat for his own stupid ideas. That left me with only two options: acquiesce despite my firm belief that doing so would not be in the best interests of the organization, or break the algorithm and force the supervisor to make the decision.

Of course, I'm sure my counterpart felt exactly the same way about me.

> Of course, I'm sure my counterpart felt exactly the same way about me.

Something about the symmetry of this is amusing for me.

the article goes on to explain that, with a shared authority present, you are required to work it out with the other tech lead amicable. if you do a poor job doing that in front of the authority, presumably the authority will decide, and also scrutinize both of the leads for not being able to cooperate / be successful at their job.

> with a shared authority present, you are required to work it out with the other tech lead amicable

No, that's not what the article says. Re-read the quoted passage:

> At the meeting, the two leads will present the one, correct decision that they have agreed upon.

The decision is made before the meeting, without the executive present.

Having the executive mediate the discussion would make a lot of sense, but it would also make the job a lot harder.

This is fiction. In most places highest rank invites for meeting and presents black box decision, but only if there are no remaining risks and queries.

One tactic I've used successfully is to require each to swap roles and defend the other's position. This should build the empathy required to find common ground.

I have been many times in that situation, at different times and levels.

Traditional escalation is always a failure for me. It means the wrong pepole (including possibly myself) were working on the problem.

Friendly escalation is good : we go together to the boss with all data and they decide because our positions are incompatible.

The biggest challenge when superstar engineers become executives that I've seen is they need to switch from being the person with all the answers to the person with all the questions.

Failure to make that switch leads to dysfunctional organizations.

Dysfunctional organizations can still make boatloads of money, for a long time, longer than your functional organization can stay solvent.

Besides, should some 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg out there - the guy who really is going to take something from zero to billions of dollars - really be asking questions from (checks notes) the 21 year old Ivy League people he's hiring? What the hell answers do you expect to hear?

And then when you talk about people with lots of experience, are they going to take any risks? What kind of answer do you expect? "Sorry Mark, but we tried that at Friendster 10 years ago." How useful.

I don't really disagree with you. I'm just skeptical of any reductive framing of what executives do, most of all "Andy Grove's book," because that's a meme I've heard a lot. And while no one should ever go around crapping on books, reading is good, Andy Grove isn't going to have anticipated organizational structures like Valve's, a place where a lot of people are extremely happy and effective but where all the management books sort of go out the window.

> Besides, should some 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg out there

> the 21 year old Ivy League people he's hiring

4 years is not such a large delta. It's certainly not sufficient to have all the answers (not even 4 thousand years would). If anything, however brilliant the 25 year old is, they are just barely old enough to have a functioning prefrontal cortex.

High level executives are supposed to be making decisions, setting directions and oiling the machine. They aren't supposed to have any answers. "Decisions" is the closest you may get. They are not in the trenches, they by definition know nothing more than the specialized workforce they are hiring.

> like Valve's, a place where a lot of people are extremely happy and effective

It's also a small place. And Gabe seems to be the sort of guy who asks for and takes lots of feedback.

https://www.ign.com/articles/gabe-newell-opens-up-about-valv...

“Growth solves all problems” Eric Schmitt

“When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens“ Andy Rachleff

It also does not seem like intel has made awesome decisions recently.

That's also a reason why law school is good training for being an executive. It teaches you a process for asking the right questions, which applies equally to business as to a courtroom.

Any resource recommendations to learn this skill?

Enroll in law school.

Thank makes sense! I had an experience where a redundant-processor project was taking quite a while (which they should). Some early Engineer who was promoted above their level wandered into the meeting. "Hey Adam, how long should it take to do blah blah". "Oh, maybe a few weeks" says Adam without any real idea what he was talking about. Project canned, people quit.

All because he was still trying to be the smart guy with all the answers, instead of all the questions.

That’s a tremendously insightful statement.

Engineers tend to define their value by the answers they can provide while in many situations it’s actually asking the right questions that counts.

Given my experiences in the middle, it is very difficult to hire people who can answer questions.

Don't superstar engineers need to have all the right questions too? The right questions during requirements gathers, development, and testing seem more important to me than "having all the answers".

"they need to switch from being the person with all the answers to the person with all the questions"

So eloquently put. I'm going to steal that :)

I wouldn't say that's the right way to look at disagree and commit. It's more: I think solution A is better and you think solution B is better and we're going to make sure we communicate why we feel that way, but we both understand that making a suboptimal decision today and running full speed in that direction is better than being unable to make a decision or undermining the execution because someone doesn't agree with the decision.

Sounds like a recipe for Denethor in Lord of the Rings. Leadership teams at any level can’t be stewards without opinion or vision or a rationale to support that vision.

My favorite part of this blog was the last paragraph where he created important distinction between common courtesies and real values. Nice read.

The CEO of Dropbox rebutted this post the last time it came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21100352

My own impression was that the author was trying to justify his lack of leadership by distorting the definition of leadership advanced by Andy Grove.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com