Why are CEOs failing software engineers?
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I've been watching the documentaries on Disney+, particularly The Imagineering Story (great doc BTW). They talk about the history of the creative side of Disneyland.
What you learn is that when they are simply given a budget and told "build" they thrive. When a CFO type gets involved with Disney, suddenly their output drops, because that CEO is asking what the ROI is for everything they do. A lot of what they do fails and has no ROI, and the people that work there start to worry about what their ROI will be before they start working.
When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the budget" then they thrive again.
I think this is applicable to software. When an engineer isn't asked to think about the ROI ahead of time, they are left free to come up with novel innovations. But if they know they will be judged on ROI, they will take fewer risks.
This of course is all predicated on being a profitable company. You have to already have a good cashflow to have the freedom to say "just go create".
I think the Pixar thing has more to do with their management, namely John Lassater, moving south to head up Disney Animation, which did extremely well when he took over. Apparently they're doing even better under Jennifer Lee, who took over for him when he left/was ousted.
https://www.disneyplus.com/series/the-imagineering-story/6ry...
But I fully agree on the CFOs spoiling the show: remember Tom & Jerry? There are (I think) 114 (great) episodes. Then at their creative peak the whole animation team was dismanteled, since they calculated they can make more money with reruns than with new content. Later there was a low quality reboot, though.
I don't believe that you remembered this correctly.
You see this with big capital assets in your personal life like houses and cars. Check out a cookie cutter subdivision new house with "builder spec" trimmings. The house is $600k, so they'll put in a granite countertop and shiny metal appliances to check the boxes and get the mortgage approved. But the light fixtures, toilets, etc are "builder grade" crap that are $14.99 at Home Depot! In lower price developments, the developers will skimp even more -- one near my house actually stripped and sold the topsoil! Imagine the corners cut inside if they were harvesting dirt for $.
Incidentally, this is how OpenAI wound up in a situation where they might die in a few years. (Aka be acquired by Microsoft.)
The logic works at Google, Facebook, and Disney. Not so much for startups without a revenue model.
After all of these years they are still an ad company after years of trying to diversify.
I’ll admit that ChromeBooks+GSuite is excellent for elementary and middle school though.
Like: Drive? Android (e.g. Play store)? Photos? YouTube? Google music?
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
Google pays Apple a reported $8 Billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS. The profit from Android isn’t even enough to pay Apple.
YouTube is thought to be barely above break even and streaming music has horrible economics for the platform. Look at Spotify. Google Music is third behind Spotify and Apple.
Who pays for Google Photos? You get free unlimited good enough storage.
What about Google cloud infrastructure and Sass that they deliver?
Possibly this and data across services is part of the package they sell to add companies? I don't think it's fair to compare between different companies. If they turn a good profit, then good for them.
Of course, not photo books are likely not selling at the scale of other products. Also, I meant Google One for storage, which I pay for, and you can buy photo books via Google Photos.
Actually now reports are that it’s up to $12 billion that Google pays Apple.
https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en...
> What about Google cloud infrastructure and Sass that they deliver?
Around $10 billion in revenue and no telling how little in profit. GCP is a distance third.
> Of course, not photo books are likely not selling at the scale of other products. Also, I meant Google One for storage, which I pay for, and you can buy photo books via Google Photos.
If DropBox is number one by a large margin and can’t make a decent profit, how well do you think Google is doing? But that is also included in the $10 billion revenue for cloud.
People who are willing to spend money, overwhelmingly by iOS devices.
gsuite docs are another point.
Applications on one's phone that they are used to, not to mentioned all of the google service integrations that individually aren't too hard, but in aggregate much harder to work around.
I do think o365 is leaps and bounds better than gdocs, and outlook, even on android, is better than google's mail.
The last time I used Firefox for a few days, it wasn't bad, only a couple plugins I use regularly were missing, and that was difficult and evenually moved back to chrome.
I actually let myself fall into using my google or twitter logins across other sites... which was really bad when I was false-flagged on twitter, and after 5 days and 2 appeals, just deleted the "offending" post. I still say the person in question was a "fucking moron," and that it wasn't a call to action in any way shape or form.
And while I've started migrating some stuff away, the daily use isn't always easy.
Switching from Android to Google though is easy because no company serious about mobile makes Android only apps - not even Google.
Google also makes it easy to import and export documents from GSuite and Office.
As standalone software, Apple’s iWork equivalents are better than Google’s (yes their are web versions), not to mention like you said, O365 apps are miles better.
For collaboration, yeah GSuite is pretty good.
Some things have changed for the better since thing, but IT is still a cost center, which drives how projects are allocated. Until you get upper level management away from treating IT as a cost center, you can't really unlock the creative potential. Of course you have to have financial discipline, and one of the classic methods for that is cost based accounting.
If you were the CEO at a retail giant, like Target, how would you account for IT's in/out budget and expectations?
I'm frankly amazed that Xerox PARC got away with being unaccountable rogues (with great unmonetized results!) for so long given that they didn't support the revenue side of the house one little bit. (Amazing place and time, though! And the director of the lab appears to have been a hell of a manager of unruly computer scientists!)
I can tell that cost based accounting is definitely part of the problem, but I can't really tell you how to get to somewhere better.
A former Disney IT employee testified before Congress, at times crying while he recounted the experience of being let go and having to personally train his replacement.[0]
Whatever Walt Disney was doing back in the day doesn't seem to apply anymore, at least based on your description of what a successful creative company looks like. To me, this looks ruthless and manipulative.
0: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3038292/former-disney-...
The extreme success of Walt Disney as CEO has created a huge company that is an unfeeling monster predisposed to owning everything and chewing up human capital when needed.
I think the takeaway for the tech side of things is what parts of our businesses are we not letting thrive because the engineers are the focus.
Companies should invest most heavily in the areas that are directly creating and discovering value, and outsource everything else to the greatest extent possible.
But if that's not the case ? What if understanding everything opens better possibilities ?
It does, but understanding is limited by time and money. In additon, the more humans you throw at a problem, the more complex solving adjacent problems becomes. A big org will not solve new challenges quickly or efficiently, this is why big orgs buy startups instead of having internal disruption programs.
This may be an understudied advantage of well-managed unionization of high-skilled industries. Many old European companies appear to have maintained a healthy corporate culture for more than a century.
Look around the web at the content being generated by people at home?
It used to take warehouse size buildings of people at tables sketching page after page of what were really long flipbooks, with huge machines churning to get it all together on reels.
Now 4-5 people, some nVidia cards can make something that artistically is miles beyond Steamboat Mickey and Snow White.
My kids don’t even know those movies exist. Precisely because of the points raised by OP you would look passed. Though I think you’d quickly see it’s mostly just people driven to create.
Disney is a draw to creatives that grew up on a lot of non-Disney created works Disney owns these days. A nice paycheck, not a source of creativity and inspiration.
How many more decades of Mickey, Marvel and Star Wars people doing the same old Mickey, Marvel and Star Wars looking things do we need? How creative.
[...] can make something that artistically is miles beyond Steamboat Mickey and Snow White.
Their actions bely their attitude, and the answer is "no".
As a person who recently joined the Disney org not by choice, I wouldn't wish Disney on my worst enemies. Seems like OP bought into Disney's propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
Take the CFO types example and dial that to 19. You can't even buy a sandwich without Disney corporate asking for the ROI of it. Want to use a different programming language? An OSS library? A SASS vendor? Please get approvals from legal and finance with ROI estimates. Nevermind the yearly dance to justify why engineers you already have should still stay on payroll. Contracts and employment are cancelled by default at the end of the year unless management makes a case on ROI for every head. Software projects to them are like movies, once it's "done", the people involved can kindly fuck right off.
This isn't just limited to the technology side, I have friends throughout the creative side in both film and parks divisions. Every hour of their time has to be accounted for and approved up the management chain, every project must be forecast with sufficient ROI before start, and will be cancelled without notice the moment it there's a hint of missing expectations.
Even getting a H1-B replacement is luxury that you have to fight for. H1-B is still more expensive than a contractor in a developing country under one of Disney's international divisions.
The magic of Disney is the boatloads of people who continue to _want_ to work for Disney despite all this.
Belt tightening like that is usually the sign that the MBAs took over. This is fine up to a point except when they start running a financial services enterprise instead of ... whatever you'd call they had before. Animation media entertainment company?
I wonder when the rot set in. The creativity out of Disney is now matching Hollywood baseline and that has been dropping significantly. They're buying major franchies rather than creating them. I think this strategy is biting them. Too much financial analysis. They are losing the sharp creative edge.
Or is this my view, not based on insider knowledge, and completely inaccurate?
This is true of all of enterprise IT though. It's not due to "CFO types" getting involved, it's just part of operating at scale in a public company where your tool choices have an impact on long-term support and governance/controls. I don't begrudge technologists who are chafed by this, but it's inherent to the category and not particular to a single corporate entity.
Think: getting approvals for upsizing an AWS instance in accordance with AWS's recommendations on an instance class you're already using in an account already serving production. Adding a user to a per user billed SASS that's critical to the org (we had to seek approvals to add employees to Slack/Github/email, and they frequently got denied).
They will spend thousands of dollars in man hours to make sure you're not misusing a penny.
> The magic of Disney is the boatloads of people who continue to _want_ to work for Disney despite all this.
YES. This nails it. Disney's unique capability is its ability to churn out its "magical" content while conceiving of human capital in this dreadful way. They've figured out how to extract beauty and precision out of people while not having to return the favor in any meaningful way. They treat their janitor the same way they treat their janitor's mop.
They seem to conceive of their customers in the same sort of way. When people buy tickets to a showing of a Disney film in theaters, how many of their customers realize they are also having their eyes tracked by Disney? [1]
[0] https://disneyaccelerator.com/ [1] https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2016/12/08/how-disn...
Are they actually doing that anywhere? Your link just mentions that they patented it but doesn't say if it's been implemented.
This sounds similar to game development in a way. You get individuals who are really passionate about the brand/products and are willing to work in unfair conditions because of it.
The usual bad software engineering practices with overbearing management, unrealistic deadlines, etc. but also below market pay and benefits, constant pressure to lower costs and outsource, and just generally a very cutthroat business environment.
Like other "cool" companies, they cash in on their brand cachet to treat employees badly, because they should be honored to work for such a company!
Whatever "magic" there is at Disney is all marketing.
RCA basically set up an unworkable scenario and management did not heed the sunk cost fallacy to realize they were down the garden path. A stylus based cheaply made consumer electronic device with the technology at the time was pretty much impossible (and then of course by the time tech had advanced a stylus based system was totally moot). You could have hired manhattan project people and it wouldn’t have changed the physical/economic realities of what they were trying to do.
Like all things, balance is required. Engineers and finance people need to be on equal footing, to serve as a system of checks and balances. The when either group becomes to strong, it spells doom.
It's usually the finance types that win these struggles of power though (I'm not exactly sure why), so don't have as many examples of engineers destroying companies. Though, I think Google might be a good example of flaky engineers taking over and the bad that results from it.
Or they end up with dozens of failed initiatives including three or four messenger apps being developed in parallel....
There are a lot of “smart people” (tm) when left to their own devices can’t create a product that anyone wants to save their lives.
When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the budget" then they thrive again.
Or you end up with the Apple Technology Group that brought the world great products like OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, Squeak, etc
All indications is that they balanced each other out as leaders.
In the cases I've seen, given free reign the engineers were happy to focus their effort on their personal interests, such as writing everything in a functional language or developing byzantine microservices + CI/CD.
Most importantly, as mentioned in the article, engineering teams need (and want) clear business goals. There is a huge chasm between having an expected ROI vs having no targets at all.
Is AirBnb profitable? Then? Now? Is it just really about saying the right stuff? Are they creative and innovative? Do engineers like working there? So what if they say yes versus no? Is it really about ROI versus not ROI?
If Brian Chesky says, as he frequently does, that he learned a lot about management from Walt Disney, okay, he did. No dispute there.
But you're talking about Walt Disney, you are speculating about CEOs who should be copying him, I found one for you. Go ahead and analyze that, Brian Chesky and his company.
Management performance is, and always will be, mostly but not exclusively explained by "I was around in the right place at the right time to concentrate returns on capital in my hands."
For every S&P 500 exec there are 6 Russell 3000 execs, most of them receiving roughly the same elite educations, learn of the same trends, representing a great diversity of businesses. S&P 500 median CEO pay 2019Q1 was $12.2m and Russell 3000 was $2.7m. Russell 3000 CEOs might be at worst 10 percentage points "less creative" than S&P 500 CEOs, but no way they are 4.5x less creative.
It matters little what you do, if the pie is big and you eat most of it you will be the fattest. This is also incidentally VC view of management and corporate strategy.
How do you know that? How would you measure it?
I agree with this statement. [1] seems to agree with it as well, finding no correlation between CEO performance and quality of MBA program or past successes as CEO.
Obviously those aren't the only two factors to consider what makes a successful CEO, but it's what a lot of people in society think.
[1] https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1db3jy3201d38...
The reason for this is that skill tends to fall along a normal distribution. As you get better and better, the number of people as good as you starts to fall at an exponential rate.
But, for your example, I don't CEO compensation in many cases has much to do with the value you provide. CEOs of bigger companies usually get paid more not because they are better but because there is more money that they can personally capture, since the companies they run are large.
And then there are CEOs that are incredibly compensated, like Cook and Nadela because they truly are providing incredible value.
Disney is all about the “wheelhouse” where the various parts of the company work together to monetize IP - movie distribution, merchandising, home video, parks, licensing, spin off cartoons, etc.
Apple doesn’t let “1000 flowers bloom” either. Everything is coordinated from software, hardware, design, marketing, operations, etc.
An example: SpaceX vs Blue Origin.
SpaceX was actually founded 2 years after Blue Origin, but it has a significant technology and business lead. Elon Musk set ambitious deadlines and micromanaged some of the technology goals from the start, requiring deliverable products to be able to stay in business. Whereas Bezos still just infuses up to a billion dollars of his own money a year, and as a result has a more relaxed atmosphere and slower progress. The result is that everyone knows what SpaceX is doing, but only people on HN have heard of Blue Origin.
Caveats: Elon Musk's far more active leadership may have also played a role, while Bezos left leadership to people who probably did not fully match Musk's creativity and drive.
This is it I think. People start basically self-censoring. The problem is that it's notoriously hard to predict ROI ahead of time. Many of the highest ROI projects look like long shots while many "sure thing" projects bomb.
You can see the result of this with Hollywood and its endless remakes, reboots, and comic book flicks. These are "sure things" and most do in fact make money, but the whole sector is sinking. I have zero excitement about movies anymore. All the interesting stuff is in serialized series and indie projects. I don't even pay attention to what movies are being released, and I'm not alone.
CEO's aren't failing software engineers, no more than software engineers are failing the cafeteria crew by using too much ketchup.
If they are failing, they are failing the business. There's evidence of significant problems in business/management philosophy, as the consensus is that you need to optimize for now, and later is somebody else's problem. That has nothing to do with software engineers.
Technology people sometimes get this worldview that they are the sun, and the universe revolves around them. Hate to break the news, but no.
Dead on. I've seen boards of directors ask for fried ice:
Management: We haven't put adequate time into building a sales training program.
Board: Focus only on revenue this quarter. It's the only thing that matters!
Then next quarter:
Board: Why aren't your new sales guys producing?! They need to drive revenue!
Management: Uh... you told us not to spend time on training.
This is actually not true of individual shareholders; most individual shareholders are investing for the long term, because most individual shareholders are investing for a long-term goal, like retirement.
The problem is that most shares in most companies are no longer owned by individual shareholders, but mutual funds, and from the standpoint of an individual stock, a mutual fund does have short-term incentives, since if the stock's performance goes down the fund will just sell it and buy something else. The individual investors whose assets are held by the mutual fund, and who have a longer time horizon (most mutual fund accounts are retirement accounts), don't care about which individual stocks the fund holds or how often it trades them. So the longer time horizon of the actual individual investors is masked and only the short term incentives are visible to the individual companies.
Do any mutual funds ever beat the market? (on the "retirement" decades time scale)
I don't think the problem is either Arrivabene or Binotto - it was Marchionne and it's going to take a long time to fix.
For all the credits to Binotto, he's not a good negotiator.
I've worked construction and at a manufacturing plant, and tech is a genuinely different business, with a different mindset than other businesses. Yes, they are failing the business, but they are failing the business in a new and interesting way, which is what this post is about.
Tech is the engine that accelerates business. Acceleration used to be slow. If you don't have an engine that accelerates quickly now, and you don't have a HUGE moat, you won't survive.
Manufacturing Management is also all about metrics and counting productivity. Trying to apply similar metrics to tech leads to things like counting developers lines of code or defects.
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Edit: another aspect of manufacturing is limiting waste. In Toyota Production system this is called Muda - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term)
Waste of overproduction (largest waste)
Waste of time on hand (waiting)
Waste of transportation
Waste of processing itself
Waste of excess inventory
Waste of movement
Waste of making defective products
Waste of underutilized workers
You can look at the other goals of TPS and see how they may or may not apply to software engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
I'm not saying these are bad ideas or don't apply to software engineering, but I am saying that they don't apply in the same way.
With software the design-made-code, where software is what in automotive would be considered the design process is 100% of the cost, the shipping of bits is 0%. In automotive, it is more like 5% design vs 95% building the car, goes the other way.
When people apply manufacturing methodologies to design practices, it rarely works out. "Design" is messy, but people expect to be able to apply a manufacturing-like "LEAN" process to it. They are mixing goslings and goats.
This is roughly analogous to corporate IT operations. There's a set of standard services which everyone uses, and there's no innovation on the desktop by most users.
On the other hand, with software and R&D, the feedback loops are primary drivers of generating information (and value). This is why so many of us preach about "testing in production" for web services.
The core of these two philosophies is pretty much summarised by two books: The Goal, by E. Goldratt (ISBN: 9780884271956 ). The Principles of Product Development Flow, by D. Reinertsen (ISBN: 9781935401001).
And the business includes the employees.
New IT staff should be given grounding in Business Curriculum relevant to the Corporate's business / Team's mandate - this ought to organized by upper level of IT management.
Software Developers / Engineers working in Corporate IT tend to stagnate in terms of their careers once they hit the wall (wall = business knowledge).
E.g., take an investment firm and within it, say IT Department XYZ Supports the firm's Private Equity investment team. It is easy for Software Engineers in the team to code up and provide Tech. solutions however for complex business cases where advanced Private Equity knowledge is required, the Software Engineers have to rely on the Business Analysts or the clients themselves to do hand-holding.
I have only seen something like 1 in 10 Software Developers in Corporate IT willing to pick up Business knowledge beyond the basic business terminology. And this is why I believe the value of Software Engineers at Corporate IT takes a serious hit - from CEO / Board / Upper layers of Finance, it looks like the drivers of revenue are basically their finance folks (CFAs, CPAs, Investors) whereas IT are just a cost center to enable the finance folks to do their work (which is a very bad vision but that is how it looks like from their POV). In these cases, the only group from IT that benefits somewhat are the top IT management who act as the guardians of the IT division.
Another thing that works against IT folks in Corporate IT is self-criticism (critical of current IT culture, constant itch to reinvent self), constant need to associate with low-paid/ low-educated professions (factory line worker analogy, plumber mentality) and appearing far too casual. Sure, jeans and T-shirts and having eccentric/artistic personality is the culture spawned from Tech stalwarts based in Silicon Valley, but that mentality does not translate into rest of the World. Even if the Corporate's HR policies allows for dress-down environment, guess what - the HR and Finance People typically appear well polished in their appearance - they rather have nice office lunch rather than pizza and pop chow-downs and you can't deny that as humans (especially if the CEO and top Execs are non-IT), it doesn't leave a very favorable opinion about the IT staff.
It’s not wrong or bad at all, but it does tend to be compensated less.
But I think that is an argument for working for a software company as the optimal career path for a software engineer (or founding one). It will help you to know more about finance as an IT guy working at a finance firm, but you will probably never be as valued as the traders.
Ultimately what I want as a software engineer employee is my own personal success. I actually identify a lot more with their “Business Management” step: I want incentives to be aligned and I will be motivated to do great work if I feel like I can share in that success. Yes it’s easier to get up in the morning if I’m working on something that’s overall successful, but that would be negated if I couldn’t get a piece of that.
This seems to fit into the more common trope that engineers are easily fooled into working for less pay than they should be getting through bullshit like “vision”. Even if I’m working on something cool I’m not going to be happy to just make someone else rich. If I only cared about solving a problem I would just write OSS.
But these two steps are different: the second one aligned the organization with its workers, but the first one aligned the organization with investors.
Assuming this trend will continue, the third step will align the organization with some other group.
After a certain amount of money, more money wouldn't bring me joy. Money is a floor, not a ceiling.
The Top 10 Things Executives Should Know About Software
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237712-the-top-10-thin...
I actually consider software / IT management to be more important than accounting, and every MBA person takes finance/accounting.
For me, a large part of thinking creatively is about exposing myself to ideas outside of what I am actively supposed to be doing and then letting those ideas permeate through my thinking when I am working on what I am actively supposed to be doing.
Between talking to users, talking to customers, talking to investors, and perpetual catch-up on my product, I rarely find the space to think about things other than my business.
That said, we have definitely had dark moments that we came out of because of very creative ideas. It's just that creativity is nowhere near the top virtue required of a founder.
Maybe you could do something similar? I'm sure you are very busy, but so was he.
At the very least, a think weekend. :)
It's hard work keeping people engaged, everyone wants a different carrot. Everyone understands and fears the stick and it's easy to hire for - can you threaten people with a stick? Yes? Hired :)
We live in a wage slavery society with fewer jobs than there are people, on purpose.
It's not that CEOs are failing software engineers, it's that the current system of beliefs humans hold in sum, seems to be failing humanity as a whole (but then again, if we think this way, has it ever not failed humanity?). Consider children digging through trash for food while billionaires fine dine discussing AI and space travel. I don't know what them rich folks believe, but it's inconsiderate of most of humanity's pain it seems.
I've read Christensen's work, along with other authors and came to the same conclusions that this author writes about, but I've never taken the time to put it into words like this.
The authors will come by and read this and dismiss it out of hand when you have a chance to help them get better at what they do (they recognize that failing to do something, in this case present their case clearly, can teach new skills)
So let's be a bit more proactive in the feedback okay?
The post bounces between background/foundation material and new material too rapidly. It can be over expository in background which may prevent the reader from connecting what background material/situation is being addressed by the new material. It fails to present a cogent summary of its thesis statement in the first paragraph, that comes in paragraph 3. Paragraphs 1 & 2 are nominally a problem statement in what reads as an obtuse jargon.
Now some of that is that the entire article feels like it is written for someone who has read all of their other articles and so there are many unexplained phrases which clearly have specific meanings. Statements like "I promise you, in its entirety, the following is something you’ve never heard before, and the ramifications of ignoring the advice herein most assuredly leads to unhappy software engineers." exhibit a certain hubris that can be off putting to engineers and that isn't a great place to start.
A friend of mine working at <large tech megacorp> told me that it is not uncommon for them to assign product/eng teams to build novel, competing solutions to the same problem or product space, sometimes without even knowing about the existence of the other team(s).
Similarly, I've heard <other large tech megacorp> sends the green college new grads out to hack together products and innovate with new ideas as quickly as possible, and once they find product market fit, they hand over the project to the seasoned senior engineers to build it out at global scale.
These anecdotes might just be hearsay BS, but it does make me think: how creative can you get with R&D and who makes those decisions? In what ways do the CEO/CFOs play a constructive role in this process?
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-develo...
They define Creative Management like this:
"Creative management is one of three dominant forms of value management. Its purpose is to establish a system of management that enables and motivates creative staff, such as software engineers, writers, designers and artists, to discover and realize new works of value."
It's an interesting thesis, but there a subtle nuance here, I think, which I would put like this:
For every clear, explicit, rational, and goal-oriented form of management, there are degenerate irrational forms, and Creative Management is more vulnerable to degenerate irrational forms than other forms of management.
Over the years, many of my blogs posts have gotten a lot of discussion on Hacker News, so some of you might remember my focus on irrational, destructive forms of management. In my book How To Destroy A Tech Startup ( https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo... ) I give details about two different startups that go off the rails because of the ego-driven nature of the decision making by top leaders.
But the point I'd like to make now is, compared to older management systems, which were somewhat more amenable to data modeling and feedback analysis, Creative Management opens the door to creativity, but also wish-fulfillment fantasy. (As a point of comparison, think about W. Edwards Deming and his very methodical statistical approach to reducing errors in a factory, and compare that to much more open ended process of inventing, say for instance, a sui generis interface.)
Please note, I'm not saying Creative Management is a bad concept, but I am saying it has large pitfalls for which we do not yet have standard answers.
Having said all that, there are some good books that have really looked at failures in the world of software, and ways the process can be improved. The books of Robert Glass are excellent, and I've posted a long excerpt of one of my favorite of his stories here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-proj...
Note to author: it might be worth moving the "How are CEOs failing software engineers?" section to the beginning of the article. With a title like "Why are CEOs failing software engineers?", the first thing i want to know is how the CEOs are failing. Only afterwards do i care about the why. This felt a bit like i was thrown head-first into a new framework for classifying types of management before I could figure out whether or not I wanted to learn about it.
Aside from the structure, really interesting piece!
Just look at the language used to describe a successful CEO 'sprinter' by Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-acco...) :
"In his late twenties, “James” was hired in a strategy and business development role inside a multibillion-dollar marketing and communications business. Early in his career, he was offered the chance to build out one of the new businesses. It felt like a demotion, or at best a lateral move, to be handed a blank org chart and a highly uncertain future. “It was zero revenue when I stepped in, and we built that business to $250 million,” he says. By building a new business from scratch, he picked up essential management skills, such as running a P&L, managing a budget, and setting a strategic vision — all critical prerequisites to becoming a CEO (over 90% of the CEOs we studied had general management experience). Thirteen years later, he found himself the CEO of a $1.5 billion education and training business."
Without such language and understanding, founders will have a harder time sustaining their endeavours. Such concepts apply whether you're bootstrapping, taking investor funds, or just an indie builder.
If you want to have an actual company that can continue paying your salary, somebody better have a good handle on those things.
We provided a really nice walkthrough to get you going as a quickstart. The whole point was originally to keep it simple so that you have to be thoughtful about the settings and tradeoffs you make in terms of reliability vs performance. I didn't want to be overly prescriptive in what and how teams use functionality like transactions and idempotence.
But we find, time and again, people get this wrong. They don't look at things like delivery reports, they don't set timeouts that make sense, they often don't even think about their replication factor. I pushed against full fledged client examples because there really isn't a one size fits all and I didn't want people to copy and paste without thinking about what they are doing.
The reality is, I am fighting a war on drugs. People want things to Just Work, and don't have the time to sit down for a day or two and read a book on kafka concepts (which we provide for free) and just want to get things done. We will repeatedly be involved in "outages" because clients could not tolerate a broker restarting and they did not configure their apps to be resilient.
On a more topical note, a guy on my team wanted to rewrite a python app we have in kotlin about 2 years ago, because it was the hot thing for about 5 minutes and our little POC python app was getting unwieldy for the scale it was growing into and its complexity. But we had no one in the firm who knew this, no support network for this, and I kind of saw that this was likely to be a flash in the pan kind of thing. I had to say no, and he was all pissy and was like but JVM! and arguments like that. I am really glad we didn't go that route, because kotlin is all but dead, and that guy left after about a year, and we would have been left high and dry.
My larger point is- what seems like such a cut and dried correct answer when its just from your viewpoint, can look very wrong when put in context of an organization, but unfortunately the end perception is often "my boss doesn't get it."
“This phenomenon is due, in no small part, to how our brains, in response to the thrill of successfully completing a rewarded task, releases euphoric chemicals that strongly reinforce the behavior that led to success.”
it's a feedback loop of reinforcement.
And Steve Jobs too. He wrote games for Atari. Not a good CEO from the start but during Next and Pixar he really learned the job.
"How do you best motivate software engineers? You attract them to significant, life changing work by elevating the need, the thing that's missing from life or society, a problem that needs to be solved, and extending a personal, creative opportunity to solve that problem. Software Engineers are motivated to solve epic problems with solutions that people love."
Let's not try to manage better by making software engineers out to be poor, misunderstood Giants of Action who are just trying to fight the good fight if only the business people would pull their share of the load.
Doctors, lawyers (think family law), and plenty of others are well motivated too. I've done 30+ years of software dev. Software like any other industry attracts a diversity of people ... lots of exemplary but also good doses of risible dumb-asses that no management will ever fix.
OP continues:
"The best way to motivate creative staff is to attract them to meaningful work through the use of strong attractors."
This is where the article just goes stupid and never recovers. Only a moron believes that the employee is somehow unconsciously enabled for greatness but otherwise an empty vessel if ONLY management would fill our need for meaning and direction with something preferably a solid budget, a five year plan, and a goal of staggering goodness. So then what are software devs? The genius of Oppenheimer (smart and good manager?) Linus T? Dirac? Or in fact blank, useless slates that the mommy corporation needs to imprint to get anything out of?
Like 99.9% of all Sunday school lectures this article talks about what without how. So it's largely useless day to day. We're reminded ad nauseam about bad thoughts, bad actions and its consequences but not how --- how to do something better in the day to day.
Let's remind readers of few things:
- Broadly speaking in his "Business Management" phase he forgot to mention that many companies lacked SPC i.e. how to do the day to day and to get away from articles like this that throw around another 10,000 maxims. These same companies weren't customer focused (be customer in not supplier out) ... on and on ... the managements phases he mention forget to mention that even the best corporations in their respective phases waste a ton of money, and a ton of talent not because of high flung issues like motivation and meaning but because of more basic issues like customer focus. Creative management by then is a distraction.
- A major problem at large corporations is not that management fails to play the role of a fundamentalist Baptist selling the good news door to door tirelessly saving us programmer-sinners, it's lack of openness (corporate speak BS), and silos. Those two issues defeat a lot of great guys and gals who already come equipped with meaning, and direction, and a desire to change but who eventually learn the unwritten corporate culture: we aren't gonna change; and if you have a great idea X but aren't in the X department well then it's not for you. Creative management isn't going to fix this; it will make it worse. The whole arc of the OP's story just wholly misses vast swathes of what really goes on in corporations that lower productivity and potential. In particular, the creative management approach fails to admit control battles exist.
- The creative culture sounds nice. Maybe. Or maybe it's a quite different thing. The perpetual ever always need for revolution is necessary to make and perpetuate frivolous consumerism. If there's always something new then there's always something new to buy. Related, there's a vaguely idealistic perhaps anachronistic impulse that any relation in society is a business target: bust it and make money "revolutionizing it".
- Meaning and quality is everybody's problem. You can have superb management and bad engineers or vice versa but if you think engineers are gonna make management enlightened or vice versa you have a lot, lot more to learn. We're here to help each other but also pull our own weight and learn ourselves and not always with the immediate result of gratification, orgasmic release, or profit.