Why is this idiot running my engineering org?
medium.com
medium.com
(The paragraph ending, "I trusted the FBI to be good at their jobs." The next paragraph jumps right to generalizations, and I didn't clearly understand from her writing what problem did she just cause without knowing it?)
Without that spelled out, I have a hard time really being on board with the rest of the essay. Actually, it's almost like they're 2 different essays broken at that point above.
Anyone else experience the same issue in reading it?
I assume it takes working for the government to fully understand. Risk averse people pile into cushy government jobs. After they shoehorn themselves into that career, they become even more risk averse. Then every few years they see people take risks and get fired for it. The aggregate effect of this is that not only might they be dismissive towards those whom they perceive as risk-takers, they might be actively hostile towards them. This is for two reasons. One is that the "risks" might pay off in a visible way (more on that later), making the other bureaucrats who are vying for a promotion look bad. The other is that they fear the risk will affect them in some way, and they want no part of it. They imagine either more work on their plate (God forbid) or adverse consequences because of this "naive troublemaker who just doesn't get it." To make it even worse, it’s way easier to just promote the people you like in government. Guess who risk averse people will tend to promote? Guess what type of work is made more visible to senior management? So hard work is not rewarded as well as at corporations, unless it’s a very narrow kind of hard work that adheres to the most literal interpretation of one’s job responsibilities. Those are my 2 cents, I could be way off about the author’s intent there.
English is my second language and sometimes it feels like a lot of people go out of their way to make their texts long and convoluted because it's cool. Same in my native language but it's another barrier to get through when it's your second or third language.
Distilling an intertwined set of thoughts down into the single point you are trying to make and then expressing that concisely and clearly is difficult and takes effort. When text is convoluted it's usually because the author didn't know how to do anything different or didn't try because they didn't realise it was necessary.
For those of us for whom English is a native language the problem is less, and I enjoyed the colour provided by the FBI story. You're right though that it muddied the waters of what was actually a coherent and interesting point being made. It is a useful lesson to me that clarity is even more important for non-native speakers.
You have, however, correctly summarized some aspects of my experiences working for the government, more succinctly and dispassionately than I could have. Thank you.
Government on the other hand is always political as their output isn't valued in market terms but in political points.
So yeah - from my experience - big corps (especially those working with government) can be political, bureaucratic, etc. But it's standard operating procedure in government work.
In more monopolistic areas (insurance, banking), my experience has been closer to government. In more cutthroat areas (tech, retail), it's been on the other end of spectrum.
This is why we should focus on increasing economy decentralisation if we want less bureaucracy and less waste of resources.
The main problem is that, once you grow to a certain level, you're big enough too lobby the government into maintaining your market position and be bailed out by the government if you fail.
She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with.
She sees herself as someone who enjoys the trappings of a job well done and doesn't mind her slow progress of ladder-climbing because she's brave and takes risks that her superiors won't reward with promotions.
I liked and identified with the writing in the second half, and it sounds like she had a good scenario to act as a substrate for her thoughts, but I don't think she did a good job merging the two.
Like you said, they feel like two distinct pieces which got bolted together. I found myself with the scroll bar near the bottom and wondered how she was going to tie back in to the original story, and was disappointed to see that she never did.
I get that this appears to be the conclusion the author wants you to draw. But what's missing, to me, is that she has provided no evidence whatever to support it. The only evidence we have about her boss is his reaction--and I can see a boss with a high tolerance for risk saying exactly what she describes her boss as saying, as a kind of whimsical recognition that the very thing that makes her a valuable employee is that she will take on these things that none of his other employees will take on. So on the only evidence she gives us about her boss, it could go either way.
What I expected to see (and apparently you did too), at some point later in the article, was some kind of follow-up to that specific story she told--some way in which either her boss did or didn't support her in some subsequent development related to what she had already told. And there wasn't one.
Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).
Ah. That makes sense.
That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.
That the narrative payoff never comes is such an infuriating let down, you actually end up confused over what the heck you just read!
I think the fact that the story comes with bespoke cover art just serves to raise expectations even further.
We're talking about Matt Cutts here who took what was likely a massive pay cut to work for the government after a long career at Google. Neither does this inference seem credible, nor does the characterization of him as "idiot manager" in the article
https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/matt-cutts...
I seriously doubt that it was the intent of the author to accuse Matt Cutts as someone who spun blame onto others and avoided responsibility.
USDS is the federal government's first attempt to recognize the fact that the United States has no cross-department best practices for software engineering at the federal level. It's an organization tasked with running roughshod over various software engineering projects, but in its first iteration, it served an advisory role, and had no "teeth." So it ran into a lot of challenges where it would try to provide best practices for various government orgs, and the orgs, convinced that they knew best because they've been doing this for decades (wrong) already, could just ignore them.
I believe they have some teeth now, and it may perhaps be because a couple of interactions like this occurred. I know Mr. Cutts himself built up a bit of a reputation as a skullcracker, because it turns out he was quite good at figuring out how to apply bureaucratic leverage (mostly by figuring out how individual team members were incentivized and then aligning the relevant incentives to make them care about getting the job done the right way).
I'm not sure if it's a good essay, but what I loved was the way she described connecting people as "just" doing her job. She didn't see it as brave. I'm not sure what degree I would need to take, or what job title I would have to have, to see "making connections" as my job.
People are cut out for different things. You have "brave" teachers, and you have "brave" managers. We all recognize them, but don't appreciate them as people enough, even when these breeds are rare gems.
Even for someone shy, with experience and hard work, one might end up becoming a death-defying samurai.
What the text doesn't recognize is that many people just don't feel all that much or have that much empathy. So there's less of a spur to actually do the work to become a natural leader or go into enough depth.
I don't think that's the case, since Matt Cutts kinda had the same role in Google before joining USDS. Or maybe he's gotten used to unexceptional employees there.
When you're bad mouthing your former boss, you usually don't state their name. Even better if you can leave the circumstances ambiguous enough that few people can guess.
If you do name them, that's scorched earth. I'd expect a lot of clear anger directed towards Matt if he was the idiot.
So I read it as her having a good working relationship with him, he was just impressed how much certain scenarios always involved her.
- Some/many workers care more about job stability, as opposed to making a difference at work
- Such workers are suffering from "real psychological damage"
- They are constantly hounded by imposter syndrome, because they aren't respected by anyone else, and they know it
- They often end up as senior bureaucrats/leaders, because of their risk aversion, and because they are trying to overcompensate for their low self-esteem and psychological damage
- They also "end up in startups more often than you might expect" (which seems ironic since startups are far more risky than being at a BigCorp)
At the risk of putting myself out there, I suspect the above conclusions are quite a reach.
I wondered where the conservatism came from given that at a business level the status quo was failure. This seems like a plausible explanation.
> ...he closes the door and takes out his badge. “I have to show you this first.”
This job is not near the level of encountering FBI interviews as an actually critical part of work. "How about we circle back when I have legal counsel present" is the least perilous interaction at this point.
> “Oh wait, I forgot something. Could you raise your right hand for a minute?” Confused. I did so. “Everything you told me today is true to the best of your knowledge?”
I mean, the badge part was enough. The 18 U.S.C. § 1001 anvil has already been suspended over your head for 6 years. This is simply cruel.
Unless you are sitting on some real family wealth this idea that you can just "lawyer up" against the friggin' FBI is just laughable. Might as well advise people to "always call the president and get him on side".
"Always"! Like it's checking tire pressure before a long drive or something. "Oh yeah I always bring a couple of $1000/hr lawyers with me to important meetings. Better safe than sorry. What, you don't?"
Big bosses were paralyzed by the threat of becoming responsible for a coming failure, and were unable to think straight. They didn't even try to think about avoiding failure. They though about keeping themselves away from risk of becoming responsible of failure. Completely incompetent people.
The story with FBI shows that she did try to solve the problem, and that she took the risk of million years in a jail.
> this just seems distasteful, on top of the confusing writing
I agree, it is confusing. It is not enough to read the article, one needs to stop after reading and think. It took to me five minutes to understand. The title is the most confusing thing: it meant to be a generalized question from an average person, not a question the author asks about her boss, but it is not obvious.
In my opinion the real difference in leadership style derives from theory x (top-down) vs theory y (bottom-up). If you haven’t read up on that you definitely should. I’ve noticed I can work with managers regardless of their risk profile, but I do not thrive under theory x leadership because it is too stifling.
One way that stands out is road rules. The French tourism operators have cottoned onto this, and plonk us ozzies by the bus load in front of the Arc de Triomphe for 1/2 an hour. And we just sit there memorised, unable to tear our eyes away. The fact that any OECD country would operate like this defies our preconceptions. The fact that such uncontrolled chaos actually works defies belief, it's like we've visited a different Universe.
And so it is with workplaces. I worked in a series of companies where the operating assumption was that if you weren't trying new things and failing occasionally, you weren't trying hard enough. (Actually, a more reasonable description of the expectation is you must be racking up successes at a reasonable rate. But as everyone knows you can't rack up successes without failing occasionally.) It's been that way for my entire working life.
Until a year ago that is, when I the company worked for was purchased. And then it was like I was in France, watching the Arc de Triomphe. The decisions seemed inexplicable, the words used to justify them like "enterprise grade" were literally meaningless to me. I went through denial, thinking a much bigger and clear successful company couldn't operate in ways much different to what I learned worked over the course of decades. Then confusion, after acknowledging it clearly did operate on different rules, and those rules must somehow be understandable to all the players, except me, apparently. And then, finally, a month or two ago the oh shit moment, "this isn't about the best decision for the corporation, it's about minimising personal responsibility and risk". Just like the article says. How unoriginal that thought turned out to be. Unlike you I was oil watching water make its way into my world. It wasn't my unchallenged normal. It was in my face, sudden, and painful. In that situation I could not be a slow boiled frog; this thing demanded an explanation.
After that moment of clarity, understanding the games being played was much easier. Approaching a problem with "I'll see what I can do without bothering too many people. Experiment a little, try 3, and ask the users I inflicted in what worked out best" is utterly untenable. Firstly, I've actually chosen something without consulting _all_ the stakeholders first (or wasting their time in fk'ing endless meetings). Heaven forbid - that would mean I'm clearly responsible for the outcome. I can't palm it off as "the committee" made the decision, or cast the decision as a shared responsibility. This choice to spend the time, effort and expense is all on me. Then there's the little matter of 2 out of the 3 experiments could be painted as failures by enemies. And finally, by actually letting others way in on which experiment was best, how on earth could I justify my "the decider man who gets paid the big bucks" position. In this process I'm little more than the bunny doing the leg work. Project must be my idea, with all the decisions for the good outcomes owned by me.
No, the way this must work is hours of meetings speaking in tongues. Hidden criticisms, white anting the existing setup, but nothing overtly back stabby like "this is shit - it's costing us money". The initial task is to create the politics for change while minimising the risk to me by keeping a small profile, then once the winds for change are strong I can sail in with the magic bullet and vanquish the remaining naysayers.
But this magic bullet can't be created by me - that would make me unquestionably responsible for the outcome. No, there must be wriggle room. It must be something purchased from outside, someone to share the burden of responsibility. That has several advantages.
Firstly, I don't have to sell it. The vendor has a well oiled sales team that gives me all the materials I need. Brochures, slick rehearsed demos where nothing goes wrong, written guarantees with SLA's no less (that offer to refund the $10 you have paid for the service was down for the day and stopped 50 people working). As I have recently discovered that well oiled sales team will be happy to be my mercenaries, using their connections (they are sales after all) to have quiet words here and there. (Strangely, it hadn't occurred to me that this would happen in the corporate world.)
To add to the air of enterprise grade it can't be cheap either - I don't want to be responsible for risking a few bucks for years by using a fly by nighter. No, if this company fails, no one could have seen it coming, certainly not me. It's irrelevant that it's a commodity like an internet link I could get from anywhere if my el-cheapo failed, as it's the failure in my choice of vendor (because it was undeniably solely my choice!) that reflects on me.
The second advantage is if it has hairs, that's the clients fault for not seeing through the demo's. We showed them what they were getting after all. And better yet, I can't fix the hairs, so I can't accumulate responsibility for fixes that don't work. The specification for those fixes must come from the client, and of course they bear full responsibility. I just sign the cheques. In fact I can probably avoid paying for the fixes out of my budget.
The third advantage is it came with a big legal document, so if all turns to shit we have recourse, and perusing that isn't my job - it's legals. Never mind the cost or perusing it is prohibitive. Never mind the vendor's legal team had years of time to fill it with more holes than swiss cheese, whereas I demanded an answer from our legal team in a week. The failure to obtain recourse can't be mine - I did a perfectly good job in getting the paperwork signed. Legal said so, and now it’s their job to see it through.
I reckon I could play the game now, if I could bring myself to do it. The problem is unlike the Arc de Triomphe, I see how it would work in anyone's favour, except mine. But I guess if I can't see that's what matters most, I'm missing the point entirely.
Right now I’m not playing it, and as the article says those who don’t play by those rules are treated as a threat. That’s a new development. To see it written on hacker news as truism when I’ve just learnt it after being in the workforce for decades is more than a little unsettling. I even didn’t notice it was happening a few weeks ago. I was probably just too wet behind the ears to notice, but in addition now we’ve outright rejected their “enterprise grade” solutions for something that is cheaper and clearly gives better service, and worse we have done it twice, in quick succession.
Now reputations are on the line and the game is on. My supreme confidence they are indeed a bunch of idiots naturally makes me believe if this is allowed to continue there is only one possible outcome - the accumulated successes will be noticed and the failed experiments eventually forgotten as that has always panned out. That is surely my hubris speaking; hardly something that could be taken seriously. But still too many successes could undermine authority, and risk personal reputations. Risks can’t be tolerated.
I’ll concede the outcome of this type of stoush would usually be a foregone conclusion, the big company culture will always squash the new acquisition. But in this particular case the big company wasn’t doing so well, the newish CEO recognised he had a bureaucracy problem and bought us to shake things up. So there’s hope. Maybe.
This is a big question that is unlikely to be an easy answer, but what can you tell us about how your previous organisation incentivised this behaviour and produced a productive culture? Also - how big was it (these things become harder to do the larger your org gets)?
Such a hassle when authors just assume everybody is also in their bubble and know all thr acronyms. I'm not in or from the U.S. I have no clue what USDS is. Bad start to introduce me to your article.
Yes, totally agree.
And for those who say 'well you got Google don't you?' or similar, my searches found United States Department of State and United States Digital Service. Both of these seem plausible but who knows.
The whole thing looks like a rushed rant written to get some views on Medium and not to share "favorite story".
> When you are in a work situation where you are respected and admired, that is often its own reward. If you don’t have that, the components of your job that give you a sense of value and satisfaction are all connected directly to the career ladder. What is your title? What is the prestige value of your projects?
My current official job title is "Code Contributor". I was quite proud of coming up with something that would be evergreen even if as my projects changed, yet emphasized what I consider key.
But it seems to confuse people that it doesn't have "Senior", "Lead", "Chair", or "Manager" in it. Maybe I should just stick all those at the end? :)
Competently writing software will involve applying engineering principles and a project management methodology: things like TDD, design-patterns, your system's architecture - they're all part of software-engineering.
Writing software is "programming" in the same way that writing a bestseller novel is "typing" or doing mathematics is putting fancy symbols on paper.
I get that it is a discipline that allows one to self-learn up the ladder to the title but why the hate? I do just as much highly-complex/critical work as my other engineering friends, so why is what I do not engineering all of a sudden?
She kind of talks about it in the last paragraph. I don't think she was talking about someone specifically (although she may have somebody in mind) but in general.
"Eventually you end up spending all your time trying to look busy, avoid responsibility and save face by scapegoating others. "
"The end result of this is that it often feels like everyone at the top is maliciously incompetent."
This, according to her, is how you end up with an idiot running an engineering org.
Short summary: Woznaik vs Jobs. The technical guy vs. the smooth talker.
Longer summary:
Some people are perpetual resume builders. They want quick promotion, bigger job titles, higher salary...
The ladder growth is their reward. And they'll avoid anything that jeopardizes their career path. They'll grab the glory for good stuff and push the blame for bad stuff.
The hacker, risk taker on the other hand does not optimize for career growth. Does difficult, critical stuff often without knowing that what they've accomplished is actually a big deal.
Even when know they've accomplished something big, they won't toot their own horns. They do it for the 'love of the game.'
I can't imagine Jobs as someone motivated put his head down and do busywork to collect a brass nameplate with a fancy title after twenty years.
No.[1]
Woz gave away much of his stock in Apple, more than half of it before Apple even went public.
[1] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/steve-...
Wow, I never considered there must exist some people who know they are bad at their job, feel bad about it, and yet have to continue doing it to keep paying the bills. This has to be true considering the sheer number of people employed by large organizations.
> The way you process risk and handle fear has more impact on what kind of career you have than any other single factor.
The likely reason the author is the one who always ends up in these situations is because they eschew fear and are willing to take on difficult issues. Most other people, rationally, run from those issues.
From my personal experience, this actually works out well for everyone usually because people like me who are happy to wander into difficult things are doing it precisely because those things don't have other power players trying to lord over them. Everyone is running from it, so you can get a good amount of independent autonomy in dealing with it.
What's really going on is that a torrent of digital change is being unleashed on the world. That change is significantly changing the skills needed by leaders.
I'm not sure if the flood of wildly successful leaders having a technical background is correlation or causation, but I am looking forward to knowing someday.
During my stint in a bureaucractic organisation I always considered this types of people as a huge part of the problem.
Instead of being candid about what they wanted, open to dialog, and making the whole system better, they forced through ideas that aligned with their own world view via back channels.
This meant that instead of getting the best outcomes, we got the ideas pushed by people who had longest tenure or were the most political.
I've used a similar "bushido vs bureaucracy" dichotomy in the past. Leadership necessitates accepting that failures will occur, planning on how to handle them, and learning from them. Sadly in the US at least, we've had decades of implicit training otherwise and it shows up as a paucity of adults in the room when problems that aren't bullshittable come around.
The "don't rock the boat" mentality that makes people accept all kinds of personal risk aversion and cognitive dissonance is rife in any organization that is putting money in people's wallet. Delaying the consequences of any decision or event until after your last paycheck works when enough people buy into it, sort of a meta-Ponzi scheme of responsibility that facilitates the real Ponzi scheme of getting paid today on tomorrow's bill.
Sort of tangential, but if you find this article whatever combination of interesting or eye-opening, you may want to read Locke's Confronting Managerialism. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11532185-confronting-man...)
>...So they would engage with the researchers, put on this big performance with meetings and field trips and PowerPoint decks,
>...and then DO NOTHING.
Yeah, “all that shit” like the way you can buy food or send your kid to college...
what are you talking about? I’ve had to prioritize money over meaningful work since my early twenties due to complex and upsetting elder care issue. Adventure phase? Get real. If your life contains an adventure phase please stop and acknowledge you are in some overwhelmingly small group of extreme privilege.
She probably has never experienced poverty, and no doubt believes (probably correctly!) that she could easily walk out and get another job for a similar (or higher) wage.
Did I misread or misunderstand that?
(P.S. Public Sans [1] was developed by the U.S. Wed Design System (USWDS) team at GSA, not USDS)
0: https://www.usds.gov/resources/USDS-Impact-Report-2020.pdf
I think the most surprising insight is his commentary on Heart of Darkness as a novel about bureaucracy -- it's worth a read.
Depends on how the organisations you are in value risk taking and fear.
If your manager is running from death, your appetite for risk is not a positive.
There's nothing to be done when the American public elects a muppet President.
The ones who violate the bureaucratic rules but don't get the bad outcome the rules are there to prevent.
Those are the people you're looking for.
This is obviously heavily embellished by the sort of person who’s really into Harry Potter as an adult.
In this context, the real question to ask is: why are you still working there?
I feel like the author is really clueless and has never worked in a startup.
You can't not get work done and survive in a startup. There's too much visibility into who is doing what to hide. That's not true in the US Government. I've met lots of losers in government who haven't done a bit of useful work in years.
The whole story seems like a concocted ... "oh look how badass and cool I am" scenario. The author is so full of herself.
There's the startup that's 50-100 people or smaller. In that case, you're completely right.
Then there's the "startup" that employs thousands of people and just closed a Series D in anticipation of hiring more.
The second is still a completely different beast from old stalwarts of industry like IBM, GM, big Wall Street banks, etc.
Maybe you guys should look into doing your jobs instead of "fighting white supremacists" on taxpayer dime?
I see no reason in the article to doubt her choice of labels.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm...
Wait a moment, you can argue about whose purview exactly this is, but are you saying that fighting white supremacists isn't a good use of taxpayer dollars? It's certainly a cause to which I'd be happy to know my taxes were going.
Ah, yes, that was the argument that I hoped you were making—based on purview (these people aren't in the business of fighting white supremacists), not on whether fighting white supremacists is itself a good idea. Note that, initially, the white supremacism was irrelevant—the issue was just that a government website (which definitely does fall under the purview of USDS) was expected to come under attack—and that, to the extent that it was relevant, this USDS employee immediately reached out to the FBI, whose job this definitely should be. The article gives no indication that any more USDS resources were spent on this than the author's being interviewed by the FBI.
What is an example of mainstream best selling books or media that use it that way? (I mean which specifically, not just in the sense of "it feels that it's used so much that it might as well mean that.")
I'd argue, even if you are right about this useage, that "white supremacist" should still be used to describe white supremacist activities—responding to the dilution of a word by refusing to use it at all does no-one any good—and that activities properly so described should be regarded as nefarious.
> White supremacy in this context does not refer to individual white people and their individual intentions or actions but to an overarching political, economic, and social system of domination.
Note the specific disclaimer about not so referring to individuals. In this context, it is true that much of the world is part of a white supremacist culture. As the author says:
> … within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do.
Pointing this out does not, I think, dilute the term; it rather insists on confronting the fact that "but I'm not racist" is not a sufficient response to claims of systemic racism.
(The author does use the phrases "explicit white supremacists" and "avowed white supremacists", thus referring to individuals; but, as far as I can tell, she does not define the term, and I think that it is clear that she means by this to separate out people with overt white supremacist ideas from those of us who are merely a part of the culture—a clarification, rather than a dilution.)