Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, the story totally lost me after she was describing the interaction with the FBI. I did not easily take away some conclusion about what she had done wrong or what deep pile of shit she had just created for herself, or what on 2 paths she had just chosen incorrectly, or daringly?

(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?

View on HN

I think she's saying that it's odd to her, as someone who innately enjoys doing highly consequential work, that other people don't share in her enthusiasm. Similarly, coworkers must find it odd that she doesn't actively dodge such work or deal with it in a robotic, CYA manner, devoid of enthusiasm. Her realization about them and their realization about her are asymmetric in consequence. Even if she judges them it won't affect them, because they're more of the norm (a tribe of like-minded people). However, she stands out, and that makes her life harder in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The occasional "joke" or compliment about her enthusiasm might actually be underhanded trivialization. Clearly she finds the fulfillment to be worth it though.

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.

> Those are my 2 cents, I could be way off about the author’s intent there.

You have, however, correctly summarized some aspects of my experiences working for the government, more succinctly and dispassionately than I could have. Thank you.

I don't find anything unique here that I don't see at big companies, it's just handled more deftly.

Difference is big corps sometimes get reorganized or their cash cow falls on hard times and they need to optimise or perish. They don't succeed often but the incentives are usually profit driven - politics are a luxury that big corps can afford to absorb because they are usually entrenched in some position and can afford to accumulate inefficiency.

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.

It's definitely a continuum depending on industry.

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.

There's a finite budget in any company, even those flush with cash. Tech companies still have all the same politics as the size increases.

You write really well.

Thank you, I had no clue what to get out of the story.

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.

A quote from Mark Twain - "I apologise for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one".

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.

I've seen this happens in big companies as well. The bigger the company, the closer it resembles a small government. Bureaucracy is a function of size.

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.

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain this from your interpretation. It helped me understand more about jobs is large organizations I never though of before.

Can confirm, this is a vivid picture of the US government contracting landscape.

Here's a summary that combines the two sections:

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.

> 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.

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.

She’s probably holding back for various reasons, despite the sensational title. You have to read between the lines.

Holding back? She names her employer and her boss yet doesn’t give anything concrete, but feels okay to call him an “idiot” in the title?

She never actually outright called her boss an idiot. The most literal interpretation of the title is "if you feel this way about your boss, then here is why you may feel that way." I certainly hope that was her intended meaning, because the counterfactual is very risque. I did think the title was unnecessary though, and the naming.

The missing piece of the puzzle is that we never meet the idiot manager in the story. She's in an organizational situation where her team has oversight over a team in the government implementing on a project but does not have the ability to directly set policy, constrain goals, or otherwise apply direct managerial leverage. The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Matt Cutts, meanwhile, is the head of her department, and also has no managerial oversight over the team she just called federal law enforcement on.

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 ;) ).

> The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised.

Ah. That makes sense.

...the team she just called federal law enforcement on.

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.

It's not precisely that she called law enforcement on them, poor choice of words on my part. It's more that, if you will, she turned the "eye of Sauron" on the project. If the team she had oversight on thought they were going to meet deadlines with open security holes, having the FBI actively looking at what they're doing pretty much torpedoes that hope.

It seems like the team wanted it torpedoed as well. Every higher up was aware but tied in bureaucracy. The team basically washed their hands and tried to deliver in order to pass the buck. Messing with things codified in federal law seems like a very poor career choice.

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.

Yeah, it's not clear unless one understands what USDS does.

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).

To bait a story with such a spectacular plot, the author could have us reading tenuous managerial pontification for pages on end, just to get the juicy revelation at the end.

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.

> 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.

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...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts

I know what you mean, but no. It wasn't that she had done something wrong, it was just amazing (to her manager) that she had done something so (apparently) brave as reaching out to the FBI. The point of the essay is -- some people are brave in this way, and some aren't.

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.

Connecting people, she'll gravitate to being a natural leader. You could say she might already be a leader, and she even recognize people can act as a leader without having the position.

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.

> it was just amazing (to her manager) that she had done something so (apparently) brave as reaching out

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.

If you make connecting the right people your job, regardless of title, you are doing things well.

Yes! I was at the edge of my seat wanting to know what happened with the FBI. I expected her to loop back to that story at the end to tie the two threads of the post together and explain how they relate. But then it just ended. I really liked both threads but feel a bit disappointed that I don’t have closure on the story.

Same for me. I feel like the essay makes some good points about the type of people who gravitate towards middle management, but I'm unable to make the connections myself because the essay jumps around. I'm still confused -- is Matt Cutts the "idiot running my engineering org"?

I think this could and should be a lot clearer, but I doubt it.

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.

Yes, I also didn't think there was much ambiguity as to her relationship with her boss - a risk averse manager wouldn't have laughed off her situation or enabled her to continue on with her continuous outreach - she would've been deemed long ago as a trouble maker to confine. The point of him laughing it off anecdote is to show the trust in their relationship.

My read is that Cutts is several levels above her (all the way at the top, perhaps), and by contacting the FBI she was doing the job someone in the hierarchy between them was supposed to be doing but avoiding for some reason or other. And the "only you" comment by Cutts indicated that it wasn't just the people in line between him and her, but all over the organization that would avoid contacting the FBI.

The first part of the essay was a very interesting view into bureaucracy and overcoming it via personal connections. The second part seemed to be very hand-wavy armchair-psychologist-esque. The thesis seems to be that:

- 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.

The part that they "end up in startups more often than you might expect" was a fascinating line for me and one that resonates with me quite well based on my experience.

I've often been shocked by how conservative an unprofitable/stagnant growth startups will be with engineering time. I've seen growing teams locked in incremental product/platform investment with no major new customer features in the roadmap.

I wondered where the conservatism came from given that at a business level the status quo was failure. This seems like a plausible explanation.

Yeah, I've been quite puzzled too, and figured perhaps they were anecdotal but perhaps they are not. I really like this definition of engineering process as "a decision making process (often iterative) in which the basic sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources optimally to meet a stated objective" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_design_process) and have met too many, by their unwillingness to commit and take ownership of a decision, pretty much stall the entire engineering development progress.

Yes. I was horrified at the point of:

> ...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.

Always lawyer up. As we’ve learned in the last few years, the FBI loves to catch people “lying” to agents as a precursor to persecuting them for political reasons.

Nah.

You’re right sorry. I forgot the FBI was full of good guys.

Well maybe there was an annular region there in the 90s when the FBI's mission was still in-between 'try to assassinate black activists', and 'give fake bombs to muslim teenagers and then arrest them for it'.

I love how commenters on HN and elsewhere often make the blithe recommendation to "lawyer up" as if normal people can just speed dial some white-shoe senior partner and get them on a $10k/m retainer stat.

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?"

There’s a great, cheaper alternative to lawyering up when your participation is optional: don’t participate and don’t discuss anything.

I don't see how the title or the concluding statements are justified by this story whatsoever. And publicly blasting a former manager for this when their described behavior doesn't support it at all? I don't know who the author is so maybe there's some context I'm supposed to know, but this just seems distasteful, on top of the confusing writing

The story describes a bureaucracy -- an organization of people averse of risk and therefore irresponsible: they did everything to be able to say "it is not my fault". They didn't tried to find a way to stop attacks.

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.

I believe she was using the concrete experience to speculate on why she ended up being different enough from the rest of her peers that her manager could know that it “could only be her”. Escalating this issue to the FBI went beyond what was called from her.

You have grasped all the points. Yes, there's a break at that point. Anecdote's over, time to go into the next part. No, she didn't do anything particularly daring or shitstorm-causing; in fact it was a fairly obvious thing to do, but things like that tend to be perceived by cowards as too risky, so she or someone like her always ends up being the one to do it.

This is a glorified text equivalent of an Instagram selfie post, moving on.

Same experience. I didn't know if the second half was talking about Matt Cutts.

I think the point of the story was to demonstrate what non-risk-averseness looks like. It was probably hard to find a way to make that explicit because it's basically a form of bragging.

Yes, I experienced the same issue. My first thought was that this essay was just disjointed enough to wonder if it was GPT-3.

I felt the exact same way.

Same reaction exactly, yes!

Same

Reply on news.ycombinator.com