What happens when something goes wrong, what happens when someone quits or is sick? What happens when business needs to change/pivot/innovate? This idea that optimized time is somehow 100% wasted is killing a lot of people.
I am often asking questions of my senior leaders about the volume of organizational change that is a constant in the company and what I can do to act as a “shock absorber” for my direct reports and subordinate leaders.
A major customer facing outage resulted in an RCA compiled by yours truly. I found that a critical engineer had quit months before-never backfilled. Work got reassigned to other people. A second event and second RCA, similarly created by me. Same story: an Ops person had left the company last year, never backfilled. A third. Each time I pointed to workloads and capacities. Not because it’s my job to do these things specifically or by expectations of my director but because no one else in the 400 person organization is yet no one else knows how to go looking for this info so it’s sort of become my duty just because I have enough of a damn to start doing it. These aren’t even MY teams, shit just rolls down hill and my team is at the bottom of the shit pipe. Which is something I hoped bringing these results would get action on. They barely have.
What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to.
If I had the balls I would straight up ask my senior leaders “what would you say it is you do here if it’s taken such severe consequences to start looking at what we’re asking our people to do?”
What’s most saddening: it’s becoming alarmingly common from job to job. It’s forced me to rethink drastically how I’m vetting companies because they do a GREAT job disguising this during interviews.
No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit, either by increasing revenue and/or reducing costs. I would bet your leaders are consciously trying to skate by and reap the short term rewards and hoping someone like you fills in the gaps. As long as the problem can’t be pinned on them, or they can bounce before it causes sufficient disruption to the business to affect compensation, their goals are met.
For example, the budget gets decided a few levels up, but the the immediate manager knows they aren’t being given the resources to succeed. Then their strategy, if they have the ability, might be to hire someone who they can point a finger to when it inevitably fails.
The morale of the story is that it takes a year to figure out that organization-person fit is bad?
That may be true now but it seems like a recipe for disaster (check 3-4 ongoing disasters outside my window, yep). I assume in earlier eras society prepared for disasters, paid people to prevent disasters and so-forth. Has something changed?
This is not a law of nature. Different cultural norms yields different business priorities. The fact of the matter is that money is only a surrogate for value, it is not the actual thing. Current business teaching has ideologically put the money hoarders in charge where increasing their profits is the only appropriate moral behavior. This yields a legitimacy and incentive for shortermist thinking.
Equating money with value builds a distorted view of what humans actually value. Money is not ideal in representing the value of stability, fairness or compassion. these are very basic human values which are shared by most of us, yet money cannot encode these faithfully.
We shouldn't accept the side effects of our choice to use money as surrogate for value as some form of natural law.
Re: vetting companies, it’s so true. You probably have a lot of wisdom already, but it’s quite the learning process.
Had that happen once. Friend in one department made a referral for me to join another, I ask pointed and direct questions in the interview-which was otherwise light hearted and engaging, the response was filibustering, platitudinous non-answers about “shared sacrifices” and “we all jump in” and “take the flank” and “no man left behind” (please do NOT get me started on the amount of militarized battle-speak that has rooted itself into corporate America like a tick). So I tactfully and delicately but firmly try to bring the conversation back on track.
Friend tells me a few days later “they disqualified you as not being a good culture fit. What did you say??”
“I asked what the on-call schedule was like”
That's the kicker: experience has taught me that if I don't ask specific (but tactful) questions about things that have caused excess anxiety and stress in the job, and how the company interviewing me handles them (or fails to handle them) early enough, I find out in the worst ways after taking the job and starting.
This is no attempt at setting myself up for malingering down the road, I am not that kind of a person; but I have also grasped how important it is to interview the company as much as the company is interviewing me. If they get to be stringent about how good we would "fit", then so should job candidates.
And ironically given the thread we're in about 'over optimization', it's just not worth the time to me to wait until getting an offer to find out the engineering culture believes in 'drinking from the firehose'. I want to know that early, so as to self-select out.
Any flashes of inspiration on this?
I’m always searching for the perfect set of little questions to help uncover the real culture of a company, rather than the platitudinous corporate-buzzword answers about culture you otherwise get.
Software and manufacturing are both highly susceptible to misery from this efficiency BS. If you are gonna work to death might as well start your own company.
You are me.
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In my junior role I did the development and the ops guys did the deployments and we both knew at least some of what the other person did. It helped knowledge transfer of hot new framework from me to the elder ops people and sage unix wisdom from them down to me. We had a "read-only" Friday where deployments were forbidden to help prevent outages over the weekend. The software changed slowly and employee churn was minimal.
Now (much later) I'm elsewhere, expected to do the dev, the ops, the deployment itself, the documentation, training a junior all the while; there are effectively half as many people keeping the ship afloat.
The most bizarre part of all is my daily rate is almost 3x what it was then, as the market dictates for such drudgery. Relevant to the article it's obviously strategic for me to accept that, but if the rates weren't so absurd and you could get a dev and an ops for 0.5x the devops rate each the company would get twice as many man-hours, not to mention the added safety of doubling the system's bus factor, cutting workloads in half and vastly improving employee quality of life. Companies offering a devops role for 1.5x a single developer's rate 10 years ago to ostensibly save themselves 0.5 of a salary, are now collectively getting 0.333x as much value out of their hires (and then losing them completely when they burn out and being thrust into chaos).
One thing that stuck out was that at Volvo in the sixties they overstuffed engineers by up to 40% to have a buffer in something happened.
The engineers may have been better rested and thus able to deliver more quickly and reliably thanks to a sense that they had an effective peer support group.
The eventual product quality may have been higher thanks to the additional oversight, review and input - leading to increased market demand.
The support, stability and resulting confidence offered to employees may have spread via word-of-mouth to their familities, friends and extended networks, increasing marketplace faith in the company and trust in the product.
And, perhaps the simplest albeit least thought-provoking explanation: perhaps the additional 40% engineering salary overhead did not have a significant impact on the company finances.
I don't bemoan having a clearer picture of costs or margins of safety. What this speaks to is re-examining our values and perhaps directing our priorities to something other than maximizing ROI at all costs.
Our entire system is built upon maximizing ROI at all costs. Dealing with these values is extremely difficult.
I may have miscommunicated; perhaps I should have phrased it as re-evaluating what "return" we want to maximize.
That was definitely the case in the Ancient World and may be the reason why some Roman buildings are still standing.
(Roman concrete was awesome, BTW. Rebar is a major source of eventual concrete failure and Romans did not use any. On the other hand, they used volcanic ash in their concrete. Some Roman concrete piers are still standing, 2000 years of waves beating on them made them harder!)
Ended up with some. Am healing. Will be OK.
A decade ago many asked, "where is the new blood?" Could see it coming. Right now, people aging and burning out are super expensive to replace. In some ways they can't be.
I consider failure to manage this kind of debt severe. When it comes due, it is brutal.
That doesn't sound "fine" to me. People get sick. Vacations are necessities.
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOVC2Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
What then?
Hard to spool people up quick enough to avoid a real hit, and second order impact.
Even for mild cases of covid, the recovery can look like the flu. That means 1-2 weeks off work. And reduced ability for weeks after that. Now half of your team gets it at once.
Efficiency and resiliency are in opposite tension.
Short story?
Was down hard for a few weeks. Still struggling with a general lack of energy that has slowly been improving.
Brain fog is a thing. Better now, but during and for the few weeks after Covid? Rough. Would walk into a room only to realize I had no idea why.
Again, all improving, but for some of us Covid has a longer term impact beyond possibly losing a month being sick.
Very true.
Valuing this risk properly seems to be the major disconnect.
With it valued reasonably, the extra head count makes perfect sense!
I wonder why people don't just work in the opposite direction? Rather than run too lean, run properly, risks managed as they should be.
Then be opportunistic!
Every so often, when things are favorable, take work that matters an nail it for a nice payback!
Works about the same over a longer period, and the big costs are totally off the table.