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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Primarily the "no politics" but I also see the wisdom in dropping 360 reviews. We did that several years ago and it was an amazingly positive change. As for no more dwelling on past decisions, that is the same thing as Intel's cultural value of "Disagree, but then commit." Basically, debate fiercely but then once a decision is made, commit to to it even if it didn't go your way and move on. This is a key part of being a team player. Things aren't going to always go your way and even leadership will sometimes make mistakes but it undermines everything if someone keeps harping on a prior decision. "See, I told it wouldn't work" is about the most immature and unhelpful attitude to have - no matter how correct it may be.

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The Intel motto you quote is a much better formulation of this concept, if in fact the recent noise from Basecamp is a sign that they agree with Intel on this. Communication is also an important skill for leaders, and that seems to be lacking.

> As for no more dwelling on past decisions, that is the same thing as Intel's cultural value of "Disagree, but then commit." Basically, debate fiercely but then once a decision is made, commit to to it even if it didn't go your way and move on. This is a key part of being a team player.

Hmm... Does (or should) "Disagree, but then commit" contain a corollary of "...and let's look at it again in X months/years"?

I mean, if you do argue for something, say some particular technical solution, but the decision goes against you, and you do actually accept and commit to the outcome... Is this commitment eternal?

If, say, you're still convinced the programming language / framework / style you originally advocated would be a better fit for your team / department / company, are you bound to shut up forever or can you raise it again at some point in the future? And if you can re-raise it, then when -- is there some general waiting period for stuff like this, or should it perhaps be an explicit addendum to every decision?

N.B: Not asking for myself, just a hypothetical that I find interesting... OK, come to think of it, perhaps actually asking for myself after all: I haven't been turned down on any such suggestion... Yet, but am thinking about raising one. And if I get a "No" at first, how long do I go on nagging / wait before I remind everyone of it?

>As for no more dwelling on past decisions, that is the same thing as Intel's cultural value of "Disagree, but then commit."

You mean the company who is flailing in the market, losing employees and generally considered a bad place to work?

>"See, I told it wouldn't work" is about the most immature and unhelpful attitude to have - no matter how correct it may be.

Blame free post mortems are vital for an organization to grow and improve with time. If you cannot review past bad decisions and learn from then then you will be forced to repeat the same mistakes while your competitors evolve.

>but it undermines everything if someone keeps harping on a prior decision.

If accepting a mistake was made and then publicly coming up with a plan to not have it happen again undermines your ability to lead then you are a horrible leader.

Oh please. Intel may not be the legend it once was but that hardly invalidates a value first forged some 40 years ago.

Intel has enough cash to finance a possible comeback down the road. I'm shocked at how people seem to minimize their future options.

Not only does Intel have the cash, but it has a quarter century of fab capitalization left and a history of come backs, first with the shift from memory to CPUs in the 80s and then overcoming AMD in the 2000s. Ironically, Intel's biggest safety net is spinning off their fabs like AMD spun off Global Foundries, which gave them the capital to claw themselves back from the grave and create this competition for Intel today. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen an Intel chiplet design.

We're seeing shortages of chips made on everything from 30 year old processes to cutting edges fabs and that demand is likely to be relatively sticky going forward. Intel's going to have to try even harder than it is now to fail and it's going to take decades for the dust to settle, if it ever does (hello Intel Business Machines).

May I ask why you felt things we better post 360 feedback?

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