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Comment by unicornmama | Hacker News Reader

> the first 6 months, they would go to all the team leaders for the teams they served and listen to the problems they faced.

I once got rejected from a manager interview with a billion dollar unicorn. I said I would spend my first 3 months understanding and observing. The director retorted and asked rhetorically what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work?

It left a bad taste in my mouth. And I have pondered for months whether I mishandled the question, fundamentally misunderstood management, or whether this unicorn is doomed to fail-at-scale because of poor organizational intelligence.

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It's the leader's job to influence team culture and structure. Culture often arrives and departs with leaders based on their values. While listening would have given you good intel, the director probably felt team members would have experienced a leadership void for 3 months. Depending on the level of morale at that time, that may have been unacceptable.

Instead you could have said how you'd work to create a culture based on your values of x, y and z. Ideally your values would align with the corporate culture and would motivate and inspire team members. You could have even told the director you'd have held meetings telling your team that you wanted to find out what their problems were. Tell them that on your watch things will get better, etc. Reassure them and provide a vision.

You don't only need to observe to discover problems, if you only ask people are likely to tell you, especially if there's new blood that might be able to create changes.

Thanks. I appreciate the observation and feedback.

Your answer is a correct description of what you actually should do, but unfortunately, interviewing is a signaling game.

There’s a lot of people out there who are smart and can perform well in an interview, but aren’t do-ers. They don’t make things happen. You don’t want to give off any vibes that you are that kind of person if you are interviewing for a fast-moving company.

I believe Amazon calls it “bias for action”.

Thanks. This seems to be a good summary of "bias for action" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-7w6BeWfQ

It also implies that ou have no experince to rely on if you wont make any quick improvements.

You should certainly look to understand large problems, but if you know a quick solution to a simple problem - just implement it.

Listening a lot is definitely what you should do. Doing nothing else for all of 3 months is rarely the solution though. When you really listen, you should identify some things that you can immediately help with. Share similar stories in your past and let the talker get a breakthrough and suggest a possible solution based on their knowledge - it won'tbe the exact same one but you can add value and perspective of fresh eyes. Other times the talker has intimate knowledge of the problem and possible solutions and all they've been waiting was for someone empowered to just let them try it.

As a leader your job is to enable those people. Then as time goes by you'll get your own knowledge of the problem space and can start taking some initiatives yourself too. But there's no need to literally do nothing for so long.

People often misunderstand "empower people " with "I'm a dunce and can't help anything for months on end" as if magically on month 3 you're now enlightened. Perhaps the interviewer was checking if you understood the nuances of these situations.

> People often misunderstand "empower people " with "I'm a dunce and can't help anything for months on end" as if magically on month 3 you're now enlightened. Perhaps the interviewer was checking if you understood the nuances of these situations.

Thanks for sharing this perspective.

Not doing any work is a valuable service at a company like this. The technical problems driving all the work in the article were self-inflicted; they had infinite VC money, so they hired a zillion engineers, who produced a zillion engineers' worth of work, so they needed a zillion servers to run it on.

Whether or not customers asked for it, or whether the same app design fundamentally could run on a single machine under their desk, doesn't really come into it. And bootstrapped companies (Instagram or Stackoverflow for example) often do manage to run on the single machine under a desk.

> whether this unicorn is doomed to fail-at-scale because of poor organizational intelligence.

This is the heat death of any organization. Organizations can absorb a stunning amount of dysfunction and somehow keep ticking.

> The director retorted and asked rhetorically what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work?

I think you can interpret that question two different ways, and it's hard to tell which one it was without being in the room/being in their head. The more generous way to interpret this is that they were checking your understanding of the role a manager plays outside of pushing changes and decisions.

That said, if it was clearly the director communicating that a manager should be jumping in and imposing a vision immediately, then you would've been misaligned philosophically, and that's probably not a job you'd want even if you're qualified. Being a manager while fundamentally disagreeing with your own boss is having one hand tied behind your back.

> what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work? Regardless of whether you're an incoming manager or senior IC, it's a good idea to observe your first few weeks/couple of months in a new team rather than come in suggesting big changes[1]. Yes, things might not be in an ideal situation, but there might be context you're missing which explains why things are the way they are.

[1] There a few times where big, shocking changes are necessary to reset a team in a bad situation. Most of the time this is not the case.

> I said I would spend my first 3 months understanding and observing. The director retorted and asked rhetorically what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work?

It's possible that the interviewer was of the "Jack Welch mindset" and worships action and making snap-decisions-- Captain Kirk style. A LOT of people see that as the ultimate model behavior for an executive. Or maybe, he instead asked that to see how you would push back to the inevitable pressure from others in the org that wouldn't respect someone that's not biased for action?

Listening is an underrated skill. We all place our attention (and thus the direction of problem solving) onto differing aspects of a situation. It takes a while to actually listen, learn those attentional perspectives, and get groups to holistically search for answers. Likewise, it takes time for team members to feel heard even when the manager answers with "You and I are not in agreement over solution X".

Even if the person doing the interview believed in your intentions, the question is still legitimate.

What kind of environment exists where employees complain that the new boss isn't doing any work?

Let them complain so you know who to get rid of in 3 months.

That three months buys you credibility to impose bigger changes.

I feel like there is a second part to tell. Can you say more?

A second part?

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