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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Your take is exactly what is wrong with the culture. An existential problem is not a problem because you didn't sell it correctly. You first need to "massage" the individuals to create some kind of coalition. A coalition willing to accept basic facts or responsibility.

If a CEO were to be a fly on the wall in this room and overhear it all, they ought to fire every single manager in the room. Quite obviously they are willing to bury important facts.

I'm well familiar with these "career limiting" types. I once was in a similar position, on an architectural board dropping a few truth bombs. One of the leaders of the many political kingdoms said to me in private: please know that I think that you're 100% right, but I can't commit to that in public or writing.

These people gladly tank a company for as long as they keep their hands clean.

Middle management games. If your company grows to the size as to have middle management, for god's sake split it up.

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I think you're taking it in a different direction than I meant. It's not about massaging anyone. Information can only be acted on to effect change if it's delivered with the context to do so.

I've been in similar situations. The fallacy is thinking that "truth bombs" are an effective communication style. If you want to effect change you need to do some social engineering and politicking. Hate it all you want, but the human psyche isn't a technical problem to solve with data and figures. What you do is manage expectations and present ideas that let people walk out of the meeting feeling like there's some direction that can be taken without disaster. Otherwise you're Chicken Little.

Good management responds to bad situations by negotiating scope and translating delays into milestones that are achievable. Like the story makes ICs feel like heroes for dropping truth bombs and quitting before seeing anything change, then seeming to be proven correct is an example of that. In my opinion they failed at the task given to them, which was to analyze the state of the project and implicitly give management something to do about it.

And that was a lesson I learned early in my career, being tasked with analyzing the state of a project and assessing why it was shit. The mistake was concluding that it was shit, because someone got fired afterwards who could have actually done a good job. What I didn't do was deliver information in a context that could have translated into change. The same is true of the ICs in the story. This is bragging about failure.

I like your take and it resonates a lot with me. But companies splitting up to remove the need of middle management - has that ever happened to anyone? A more realistic advice is probably to get a different job once you see managers start playing their status games and climbing their career ladders while ignoring often uncomfortable facts.

> You first need to "massage" the individuals to create some kind of coalition. A coalition willing to accept basic facts or responsibility.

Hard agree with this approach! Why surprise and upset people enmasse when you can talk to individuals more privately and test the waters beforehand.

Test what? There is a massive problem. The priority is to acknowledge and solve it, not to spend a huge amount of time shooting the messenger or managing feelings.

I think the irony here is that OP _did_ do that anyway, he basically says he spent a year informing more and more management and others that the project was not on track. He played the game for a year, eventually got approval to make this report, and still half the people on here are going "well he didn't play the game long enough".

At the rate things were going, by the time OP "carefully" worked his way up on tactfully convincing everyone that the project was not on track it would have been release day.

Any anecdotes of a company that was successfully split up as you suggest?

No, but companies internally re-org all the time. And one of the big motivating factors is to re-align incentives so that internal responsibilities are split into discrete, measurable areas. It seems like re-org success has mixed results - often due to Goodhart's law problems.

Not specific, but I have some friends who are involved in highly successful private equity firms. I was talking to one of them about the work and he was saying that one of the primary strategies large firms use is buying existing large companies and firing all the middle management, because that’s the fastest way to create value after the acquisition.

This seems to be in the vein of PE acquiring companies and cutting cost to extract value - just a sensible more strategy of firing middle management haha.

But this reminded me of a podcast episode with some PE guys. The PE was able to enhance an acquisition by issuing ESOPs to all employees and educating the employees about the structure and value of the ESOPs - Inverse of firing folks.

No, but it feels good to say it.

I just think middle management is a recipe for disaster. Their perceived high status means they aren't easily criticized or managed for rational output in a way normal workers are managed.

For some, middle management is a mere bus stop on the way to the top. So they play it hard. Elbow tactics. Other knows they end in middle management and forever try to sustain artificial kingdoms by any means necessary.

It is too distant from common workers and it's not the top either. It's the one place in the organization where the most vile and unproductive behavior goes unchecked.

>It is too distant from common workers

Isn't this the ironic part of the post? The "middle managers" empowered the common workers who were ostensibly in the best position to identify and solve the problem. Yet those common workers seem to interpret their role as just messengers and not wholly owning the situation by also offering alternative solutions. It's not even clear to me that they identified the root problem so that it wouldn't happen elsewhere *

* yes, they said it was performing work that wasn't spec'd. But why were they doing it? Bad requirements management? Bad contract management? Something else?

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