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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

"I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage"

One of the most important things an organization can have is a "no man". A project that I was involved in when I worked at Google was completed on time primarily because we had a very senior (DE level) engineer tangentially involved in the project. He was near the end of his career, and he just didn't give a f* about politics. He'd sit in design reviews and rip stupid features to shreds, with accurate estimates of what they'd cost in terms of headcount and project delays. He was probably the most valuable member of the team because he was respected enough that his objections kept the project focused and on scope, and it was a 20% project for him.

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The part about not giving a fuck is crucial. You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.

In fact, you might feel like a hero for needing to put in OT to put out a garbage fire! Never mind that it shouldn't have happened in the first place...

You can, but only in the long run, and only if you’re saying “yes” to good things too. We’ve all probably worked with someone who just says no to everything and manages to kill both good ideas and bad. That leads to stagnation, which can be even worse than trying and failing at a bunch of different ideas.

What's tricky is managing "the good idea BUT" situations.

Good ideas at the wrong time, or good ideas if only we had the heads, skill, money.

Say Yes to those and you can screw things up, say No and you might not be forgiven.

It really depends on the size of the org and the team dynamics.

In a small startup with a fairly high degree of trust and emotional safety your CEO is more likely to notice that you prevented damage/loss by saying no.

A large org where so much is lost due to the telefone game, misaligned goals, hierarchy and increased complexity is not an environment where this is (usually) noticed or appreciated.

I got top marks in 2021 based on feedback from two high level managers because I "prevented a year of wasted engineer with with a comment on a Google doc". Those marks lead to a nice pay bump.

Like with politics. Everyone notices leader visiting places after disaster while no-one can notice if one was prevented.

I think the story of the Japaneese major that built a silly big storm wall was noticed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudai,_Iwate

However to prove your point, years after his death.

> You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.

This is the source of so many problems at large companies. The employees part of the day to the day understand how much of a positive impact this has but the people in charge of the cash don't see that.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or the new product launch gets the promotion.

> You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.

A few years ago I saw a promotion announcement e-mail come into my inbox for a colleague who sat a few steps from my desk. It was filled with the usual "did this, did that, made an impact, etc." statements but it also had a large section dedicated to the analysis this employee performed and presented to kill a huge initiative before the organization rolled it out. The initiative was very innovative but it ultimately wouldn't have achieved its goals. It was encouraging to see this in a promotion announcement and indicated to me that some organizations do explicitly reward for preventing bad things.

This was at AWS.

Might be an exception that proves the rule. Killing a major initiative might’ve been a boon for sibling initiatives m — no wonder those leads applaud an underling who usefully twisted the knife. Politics — is Amazon known for it?…

Or it might not. Have you any reason to search for the negative in a prima facie positive?

My experience matches with the GP. In my ~20-year professional life, I can't recall even one instance when I'd read a promotion announcement and saw that one of the person's accomplishments was that they prevented something bad from happening. Sure, it's possible I'm forgetting, but such a thing seems odd enough to me that it feels like something I'd notice and remember. I expect most people will have a similar experience.

It's also possible that people are getting praise for these sorts of "negative accomplishments" in private, or on performance reviews. Which is better than nothing, but I think it's still valuable and healthy to remind people that part of the job isn't just building stuff, it's also making sure the right things get built. And public praise for killing bad things is a good way to do that.

I've never seen it either but that's irrelevant. The original guy talked about someone blocking a crap project with good results. That's a positive.

So someone responds by assuming it's a negative: "...applaud an underling who usefully twisted the knife". I mean maybe, but quite possibly maybe not. But some people seem wired to find the worst.

It's a save-the-budget kind of thing. By showing that we don't need X or can delay buying Y for 1 year, saved the company from $ZZ million dollars of spend. It might not be stopping other people from working, but it is praised.

> Have you any reason to search for the negative in a prima facie positive?

This article from three days ago: “'Stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere': An internal Amazon study slams the company's culture.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-earths-best-employer-...

That’s not what exception that proves the rule means. “Parking allowed only on Tuesdays” is an exception that proves the rule. This is just an exception that disproves the rule, like most exceptions.

> You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.

Akin to not being rewarded for deleting lines of code.*

* unless the deletion measurably improves performance and you get rewarded for the improvement

That's generally the case. It's soul-sucking to work when you can't prevent idiocy and at most places you're punished for pushing back hard, so the only response (other than, you know, burn-out) is to leave. When you see senior people you respect getting the hell out for no obvious reason, that's usually a sign that you should be polishing your resume. Bad times are coming.

I’ve also seen morale being slowly killed by people who _thought_ they were doing this, but were _actually_ just argumentative defeatists.

I don’t think Carmack - or the engineer you describe - is likely to be one of these - but anyone hoping to emulate them should be conscious of what they’re doing.

> I’ve also seen morale being slowly killed by people who _thought_ they were doing this, but were _actually_ just argumentative defeatists.

Yes, I've also seen this as well. At some point you need people who will go off on a limb and do something crazy. I've seen in multiple times in my career. In particular I remember an architect who'd ruthlessly attempt to take scope out of projects but while we was in charge, we were nearly never innovating. Just delivering features on time and budget. Existing customers were always delighted but we had a hard time reaching new markets.

After he left, there's been a fair bit of projects that "didn't work" but there's been a couple of absolute home runs that would've never gotten off the ground because they were pretty wild.

There's I've heard a few times that resonates with me and I reiterate to all senior engineers I work with when they get into conflicts. "It takes all kinds of people to make a great company" You need dreamers, the people who worry about the money, cold and calculating execute at all costs types and folks and the folks who are happy to toil in a small but critical corner of a massive system to keep the lights on.

In my experience you can get into trouble when you try to play multiple roles at the same time because it's mentally exhausting trying to to do things like sell a vision while being the person trying to keep the economics of the thing from completely falling apart.

This is true. I think a good test for this is that the person making the criticisms also provides alternatives that are reasonable and it's evident that they're trying to make things better and not just arguing for argument's sake.

You need people to say no. You should be saying no more than yes in most cases. You have more important, more profitable paths to take.

Definitely depends on the person. The amount of projects I’ve worked on that were dismissed by such people done anyway and invariably became the saving of the team/org/company is laughable. These always took longer as they were under resourced and the people working on it did because of belief not because it was good for their status in the company. The hallmark of these is the last minute surge in resourcing when management figures out they got it wrong. Sometimes I think it’s almost like they bought an option on saving themselves by badly resourcing something at the start.

> The amount of projects I’ve worked on that were dismissed by such people done anyway and invariably became the saving of the team/org/company is laughable.

That's intriguing. I would love some examples of these projects / products.

> The hallmark of these is the last minute surge in resourcing when management figures out they got it wrong.

Got what wrong? That they've heard the yeas and nays and chosen to undertake the project sounds like mang got something right?

Good question hard to bake all the context in. The area I have worked most in is operations where a technique/widget/process is needed to fix a problem present within the environment due to an external actor which otherwise couldn’t be identified/monitored/resolved. Also to clarify I’ve been lucky to be part of such skunk work projects never actually lead one.

> That's intriguing. I would love some examples of these projects / products.

It's literally the definition of skunkworks projects. Many companies have been saved by a small few ignoring all the "Nos" and just doing what they believe in at personal risk.

I really disagree with the general notion of people saying No. This is actually, imo, the death of big companies and very common. It is not heroic to say no, it is maintaining the status quo. People who talk about such things with glowing eyes probably have spent their careers only at big companies.

Experienced people tend to have narrow vision and will shoot down ideas because they can't think outside of their worldview. That's why new ideas are so rarely born at large orgs. And the most innovation tends to come out of scrappy startups from kids who don't know that what they're doing is impossible.

Switching between business and academia several times I am really struck by this.

Meetings where the elephant in the room is not mentioned, because nobody wants to loose face. Really bad practice not commented on because (I guess, I am bad at this) some form of "mutually assured destruction". I will not point out your mistakes so you do not point out mine.

That, in case you are wondering, is from business.

I am really pleased to see people commenting here about business experience that go against my experience. And in my little group (of two, we could easily be five) we are straight with each other. But in the wider group? Rank incompetence, and dreadful mistakes that could be corrected if someone would point it out.

The point is technical excellence, good scientific practice, that is not required for being successful at business. It is al about "people skills". I.e. convincing somebody that they got what they were promised when they did not.

The university system in my country (Aotearoa) has been hobbled by people with business fetish. The meme was in the 1990s that "business is the most efficient". I believed it, until I saw the waste, inefficiency, downright lying and dishonesty, aghh I am triggered, that is business.

The same thing happens to some degree in academia (especially in commerce. My academic experience is science in the 1990s and commerce in the 2010s) but only "some degree". I see it at every nearly business meeting I attend.

I said before, I will say again, how pleasing it is to see comments here from people with different experiences than me.

These dumb things emerge because of two forces: first, the promotion game of people trying to get theirs. Second, price's law.

Price's law is what constrains scope, and the boundary between engineers can often be the luck of having the right opportunity. As such, all the stupid things emerge trying to invent scope. I'm guilty of this, but that was the game.

There is no solution except accept that big companies kind of suck and are slow.

Maybe I am unusually lucky. After managing a small team for a year in a FAANG, I am considerably less jaded.

I think it is entirely possible to be truly focused on the customer, to have a vision and a strategy, and to balance working toward this goal with experimentation.

It is of course also very hard work, it’s easy to make mistakes, and nothing is perfect. But I really don’t see that this is all doomed from the beginning just because of bad incentives and structural forces.

If your leadership chain is good, then it is easy to have a great experience and good scope to grow.

As you get higher up, the politics and limits become very visible. Strategy and focus are really hard to scale up which creates limited scope for continued growth.

Come back in 5 years and let us know if that's still your opinion. Maybe you'll get lucky, but most people aren't.

This sounds familiar. It's usually when I've decided to resign in a few months because thing don't change that I start not giving a fuck and actually enacting change. I wonder how to break that cycle.

It might sound easy to "just don't give a fuck sooner" but it's exhausting. The constant uphill struggle is not something I want to live with.

One of my favourite board games is called Burn Rate. The premise is a parody of silicon valley during the boom. You compete with the other players for talent (each employee is a card, with varying skill levels).

You could slow down other players by attacking them with “bad idea” cards that would tie up one or more of their engineers for an amount of time. To defend against bad ideas, you need a good manager (one type of employee card).

I could be misremembering some of the details, but the wisdom of the above game mechanic has stuck with me :)

As a counterpoint, this does add to Google's already established reputation of not shipping stuff. "No men" are generally a bad idea, they kill innovation and slow things down.

Big orgs reward stupid BAs for coming up with “exciting looking stuff” and the most engineers gladly take it up their az and all would say yeah we can do this like it would make them look bad if they said otherwise. The ones that speak up would usually get grilled and questioned like their job was on the line.

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