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Comment by GreedClarifies | Hacker News Reader

“ The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership ”

Not what I saw. Leadership was shockingly hard working. I have never seen a person who works harder than Calder at GOOG. Urs never stopped as well. Lower level VPs were always “on” as well. But VPs can’t do everything, they can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels, the orgs are too big. I think you want something superhuman from them.

The problem in tech, such that it is, is that the perf process is somewhat broken. But that’s a discussion for another day, and is likely intractable.

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Senior leadership has many important functions, and more demands on their time than hours in the day, but their number one job is communicating a vision to the org. There's basically nothing else with similarly high impact as this is what blocks or unblocks the productivity of the entire organization.

I've watched 1,000 person orgs rot because the senior leader could not settle on a vision. He was "always on", smart, articulate, all those good adjectives. None of it mattered without the vision.

An example is the recent sale of Google Domains to Squarespace. Seems like it was a profitable product, why get rid of it? I'm sure they worked very hard on selling Google Domains, doesn't seem like it actually benefited Google as a company in the long term. Working hard isn't helpful if you don't have a solid vision for what you're working toward.

In fact working slower with a more coherent vision is often better, since you actually get closer to a goal rather than just bouncing around between undefined local maxima as fast as you can.

Working hard doesn’t necessarily mean working on the right things.

Were they "working hard" on individual-contributor-style work, or on management?

"They can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels" - I'd imagine this is exactly what management should work "hard at".

If you're not keen to do that, then maybe be a high-level IC?

That was years ago, before Urs responded to crumbling infrastructure by telling the whole company the the would fire junior engineers who were near a keyboard next time a system went down.

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