Hacker News Reader

Comment by lowercased | Hacker News Reader

> The CEO would walk down the hall a couple of times a week, stopping in each office, and change priorities on us.... Eventually the CEO saw that we were making very little progress...

I'm flummoxed as to how someone can not see this. Can you not run a little thought experiment on yourself, like...

"How much could I get done if every 3 days, I told someone to stop in the middle of their 4 day task and do something different?"

It's not 'management rocket science', it seems it's just basic human behaviour. If every couple of days, someone kept giving the CEO new/different tasks, would he ever expect to be able to get anything done? How can you not see the root cause of such a plain-as-day problem? Willful ignorance?

View on HN

Because that's not how the CEO's job works - his job is to keep a bunch of plates spinning, and switch quickly to the one that's about to wobble off its pole. Sales is similar. If your CEO came up via sales, it's hard to believe that other professions need to work differently.

I tried to convince a CEO of this once and he initially just got angry, then started to parse it as my personal need that he might need to make allowances for due to neurodiversity or something. That all his engineers might work better if they could focus on a task for more than a day was too far outside his world view to be believable to him. And this wasn't a stupid guy, no matter what it might sound like.

> And this wasn't a stupid guy, no matter what it might sound like.

He might not lack intelligence, but a CEO unwilling or unable to understand the other people work in a different way to him /is/ stupid.

CEO is management, and (effective) management means well... managing the various people, resources, and other restrictions to achieve the goals at hand. Being pissy that people and the universe don't work they way they want is immature and/or incompetent.

> CEO is management

I disagree, a CEO is not management in the sense you are describing. Being a CEO is more about decision making and direction setting for the organization holistically to maximize the value to the shareholders of the org. Depending on the size of the org, management might be a task they perform, but in larger orgs, CEOs rely on managers to manage.

Even accepting that definition (I don't 100%, but nevermind), a CEO is still making strategic decisions that need to take into account the variety of people that report to them and how they work.

For example, if a CEO in a large org demanded that engineers are all available via phone for level 1 support calls to cut support costs - that would be stupid, because even two short calls a day is going to have a massive impact on those engineers productivity on building the product(s), followed by any of the half decent engineers leaving for other jobs shortly afterwards.

I am not saying that every CEO decision is a sound or good decision, but the failure in your example would be at whatever management level is between the CEO and the engineers because they provided could have provided sound advice.

However, if the strategic need of the organization required that level of direct engineering support more than the specific engineering productivity…it could be a sound decision.

As an example, I worked at a organization in the late 90s managing field engineers. For an entire week the CEO required our team to be in office instead of in the field. We thought it idiotic at the time, but apparently it help create the optics that convinced the owner of a small company to sell his company which allowed our company acquire a game changing product.

None of us understood the big picture because we couldn’t see the forest through the trees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com