Leadership is a hell of a drug
ludic.mataroa.blog
ludic.mataroa.blog
I also concluded that doing meaningless administrative/management work is addictive and those who engage in it will actively and constantly try not only to overemphasise their importance but also force themselves on top of those who they know are doing actual important work. This is in my opinion a form of understated and poorly understood violence, but also a natural survival instinct for those who feel themselves useless (maybe correctly) and must then fight to remain relevant at all costs.
Sorry for those 1% of you out there who are actually useful and efficient leaders/managers; you know who you are and this is not for you.
Leaders are 'in the trenches', in a commercial environment this means they know their stuff, are putting themselves 'on the line' and are demonstrating the values and standards expected of those further down the ladder.
Corporate managers are more like administrators, they dispassionately work the system for their own benefits and pay lip service to the cares and concerns of those they're meant to be leading.
Translates to a work place here is what happens: often when you offer competent people position of authority or power they don't take it or are extremely reluctant to take it.
He got overly stressed from all the extra responsibilities, and after few months asked to move back, while everybody told me he did fine job.
Here is the thing - he still wasn't ready/good fit even if at glance all seemed fine. Its not just raw skills that make you a good fit for such a role, its the whole package, and how you manage long term while not going crazy. He was simply too junior for that role, even if from whole palette of skills only confidence/'maturity' (lacking proper word here, non-native speaker) was lacking. That was enough.
He will get there eventually. No point pushing hard for position that somebody may even give it to you, if it eats you alive (he kept elevated salary though... multinational corps are often weird)
i.e. the core job becomes tweaking the money making machine. And because everything is so complex it's almost impossible for anyone to identify which tweaks are moving the needle. And so self promotion, displays of power and competence become the de-facto measure of competency. In other words, they become politicians.
"The purpose of the system, is what it does"
That doesn't mean that leadership isn't necessary, it just more often comes too little too late because everyone's been busy doing nothing important.
Exactly. Let's not lazily tar the MBA degree itself and leave it at that: Lots of people have MBAs and aren't corporate tools. Heck, the guy sitting next to you in engineering may have an MBA. They aren't particularly rare, generally taking only 2 years to obtain, and they don't make you dumber when you graduate.
The problem is with corporate execs who are running things but are not subject matter experts in what they are running. An SVP of a tech company may know nothing about tech, having managed a soup company or an auto maker in his previous job. His so-called qualification is his ability to make business pronouncements/decisions in a vacuum from the actual technical realities and constraints of the company. They are "generic leadership" professionals. These are the people, in general, who are ruining things, and they don't necessarily hold diplomas that say "MBA" on them.
The Second Coming by Yeats.
(Written in 1919, the year before Bukowski was born.)
You need to read David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs".
... for some people. and easier for others.
we need both, and there's a need for balance. (and you need more careful administration in some areas and you need a lot more creativity in others. we want Boeing to be careful, but it's madness that we need paperwork for internal remodeling, etc.)
100% of managers nodding as they read this
Might just be in my head though.
You can say all N managers in any organization are bad apart from two of them. Of course, managers want to assert that they're the good one (and some of them actually are), but they can't if you say one person is good, because to claim that spot would be to throw all your colleagues under the bus. But if you assert that you're one of the two good ones, then they can all claim to be one of the good ones without upsetting a specific person.
This is obviously not how it works at all, but I was very proud of myself.
There was a saying that I think also applies here: “Everybody knows who #1 is, and everybody thinks they’re #2”.
Made me laugh - but I think that's not quite fair.
1% of managers know they're useless and inefficient. Ironically, that puts them in the top 2%.
Sometimes it takes more indoctrination than others to try and convince people that the social climbers who seek leadership positions above all else can be suitable for the job.
>Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug
The concept makes sense, with "leadership-seeking behavior" manifesting itself strongest in those who have the greatest (yea, bigliest) lack of natural leadership ability, and who need some kind of a "fix" to supplement this deficiency. Kind of analogous to the drug addict and their toxic drug-seeking behavior which is not only self-destructive but damaging to everyone involved in one way or another, whether apparent or hidden behind closed doors.
And once they've gotten their fix they still can't perform as well as ordinary people who don't need some kind of artificial aggrandizement.
Do you want high or low aggression? Guess what: it depends.
I do want to suggest an option I haven't seen before which is "what if it turns out that middle management is more automatable than everything everything else"? i.e, very broad status updates are scalable with ai and it turns out middle management isn't as needed in the future as it used to be.
I can't even imagine how that happens. Did they wake up that day, intending to do that before they even opened their laptop? "Today's the day!" Or, were they just dropping by the Edit form, when they were struck by such a brilliant idea?
Every time I see it, I just hear Tywin intoning the same old lesson:
"Any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king."
I guess it sounds a little less dramatic when you swap in "Product Leader" for "king," but I think the point still holds.
Even if I heard incorrectly, I still like the idea.
You have a rank, you get to give orders, it's a hierarchy generally.
But the difference between an experienced, senior NCO and a junior officer is well understood, and built into the structures.
Specific examples: why is there an officer's mess? Is it classist? Or is it because familiarity breeds contempt, and when you need to order someone to do something if no one respects you; everyone dies?
On the other side of it, who eats last, the enlisted or the officers? If you get that wrong you get mutiny.
Not only does familiarity breed contempt, but putting executives in IC tier offices lowered the standard for everyone, and now ICs have been reduced to factory floor scrubs.
I'd assume it is because the officers might be in a position where they choose to send the men (and women, in this enlightened age) to their deaths. There isn't much point eating together if that sort of politics might come into play, the power differential is too large. And it'd be harder for the officers to do that in an emergency if they see themselves as part of the same group.
Not to cast doubt on the officers, I'm sure they care very deeply about the wellbeing of their people and generally do a pretty good job of keeping people alive. But it is the military. People can die. Historically in war, some people die when their officers decide something suicidal is better than inaction.
Historically, the value of eating with your men is that the men will actually follow your orders rather than just mutinying and killing you.
That is despite the fact that post-hiring they want you to be a follower, not a leader.
It seems like 80% or more of jobs are bait and switch at worst and definitely not aligned with hiring expectations at best.
Edit: instead of responding to individual comments, I will just edit this comment.
I am just a little bit sad about the emotional responses here on this thread, just echoing a sentiment, without much critical discourse.
Being a leader is absolutely a huge part or the main part of many professions, and the truth is that the more people you are responsible for, the greater the importance of your leadership skills. That is, to be the CEO of a company requires you to be an exceptional leader as that is one of your primary responsibilities.
One must make an attempt to be seen as one wants to be and it's not easy to do that without sounding arrogant but being humble doesn't work either.
In my experience, people who call themself leaders, are often not performing very well in their main role, which usually happens to that of a people manager.
With 40 years and counting in this particular sub-field of anthropology, it's been fully confirmed that the so-called "Thought-Leader" (Ignoramus Rex) does not fall within the evolutionary branch of the now-extinct "Idea" man (Traumus Pieintheskii) whatsoever.
On the contrary, Ignoramus has now been shown to be an evolutionary dead-end that arose from lower-intelligence forms than those which gave rise to Traumus. As we have seen from intact specimens, Ignoramus is simply not capable of achieving the level of sophistication in its natural environment as Idea Man once exhibited during the brief epoch when it was thriving.
Whereas Linux Torvalds is a leader by default because he had to be. There's also no need for him to say it anywhere. He just did it and was it.
Executing them on the otherhand, that's hard, and well - it's is the only thing that matters.
"They found me after 1,5 years" lol
Odd, it's probably true. Just not what I thought.
Because they want to get the moneys! Because they want to get hired as a leader!
Because _you're_ not the audience. Their cronies are, the other cultists. They didn't come up with this themselves, they're just copying what everyone else (in their peer group / bubble) are doing... shrug
I can't help myself but swap it with the German translation of "Leader", which is "Führer". Especially when somebody insists on calling himself a "Leader" (in English) in an otherwise German conversation, which unfortunately is quite common.
https://satwcomic.com/not-a-yahtzee
If Germany acted less neurotic, they'd draw less commentary.
> LTI demonstrates changes in the German language in most of the population. In contrast, the text also emphasizes the idea that resistance to oppression begins by questioning the constant use of buzzwords.
> Verschärfte Vernehmung ("strengthened interrogation"): torture
And the prefix „Welt-“ ("world-") reminds me of British politicians repeatedly calling their policies "world-leading" or "world-class".
What the Nazis implemented to a unique extent was the process of (re-)defining words in a specific meaning. This happened top-down and censorship not only acted passively (disallow certain publications), but the propaganda actively pushed the terminology and narratives to use by the media.
The recurrent use of seemingly harmless words in specific ways impacted the society much longer than the Nazis were in charge. Some seemingly unpolitical narratives have lived on until today. Fortunately, the (Western) allies realized that they needed to counter this after the war, but of course the denazification has not been able to undo all the damage.
At least „die See“/„der See“ (ocean/lake) are at least both about water you can put a boat on.
„Briefkasten“ is a fun one, coming from English. Sounds like "briefcase". Same etymology, both are boxes that you put letters into, it's just that the English one is the thing you carry to work, and the German one is part of the postal system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...
Or to put it even shorter: leadership is reserved for the top of the org-chart.
It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.
Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"
Global warming is real, the sky is blue, etc.
>This person sounds like an energy vampire.
The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations.
As one other commenter put it, the emperor has no clothes. And a lot of us are _really_ tired of pretending like he does.
There are many old adages for this: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, fire doesn't beat fire, etc. Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.
Difference is, nobody forces you read an article and what a random article says has negligible impact on your quality of life. You can choose to ignore it. Situation like this at work, while it is true that it is better if one minimises the level of being affected by them, are impossible to not affect one at all in some way.
Some people crave to be winners, crave to be on top, to be above others. They will raise hell and bring down the heavens on your head if they don't get what they want. They want status, they want control and they are constantly spending every waking moment of their lives on figuring out how to achieve it, and don't care about much. These people will destroy your organization if they don't get what they want.
These are a separate breed from engineers. You can look up their CVs and I guarantee even if they started out in technical roles they didn't spend more than a year there.
As for are they viable from a societal standpoint, I'm not sure. They are essential for the functioning a certain type of highly toxic organization, just like lawyers and prosecutors are essential for a functioning legal system. Office politics is a negative sum game, but not playing is worse than playing it.
It's going to take ambition, desire, hard headedness, reward etc to make anyone do such an undesirable thing. The higher and more risky it gets the more tough people probably need to be. It's also a lot easier to be selfish and tough than caring and tough so there's a larger supply of bastards to be in charge than empathetic and kind but still somehow tough people who can take the nasty decisions.
If they crash whose fault will it be? The answer is always the drivers' You cannot be held responsible for things that you have no direct control over.
In software, if the infra goes down, who will need to fix it? Developers. If a feature is particularly tricky and technically challenging, who is responsible for getting out of a rut? The answer is the developers.
Things like fixing a tricky bug in a million line lib I didn't write (IRL example).
Managers can use the carrot and the stick, bring in more resources, communicate the developers pains upwards, but most likely they cannot do anything directly that will bring about success.
To be clear if done properly, this can be helpful, but to say that they are under more stress and responsibility than ICs is just untrue, considering they literally cannot do anything to resolve the origin of said stress (see car analogy).
On the other hand, a tank with 5-8 functional roles does have the role of tank commander.
Ultimately the CTO is responsible to the board for why a problem damaged the business (even if it was all the mistake of a developer somehow). And the board to the shareholders for losing money.
In reality people, of course, try as hard as possible to evade blame or lay it elsewhere but in theory a developer who makes a big mistake should not have been in a position to do that damage solo and it's a fault in the system if they were able to - and in the people responsible for the system.
- How long will this take?
- I don't know. This is very complex and I'm not familiar with the code.
- You HAVE to know, we HAVE to plan for it.
- Okay, then 5 days.
- Hey 5 days has passed, why isn't this done yet?
- I underestimated the complexity of the task.
- Ah, so YOU estimated wrong, so it's YOUR fault!
Hard problems exist. They can only be solved by hard-work and expertise and even then solve times are unpredictable and draining to the individual and are thankless endeavors. Management tries to paper over that, but this is a fundamental invariant of life. The fact that management makes solving these problems feel like punishment, only makes people try to avoid these problems more.
I think, however, if you're in a company with bastards who don't care they will find out how to screw agile just as they screwed the scheme before that. In the waterfall projects the example you gave is just the same.
In your example "I don't know, it's very complex" should lead to a spike where you have a chance to find out more. Then you'd give a high complexity estimate and everyone would try to think of ways to chip off a bit of the problem at a time.
You're also trying to get your whole team to think about what can be done rather than each developer facing horrible problems alone. But if you're managed by arseholes then even the most positive ideas tend to get turned into nightmares.
Because if you do you know you can't do certain kinds of stuff. You can't bring in another guy who's a cryptography expert while also having your particular domain knowledge. You can't communicate effectively upwards that you have a teethy issue.
Management is a leaky abstraction. The idea is that a manager is the person for a team who upper management can treat as a proxy for the team itself.
As for how things should work, the difference between that and how things actually work is the existence of carrot-and-stick feedback mechanisms to enforce a desired reality.
In absence of that you get a regression to the mean. Management which shifts blame. Disgruntled engineers who shirk responsibility. Stupid idealist youngsters who maybe go above and beyond once or twice, then after being burned either join the disgruntled majority or quit the company.
TLDR: the use of BLAME is not that helpful. We're all human and fallible. We don't want to get to the point of blame in the first place anyhow. We want to solve problems before they go badly wrong and blame is really just about what we try to do to make things better in future. Like, if you say "this person is the one who screwed up - they're just an idiot" that lets everyone else off the hook and lets the company not change itself at all. So I don't think that mode of searching for a scape goat is very useful. What's useful is that when there are several people and none is sure who should take on some problem then you need to clarify who is most responsible and should follow up and keep chipping away at it till it's solved.
I wrote a lot of other boring crap and deleted it to spare you the pain of reading it. Yes I'm technical but it's impossible to be technical in all areas. I do write code and I'm always struggling to keep up with the other developers on the team. I have specialist skills but they're only of limited relevance to this company and this team and skills become less and less relevant. It's very hard to deal with problems in a domain that you're not familiar with but you end up being forced to deal with things that you're not equipped for because nobody else really is and you're responsible.
Yeah, our turnover rate is 300% and people are crying in meetings, but please ensure your concerns are raised elegantly, with many euphemisms for conveying urgency, and above all, please ensure by raising your concerns you are not impacting the roadmap.
That kind of low-energy "platitudes driven" communication around issues is exactly what leads to insane dysfunctions like ones we see at Activision and every startup that failed before getting to build an MVP.
If you exaggerate and state things in as emotionally insulting way as possible, you are not saying things as they are. You are exaggerating and burdening everyone else with need to disentangle your emotions from actual content.
Congratulations - you've made it into their compliments list: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/
In case the author reads this: I recognize that happiness will make your writing suffer, but there are companies out there that don’t completely suck and that actively want driven competent independent thinkers to come work for them.
So that is not my conclusion at all. However, I looked around for quite a while and failed to find placement at a good company (in fact, I suspect the best companies almost never go to market, they just hire friends and former colleagues). "Start a popular blog and escape" is not a viable strategy for most people, and I'm trying to do something about it.
You are right though, relentless negativity is pointless. I can only afford it in these concentrated bursts because... well, my situation is actually quite good.
(But I think you've said something very valuable nonetheless for many people, including anyone that reads me regularly. Complaining is cathartic but you've gotta chart a way out, and there IS a way out in basically every case.)
Great line, and it's true outside of work too.
IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don't know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all.
They have to stick their necks out a bit otherwise their forward thinking is of no use. That requires a bit of arrogance and some people have lots of arrogance of course but without it how could we deal with uncertainty?
In real life who really @#$# knows what will happen or what we truly need to do to succeed? Success may be more accidental than planned. If one is to get people to work together however, there has to be a degree of belief in what they're working on and that starts with "leaders" - who are forced to bullshit just as politicians are and then get blamed for doing so. If they didn't nobody would begin to listen to them. Then the group would not work together and no goal would be accomplished.
Authority is another matter. Who is going to take responsibility? There's a problem - who is going to take time out of their day to solve it? Who should have made sure it didn't happen in the first place? Authority is just the supposed answer to these questions. And at the end, who will be able to get everyone to a decision so that discussion doesn't go on for ever. At the end when their decision turns out to not save the day, who will accept the risk of blame for a failure?
You do get people who "don't believe in leadership" or authority or whatever but I am a bit suspicious that they are the ones who in practice do a lot of leading and pushing people around and are successful at doing so whilst avoiding responsibility. So they want more of that obviously. To be fair I probably do a bit of it. Nobody is wholly wonderful.
Your stereotype is 100% wrong. They emigrated to Australia from Southeast Asia according to: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-an...
And working in a country usually doesn't make you a citizen. He hasn't got an Ocker passport AFAIKT.
That's a really great pithy summary. It gels with one popular definition of software architecture: good software architecture anticipates which bits of a codebase/solution are likely to change more effectively than bad software architecture.
But in Australia, the driver got out of the front carriage and screamed "OI, DICKHEAD!" and that rapidly resolved the issue.
Nothing really particular to Australia, the same happens in many other places.
You typically get paid more, and you get a degree of autonomy that you can use to arrange your own time. So, big incentive.
But you also get to hide, in the sense that it's hard to call out an incompetent manager like you can call out a dev who doesn't know how git works. After all, a manager needs to interact with a bunch of people, and any one of those people could hold up the show. This is why people feel thrown under the bus, their manager needed an excuse that wasn't incompetent management.
It's nebulous. If someone delivers a project well, was it them, or was the project not ambitious enough? If they don't deliver it, did they not have enough resources, was the timeline unrealistic?
So there's a massive incentive to manipulate the baseline. You want people to feel like you are personally delivering way over expectation.
This is where leadership comes in. Nobody can know the nuts and bolts of how you manage your weekly standups, but everyone can see your TED Talk. You must be really important, why else would you be at Davos? You're clearly very up to date on modern management techniques, that's why you have an agile coach for your team.
It's not all smoke and mirrors. I do think that leadership means imparting some sort of overarching goal in a business, along with direction like "we want to exit any business where we're not number 1 or 2 within 5 years". That's not stupid, but it also isn't time consuming. Mostly what they need is a lot of experience in the trenches, but by the time you're a senior leader, you already have that.
I get the feeling a lot of these made-up things that leaders come up with is precisely because they don't do anything during the day. The decisions they make don't take that long, since they are baked into experience and organizational momentum, and getting the updates from subordinates doesn't take much time either, but they feel like they need to be seen to be always busy.
Amen, amen. Let us rejoice for a prophet has arisen that cuts through the corporate image.
Many bullshitters have succeeded in management. This is why I think people should not be so frightened of giving it a try - there will certainly be a lot worse examples than you who made a living out of it.
But people are not worth following. In the context of work, ideas might be good or bad, and the good ones don't need spin unless the environment is already as toxic as Chernobyl.
I think this is the cause of lots of problems in the world - we cannot all be scientists, laywers, doctors, engineers etc and we have to make judgements about who to put our faith in.
Happens all the time. Just not common in the US. It’s a cultural thing.
In Northern Europe and Japan(?) if you talk out of your ass overconfidently people will largely ignore you, similar to how you’d ignore someone making a TikTok prank video on the street.
Funecdote: I had a meeting once in Swedish company and the most quiet dude (from the northern part) didn’t say a peep for a good 40 min, and was asked near the end of the meeting “what do you think?”.
He paused for a good 10 seconds and said a few wise words like a goddamn wizard. Unfortunately it was too long ago to remember what we talked about, but I strongly remember everyone took that very seriously - he clearly had distilled his thoughts.
When those suggestions don't fit with the group-think I take the dismissive rejections or even mockery and the originators of the idea don't open their mouths. On the incredibly rare occasions that they do get some traction I immediately say - actually that's X's idea.
So IMO it regularly takes confidence to speak out and be heard. I've worked in South Africa (only as a student on some projects but it counts), Zimbabwe, UK, Germany and the US. Companies were everything from Finnish to Japanese to American to British and people were from all over the world - Britain, India, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Zimbabwe and South Africa and the US.
In some places like Zim there's a culture of respect to older people and things are more formal - so you are taking a big risk by disagreeing or expressing an opinion which might turn out not to be popular.
Americans do tend to get heard and listened to because they put themselves forward. IMO you can learn from them or be beaten by them in that respect because they will not learn to be meek.
When you're not sure if you'll be able to pay your rent or feed your family, you'll join any organization, regardless of reputation.
It's not free but it can be made very cheap. Look at Amazon literally running out of people to churn in the near future.
People are not fired every time there is a personality clash or a new leader with a different style. There is no way the company could run with that much turnover and brain drain on a regular basis. People need to learn how to work with all kids of people and personalities… especially if they are working in a leadership role. If a leader feels the need to fire everyone they don’t get along with, they have no business being in that role.
A good leader will figure out how to get the most out of each person on the team, not demand they all fit in a certain mold or get out. The boss I had who got the most out of me figured out that if I was interested in a project I would work 12 hour days on it and really go the extra mile, while if I wasn’t interested, I’d drag my feet and procrastinate. If he saw me pushing something off, or with more experience, if I didn’t immediately jump in with both feet, he’d give the project to someone else who would slog through the projects I hated, but flounder on the ones I excelled at. It’s all about resource management, and to do that, there needs to be some variety in the resources. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the leaders to align the people in a way where the strengths shine and the weaknesses are supported.
If there's one thing my nearly 10 years of capitalism has taught me, it's that many businesses can handle significantly more malfunction and rot than you could possibly imagine was tenable without going under. They might not soar, certainly, but "the business still exists, so it cannot be that bad" is just simply not valid reasoning.
However, i think your assumption there is no need to do that is wrong.
Take an area like the bay area - it has about 120k software engineers. This is not a small number. Even so, most companies the scale/size of Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have, at this point, interviewed 95+% of the bay area SWE population, and most (Apple is the exception here) had done so by the time they were ~10-12 years in existence. That is a very short time period to go through the available population, and the population does not grow that quickly.
So even if there was zero rampup time, etc, none of which were true, they can't practically afford to churn people as quickly or as randomly as you suggest because they can't replace them fast enough except at very high cost.
If you talk about something that has a much much larger available population, or companies with much smaller need it might be true.
People in orgs that groan and complain are sometimes their own kind of difficult. They find ways of reducing overall morale by constantly making fun of the work and devaluing what everyone else is doing.
Reducing morale or devaluing work sound bad, but they can be more descriptive (as opposed to subjective) than they may seem. The work might be poor. It's possible morale should be low. The alarm goes off because it's sensor is better than the average person's. If the alarm is broken, that's a different story, but it would suggest not "agree[ing] with the author."
I don't think you're at all alone in the preference, it just kinda reflects our relationship to work in that people opt for the fire.
I make a deliberate effort to migrate away from that kind of influence in life and would rather add a dent in my résumè than stick around when a company goes scrummy.
The freedom of choice disappears, and along with it the joy of solving particular tasks. Long term planning is replaced by two-week windows, people bicker about what is a story, and what is an epic, and why can’t I move an unsolved sub-task to the next sprint. It turns the joy of coding into a march of attrition: the solution is only a multiple of two weeks from being solved if everyone marches the same way. It’s also like herding cats.
On the other hand, a company run by someone who knows what they’re doing gets to skip all of this. No need for middle managers who “know software” in the same sense anyone “knows furniture” because they also sit down.
The first is that I have an audience of a few thousand people at this point, and that's enough of a network that I will probably find work if I get laid off. And, you know, they're not going to kill me, the worst case is I've misjudged things and I'll need to enter a new industry.
The second thing is that my writing has reduced my employability at the kind of company I would hate anyway, but increased it at the truly excellent places. I've been in touch with the CEOs and directors at high-functioning organizations, and I'd rather work with them anyway. They wouldn't find work for me instantly, but they might eventually.
The only reason I remain employed at this place is that they agreed to give me a three day a week permanent contract (because they pissed the engineers off so much that four of them left in one week). It's a convenient deal, and it gives me time to focus on my own business, but I'd survive without them. I'm already looking elsewhere but don't want to land in a similarly toxic environment.
But I think, most importantly, I used to be very inauthentic at work (which is almost half my time and most of my daylight hours!), and it made me miserable. I'd rather be who I am and get forced to work at McDonald's for a bit. So I'm a little bit afraid, but I'm more afraid of what happens when I don't say what I think.
(And I read the book after hearing him recite his poem, The Faces At Braga, which is the only piece of poetry that has ever moved me, a very level-headed and unemotional man despite my writing, to tears.)
> I bargain with no axe in my hand.
To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this. Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.
Successfully executing on something requires _both_ domain knowledge + knowledge how to execute things efficiently.
This might sound insane for the IT world, but this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.
Which makes "knowing stuff well" an extreme modern leadership blindspot, in my opinion.
That's a good point. Perhaps, seen more in larger businesses than smaller ones. As businesses grow, they accumulate support staff. Moreover, planning horizons get longer, so it gets difficult to associate "pnl" and effort concurrently.
My critique is that it feels a little idealistic. That might not be the best description, but it's like railing against the way the world just is. I'd love to see counter-examples of successful companies that do things right, but it feels to me like what most companies turn into is just the best of a bad bunch of options.
At the end of the day, we're all uniquely flawed people trying to work together in increasingly sized groups. It feels like some amount of dysfunction is to be expected. Having leadership flow between people depending on the problem being solved has the potential to make many people very uncomfortable day to day and in turn, erode the benefit of optimising competency for each task.
At the end of the day, though, that's why many of us tend to aim at small companies: the pain is not amplified. The advice I used to give colleagues at large companies was not to try and fight the ocean; you just need to let it wash over you. Bottom-up change is so rare at large companies that it just burns out those who try and alienates the people they need to impress to move up and actually effect change. The truth is that even at a high level very people can really change things fundamentally.
But maybe that's for the best. Fundamentally changing the way things work for thousands of people's livelihoods should be hard.
Or he has been working at profitable companies where he is working in a cost center vs. a profit center and thus doesn't really matter.
Tech in Australia is bleak, the place who's top tech company is Atlassian, creator of some of the most loathed software in the world forced on others by such as described here. Does he work there? Wouldn't be surprised that a place that made JIRA would do this to their own staff. #2 is Canva, a mail order print shop.
The internet is some of the shittiest and expensive in the developed world because it's so captured by the local telecom monopoly. It's the place with the worse anti-espionage laws. It's the country that the other ones in the 5 eyes go to do the most unethical spying because even their own fig leaf laws prevent them from doing so. Bleak bleak bleak.
Get out and go somewhere competent, like the US west coast or western europe. You obviously have taste, go to somewhere with some taste.
Good luck.
"If I ever become a thought leader, someone has to assassinate me."
I also am reluctant to just outright write a post that says "find me a job" unless I'm in a dire circumstance, as that seems like an abuse of my reader's email list, so I'm doing it the old-fashioned way.
PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.
Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.
From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible.
So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state.
(I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)
To the author: did you use this line before, in another post? I'm pretty sure this is not the first time I've laughed uncontrollably at it.
There’s the people in the highest management jobs - they aren’t necessarily leaders but they call themselves leadership. They can actually be terrible at their job (or good).
Then there’s leaders - people in various levels and roles who empower others, build teams, drive successful change, know shitloads about their company and are sought out to help by all kinds of colleagues. Be one of those regardless of your level.
I can't stand the linkedin-depth-level of leadership anymore. Deep concepts like systems thinking are introduced, workshops are held, but nothing really of depth ever comes: concepts are introduced at blog-post level. There's nothing to learn from these people, they can only 'manage', they have no domain expertise. Yet they out-earn me by a factor of 2 or 3...
There are times where external advice can be helpful, but it can also be a form of plausible deniability. Managers can display a "willingness" to improve a situation, without engaging with their team or changing their actions.
I think a big part of this is ego, as stated in the post, but a lot of the times it's piss poor communication skills.
The worst manager I've ever dealt had been very skilled engineer, but he suddenly found himself in a position where he had to actually listen to subordinates and mediate conflicts between departments. He simply did not. Mind you, this is not a large organization. Departments almost never talked to each other, even if they were on the same floor. Feedback was futile and met with hostility. Bright and motivated employees were quickly demoralized and retention was low.
I was happy to see the distinction drawn between leadership and management. Leaders manage but not all managers lead. Sometimes that’s just fine - a good manager who stays in their lane will be effective. Sometimes they will even turn into decent leaders without knowing it. But the ones who are oblivious to the distinction will probably fail in both.
Why should you give time and energy for something worthless? Listening to 4 hours of bullshit rants about leadership on a monday morning, while you could be relaxed and productive at your home office?
Also, of course he was "willing" to give those 4 hours. He had to as it was mandatory.
That one is easy! The sort of metacognition and reflection exhibited by the lawyer makes one a bad politician. Good politicians get the C-level seats.
Or taking the logical inverse position, can one be considered a good leader if they cannot inspire that kind of decision-making?
I do think there is some truth around all people managers wanting to be considered good leaders... and very few of them actually conforming to that definition. But that's a different topic.
I mean, it's sort of outside the point of this article (which i understand and agree with), but as a person who once set his job description as "C++, Lawyering, C++ Lawyering" i'm going to offer the answer to this question may be simply that
1. Programming lawyers often are trained at being self-reflective
2. Big-company CTO's have bigger issues to worry about than programming languages, and have to delegate very effectively. So the answer the big company CTO should give you should probably be "I probably should not have thoughts about them, but this highly qualified person x who I ask to help me understand this area when i need to is who you should talk to"
If the article said "small company CTO's", I think it would make more sense.
You are giving the case where either they have no area of technical competence, or one that, uh, charitably, is so far outside anything the company does/cares about that they can't explain it to you.
That one is a clear fail of this particular test :)
also obviously, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a good CTO. Another good condition would be "generally assumes the time of people 'on the ground' is the most valuable time the company has, as this is what directly leads to features/revenue/customers/etc".[1]
As such, the number of situations where such a meeting would be net positive for the company amount to something like:
1. you are about to save everyone 4.001 hours worth of work, increase per-employee revenue by 4.001 hours worth, etc, by talking at them for 4 hours.
2. The company is going under and therefore you are saving everyone 100% of their time :)
#1 is actually within the bounds of possibility, but I would certainly agree that it is much more likely that anyone who believes they are about to accomplish that is probably suffering from hubris of the highest order.
[1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be.
To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both.
Instead, i think you see managers/leaders who start by believing they exist as a net positive and think occasionally they screw it up and are only a little net positive.
On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.
It’s much more than that, because of opportunity cost. If all company was doing is how to get 0.025% improvements, it would never get off the ground.
Most of the time, the issue is not the error bars in thinking about the quantity. They aren't thinking it needs to be worth 4.001 and it needs to be worth 6, instead, they aren't thinking about it at all.
>To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both.
An unexpected side effect of starting my own business is that I can't help but view myself and my team this way. We're bootstrapped and have day jobs, but there is absolutely no avoiding the gap between how much revenue we generate and how much we'd need to work on the business full time.
>[1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be.
I read a lot of Taleb in my early 20s, and he'd call this iatrogenics in a non-medical context, and I'd agree. One of the ex-Pivotal guys I spoke to mentioned that most of the highest-performing teams emerged from "benign neglect" from management - i.e, they got busy and left the team alone. Could be a recipe for disaster, certainly, but there's also compelling anecdata out there that it could be the grounds for great things with the right people.
>On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.
I really wonder how many people would say "yes" to this. It seems like an insane thing to say, but I'm honestly not 100% sure how many people would pick up on that.
Alan Eustace, who was Google's SVP of engineering forever, used say he would deliberately put enough on director's plates that they couldn't pay attention to everything, in the hopes that exactly this would happen.
It’s ruined me by setting an unattainable standard for most people and makes me afraid of the future.
Management is not leadership.
For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and indeed counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, and so forth, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?
— Hugh Nibley, Leaders and Managers
Like the author said, it’s usually a bunch of clowns who are paid way too much money to do jack. Sounds cushy if you’re willing to sell your soul.
Which leads me to ask. How exactly do you begin such a journey? It doesn’t seem as if there’s a particular (useful) skill you need to have.
(Disclaimer - I’m CEO of a small company and also adore the Turn Your Ship Around book and partly base my leadership style on that book. )
I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.
Human beings are wired in a particular way; being physically present together in a room at least occasionally should have strong benefits, if enough other caveats are met.
So - I wonder if the baby is going out with the bath water?
Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly.
Maybe we could say that resources need to be managed and people need to be led, but the average manager/leader doesn’t understand the distinction, or perhaps doesn’t have any desire to.
One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake.
And that manager is a superstar if their team members are able to regularly grow into new roles (or switch into a new role that is a better fit, as happened today.)
~ Edit ~
I just read the blog post that the author linked to, about Pivotal Software. We have a very similar philosophy. In the blog post he describes the hiring process has being designed to filter out assholes and that, for me, has to be one of the most successful parts of our approach, too.
Are you quoting Dwight Schute?
However, one of the few people who he admires in the post most definitely describes themselves as a leader.
The post would be less funny with the appropriate disclaimers (‘of course not all people who see themselves as a leader are like this’) so I think we can safely assume that he trusting in the intelligence of his readership to figure this out.
I can assure you that there is no leadership team competent enough that I would be "fine" with a mandatory four-hour all hands on Monday morning. Not even the bosses I have liked personally could make that worthwhile.
Some of them horrible, some of them wonderful, some in the middle.
Having worked for a few companies that don’t have the ‘HR types justifying their own paycheck’.. it IS possible to find a positive environment. The one thing they’ve all had in common was a sub-100 head count.
Disagree. Speaking for myself, even if I already liked my leadership, if they gave me a mandatory 4 hour meeting with that kind of language, I would wonder if they had been eaten and replaced by aliens. Clearly something changed, because that's a bad meeting, and if I was ok with them before it's because they don't do stuff like that.
The point I was making is that I can conceive of a world where ‘come to a meeting for 4 hours’ would be something that in some companies, people wouldn’t mind because they already have so much confidence in the leadership that they know it would be a good use of their time.
I know this wouldn’t be the case in most companies. I am trying to say that I can conceive of exceptions.
A barely related anecdote to illustrate why some people mistrust management. Not entirely necessary but having typed it I might as well press the button:
The only time I've ever been pulled into a 4-hour all-hands meeting it turned out to be a covert way to fire a bunch of employees without giving them the chance to say goodbye to their colleagues.
One by one, people got summoned out of the room ("hey, there's a phone call for you", etc) and never returned. The rest sat listening to the "leaders" (including one fairly well known public figure) droning on about nothing. By the end many of us had figured out what was happening, and when we all returned to the office to find ~30% of the desks empty there was universal outrage.
Lots of other people left in the aftermath, and the exodus apparently continued after I went.
It's a bit like how there are some legitimate blockchain use cases (or so I've been told by a friend who works in the space) but you'd have to be nuts to identify yourself as a crypto-advocate with no further context.
>One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake.
In the tech space, what do you make of high turnover? Do people get a pass if their staff average a 1.5 year tenure, or is this indicative of systemic issues?
Also, this would only be done by a true sociopath, but you can fake that number with sufficiently intense levels of psychological manipulation, enforced skill atrophy, and fear. Someone recently told me that they can't leave their organization before a contract expires because their CEO litigated very aggressively against the last person to do so, even though it was perfectly legal.
>I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.
Absolutely correct. I can imagine a useful four hour meeting, but it would be very rare. A lengthy face-to-face meeting would always be an annoyance, but they've made plenty of other mistakes and this is the cherry on top. I had hoped more people that didn't 100% agree would have been able to make that charitable inference, but I'm glad someone did.
EDIT: I apparently don't know how quotes work on HN, and don't have time to find out. Sorry!
In terms of high turnover, I’m not an engineer and have not managed an Eng team.
However, the companies I most admire tend to have a single digit % turnover annually.
Toyota is my favourite example but there are others - I don’t like Costco for other reasons, but they do seem to be another with a great culture.
"..dragged to the office.."
a very recently invented company policy stated that any company device for home office (just ordered new or old, all the same), should be hand-picked from the office. Which coincided (?) with ordering some monitors.. and in my case, is 600 kms away. And there are two of us to travel that distance.. over not the-safest roads. And we are on the critical path of the new project (?). And i was the So called "cto"..
i am not any more. That was the last straw.
What a Fresh breath.
so i am Looking for mentoring a team. "Leading".. is a loaded word.
links, e-mail etc in profile (also in recent HN-who-wants-to-be-hired [0]).
have fun
So, anyway, when has the word "leadership" started becoming more widely used to describe essentially "management"?
It shows. Whoever wrote this is very immature. Management isn’t making a big ask here.
Any shlub can rant about "muh bad management", annoying meetings, the Peter Principle, "terrible middle management", it's become so frequent in comments on Hackernews that my eyes automatically start rolling as soon as I read the same tired old crap.
Does gibbering out the same old criticisms make anything better or just perpetuate the myth that all managers are somehow shitty and horrible people or somehow never wrote a line of code in their lives?
What does the author intend by writing out this sort of sophormoric rant? Is it just for the clicks? To try and big up their own profile? I suggest doing something better with their time that would actually make the world a slightly better place.
Management is something you do by mostly moving your lips and typing text, leadership is something you actively do and are that inspires others to put in their best work.
It'd be nice to find someone complaining about narcissism at some point who doesn't also have too much self-regard to proofread their opening paragraph.
It is so toxic to work with people who are this entitled. Getting this upset over a mandatory meeting? What a nightmare. You know this is just the tip of the iceberg for their bad behavior if they are the type to publish a seething screed over something so banal.
I don't like four hour meetings either. But give me a break. Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like. That's just called being an adult.
A mandatory four hour meeting that boils down to "do the thing" is a waste of everyone's time. It's organized by someone in love with the sound of their own voice.
A meeting like that costs thousands of dollars in person-hours. It's then a few thousand more of lost productivity as everyone scrambles to figure out what the meeting means for their deliverables.
It could be an email. Then all the employees would have an extra four hours in their week to actually get shit done.
Little secret: outside of self-proclaimed "leaders" in the Linkedin bubble, most normal people think like the writer, if not put so eloquently. They have jobs to do, and know how to do them, and do not appreciate being dragged into a 4 hour meeting to listen to bullshit. Of course they'll do it if they are told to. But if you are a "leader" you would be conscious of their time and not waste it on self-congratulatory claptrap.
If keeping teams of professionals aligned is hard the problem is unlikely to be in the professionals..
Terminate people you disagree with and your blindspots get.. blinder? You end up being delusional, which is far from good.
It is actually really really easy to not send your employees emails like "This will be an all-morning meeting so arrive energized as we hit the ground running on Monday morning". Shockingly easy in fact.