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Comment by The28thDuck | Hacker News Reader

So I’m more junior so I don’t understand why this letter is controversial. Is it not important to meet your business goals in a crunch and address systemic issues in some sort of post mortem or retro? I do understand that there exists “management debt” for intra team issues, similar to technical debt, but I don’t see how it’s problematic to ask to prioritize finishing a project that’s been signed and on for and deal with the issues later, especially with the state of the business at that time.

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Multiple times he mentions the most obnoxious manager-level thing "I don't understand why this is so hard".

I don’t understand what’s so hard about it either. It seems like a pretty simple wrapper around infrastructure that Facebook already had.

That can be a good position to start from when trying to break a logjam.

Of course it must be coupled with genuine flexibility to change your mind when someone points out actual, real difficulties.

It's one of those things that sounds really obnoxious until you've been on the other side of the table. There's lots of things that can go wrong to make an easy problem hard, and some of them are only really detectable when you think about it from first principles. I've personally seen multiple designs that split a moderately hard problem into a set of extremely hard tasks, often in such a way that no individual task could be simplified on its own.

I am no fan of Zuckerberg nor a user of any of the things his company makes.

But he is an engineer, more so than most managers. He would know what goes into making an application like this, and so know that things are moving slower than they should.

I see nothing obnoxious about asking this very valid question under those circumstances.

chatgpt grant me an AI demon that can transform any manager saying this into a pixie trapped in a cage, attached to each of their ICs' heads for duration of the project, or something

He doesn't just say "why is this so hard?". He provides rationale for what he thinks is required and the effort it should take, posits some things he might have missed, and asks for more explanation. If you get a good-faith request like this from a technical manager, you should be able to point them at some docs or give a relatively concise response as to what they're missing. Honestly, you should have already headed this off, because the moment you realized you were in danger of missing deadlines, you should already be raising it as an issue and either explaining your plan or asking advice for how to get back on track.

If you're missing deadlines, you can't both complain a) when there's no accountability and the business is going poorly, and b) when your managers are trying to hold you accountable.

Ultimately your employer has to make money to pay you for your work. Keeping this in mind is one way to help you avoid yak-shaving, bike-shedding, and other weed-entering activities.

Maybe because all too often "management debt" get balanced on the backs of the engineers. We're always being led to one "don't care about the costs, get it done" situation to the next.

You can theoretically ship at any time. But it might be broken, slow, harmful, or fail some critical objective.

Team dysfunction is inseparable from tech dysfunction. Imagine one team owns three quarters of this service as another owns half of it. Or more likely, one owns a tenth of a problem space and another owns a fifth. Suddenly you need a fully realized solution. Who will step up? Well, you’re the one who actually needs it…but surely you don’t have to start from scratch? Surely…?

Then there’s just the fear of showing your ass. The day after it launches, who will be in hot water? Will it be you, because you agreed with the PM that your substandard code could ship? Why didn’t you flag the problem earlier? Get more help? Tell someone you weren’t already a superstar at this infra or that architecture?…

And then recall they did ship, it sucked, they bought Instagram. Then WhatsApp. And dozens of others

I guess the lesson is: yelling “go faster!” at a blocked-up engine is only gonna go so far. Mark’s (and many others’) move is to apply money to replace or get additional engines. Or roll up your sleeves and fix the org and culture…doesn’t have exactly “founder mode” romance to it tho, and there’s scarcely a harder task out there.

Depends on the business goals and why it's being perceived or presented as a crunch. A lot of it is just to make someone feel important rather than produce value in the market.

zuck is the founder of the company and has been at the helm since its inception

consider where that management debt may have come from, and whether accepting the current crunch will somehow alleviate it, or signal that crunch will solve all problems and should be used, likely more aggressively, in the future

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