My Failures Onboarding at Splunk
people-work.io
people-work.io
It's not wrong to wonder about your career trajectory, but it's telling to see someone pretty nakedly talk about optimizing for changing their level at a company, before they've even landed there and evaluated if they can help / how they are helping their team. I'm not naive, and I recognize those people exist and can acknowledge that they can do good work. But if someone came into my workplace with the mindset of "aggressively [seeking] to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks" and their goal was going "from Senior Manager to Director in ... 12 months", I'd be skeptical that they weren't going to damage peer relationships and optimize for being recognized at the expense of their direct reports, even if I thought they could be a valuable asset in the short term.
What I should have done, at the point of being hired, is to drop all that, and focus patiently on what I needed to do. And I'm sharing it because not enough people share this side of it, and because I am working on elements that would have made it better. Thanks for reading! :)
The tone of the writer comes across as mildly entitled as if they, just by wanting it, are entitled to the role. No mention of other senior leaders in the company that may have been on the same trajectory at the same time, and how he was measuring up against his peers. Most of the achievements listed in this post are purely overseeing groups of people, which in itself is the bare minimum for this level of leadership. I also perceive some cultural barriers in this post.
And then of those underperforming teams, what percentage of those would the team members identify themselves as part of underperforming teams?
What I like about well-run small companies is that there is essentially no chance of a promotion: all we can do is do our work better, improve processes and make our customers (internal and external) happier. If you hook monetary rewards to title and responsibility treadmills, you lose all that. Hypergrowth is a trap.
Small companies that aren’t worker-owned and without promotion ladders aren’t immune to this. They get workers who strive toward promotion via job switching.
You can debate the fairness of equity hoarding by those who invest money into the business but it doesn’t change the worker dynamics
Maybe VC money warps the economics so that every company needs to be winner takes all lotto tickets for the investors. Having it be worker owned gets rid of the extreme ROÍ VCs expect.
If you know any papers on the subject I would be interested though.
VCs are not interested in worker-owned coops. Economic climate works against the concept at scale. Workers are also divided on it and are not organized around enabling it. Employers are highly coordinated on maintaining current employer-worker relations.
edit: here is some related reading you might find interesting:
- Sociocracy - consent-based decision-making organizations (as opposed to dreadful unanimous decision-making which doesn't work and is a common criticism of non-hierarchical organizations) https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ // https://sociocracy30.org
- a UK tech co-op network: https://www.coops.tech but it seems a lot of these are more tech services than product companies
REI is a consumer coop, not a labor co-op (and WinCo, while employee-owned through an ESOP, is not a co-op at all.)
Cooperative Home Care Associates, a home health care agency HQ’d in the Bronx, appears to be the largest US labor cooperatives (and labor intensive service industries are probably the most common places to find labor coops in the US.)
> Maybe VC money warps the economics so that every company needs to be winner takes all lotto tickets for the investors. Having it be worker owned gets rid of the extreme ROÍ VCs expect.
Right. VC goals and labor coop goals are almost never aligned, and instead are almost diametrically opposed. Labor coops tend to favor conservative expansion and risk mitigation and stability. VC’s want to swing for the fences on scale—a succesful steady-state business that will pay its founding employees good pay forever but not expand much is a massive failure for VCs, but a win for a labor coop.
REI is owned by people who pay a one-time lifetime membership fee. Those co-op members elect the board fo directors who runs the company.
Employees might want to receive the most cash they can right now (and therefore prefer 100 units of cash over 90 units of cash and 10 of equity compensation). We shouldn't force them to accept a different mix of compensation, particularly one which forces them to invest in their employer via such a tradeoff. They might choose to work at business X instead of worker-owned cooperative Y for any number of reasons.
Employers think about the value proposition they offer to attract and retain employees and if there are 100 units of compensation available to be paid and they have reason to think that employees prefer cash over equity, they are likely to offer all 100 units of comp in cash rather than 90 units of cash and 10 units of equity. There's no sense tying up 10 units of equity that an employee only values as being equivalent to 5 units of cash.
In the case of workers working for public companies, they have a straightforward way to invest in their company if they want: take some of the cash and buy shares in the company. That's barred in most cases for private companies by practicality and accredited investor rules.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
As you find reasons to object to that, many of those reasons are likely the same shared by others and make this a vastly less common arrangement, because someone has to take on the massive initial risk to start and fund the business through the unavoidable period of initial losses and probably wants to see a way to having a compensating upside in the event of success.
Brainstorming and figuring a way to address that might be a way to help you mold/nudge the world towards your preference.
When I make someone an offer, I give them a spreadsheet where they can plug in different salaries and equity stakes to see outcomes based on future funding events, valuations, and exit scenarios. Without exception the people who've leaned into equity have turned out to be the best performers and ended up with higher salaries anyway, but a majority favor cash up front.
* Doing your part to make the revenue grow. For management, going from say $1M annual revenue in seed to $3M in A means the company can support 3X the staff. Joining a startup is basically a bet that you can outperform when unleashed.
* Surf that wave. Show it makes sense to put new hires below you vs above, or give you increasingly big responsibilities, etc, bc you managed the past ones well. Startups run to their limit so can feel like pressure cookers, and they're relatively small, so your demonstrated ability should be pretty apparent to hands-on leadership.
* Compensation comes out of that. Stock becomes worth more, you get bigger refreshers, more experience, new title, etc
Hypergrowth is an extreme, but so is a communist mentality where everyone is happy where they are and does not see any incentive to improve. There is a moderate middle ground that is best for economic mobility.
I feel this is as close to “Management 101” as it gets, or even “employee-ing 101”, as it applies to technical roles too.
Don’t do it!
Just write down your list of gripes for the first month; use them as your list of things to ramp up on.
If something seems odd or wrong, it may be actually broken, but it’s unlikely to be so urgent that you have to go out on a limb like this.
It’s more likely that there is some context you are missing. By Chesterton’s Fence you need to spend some energy to understand why the thing was put there, before you tear it down.
Even if you are right - you will face an uphill battle because you haven’t built trust yet. So pick your battles carefully!
Every time you see, or encounter, something that makes you go "WTF?!??" you write it down.
Chances are you don't have NEARLY enough context yet to figure out why it's like that, and so barelling in to "fix" it is just going to lead to frustration and bruised ego's all around.
After a few months you'll either have crossed off things "Oh, THAT's WTF" or you have a list of things to start chipping away at, now that you have the FULL context.
I think the hard thing is as on engineer you're paid to have the "right" answer, but as a manager you're paid not to be right but to bring all the "right answers" together. That's a subtle but important shift.
I think I didn't study the actions of the people enough, a point I was trying to make in the post. If I would have I would have made better decisions.
That this is an ad actually makes the grammar issues worse.
I'm sorry it came across as an ad, I'm full-time in a bootstrapped company working to try to solve this problem without any VC funding. It was a problem for me and for many people I know so I thought I'd share it in hopes to help people.
Also the grammar part here is interesting, I purposely write without AI because I think that's important, but I'd love your help in making it better - reach out on LinkedIn if you can. Thanks :)
What kind of audit one might not pass? People use all kind of log solution all the time without any problems.
The paragraph only barely, tangentially links to the conclusion paragraph above it. No lead up or reference in the post. And you are left dazed. I don't even know what this supposed tool would do even slightly. A hard souring of trust built up in the article.
Splunk maintains a logging aggregator with a mostly San Francisco staff.
A manager’s job at NCR is mostly about cracking the whip to try to get your team to solve boring enterprise client technical problems, but they usually don’t have enough context to understand the problem.
A manager’s job at Splunk is to motivate a team that used to work at a hip, fast growing startup who just got their payout from an Cisco acquisition and feel like the product is getting sidelined.
Without knowing this Sr Director, I have to wonder if this is actually the take away they were trying to offer. If a senior engineering manager isn't regularly celebrating their team's wins, being proud if their achievements and recognising the smart and hard work, providing exposure to the rest of the company, then there's something amiss.
If the take away really was "do this and you will make yourself look good for a promotion" then, yuuuuuck.