Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> Somewhere around 100 people, the ground shifts underneath you, as you realize you don’t know everyone anymore. You just can't. There aren't enough hours in the day, and honestly, there aren't enough slots in your brain

This is definitely a rare exception, but at my first job, my boss's boss's boss (basically the #2 in the engineering organization, although probably only like 2/3 of it was under his purview) somehow seemed to have an unfathomable ability for knowing not only everyone under him the org tree, but details about what they were working on. I think it must have been at least 150, maybe even 200 people, and as far as I could tell he could recall every single person's name, project, and the general status of their work without needing anyone to remind him before talking with them. Maybe he did just really studiously review notes or something before any meeting or even chance of an ad hoc conversation in the halls, but I never really saw him typing at meetings or writing stuff down to keep track of later, so at the very least he'd need to have been able to retain a lot of information long enough to accurately record it later. Witnessing this firsthand for a few years was easily one of the most impressive mental feats I've ever observed.

Did having such a person in charge make a qualitative difference in the atmosphere of how work proceeded among people there?

If so, do you think it would have played out similarly if the organization had had an equally effective "glue person" who wasn't in charge (therefore didn't have any authority to delegate or divide most tasks) and was required to manage upward [sic] to coordinate things for people?

LOVE this question! Thanks for asking.

I also like toying with variants of where "essential elements" can live, sometimes in odd places :)

https://x.com/patcon_/status/1963648801962369358

> I have an idea for a quirky event experimenting with the "minimum viable feeling of community", but need to explain some context first. Bear with me...

> [...]

> So here's the event idea: what if someone ran an event where the 2nd rule was "NO INTRODUCTIONS", but only because the 1st rule was "you must arrive having fully memorized ONLY everyone's name and face". Beyond the strange entry requirement, what would such an event feel like?

> And what strange sorts of intimacy might be created by this minimal scaffold of "knowing everyone"... & being in community together? I suspect it might feel like a warm event full of friends, but where everyone had mysteriously forgotten everything they knew about one another :)

I'm not sure, mostly because it's hard for me to feel confident in figuring out what to attribute to that versus other facets of how he did things. Overall, I have an extremely positive view of how he ran things, but I also personally found him great at a lot of the other things that go into a technical leadership position (making good decisions about what to prioritize, having a consistent vision of what our long-term goals were, not falling into the trap of micro-management, having enough technical skill to be able to help out with the higher-level issues while still respecting the areas where others were more knowledgeable, going out of his way to try to address issues that people raised with the idea that retaining talent long-term was hugely important, etc.), so I honestly don't know how much things would have been different if he didn't also have this level of retention of details. It was impressive still though, not in small part because I don't have any trouble imagining someone in his position just genuinely not caring enough to do it even if they were capable.

Maybe the genuineness that it seemed to come from really is what made the difference in the long run; I obviously don't know how everyone else felt about it, but in other jobs I haven't found it particularly difficult to notice when the general perception of higher-level managers is a lot more positive or negative than my own, so my instinct is that most people probably also liked him, and I do think that makes some amount of difference. Having a "glue" person who is more detail-oriented is probably fine if the reason the actual authority figure doesn't retain the details is just not having that particular skill, but if it's because they genuinely think that the people beneath them in the org chart are just resources they can use to solve problems rather than actual people who will work better in the long term if treated well, then no, I don't think it would be as effective.

I recall in the first lecture of some Comp Sci class back at uni, our lecturer had learnt what felt like every student's name and face from their digital profile, some 100 people. Whenever a random student raised their hand to participate he would say say "yes, <first name>". I'm still to this day in awe of that.

I had a math prof who did that in a class of 200 and still remembered our names 2 years later. Incredible.

My macroeconomics professor did this. Day 1, he greeted every student by name at the door. The class had at least 100 or so students.

counterpoint

My last CTO was hired after me, the org was hyperscaling. When i was interviewed I was told that the company is banking on JS and that's what we were doing on both ends [1]

When CTO was hired he made a walk through the office, greeting every team, he stopped at our cubicle and asked what we were doing - I told him basics - and he said "you should be doing that in Java".

Few weeks later he had a townhall presentation. He came to a room full of people, plug in his computer and the screen started playing a pornhub flix.

He didn't got fired. I was.

I’m not sure it’s really a counterpoint, but still an interesting story (interesting, because it’s not really funny, is it?)

Why did you get fired?

Maybe the p-hub Java player was buggy and shouldn't have auto-played?

Not the OP you asked but.

I think it is sour grapes that new CTO didn’t know shit and even did full embarrassment on display - yet tech guy who knew his job was let go most likely with his team just because CTO thought whatever they were doing should be in Java.

also a sense of broken promises to the CTOs fault

javascript coder joined taking the company's statement in good faith "everything will be javascript, the front and back end both" and happily did it

New CTO joins, warmly visits all, dude who joined in good faith parrots his understanding of what we're doing to the CTO. CTO reacts "NO IT MUST BE JAVA" and this is a flex new CTOs love to do -rewrite everything- often to failure

javascript coder now arguably may no longer be needed if he's not a java programmer, maybe CTO is bringing in their own guys, gets canned.. gets canned by a clown who (a) is watching porn during work and (b) shows it to everybody and (c) leadership above the CTO saw this and did nothing

I'm honestly not sure I understand what this has to do with what I said.

Is this that impressive? In my high-school there were roughly 200 people in the year group and I'm pretty sure most of them could list off practically everyones names and something about them?

On day 1 of your first year?

I don't think that's equivalent. If you were responsible for trying to make sure each of those students were getting good grades, keeping track of each of their GPAs, and getting involved proactively whenever signs that someone's grades might be slipping, that might be comparable. There's a difference between "knowing something general about each person" and being able to keep track of the same general detail about all of them and not ever getting mixed up. If anything, I'd imagine that the facts known about each person were more likely to be things that stood out compared to the others rather than 200 difference instances of the same detail.

Was he a good leader? And is that capability related to him being a good leader, would you say?

I responded to a similar question in more detail from a sibling comment, so I won't repeat it all here, but to briefly summarize: yes, I think he was a great leader, but it's hard for me to tell whether it had much to do with that capability specifically. I certainly don't think it's a requirement for a great leader, but I also think it probably helped at least a little, even if it just ended up being a minor convenience for him and one of many small signals that helped convey that he genuinely cared about trying to do his job well.

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