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Comment by farazbabar | Hacker News Reader

This team does not report to me, I will ensure their demise and make sure their work is never adapted by anyone within my sphere of control. It is easy to justify such behavior behind snazzy terms but I have seen this so many times that it isn't funny. Sometimes leadership may make a decision you may not agree with or even understand but focusing on why it happened, what you can do to align yourself and how you can help product, customer and business succeed are more important than your walled garden of carefully controlled conway conventions. It is right there in your own terminology of tribes, how very tribal.

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What exactly should the author have done differently? It's part of the leadership roles to understand the power structures within your organization. Reading between the lines, a new team was thrusted onto an arguably functioning sub-org to address concerns that they had not themselves raised. Then the expectation was for that sub-org to take a hit on their KPIs to onboard to the new teams platform.

It's not "tribal" to refuse to do something that is misaligned with all your explicit incentives. Otherwise we'd have to pay lip service to every internal tooling team just because they exist. It's the leadership team's job to keep pushing if they strongly believe the sub-org leader is acting in bad faith.

The best managers I've seen would turn this situation into a headcount request.

The problem is leadership has priorities 1-5. Your team works on 1-3, but the PM keeps getting hassled about 4 and 5, so they look for levers to get them to happen.

In this situation, the PM scrounged up headcount from elsewhere, but if you present the option of adding headcount to the existing team, then you create a more harmonious option of getting these lower priorities accomplished.

Of course, this guy was taken fully by surprise by the suggestion. It's much harder to present a better option after the fact, and I agree that letting leadership feel the consequences of its decisions is a reasonable thing to do in this case.

> letting leadership feel the consequences of its decisions is a reasonable thing to do in this case

In this case the consequence of leadership's decision was a permanent solution to the CX problem with no permanent increase in headcount.

"Sometimes when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

> What exactly should the author have done differently?

Work with the other engineering manager.

This person was angry about the team's appearance, but the other engineering manager who assembled the team is barely a side note in the document.

The way you deal with these situations is by working with the other managers involved and propose better solutions.

This is a weird blog post because it's supposedly from someone in a high up engineering manager position, but it's written with a political awareness that I'd expect from someone who had never managed before or who was a first-time manager without good mentorship.

They had better solution and used it. You cant "work with" people who are not working with you in the first place.

This was not a cooperative situation. Trying to cooperate in this situation will make you walked all over and also will make you the one to be blamed when it fails.

What about expecting them to suck up their pride, work with the other lead for a comprehensive plan that includes possible WONTFIX-es?

Strategy and leadership don’t come to exist on their own. It’s middle management that has the best operational and tactical view bear none. Use that to influence decision making instead of complaining. (Yes, this is a theme in my professional life. Our middle managers don’t know their own worth. Pretty please give me Plans about what you Want to Deliver. Those are so much better than general strategies.)

sports and competitive gaming can really highlight team attitude with this sort of thing.

if you are playing as a team, and someone on the team makes a committed decision then it no longer matters if it was the best decision or not given the info at hand - the team is committed. Everyone making an effort to make the best of ANY plan usually has way better results than a confused/sloppy execution of the best plan.

and with longer term plans, once everyone is moving together and following each others lead, you can quickly pivot into the right plan if something is very obviously wrong.

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