The Ask

You need socialism. That is not a snark. I am serious. It is getting rarer in the world. Even the "left" is very capitalist.

There's an intuitive appeal in having a coordination mechanism where good leaders decide which problems are important to work on and then get the smart people to work on those problems. But historically, societies structured that way haven't worked well; they struggle to get good signals on whether the solutions make sense, and the coordination mechanisms are vulnerable to subversion by bad leaders. The Soviet Union famously forbade anyone from researching genetics for decades because a crank named Trofim Lysenko who didn't think it was real happened to become politically popular.

We flipped from an Epicurean mindset to a Stoic or Nihilistic mindset. IOW, we stopped talking about helping people lead good lives and started talking about how we can all weather stress and work hard and deprive ourselves of good things to build something. Or we're talking about how nothing matters so why bother?

Sounds like you’re really going through it. Sorry to hear

Some people long for a savior-leader to come along and right the ship. An Obama that can from the top make all the stuff underneath right. They can’t do it themselves because structurally they, the middle or lower layer, are deadlocked, or the system makes things unsurmountable. But then it turns out that the savior-leader can’t make things right because they too are a product of the system. Just as convinced that the system is too broken for them to fix.

The $5 trillion didn't come from nowhere. People spend money on the products because they are helpful.

However, you're right that most people at these companies are so accustomed to the "free money faucet" from ads, huge margins, etc. that it's incredibly easy to end up totally disconnected from reality. That's probably what frustrates you the most.

I will say - after having left Google just about a year ago now - that there is literally no better time to make money in tech than right now. AI is eroding the moat of all large tech companies, and skilled individuals with passion and drive can make a huge impact on the world with an incredibly small budget.

You'll make it. All of us will.

As someone who has been CTO at a small company, senior leadership at a scaleup, and now middle management at a large co, I can tell you that what you are imagining is not structurally possible in our current system.

That's not say leaders here and there aren't thinking about what they're building and the macro effects, but you have to understand that unless you're bootstrapped and self-funded, even the most morally minded CEO is still beholden to investors who primarily care about money. You can only be as ethical as your board allows, and that primarily comes from profitability and financial success. In the good times its easy to talk a big game (eg. Google's "Don't be Evil"), but eventually competition comes for us all, and if your morality is hurting the bottom line you will be replaced. The backstop would be customer sentiment, but most buyers (whether B2B or B2C) are also not morally motivated. That's why free + ads is the dominant model, why micro payments failed despite years of techie hand-wringing, and paid consumer apps outside of streaming are vanishingly rare.

It's not all hopeless though. If things reach a high enough threshold of public sentiment then we can put legal and cultural pressure that will actually change things top-down. I think this is where AI is probably going as it's the most universally feared and hated impact across party lines that I have seen during my life, and the leaders in charge seem incredibly tone deaf about how it's being perceived, so I do expect regulation and softer forms of social enforcement to affect that trajectory. But if you're hoping for individual CEOs and leaders to fix our systemic problems, don't hold you're breath, they are just as replaceable as the workers under them.

cos people will do things for money. Regulate money, tax better, redistribute better. Give more people the power to say "no" as opposed to "holy fuck I need to make rent next month".

Politically addressing needs has the same issue as regulating money, its unpopular either because of billionaire marketing or general ignorance and cognitive dissonance. Also resource allocation is hard when people interpret any level of cut as murder. So you're hemmed in on both sides while FPTP makes it impossible to be honest with the electorate where jetpacks for everyone and free head is what wins you elections, regardless of its delivery.

While some commenters might suggest socialism is the panacea, I think that's just a different format of the same sort of failure. The fundamental flaw in our societies is ourselves, as we build societies that reflect our own failures. We care for ourselves considerably more than we do others, sometimes aggressively against others, sometimes will utter, wilful ignorance of others. The big picture is too hard for our brains to deal with. We have no baseline emotional regulation, humans can wrap themselves into the same emotional state about leaving Britney alone as they do about the death of a loved one. This means everyone's needs seem the same, which makes resource allocation hard.

We see a similar whine about immigration where the abstract is simply: You get $10k and an immigrant moves next door, or you get $0k and an arbitrary person who isn't an immigrant moves in next door. Solve for the status quo. But people will elect governments on a policy of cruelty to think that status quo won't immediately rubber band back.

Look up the organizational chart meme. Look at Amazon's chart. You'll know what's off.

It's the writing of someone who has been writing articles like this for decades now, instead of your average blogger or journalist. Just enjoy the difference.

To me, as a non-native speaker it feels like a series of interruptions and focus changes with no natural flow. Hard to follow.

Very. Short. Sentences. That’s AI

Terminal LinkedIn brain

This is just how he writes. Busy-executive-bullet-point style. Its not AI.

It's that opening paragraph.

> Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar.

How many Tuesdays are there in his work week?

I think it's just a characteristic voice. Just like you can tell Vonnegut, DFW, or Palahniuk from a couple paragraphs, Rands developed a pretty distinct sound.

It's awfully literary. It reads like James Joyce attempting to convey advice about effective leadership for technical teams. In my opinion, it's an obnoxious, pretentious approach to writing about practical subjects, but I may be in the minority.

I think much of this kind of management faffery might be like advertising - I know half is useless, but I'll be damned if I can figure out which half.

We never found out who Mark was. Or what the problem with Rachel was. Or what and why behind and ahead of the pressure to meet either were in place. So going with not at all. They've literally described their job as having too much cruft that could have been partially solved by the non-existence of their role.

Apart from the tone which is not my cup of tea either, I think what these types of articles/advice try to convey is that we (the working population) are still the monkeys we were thousands of years ago.

Sometimes we do stuff well because we like the other monkey we're doing it with. Sometimes we do stuff badly because we are an angry monkey. Sometimes we do the right thing but we cannot really explain why. We can sort of predict what the future will be like but not really well.

Management is pretending to "execute programs" and "align value chains" and "strategize on market trends" because the suits they wear are very expensive. But the reality is that they are also monkeys, who try to manage the emotions and urges and pitfalls of other monkeys by guiding interactions between the monkeys.

This kind of slightly wooly, slightly look-at-me-being-business-y kind of writing feels to me like selling your "I'm a monkey who can sometimes make other monkeys interact more effectively" as some cold hard logical skill.

Just felt like a pointless LinkedIn post, I don't understand what everybody else sees in this article.

In this case, ask is a noun, synonym for a request. “My only ask is that you tell me before you leave”

Its different because corporate workers will bend over backwards to do anything except speak normally in a corporate context. Because, for whatever reason, thats what corporate culture has developed into.

It's a common way to phrase a request in the corporate world. It's a bit more of a concrete and explicit than a simple request, something that can be written down in bullet points in a meeting notes summary or an email.

I hate it too (and others like "learnings" when "lessons" would suffice), but I see the purpose it serves. Asking a team "What's the ask?" is a way of explicitly asking what the concrete requests are which can be documented and followed up on (i.e. "circle back"), whereas just asking for "requests" is more like asking for preferences, which may not be binding, or a vague direction to go for planning.

I first encountered it in the 1981 James Clavell novel Noble House. The character using it was a well-educated Hong Kong gangster, or something similar to that.

(The plot of the book revolves around massive favors that a certain character is obligated to fulfill. At one point it is argued that "the ask" for one of them, while greatly annoying, could instead have been worse yet.)

There’s a common phrase in English: “what’s the ask?” As in, “what is the other party requesting?” “What does this person want?”

I can see how that would sound/read a bit strange to one coming from another culture. It’s just another way of stating the concept of the purpose behind the reason for a person’s request, actions, statement, or in this case, why they requested a meeting.

Getting to “the ask” here meant, for the author, “what the hell does this fool REALLY want out of me?”

I prefer Walt’s approach. When I was 19, I worked for a small business up in Colorado. They had this contractor named Walt that did all their email, website, all that stuff (very early 2000s). Every time he answered the phone, it wasn’t a polite “Hello?”, no! Walt got straight to the point with one loud, gruff word that immediately set the tone for all his conversations:

“WHAT?!”

The use is to signal you are part of the club that is understands that all meetings have a request. And they're not always explicit.

This comment was a good learning for me.

I assume based on the content of these comics you'd like to punish him. You don't have to carry this weight. Let it go. It's been 25 years.

Ask is a noun

"The Ask" is in widespread usage as a noun.

The nouning of verbs is a very annoying type of corpo speak

I'm in a big org and while we had a lot of COVID-related turnover, before and after COVID our average engineer tenure went from ~1.6 years to something like 6-7. I'm at the upper end of my part of the org at 8+ (one at 9, one at 11 one at 13). Only like 3 people in my group are below 6.

I would like to move on but also given the current climate that seems ludicrous.

People I talk to in similar places are in the same boat. Hiring is frozen, there's not enough people to manage everything we have, and everyone remaining is hanging on for dear life.

Relationship oriented workers keep their network as they move from job to job. Never know who you might be able to help or be helped by in the future.

Well, nobody said lifers. But you can't really get a management job without already having management experience. You typically have to be promoted internally, not just go look for a management job elsewhere with no experience.

I had the same instinct. Was about to copy paste it into ChatGPT to summarize. But powered through it. tl;dr: your job as a senior manager is to listen to people

lobste.rs is similar to hn, just around the corner, and does something like this.

I have a theory. How close does the following describe you?

* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role

* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.

* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.

Humor me, please. I'll explain after.

I don't agree with this.

But I also found the article really unsatisfying. The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.

Replacing middle management with AI would not work, but using AI to avoid managers needing to have all these meetings would probably work really well. The idea that there's some AI system that has access to all the documents/email/task management systems at the company is a good one, and it could identify situations (like the one in the article) where two projects on opposite ends of the organization are colliding.

Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes that they should could be replaced by an AI system that uncovered situations like the ones mentioned in the article.

This wouldnt replace middle managers, but it might help them do their jobs better.

Firm, but partial, disagreement.

People, especially in remote jobs, benefit from being organized into groups intentionally, with distinct rituals that enable them to operate effectively while they get to know each other better. Another person needs to design and oversee all that.

While you can provide templates for that structure that allow oversight to scale so that one person can oversee larger groups, that tends to be more effective in non-remote, and more predictable, work environments. Modern software development is very little of that.

I don't have much in-person experience with middle management in contexts outside of software development, and I suspect there are some opportunities to use AI to bring engineers closer to customers.

A key job of management is to figure out what's actually going on, as opposed to just what people tell you is going on.

LLMs are inherently gullible.