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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are,

While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO.

The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are getting the most complaints and refunds, and so on.

[1] intangible concepts like 'innovation' and 'culture' for example

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If you can figure out how to turn the "should" in that sentence into "can" then you'll die wealthy. Tracking goals and turning them into a coherent strategy is a major unsolved problem in software engineering.

We accept best-effort from CTOs, but that leads to an industry that is a bit like a comet with a few success stories and a huge burning tail of leadership where they have limited to no ability to understand whether they are on track to achieve their goals and those goals don't come together into a coherent strategy. There is a strong argument that many of the success stories are only good relative to companies that failed even worse than they did and we all had to pick one of these bug-ridden software packages.

It is a lot like the era of the manufacturing industry before the statisticians moved in around WWII. We haven't managed a similar moment in software yet.

You can never understand complex adaptive systems to anywhere near 95%, and leaders believing that they can—that the map is the territory—leads to some pretty bad dynamics.

Not just wrong, but confidently wrong! I've done that one myself a couple times too.

Sadly at many companies that's really not true. The CEO has direct visibility into direct reports and those metrics, but those don't necessarily clearly indicate what changes to the system would do. Largely because they're descriptive, not predictive, in my limited experience. They also tend to be lagging or current indicators, so they tell you what policy was doing last quarter. If those metrics are trending badly, you can't just demand "move X number up" and expect any success.

Any workable management approach relies on not managing down further than your direct reports, and believing what they say. Otherwise you've eliminated that layer of middle management, and have to do their work.

It might happen that this is the correct approach, and how to slice things up is often an eternal argument both on an organizational level and technical level.

Unfortunately that gives a lot of power to the middlemen, whoch they might use against you, but that's how the cookie crumbles.

That's why sometimes new management comes in and cleans house at the direct report level so they have people they know they can trust.

My internal metaphor for senior management is of a man sitting in a darkened room receiving slips of paper under the door with little messages on them.

That's why founder types have such a massive advantage. They've got a much better mental picture of what's beyond the door.

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