Replicable, in this context.
7 karma · joined March 7, 2024
And the level of disrespect we receive in order to do so..
Edit -
I’m no longer in the tech industry and this is a big reason why.
I was never treated poorly per se, but I was always treated as a second class citizen. Salaries, responsibility, seniority .. you begin to realise that there’s a glass ceiling which you’ll struggle to break through.
The breaking point for me was when after conducting a detailed analysis of some data using Looker, an entry level engineer was tasked with making sure my analysis was correct. (I was the most senior marketing employee at a company with a $200m Val and reported to the CRO.)
And then his correction of my analysis - which was accepted unquestioningly - was littered with mistakes.
Once we had gone through it together; he had corrected his report and apologised to me.
Second reaction - the pricing is way over the top and the model is unusual. In your own pitch you talk about the volume of documents created every day. How does that square with per document pricing?
In terms of high turnover, I’m not an engineer and have not managed an Eng team.
However, the companies I most admire tend to have a single digit % turnover annually.
Toyota is my favourite example but there are others - I don’t like Costco for other reasons, but they do seem to be another with a great culture.
The point I was making is that I can conceive of a world where ‘come to a meeting for 4 hours’ would be something that in some companies, people wouldn’t mind because they already have so much confidence in the leadership that they know it would be a good use of their time.
I know this wouldn’t be the case in most companies. I am trying to say that I can conceive of exceptions.
Having worked for a few companies that don’t have the ‘HR types justifying their own paycheck’.. it IS possible to find a positive environment. The one thing they’ve all had in common was a sub-100 head count.
Some of them horrible, some of them wonderful, some in the middle.
However, one of the few people who he admires in the post most definitely describes themselves as a leader.
The post would be less funny with the appropriate disclaimers (‘of course not all people who see themselves as a leader are like this’) so I think we can safely assume that he trusting in the intelligence of his readership to figure this out.
(Disclaimer - I’m CEO of a small company and also adore the Turn Your Ship Around book and partly base my leadership style on that book. )
I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.
Human beings are wired in a particular way; being physically present together in a room at least occasionally should have strong benefits, if enough other caveats are met.
So - I wonder if the baby is going out with the bath water?
Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly.
Maybe we could say that resources need to be managed and people need to be led, but the average manager/leader doesn’t understand the distinction, or perhaps doesn’t have any desire to.
One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake.
And that manager is a superstar if their team members are able to regularly grow into new roles (or switch into a new role that is a better fit, as happened today.)
~ Edit ~
I just read the blog post that the author linked to, about Pivotal Software. We have a very similar philosophy. In the blog post he describes the hiring process has being designed to filter out assholes and that, for me, has to be one of the most successful parts of our approach, too.