Having been an executive myself (in the past), my theory is the "clear" part of this is the root cause of ageism in tech. On anything more complex than Minesweeper, unless you've done it a couple of times in the past you won't be "clear" on anything when you lead people. You can create the _impression_ of clarity, but it'll be clear as mud to you all the same. Younger people don't see through this facade, so they take your bullshit at face value. Older people for whom it's not the first rodeo see right through it and most "leaders" feel really insecure in this situation.
When I was younger myself, I sort of assumed competence on the part of everyone. The older I get the more I see that people around me (as well as myself) don't really know much about anything and don't care to know. This includes "leadership" and, as painful as it is to say, myself.
Coincidentally, the article doesn't mention "honesty" even once. I've found honesty to be the best policy. I can't _always_ be honest when I lead (everyone would quit and go into depression if I were perfectly honest), but I try to minimize the blind spots and somewhat accurately give people a sense of difficulties and tradeoffs without making the situation look as hopeless as it usually looks to me when running "hard" projects. That way, if they care at all, they'll steer things in the right direction on their own, and focus on the right things.
I'm in my mid-40's though, so I sort of assume (knowingly incorrectly) people around me think like I do, and bullshit doesn't work in the long term.
This is an underrated comment IMO and hits on a critical point that people complain about but don't really understand.
That is, "The people at the top don't know what they are doing."
For IC's and other people actually doing most of the work, they interpret this as base incompetence on the part of leadership. It's certainly fair to say that there is a lot of incompetency at the top. However, even for very competent senior leaders it's often completely unclear how to get from "Here" to "There" because the organization may not be positioned to actually get there.
It's an extension of the technical debt problem, what made you successful in the past may not be what makes you successful in the future - and as a senior leader, it's your job to help the organization make that transition. The costs/risks to getting "There" might be considered impractical or devastating to the current organization. You can see this with any major company that fails to capture some huge new market.
On one hand you want to take care of your people, and a complete pivot with a 20,000 person organization might see huge layoffs or "restructuring." Is doing that, not knowing if it's going to work in the long run the right plan? We praise those who made the right pivots, but forget those who mistimed them, so corporate survivorship is real - and it's not about pure genius competence.
Now, try and communicate all of that to everyone on the team, considering all of the market dynamics, funding personnel issues etc... for context, and it's just not something that is feasible to communicate with everyone in a way that doesn't totally spook the whole organization.
That said, it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Communicating WHY smaller decisions are made and what the assumptions and context behind them are made is something feasible at some levels generally. This is where competence and maturity do play a huge role, and where great leaders distinguish themselves.
Besides not forgetting the word “know” make sure that you are actually prepared to honestly listen and act on what people tell you. I hear this phrase quite a bit but when you tell them how to help they promptly ignore it because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
A lot of today’s management phrases are totally empty and just sound good without any meaning. “Let me challenge that assumption” or “but what if we had an anti-gravity drive?” are fashionable phrases that sound insightful to the person saying them but really aren’t.
Also, that sentence should come only after you exhausted the ways to help that you already know. If someone already voiced needing help with something during past conversations, they won't repeat that thing while answering that question.
Start helping, then ask what else you could help with
That’s a great point that often makes an otherwise genuine “how can I help” look/feel empty unnecessarily.
An important thing we can actually do to help is think about what we can do to help and not wait to be told that. It’s hard, especially when your team grows, but it’s where you earn your team’s trust the most.
Also be prepared to ask that a lot before you get the truth and be SEEN actually doing those things when others ask to establish that there is value in answering.
I worked for a VP who got upset if he didn't get questions, or requests when he asked, but he never answered any of them in the past and somehow he never understood that those two were related and by the time he wanted to do it he had established the culture and it was impenetrable.
Frequently people early-terminate their ideas. Often to the person doing this it sounds like trying to conquer gravity. A coworker of mine would assume some constraints were immutable. So I'd be on the other side of the table. Examples:
* We need Bob, but Bob is busy working on the other thing -> but what if Bob wants to work on this and this thing is more important. I'll ask him.
* We would need at least 32 TB RAM to process this in-memory -> okay, looks like we're going to GCP with some big requests then
* We can't scale like that in the datacenter (the capital costs are too high) and we don't have the time to move to the cloud -> I can find you the time.
* We can't fix that bug, it would cause downtime -> okay, tell me when you want that downtime. How much do you want?
* They won't sell us their data -> we can buy the company itself.
Almost everything except natural laws are mutable.
EDIT: Sadly, chris, I am rate-limited but we actually did take all the actions on the right. That isn't to say someone can idiotically offer these things when they aren't an option, but asking the question does often have value.
I have been in several meetings where somebody said that a thing is simply not possible and a manager asked "but what if it was possible?". How are you supposed to respond to that? It's just a silly thing to say. Now if somebody says "I think it may be possible because of A, B and C" you have something to discuss. Otherwise it's just an empty phrase.
> somebody said that a thing is simply not possible and a manager asked "but what if it was possible?"
I've been an Individual Contributor, and a Manager, and am back to being an IC.
I've been on both sides of this conversation.
One of the benefits of being a manager is being able to see the forest from the trees while your team members may be so focused on their tasks they do not see the big picture.
Sure, sometimes the answer to "but what if it was possible?" if just "it's not."
But a lot of times, the good managers I've had would propose an approach to MAKING it possible that I just simply didn't see. And I've been able to do the same in their shoes.
Sometimes it requires a paradigm shift -
Q: "How do we get to the other town faster?"
A: "The horses are running as fast as they can"
Q: "What if we found a faster horse?" (e.g. a car)
But honestly in day to day office culture it rarely needs to be so revolutionary -
Q: "Could we finish the project faster if Bill's team helped us?"
A: "No, it's not possible. Bill's team said they are completely swamped"
<Goes off to do some managerial work>
Q: "Okay, I've chatted to Bill, and his team is fully available to help us finish the project."
interestingly, your examples revolve around making things faster. Which basically is understood as : "well, we've already too much pressure and our PM wants to put even more pressure on us". Going faster (or being more efficient) always mean being able to take more work.
No, it doesn't. For instance, at a place I worked at, we wanted to build a particular ad tech product to reinforce strength in a different area. The correct answer to "how do we make this faster" was "buy the guys who do it and then integrate via a bunch of CSVs on GCS and some RPC". We canned our forays into the space and bought them. Less work for all the engineers and data scientists. More work for M&A but they like doing that so it's not upsetting.
At a more granular level, in a different project, the answer to "how do we develop this faster" was "lose these requirements, and just use AWS services for those". Less work in total.
The horse/car example isn't really about going faster.
It's an example of hitting the limit of a certain technology, saying any further improvements are "impossible", while not recognizing that a "better horse" might just not be a horse at all.
It's not a metaphor for faster project delivery, but a meaningful technological difference that someone may not be able to see.
I'm not so sure that's silly. There's two discussions - one is 'is X possible', and the other is 'what do we do if X is possible'. They're asking you the second question, and you're answering with the first, which is probably the silly thing here.
They're possibly asking you the second question because they have context that you do not about the first, or they have conflicting advice from another expert on the first question. It may not be possible to pass on that context, for example for reasons of time or security, but they want your answer to the second question anyway.
It's reasonable to answer the second without the first.
It’s not always necessary to explain why you think something might be possible in order to ask whether it’s useful. Ideally you could trust your team enough to assume that they wouldn’t waste your time with “what if X was possible” unless they had reason to think that it was possible.
Speaking of nonsense lines from managers. One I'm hearing more and more is "this is one really smart group of engineers. I know you can figure it out."
This goes back to what you're saying. You need to actually be ready to listen, analyze, and present actionable plans. There's a lot of management like Homer Simpson who just buys everyone hammocks and parrots one liners.
A much better phrasing is “what help do you need?”. This works with people you’re responsible for, peers, and others. This has a better chance of discovering if they’re using you to vent to, or discovering a need that someone else can provide and you can connect them with. Secondarily it prevents the problem from becoming your problem because the question stops being an offer.
>Vision, goals, key results, what we are allowed to do and not do, are clear. Likely written down, understood, repeated frequently, taught to new members of a team.
On the nose.
Amazed by how many leaders that I've worked under that can't seem to set direction. That's all - communicate what's important, what's going to make the company differentiate itself, and then allow the smart folks you have hired to set their priorities accordingly, execute, and then adjust where needed (but sparingly).
I can see why you might think it was a shallow dismissal, but it actually has depth. You see, the words I was highlighting for their lack of meaning are themselves talking about meaning. It's possible this was an accident on the author's part, but it's also possible that it was deliberate, in which case the author is using irony (actual irony, not that rubbish the kids say is irony) to make their real point, and I'm applauding it. Hardly a dismissal.
Either way, the reader extracts extra layers of meaning at this point. Remember all that stuff in school about literature and how to read beyond the literal, that HN tends to ignore in favour of pretending to be rational cyborgs? It was for this sort of thing.
You missed the possible original point of the author, and my point as well. On the plus side, this comment could well have been a learning experience for you, so you should be happy with it.
It's like saying you're on your own and if anything goes wrong, don't tell me I didn't offer to help.
Or the worst phrase ever: "let me know if you have any questions" (often following a barrage of gibberish empty talk). Kind of like saying if you have no questions then you totally agree with my poor vision/leadership.
When I was younger myself, I sort of assumed competence on the part of everyone. The older I get the more I see that people around me (as well as myself) don't really know much about anything and don't care to know. This includes "leadership" and, as painful as it is to say, myself.
Coincidentally, the article doesn't mention "honesty" even once. I've found honesty to be the best policy. I can't _always_ be honest when I lead (everyone would quit and go into depression if I were perfectly honest), but I try to minimize the blind spots and somewhat accurately give people a sense of difficulties and tradeoffs without making the situation look as hopeless as it usually looks to me when running "hard" projects. That way, if they care at all, they'll steer things in the right direction on their own, and focus on the right things.
I'm in my mid-40's though, so I sort of assume (knowingly incorrectly) people around me think like I do, and bullshit doesn't work in the long term.