This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay.
Real wartime footing:
1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling daily read-outs on project progress, and half the organisation spends the weekend frantically hallucinating project plans into Google Sheets.
2. Engineering staff react with dull-eyed disbelief on Monday; they knew this was coming, because the same thing happened a month ago, and six weeks before that.
3. Emails come from HR that there are are new, even-more-labyrinthine approval processes for expenses, and shrinking budgets for anything not directly related to whatever the projet du jour, which will be fed enough to make it look like it's succeeding until the next Friday evening email kills it.
4. There is wide-spread burn-out across Engineering teams, and people are reduced to reactive, sarcastic automatons.
5. A creeping understanding seizes the better engineers that things cannot improve; they sign articles of Armistice, pretend to comply, and start interviewing elsewhere.
6. An email arrives on Friday night...
> Focus on the positive aspects of the job that can be taken for granted, like the opportunity to work on cutting-edge challenges, the company's still existing perks and benefits, the amazing team you have, the chance to work with a modern tech stack, or how your product is helping its users. Showing your team how you appreciate what's still good can help with morale.
If HN supported gifs, there'd be several in this spot.
I always cringe whenever someone who is well tenured on managing IT projects says on a group call that "They're not really a technical person"... It's often the result of being someone's protected buddy, but let's all be serious about it all, if these people continually manage technical programs, it's a huge failure for them to not be learning the landscape and regularly work on improving their understanding of how tech works, or at the bare minimum, leaving direction to accountable people that do know tech implications.
So many of the current apps we use now have been buried in adware and bloat due to the decisions of non-visionary minds leading as product owners... Most notably with Twitter/X, and frankly, it frustrates everyone and scuttles very mission critical operations that grow to rely on tools and services that were originally created by actual tech visionaries that learned and accelerated in the art...
Also, "learning on the fly" should not be a normal practice on mission critical operations... The ideal of under-bidding contracts and under-paying employees, and even hiring tons of junior employees for mission-critical development efforts is really destroying and undermining the entire industry.
Sometimes we need to just turn down the opportunity to work in a burning bowl of spaghetti, the resulting products & services always reflect the process applied to create them, no matter how many "smart" work-arounds are created.
Is there a German word for the feeling you get where you want the opportunity to apply a hard-won skill, but also kind of don't? I feel that reading this all-too-accurate comment.
Like many/most of us, I've been through this, but by virtue of luck and experience, haven't in a while. I think I've learned to spot the symptoms early enough that I avoid the companies/teams/projects that are on that path.
For those who think this is inevitable and unavoidable in a tech career, take heart in the fact that it's not!
I have a pretty high threshold before pressure at work actually stresses me out, so I've stuck around for a while after seeing the warning signs before leaving a team on this path.
Warning signs are always there in my experience, you just have to pay attention. The real challenge is paying attention as the problems start to ramp up, its easy to get distracted fighting fires and not see the bigger picture.
What is worse, once you get promoted enough, you learn that throughout your career when these things happened, senior management often had some juicy completion bonus or other perk tied to delivery. Yet when you are doing this you are expected to just comply because the company is in trouble.
I told you to stop talking to my wife! She has 35 years engineering, now a quality manager, and the new boss has been hair on fire all weekend, cosplaying that a top down intense low bid culture can adapt, and uh, oracle is in the mix. This is not what we signed up for.
Corp jumps into the trunk, Oracle slams shut the lid, and the usual story ensues. There's a process bug now, not Oracle's to be sure, and to fix it will cost real money.
the obvious follow-up to the obvious solution is you don't need to feed 2 extra horses after you're out and you end up with websites counting how many horses are suddenly starving.
Agency cosplay sounds like the right phrase. Everyone wants to believe they have the power and resources to achieve their potential. Even in dying & desperate departments warring with themselves. If a professional doesn't believe their actions get good outcomes, they quit or quiet-quit.
For the manager trapped between their hopes and reality, this blogpost is basically therapy. It comforts with a classic remedy: level up your game and you can win the game. Replace negativity with a "bias heavily toward action". Tell yourself and your reports: "perfection is the enemy of done", have "ruthless prioritization", be "laser-focused on shipping what matters most“. Believe in this all until you get a new position (with real agency), then you can discard this illusion along with your reports.
An older phrase for this phenomena, absent the management aspect, could be "hustle porn." If you ignore ethics, and work crazy hard and crazy smart, you'll win https://www.inc.com/serhat-pala/alexis-ohanian-says-hustle-p... . Though in my experience, you'll just end up crazy.
This is painfully accurate. I'm not sure how companies fall prey to these problems, but they seem to be incredibly hierarchical. What I means specifically is that the lower level employees and mid-level managers seem almost rabid to praise, cater to, and and be swept up by the useless whims of nearly anyone in the executive suite. It's sickening, and not because of the impacts on work. Why do so many grown adults act so pathetically servile to someone who is in a higher rung in a company? These executives don't have better ideas inherently, and due to being so far removed from the real work, are often a misinformed distraction.
No one seems to think that an executive would want to be told that they are wrong, or misinformed, or missing the point. But, a worthwhile executive would want to hear exactly that. They would want to know if their ideas were actually going to disrupt work, make the firm worse off, etc.
And I know what you're thinking: many executives are self-interested, and just want to see their ideas implemented, company health be damned. Yes, that's true. But then why does anyone give them the time of day? If an executive is nakedly self-interested they should be sidelined as aggressively as possible, both to neuter them and also to protect the company.
I had a bit of hope when companies started down the OKRs path.
That model could work really well when done bottom-up, with individuals defining what they see as most important in their context and managers rolling that up into coherent strategies at each level as it goes up. Effectively, managers should be puzzling together what those closest to the product and customer find rather than forcing down goals and metrics.
Unfortunately companies don't work that way and leadership fundamentally doesn't trust their employees, especially employees they are a few layers away from in the org chart. OKRs ended up being just another name for leadership slamming goals down the org, no different than the Company Pillars I would see at Microsoft 15 years ago.
They act that way because anyone who didn’t got fired, and those that did got promoted. So either the ‘smart ones’ started doing it, or the ‘dumb ones’ all got removed.
Why do so many grown adults act so pathetically servile to someone who is in a higher rung in a company?
- Because the alpha apes on the top of the pyramid got all the bananas and they will share it only with the ones they like. And it goes all the way down. Too bad tha apes have not come up with a better system because the apes have prioritized bananas over everything else. Peace.
It's simple, at certain point at certain growth in a company, the "yes man" virus is going to infect the whole corporation. Why? Because there's one spot where the virus is going to spread, and around this spot only "yes men" will get promoted and they will only hire, reward and promote other "yes men".
It starts from a person or persons who don't know what they are doing, but are really good at selling themselves. So their only goal is to show themselves in a good light to leadership and fool them by surrounding themselves with people who will agree with everything they do.
I mean, I think there are a lot of motivations for people who behave this way, but one of the core ones is less a matter of servitude or slavering desire to satisfy upper management and a lot more a result of the kind of language this article uses.
People want to believe the things that they do matter and are often willing to gussy up their jobs to make their contributions feel important, to make themselves feel important, to feel like the world needs them. It's the same thing that motivates mall security guards to dress up in tactical outfits. "If I spend all my time doing this thing that doesn't matter and isn't super important, then I don't matter, and I'm not super important." They convince themselves that whatever this current thing is Truly Does Matter, and then are willing to run themselves into the ground to prove the point that they contributed to the thing that matters.
I see the sort of self-aggrandizing "identifying as your job" behavior that leads to this mindset in software more than a lot of other jobs. People get into software and their personality becomes "I'm a software engineer" or "I'm a coder." They're better than the average - they're a highly-compensated expert who understands concepts like "UX" and "Architecture" and "Infrastructure" and they are going to run a Beta Test and Have To Stay Late To Deploy The New Version. They have an Important Deadline! The things they are doing Matter. I think lots of people in software had this idealized image of themselves as a core contributor to a product that's broadly loved and people care about and are unwilling to accept that they are toiling away to marginally reduce the time to first meaningful paint on yet another shopping cart page which only a few people use because the company they work for is niche, not particularly innovative, and not interesting.
I don't think a lot of people are doing this for the promotion - I think they're doing it for the validation. So they can believe that what they do actually matters. The sad reality is that 95% of software is bad and uninteresting and the people working on it are mashing together lego pieces to re-solve completely solved problems for management that doesn't get what they're doing and customers who don't like their work, and the desire to create importance where there isn't any is a self-defense mechanism more than anything.
Breaking out of this mindset was a key development in my career and I've not seen any less success but I am substantially more happy.
The other issue with this piece is that the vast majority of problems companies have in a more cash constrained environment are ultimately accounting problems.
No amount of "existential threat" pressure on teams to perform will replace leadership going through the balance sheet and figuring out where profits/growth/etc is getting it's highest return on investment and where it's not. Then planning for how to change that.
I was at a newly IPO'd company a few years back and it was almost laughable the gap between leadership's fantasies about profitability and the raw data in the earnings statement. Not a single decision planned or statement made addressed the mathematical reality of the balance sheet.
A simple "We need to get X% more out of this, and reduce the cost of that by Y% and we'll be good, here's our plan..." would have been endlessly more productive then feel good speeches and pressure on teams to improve performance in unspecified areas.
A lot of tech industry mythology is written from the perspective of a technical lead as imagined by an executive, or from the perspective of an executive who views themself as primarily a technical lead. In practice, this mythology is usually exactly just that
Real wartime footing:
1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling daily read-outs on project progress, and half the organisation spends the weekend frantically hallucinating project plans into Google Sheets.
2. Engineering staff react with dull-eyed disbelief on Monday; they knew this was coming, because the same thing happened a month ago, and six weeks before that.
3. Emails come from HR that there are are new, even-more-labyrinthine approval processes for expenses, and shrinking budgets for anything not directly related to whatever the projet du jour, which will be fed enough to make it look like it's succeeding until the next Friday evening email kills it.
4. There is wide-spread burn-out across Engineering teams, and people are reduced to reactive, sarcastic automatons.
5. A creeping understanding seizes the better engineers that things cannot improve; they sign articles of Armistice, pretend to comply, and start interviewing elsewhere.
6. An email arrives on Friday night...
> Focus on the positive aspects of the job that can be taken for granted, like the opportunity to work on cutting-edge challenges, the company's still existing perks and benefits, the amazing team you have, the chance to work with a modern tech stack, or how your product is helping its users. Showing your team how you appreciate what's still good can help with morale.
If HN supported gifs, there'd be several in this spot.