251–260 of 267 posts
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No I didn't...it's only irrelevant to you because you are not trying to understand what I'm saying.
If you just dropped the Einstein part, it would be a perfectly fine comment.
> And I can think of more than one well-regarded unicorn where everyone still has access to basically everything , even after their first or second bad security breach. Which companies? That's pretty scary.
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It's a bit like when there's two cash machines, with a long queue at the first but no-one at the second. You can see people looking at it, wondering whether it's worth the humiliation of finding it's broken and having to go to the back of the queue, or the joy of finding it is working and getting one over everyone else. Often nobody cracks.
Why i have pretty much given up on burger chains. Their places have X number of cash machines, yet only one of them is in use even though there is a massive queue. And if you wander up to one of the unused ones you get yelled at...
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My friend and I used to have a serious case of "after you" deadlocks during our studies; we would get stuck in front of a door insisting the other goes through first. We eventually figured out a simple solution - if we found ourselves about to get stuck in another "after you" loop, we'd play rock-paper-scisors, and the loser had to go first. It quickly became almost a second nature for us, and it looked pretty confus…
I live by the rule that I never follow an "after you" with a "no, after you" without good reason. If they want demonstrate their politeness, why compete?
The less obvious reason is that after a certain number of back-and-forths, you can interrupt the other person saying "aft-", cut them in line sideways so you both sort of swoop through the doorway, which then leads to a warp zone.
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The DoD (!) is hardly representative of the cultures being discussed in the linked article, which is about tech startups (with a bunch of examples from medicine too). Yes, there are worse examples, but those may be beyond help.
I fail to see how governmental organizations should fall outside the scope of the discussion. And the Air Force is not the DoD. While, technically, the individual branches of the US military fall under the DoD, they all have very different organizational cultures, and the DoD has staff and culture of its own.
I won't tell you what falls within the scope of this discussion or not, but I can tell you why they don't add a lot of value to it either.
It's already quite hard to somewhat objectively discuss whether a business company is dysfunctional, in part, or not at all, and what are the reasons for that.
It's almost entirely useless to attempt to have that discussion about government. Because politics. Because people root for their home team. Because people are inclined to dismiss the other team's ideas even when they're real good. If I told you the US Government is dysfunctional, someone would counter that I'm not American and I should see my own government. If we move past that and we got into the details of why things are not working properly, invariably Americans will start quoting bits of the constitution, bill of rights and foundling fathers at each other (and from there on it just becomes religion to me).
Discussing whether the function of Military organisation is working properly is even more difficult. In addition to the above problems, there's also hazing and indoctrination, which are incredibly strong psychological forces (without those, like said, people won't run into their deaths without question). And it pretty much divides the crowd in two slices, those "outside" that have no idea how it really works, and those that have been "inside" who are unable to disconnect the indoctrination bits from forming an objective judgement about how well the organisation functions and how that comes to be.
Certainly, discussing businesses has similar problems, but this just amps up the personal emotion factor to eleven. Also one of the reasons why the businesses were kept anonymous in the featured article.
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I recall reading somewhere that while military organizations are very much synonymous with hierarchy, they have historically experienced a lot of pressure to flatten and decentralize, at least as far as field command goes. Napoleon's success was attributed to smaller units that responded to feedback more quickly. Unfortunately I can't find that article. However, this is not to say that in regular administration there…
The US Marines are often cited in management literature as an example of an organization where the leadership communicates high-level intent and purpose to achieve strategic alignment, and then totally decentralizes tactical decisionmaking to the people doing the actual work in the field. The stereotype that they are just all about top-down decisionmaking and following orders, is false. They recognize that individual…
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Why i have pretty much given up on burger chains. Their places have X number of cash machines, yet only one of them is in use even though there is a massive queue. And if you wander up to one of the unused ones you get yelled at...
Is this an american weirdness? That sounds completely unreasonable.
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This is exactly a perfect example of WTF worthy behavior being treated as totally normal; that it's encoded that there's "leadership" and "not leadership" as binary job distinctions with distinct responsibilities. I've been in both types of cultures and, by far the healthier culture was the one in which "making the organization better" was treated as everyone's responsibility. I've seen very junior engineers drive qu…
Leadership leads. This is a tautology. It is unhealthy to pretend otherwise. Lets take for Leadership decides to incur technical debt to allow a faster entry into market, Development Team Lead decides this is unacceptable, and does not take on the Technical Debt, but instead does things 'The Right Way'. This leads to competitors entering the market first, snagging customers and mindshare, which eventually leads to th…
That's a bit of a loaded question.
You assume there is a right and a wrong that can be determined before knowing the outcome (a.k.a. deontology).
It's easy to see this is not at all clear-cut if you consider the other possible outcomes. What if it turns out that DevTeam's decision was what saved the company (and maybe even their competitors are now buckling under Tech.Debt).
Would that have made them right? Maybe yes. But in other's eyes maybe not because they still disobeyed their "superiors". But maybe the company would have fallen if they had listened.
Can you categorically say, beforehand, that one decision is right and the other is wrong?
You could, but others might disagree (and rightfully so, IMHO).
Say you claim it's always right to do what management tells you, and it's wrong to decide to go against that. And you can argue this because a large business needs that kind of structural dependability, otherwise it would fall apart in chaos and specialisation is a good thing, so management specialises in determining long-term vision that a Dev.Team leader is not as knowledgeable about. Sounds like a pretty tight justification, no?
Well, except when you're Dev-team and your livelihood (maybe family) depends on this job and following management's will crush the company, you decide to disobey management, and it turns out that indeed the tech.debt would have crushed the company instead of the entry-to-market delay. Then Dev-team gets to claim they were right. Even if management says "you saved the company this time but in general you ought to always listen to us even if you think it's a bad idea", except that (obviously) protecting their livelihood ranks a lot higher on Dev-team's ladder of oughts than following orders to facilitate a smooth tightly-run company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly a perfect example of WTF worthy behavior being treated as totally normal; that it's encoded that there's "leadership" and "not leadership" as binary job distinctions with distinct responsibilities. I've been in both types of cultures and, by far the healthier culture was the one in which "making the organization better" was treated as everyone's responsibility. I've seen very junior engineers drive qu…
Leadership leads. This is a tautology. It is unhealthy to pretend otherwise. Lets take for Leadership decides to incur technical debt to allow a faster entry into market, Development Team Lead decides this is unacceptable, and does not take on the Technical Debt, but instead does things 'The Right Way'. This leads to competitors entering the market first, snagging customers and mindshare, which eventually leads to th…
If management is planning to do things quickly and badly, the dev lead should know that and plan accordingly, trying to do it in the best possible way.
If he's kept in the dark, of course he might blunder. But that's not his fault, assuming a company that encourages initiative and fix it yourself attitudes.
Best leadership leads by empowering people, not by enslaving them.