Ask HN: How do big companies ensure the execs get the right info from below?

I'm guessing that they don't.

The “right” info is the challenge. A company with >500 engineers will also have at keast that many sales, marketing, bizdev, legal, facilities, HR all put together. At least 1,500 people. And esch executive needs to handle communications laterally and from above. So “right” info is challenging to define from all the possible info. Good lower management will be able to prioritize necessary and useful information. Bad lower management will too, just with different ends in mind.

I don’t think I’ve seen good examples, except in stating that there’s a culture of transparency and inclusion and then not shooting the messenger that points out things that need improvement. Just describing that it’s not easy and likely not possible to get all of the right info, only some of it.

> it is important to be aware of what projects employees work on (with much less detail)

In my experience, employees get told which project to work on by management, usually through a formal budget / roadmap process which allocates resources to the initiatives being pushed by different stakeholders such as marketing, sales, IT (e.g. for maintenance projects), etc.

So the need is not so much to know what the employees are working on but rather how the projects are going. This is usually handled by steering committees or similar governance bodies, where each successive hierarchical level gets a broader (but necessarily more concise) overview of all the projects they are involved in.

What makes it through these different sieves depends on the company culture and what is considered the "right" level of information. In the worst cases, bad news will be edulcorated, then removed, until every line on the dashboard is green. In more result-driven companies, what makes it to the top is what is susceptible to impact business, so it's going to be the project delays and other bad news. But this process is like the "auto-summarize" feature in Word: a lot of nuance gets lost in the different layers and there's alsways a risk of ending up with nonsense. There's also a lot of mediation being done by middle management.

The closest I've come to direct feedback from the junior employees to the execs at large (>10k FTE) companies is when execs tour the office and come take a look at the grunts in the trenches (this will happen once or twice a year). Inevitably there's an awkward roundtable with a chosen team (usually the one working on the most visible project) where the exec asks each person in the room "what is blocking you and what can I do to help you" while that person's boss and grand-boss glare at them from the back of the room, silently promising retribution to anyone who raises any actual issue.

The short and true answer is that THEY DON'T. Why is this? Because of the SNAFU Principle: "True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth."

Junior people almost never give senior people the unedited truth because doing so is a good way to end up unemployed. Instead, junior people figure out what senior people want to hear and tell them that instead.

https://foldoc.org/SNAFU%20principle

Different large companies do things in different ways. Some companies do things very top-down to the point where "execs getting the right info" is merely "some report down the chain seeing something or other has to be delayed". Other places are a bit more open. Depending on the exec in particular, they may spend a lot of time reaching out to random individuals/reading planning + update docs/etc.

In general, I'd say it's part of the exec's job to ensure that the right sort of culture is set where individuals feel empowered to surface relevant information. This includes trying to make sure that people feel safe enough to surface issues, getting rid of people that aren't good about responding to feedback, etc.

As a corollary of this, you can tell when an exec is bad since not only do people snark, but the same topic of snark lasts for years and years.

There's also a part of their job to have the right organization structures in place such that if a piece of information should really get resolved at a lower level, it does. If a lot of information is having to be resolved by an exec, it probably means an organizational refactoring should probably be happening in the first place.