CTO day 2: downsizing the team • Hacker News Board

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#61

Post by jokethrowaway » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 12:57 PM UTC

Folcon wrote: post #60

SMFloris wrote: post #18

In the beginning, you are on an island, you have an idea to go on an adventure, so you start building a raft with the other guy on the island. The other guy has no building skills, but he procures food, water and wood. The resources on that island are dwindling but you manage to finish the raft just in time. You begin to sail the raft, you start fishing while out in the open seas. You reach another island and sell th…

This makes me wonder, considering the cost of acquisition of talented staff why I don't hear about more large companies with lots of capital on hand requiring that people instead of being fired, just asking them to take a period of paid leave. It would have to be for a while to shake out issues, but if you suddenly discover you need the person, then they're not gone. You also get to experiment with different team com…

There are some companies doing this. It is a way to uncover hidden dependencies and reduce the bus factor but also to uncover fraud.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#62

Post by jokethrowaway » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:01 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #54

SMFloris wrote: post #18

In the beginning, you are on an island, you have an idea to go on an adventure, so you start building a raft with the other guy on the island. The other guy has no building skills, but he procures food, water and wood. The resources on that island are dwindling but you manage to finish the raft just in time. You begin to sail the raft, you start fishing while out in the open seas. You reach another island and sell th…

And through it all I bet you wonder if: 1) It'd all be better or at least the same without any external interference from you 2) The positive outcomes to the business are more a result of external factors like market expansion, word of mouth, a new fad, rather than your own contribution

The impact you can make as a CTO is bringing an engineering perspective to the board and keeping engineers happy (either by doing it personally or by delegating to someone else, eg. a VP).

Both are important tasks because it's easy for business to start thinking of engineering as just a cost centre (which is the easiest way to make sure your company will never use technology efficiently to multiply its revenue) and because hiring engineers costs can be a significant part of your company spend

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#63

Post by troelsSteegin » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #32

I read a lot of criticism of Daniel's approach in this discussion. People don't like the fact that he wrote an app and tried to deal with the problem objectively. But, really, how is this so different to any other objective approach? Here in the UK there is a significant body of legislation around the process of making people redundant, so it would have worked differently, and particularly it will work differently fo…

I would make a distinction between "objective" and "explicit". Daniel's model is product of his judgment. It's his perogative and responsibility as a leader, and he's well intentioned, etc, but his judgment is subjective. I am not familiar with the UK system but providing explicit criteria and an oppty for feedback seems like a step forward relative to the US. It's a question as to what else would need to change in US industry for that approach to play well.

Pooling diverse judgments is a way to produce more robust predictions. An explicit model can help multiple people engage. Daniel did not mention discussing the re-designed org with any of his team. A less top down approach than his might have included seeking feedback about direction and team composition from members of the team itself.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#64

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #36

jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He should have realized that he lacked the knowledge and experience to tell his boss to fuck off because on day #2 on the job you simply can not make this decision in a way that won't kill the company.

The author was promoted to CTO, he worked for the company before. Given that the company has less then two dozend people, he likely knows it in and out, including everyone working for it. Also "Day2" is likely a metaphor for "story series entry number 2" and probably does not literally mean 2nd day at work.

The story does not give that background, I'm assuming he is an outsider because of his choice of words in the beginning and the fact that he seems to treat his apparently former buddies suddenly as cogs in a machine. Maybe that's just another way for him to fortify his own mind about doing callous things to other people. Regardless, the second day on a job you are not ready to make decisions like this until you have had a lot of conversations with different people in the organization. Any CEO that tasks a just-promoted former team lead, project manager or other non-manager to first time CTO and MT member and that then expects that person to take the axe to the team in a way that will not destroy the company is out to lunch.

This article is proof positive of that, it misses a whole slew of important considerations and will likely result in a mass exodus of the people that keep the company running within the next couple of months.

I've had to lay off people before, this is not how it is done.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#65

Post by vasco » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

czbond wrote: post #57

vasco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And through it all I bet you wonder if: 1) It'd all be better or at least the same without any external interference from you 2) The positive outcomes to the business are more a result of external factors like market expansion, word of mouth, a new fad, rather than your own contribution

As an engineer speaking to someone who is clearly also an engineer - you're highly discounting the levered impact proper, high quality leadership makes on a business.

I put myself in those shoes and wondered what doubts I'd have about the contributions I could do. The OP was a great illustration of the chaos it can be. I wasn't saying that leadership has no impact, that's crazy.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#66

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #33

jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He should have realized that he lacked the knowledge and experience to tell his boss to fuck off because on day #2 on the job you simply can not make this decision in a way that won't kill the company.

As the CTO he was in charge. It's absolutely fine to face à situation that is new and that you feel you lack knowledge and experience on. But as a leader and the guy in charge you should not refuse to deal with it, you need to find a way and people to advise you. Don't think that CEOs, Generals, Heads of States, etc know everything, no they know how to seek information and advice but the final decision and responsibi…

Such refusal is a sign of maturity in an MT member. Taking a stand to protect your department from unrealistic requests is part and parcel of being a responsible person to begin with, at the management level it starts to make the difference between a company that will continue to function and one that will be dysfunctional soon - if it isn't already.

The complete lack of empathy on display here is proof positive for me that this person does not have what it takes to be a successful manager.

I've just taken my company through a 50% drop in revenues and we've survived, stronger than ever, not a single person got laid off and all our bills are paid. That didn't happen because I treat my co-workers, partners and employees as replaceable cogs and if I would give my second in command the order to get rid of 50% of our workforce I would expect some serious pushback on that. Not that I would ever do that.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#67

Post by fpig » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #32

I read a lot of criticism of Daniel's approach in this discussion. People don't like the fact that he wrote an app and tried to deal with the problem objectively. But, really, how is this so different to any other objective approach? Here in the UK there is a significant body of legislation around the process of making people redundant, so it would have worked differently, and particularly it will work differently fo…

> But it is objective, and it's important that it be so

But it's not objective at all. He still subjectively evaluated each individual employee, and fed this into the program as an input, in order to help him find configurations that fulfill certain conditions.

And this is a good thing. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by:

> There is always some sort of objective scoring criteria. For larger redundancies these are agreed with employee reps as part of the consultation period.

...but if I am guessing correctly, then this is fortunately NOT what he did here.

Any objective metric in a field where there's no clear way to measure performance will always be extremely poor, despite employee reps' / unions' love for them. What would this metric be? I can remember one example (not in CS but in another hard-to-measure-output field), where it is just how long you've worked there. So if there are 5 people doing job X and 2 need to be fired, the newest 2 get fired.

I'm entirely confident in a former team lead, now CTO's ability to beat the accuracy of that metric with his subjective evaluation of each individual's abilities (regardless of whether he uses a program to help him optimize based on that information).

The problem people have with this is that they think the person making the subjective decision might have some kind of bias. And some bias definitely exists, pretty much 100% of the time. But in reality, even a biased boss who's worked with those people for a while is likely to evaluate SD employees more accurately than some arbitrary metric. If you don't deserve to be fired, but get fired anyway, it's equally unfair whether it was because the boss really likes a shitty employee who should have been fired instead, or because the shitty employee has more tenure at the company and they're firing the newest people, or because they threw a die to pick whom to fire.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#68

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

> There are broadly 3 experience levels:

> Senior: creates the plan. > Mid-level: follows the plan. > Junior: needs to be taught to follow the plan.

This person is a horrible leader and failure if they think this way.

This tells you all you need to know about the rest of the article.

And indeed:

> “The ideal team would be one that has all disciplines covered at a senior level with multidisciplinary people working in just one team, and with enough overlap to avoid a bus factor of one. Additional people will bring additional capacity.”

It’s just the tired old foolish mirage of fungible full-stack teams where there’s no such thing as specialization of labor.

This article is basically a farce of bureaucratic management mediocrity.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#69

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:27 PM UTC

bravura wrote: post #56

_vertigo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s a better reply?

CTO: "This is an important and disruptive decision. I feel that we need X more time to gather information and make sure we don't kill the company doing it incorrectly. What do you suggest?" It's the CEO's job to be able to weigh different kinds of risks and make a decision. So bubbling up your concerns is the correct answer.

Spot on. This is surgery and requires precision, not axe work, and definitely not something that you're going to solve by coming up with some clever algorithm.

Intra-team relationships are super important, as are the degrees to which the team members have arrived at the company, how long they have known each other, whether they knew each other prior to their arrival and so on. Before you know it you have a mass walk-out on your hands with those that have options leaving first.

The best way to deal with this is to do it very gradually and taking great care to not inadvertently wreck the core structure of the tech department.

Re: CTO day 2: downsizing the team

#70

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

vntok wrote: post #40

Sholmesy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot boil down humans to 5-6 attribute points. What about personalities/coordination/how people actually interact. Product A might be filled with people who are use to taking charge, and Product B might be filled with people who are more reserved about their opinions. This is a dreadful way to solve this problem. If it were that easy, his job as CTO wouldn't exist and we could simply plug it into a SaaS AI that…

Did you read the article? He specifically says: "Most important, the application gave me a few starting points. Of those, I still had to consider the team dynamics, existing teams, personalities, seniority, potential, personal situation, future needs, …"

And totally missed on the friendship angle. So, here is my prediction: the people that got fired will find new places to work at where the management is a bit more mature, and will then pull their capable buddies left behind at their old company with them. That's how it usually goes when a new junior manager goes to town with an axe.