91–100 of 112 posts
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What do you do when half the people don't?
You tell people you'll only do it if at least 85% ok the pay cut.
You don't seem to realize that having a lot of senior developers on a team can cause problems because there's no hierarchy. That's why junior developers and especially medior developers are very useful. Medior developers have quite a bit of experience too, they just haven't become leaders yet. Especially if your team size is a bit larger you will not want it to consist of only seniors. Also having explicit leadership…
> 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…
Could you share more about your opinion on why this makes a horrible leader?
All engineers, whether junior or senior, need lots of autonomy to propose and try plans. No engineers needs to be “taught to follow the plan” - that is career death.
Meanwhile, the risk of political motives and malicious intent or self-preservation is much higher among senior staff, especially as they become ex-technical.
Finally, many products need teams of specialists in various areas, and their team structures don’t resemble fungible full-stack wishful thinking. A good leader tries much harder to give them what they need instead of imposing the fiction they are fungible.
So, overall the leader of this post is
- overly reductionist
- failing to protect autonomy
- failing to protect specialization
- failing to deal with reality
- mentally representing “senior” vs “junior” as “creates orders” vs “follows orders” which puts political authority as a central cultural value.
These are all classic, well-known leadership mistakes.
I guarantee the company in this example is full of under-appreciated engineers treated like cogs.
Even the overall premise of the layoffs is suspect. Nowhere does the article even ask the question of why the critical project failed in the first place. Why was staffing preemptively overallocated?
If you fire these people, will you have to hire and retrain new people later when things change again? How costly would that be relative to retaining them now?
Why aren’t there senior leaders being fired? The failure of a project with such wide spread ramifications surely isn’t down to a bunch of little guys.
Here’s what happened:
Using the same overly reductionist, chain of command failed ideas described in this post, other leaders pursued a bad strategy and allocated resources poorly. Now, to avoid being punished and paying the consequences of their failed strategy, i.e. actually firing executives and senior leaders who caused this problem, they need to scapegoat it as an IT downsizing and they need some inexperienced twerp (this CTO) to spas out pretending like some critical calculus was applied to make the heartbreaking least-bad fewest cuts they could.
It’s disingenuous to the core. Absolutely this is shitty, low-accountability leadership.
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> CTO: Yes, of course. Right away. If it's the best reply they can come up with, they're not competent enough for the position.
What’s a better reply?
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In a way that just makes it even worse. Because a newbie that lands in a situation like that might be excused, a former team member isolating himself from his own responsibility by asking his computer who he should fire is an even bigger insult than if he came in as an outsider. This company is dysfunctional. They have a CTO that doesn't report to the CEO but where the CEO will cross their lines of command to give di…
I was only pointing out the context and that the first sentence is a rather obvious tell that it is part two of a series and should not be interpreted literally.
Just read this thread and see how many people are wrong-footed by the article.
So if I get this right. An organisation told an engineer to fire someone. He built some software that told him to fire himself. He then fired someone else based on Role & Salary parameters. Then gives advice on treating people like adults when firing them. Does anyone else find this whole thing macabre and absurd? ( I'm not being negative - Im not against the great / funny article and an attempt at a novel approach,…
I don't see where in the article it is stated that he should fire himself ?
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> CTO: Yes, of course. Right away. If it's the best reply they can come up with, they're not competent enough for the position.
You can come up with a better reply of course. But can you really beat the "are we aligned in the same direction" from the CEO and the other executives? Especially on the 2nd day. You can spin it however you want, come up with some great arguments, but if the CEO decided to fire people, I don't think he takes that decision lightly so when he/she presents that decision you can count that it really is the last option h…
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was only pointing out the context and that the first sentence is a rather obvious tell that it is part two of a series and should not be interpreted literally.
I have a pretty simple rule for evaluating articles: if not indicated otherwise I assume they stand on their own and that the article writer means what they say. It's on them to communicate any circumstances that are required to be able to read the article, at a minimum a link should be provided to such context if it is available. Just read this thread and see how many people are wrong-footed by the article.