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Effective teams don’t keep secrets

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Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#31

Post by shoo »

drewcoo wrote: post #4
throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

> If I don’t believe that other members of my culture have my best interests at heart, I may decide to keep as many secrets as possible to prevent information from being leveraged against me. The biggest challenge for me here is that I don’t believe a team or company can have my best interest at heart, as they often conflict with the best interests of the company.

Is your main goal in life not to maximize stockholder profits? How strange!

In practice, the company is not an entity able to set objectives or make decisions, decisions are made and influenced by individuals, and often the incentives of individuals are _not_ aligned with maximising stockholder profits. In many cases companies do things that do not maximize stockholder profits. There are blatant examples of this where a company CEO or company president is able to plunder assets from the company for their own personal enrichment (e.g. through self-dealing where the company buys or sells assets to another entity controlled by the CEO). There are also many cases where a project pursued by the company may have zero or negative benefit to the firm and to its shareholders, but provide many benefits to the employees leading or participating in the project.

William J. Bernstein's article Of Earnings, Dividends, and Agency [1] offers an educational and entertaining perspective on this:

  > in a taxless world a company’s dividend policy should matter not at all to the shareholder. Inside academia, this is known as the "Modigliani-Miller theorem." In the taxable world, of course, shareholders prefer capital gains to dividends. So why do companies pay them?

  > Because, to put it bluntly, corporate officers are often scoundrels and theives. They lie. They cheat. They steal. They invest in projects more on the basis of turf, prestige, and politics than cash flow. They run around in Learjets and eat fois gras on your nickel. Shareholders intuitively know this and insist on spiriting their cash away from these bad actors as fast as they can.

 ....

  > "failure to disgorge cash leads to its diversion or waste, which is detrimental to outside shareholders’ interest."

 ....

  > But what is most remarkable about [the paper by La Porter, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, Vishny][2] is its tone, which is almost Menckenesque in its description of modern corporate ethics. They describe a Hobbesian world in the kind of plain English rarely seen in academic finance; "Firms appear to pay out cash to investors because the opportunity to steal or misinvest it are in part limited by law, and because minority shareholders have enough power to extract it."
If Bernstein were to update his 2000 article for 2022, he might need to briefly discuss share buybacks as an increasingly popular tax efficient alternative to dividends. Share buybacks, like dividends, allow cash to be extracted from company coffers and captured as gains for shareholders.

[1] http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/700/agency.htm

[2] the link given to the La Porter, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, Vishny paper from Bernstein's article is dead. There's a copy of the working paper at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w6594/w6594...

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#32

Post by darkerside »

crispyambulance wrote: post #24
bob1029 wrote: post #5

Sometimes letting someone know about a piece of information too early can cause problems. I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like "refactor" and "iterate". Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us. In order to make everyone's…

What you're talking about is sometimes referred to as "exercising covert agency" and IMHO it's absolutely essential for the well-being of creative folks in heavily project-managed corporate workplaces. "Not keeping secrets" effectively ends up meaning that you need "permission" or at least consent for everything you work on. Depending on how tight things are this can be a recipe for misery because it's common in mana…

Google turns up nothing on that concept, but I agree that it is essential. You need a strong leader who can sense when stakeholders don't want to put up with that shit and when it's OK, and counterbalance that with how much of a dumpster fire the codebase is becoming.

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#33

Post by darkerside »

travisjungroth wrote: post #22
rubyn00bie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire […] I think your urge to hide things until ready is clearly a symptom of other (root) problems within the organization. I have never seen what you describe in a healthy organization, and many seemingly “healthy” places are not. It sounds like the organization fears failure and refuses to learn from mistakes or…

“Sometimes I work on things for up to a week before showing people unless asked.” “Your company isn’t healthy. Either get senior leadership to change or leave.” Internet advice is weird.

It's easy to not have seen things in healthy workplaces if you don't have a lot of experience. This is why we have implicit bias against folks who look really young, fair or not.

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#34

Post by darkerside »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #30

> Although many factors contribute to a secrecy culture, they all boil down to a lack of trust. In my experience, there are two reasons for internal secrecy: 1) Security. There are things that only certain people need to know. It may be trade secrets, or security. In any case, these can make life difficult, but are important and valid secrets. 2) Gatekeepers These are individuals or organizations that are hoarding in…

Third reason is that since information is distracting. Say there is a 30% chance of layoffs in the next quarter. Should this be communicated down the chain when it's not actionable and will do nothing but probably effectuate itself?

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#35

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

darkerside wrote: post #34
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #30

> Although many factors contribute to a secrecy culture, they all boil down to a lack of trust. In my experience, there are two reasons for internal secrecy: 1) Security. There are things that only certain people need to know. It may be trade secrets, or security. In any case, these can make life difficult, but are important and valid secrets. 2) Gatekeepers These are individuals or organizations that are hoarding in…

Third reason is that since information is distracting. Say there is a 30% chance of layoffs in the next quarter. Should this be communicated down the chain when it's not actionable and will do nothing but probably effectuate itself?

I'd say that's a #1 thing.

Secrecy is an important part of running any organization.

I worked for a company that was seriously tinfoil. I thought, over the top, but they had certain policies, and I abided by them; whether or not I agreed with them.

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#36

Post by jka »

Silhouette wrote: post #26
jka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can also easily become a vehicle for one or more lurking manager types who simply have to know everything all the time, whether or not that brings any actual benefit to the team. Given that type of character within the working environment, I'd personally prefer that their communications were largely on-display to all the teams around them. Them knowing everything that is going on doesn't necessarily seem a probl…

Given that type of character within the working environment, I'd personally prefer that their communications were largely on-display to all the teams around them. But their communications are often the last things to be shared, except when they are insisting that everyone else share everything. IME this is a bad idea for much the same reasons you don't want managers in code reviews. You don't promote honest feedback…

> But both micromanagement and chilling effects can be extremely disruptive.

Completely agree.

> You don't promote honest feedback and constructive criticism when those giving and receiving the comments feel like management are snooping on everything all the time.

Also true.

But management couldn't do much to coerce people -- including plausibly-deniably intimidating, harassing and spooking staff -- even if they're watching everything they do -- without themselves entering into some risk.

Add to that the fact that any kind of sophisticated employee-trolling would require co-ordination and research, and transparency becomes more and more attractive, as long as it's applied in both directions.

(I'll add that part of the working theory here is that rank-and-file staff (non-management) are on equal footing; not always necessarily true, perhaps, but should be on aggregate for large enough populations)

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#37

Post by jka »

davesque wrote: post #25

I remember working at an organization that essentially made the results of performance reviews open across the team. The rational was that it would help people make sense out of salary figures (which were also open). It did not improve team function and led to a lot of paranoia, fear, and resentment. People keep secrets on some level because they need privacy. If a person is struggling, they often react by withdrawin…

I hear what you say, but I'd like to add that as an employee, I'd like the option to make my performance data, salary, etc public -- even if it that is not the organization-wide default.

The reactions that people have to their own data being public are partly a result of the current hidden-by-default model.

I'm not a great developer: I'm experienced, but I make the same mistakes that any junior would. I'd prefer to share the kind of feedback that I receive and how those discussions proceed, so that juniors can look ahead, learn, and avoid repeating the same mistakes (hopefully leading to a much more advanced cohort of future developers).

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#38

Post by cirgue »

bob1029 wrote: post #5

Sometimes letting someone know about a piece of information too early can cause problems. I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like "refactor" and "iterate". Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us. In order to make everyone's…

I feel like that doesn’t quite count as a secret, if the aim is explicitly to show people a fully expressed idea as opposed to something theoretical/conceptual.

Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets

#39

Post by darkerside »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35
darkerside wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third reason is that since information is distracting. Say there is a 30% chance of layoffs in the next quarter. Should this be communicated down the chain when it's not actionable and will do nothing but probably effectuate itself?

I'd say that's a #1 thing. Secrecy is an important part of running any organization. I worked for a company that was seriously tinfoil. I thought, over the top, but they had certain policies, and I abided by them; whether or not I agreed with them.

Ahh, that makes sense. I was thinking of #1 being primarily external focused.
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