Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#121

Post by Hermitian909 » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

GreedClarifies wrote: post #75

eysquared wrote: post #32

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…

“ The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership ” Not what I saw. Leadership was shockingly hard working. I have never seen a person who works harder than Calder at GOOG. Urs never stopped as well. Lower level VPs were always “on” as well. But VPs can’t do everything, they can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels, the orgs are too big. I think you want something superhuman from them. The problem in…

Senior leadership has many important functions, and more demands on their time than hours in the day, but their number one job is communicating a vision to the org. There's basically nothing else with similarly high impact as this is what blocks or unblocks the productivity of the entire organization.

I've watched 1,000 person orgs rot because the senior leader could not settle on a vision. He was "always on", smart, articulate, all those good adjectives. None of it mattered without the vision.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#122

Post by getmeinrn » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:51 PM UTC

Now let's talk about how this extrapolates to the rest of society.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#123

Post by meristem » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

TL; DR: the perception of “ghost work” can also appear when employees work in functions where failure doesn’t immediately break the company. The work may have value, but the contributions support longer tails, look not needed. ———- I used to ask direct reports “how does what you are doing map to company strategies?” And if they could not do so we’d talk about what they were working on, how ‘mapping’ might work, and then decide if the work was worth it/ how to learn more about the company so their tactical was also strategic.

This was significantly easier in roles the company publicly supported. For roles where our team failure would destabilize things in a longer timeline, it was extremely easy to not be able to directly map to success, or feel fungible within the company.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#124

Post by costanzaDynasty » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

It’s not just tech. It’s everywhere. If pay X dollars to got to college/warehousing and there isn’t a job at the other end then the Ponzi scheme falls over. I didn’t know you could go to college and get a job planning pizza parties but at my last job there was someone who that was their only job.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#125

Post by asielen » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

pinewurst wrote: post #109

endtime wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real opinion. Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and there was nothing he could have done abou…

My last employer was/is very much this, with the VP layer imported from Google. They don't even know the area the (tech) company operates in, but in meetings it's a drinking game to count their (almost always inappropriate) mentions of the Ol' Goog.

My current place is like this but with Salesforce leadership. I call it big company syndrome. They are so far removed from the actual work and just like to reminisce about the old days.

Their first inclination is always to try to implement whatever they were doing there. But this is a very different industry and marke. Every few months we end up rolling back their "great" Salesforce ideas.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#126

Post by foldr » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

throwaway1492 wrote: post #70

eysquared wrote: post #32

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…

> Gut from the top if you want to get rid of the problem. It’s not the L5 engineer or the first line manager that’s holding any product back. I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving engineers to their own devices. I know this will be downvoted, but software engineers are the worst at planning their own work. The vast majority will just go off and do wtf ever they want. There really has to be guard rails…

>I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving engineers to their own devices. [...] The vast majority will just go off and do wtf ever they want.

I think in larger organizations this is true of pretty much everyone but in different ways. No-one's career success is very directly tied to the overall success of the company, so everyone is trying to get something for themselves out of any given project. For software engineers that might be pointless code/devops complexity or unnecessary use of esoteric and interesting technologies. But PMs, designers etc. are equally adept at coming up with pet projects that contribute little to the fundamental success of the business. There are lots of PM-driven dev teams 'urgently' working to complete features that are completely unnecessary or even counterproductive.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#127

Post by kurthr » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

eysquared wrote: post #32

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…

Yeah, I can't say I'm hoping for the LLM/AI replacement to start at the top, but it often seems like that's the best "bang for the buck". There's a lot of gibberish spewed and arbitrary dice-roll decision making in upper level management. They certainly aren't expecting it!

But then we'll be working for the AI... stickin' it to the Man.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#128

Post by netbioserror » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #104

This kind of finger pointing / blaming is not helpful. Basically, the reason why big organizations are a lot less efficient than smaller ones is the communication overhead; and the resulting miscommunication. Small groups of people don't even need managers because they can figure out between themselves what needs doing and in what order. Management is introduced when small groups become larger and point to point comm…

Also, the communications overhead of large corporate hierarchies often serves and sometimes incentivizes the reduction of work. Most people are not driven by a vision of a great product, a desire to create real value, or a desire to improve one's own value; there is a reason this is the exception, not the rule. Most people want to skate by on the absolute minimum required of them, and large hierarchies have all the leaky cracks that create opportunities to avoid, defer, delay, delegate, and generally abstain from work.

In my own personal experience, if your desire is to work on something that has value or if you'd like to increase your own value, you should probably work at a small company, where the hierarchy is relatively flat and where you are as directly responsible and answerable for tasks and projects as possible.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#129

Post by kimburgess » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC

abeppu wrote: post #84

eysquared wrote: post #32

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…

I think there's also an issue that execs can create the appearance of being busy (and may indeed spend a ridiculous number of hours in meetings) but it can be hard to see if they're contributing anything valuable. I was at a startup which over a period of years repeatedly had new execs come in, claim that something was wrong with our planning or goal-setting process, "restart" the whole thing in a way which was virtu…

That failure mode is not isolated to tech, and predates modern org structures too. See Chesterton’s Fence (https://simple.industries/notes/chesterton's-fence.html).

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#130

Post by CSMastermind » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

cdavid wrote: post #56

Middle management (above first line manager) in large organizations is hard to do well. I think it is difficult to understand if you have never done it, and it is even difficult to articulate why. I find it much much harder than working as an engineer or Eng Mgr. Fundamentally, I think it is an incentive and systematic issue: what is expected of middle managers, and incentivized, requires almost complete dedication t…

As a middle manager I found that you traffic in clarity.

Figuring out what ground truth is at the team level and effectively summarizing it to communicate up and sideways.

Figuring out what's happening around the company and identifying any connections to what your teams are working on then communicating that up and down.

Figuring out what's happening in the company at large then effectively communicating then identifying anyway your teams' work might be out of line with the directions things are moving.

In other words ensuring alignment, doing that efficiently (don't waste people's time).

That is something that is something that is totally in your control.