On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

Which leads me to: great, you are a "VP of Engineering" but there is little to justify why I should believe you are an exemplar of that title/position. The LinkedIn isn't a fraud, but it isn't full of any formal management degrees, IT coursework, IT Management coursework. I don't see companies whose products are on the front lines of foundational technology, scale, or quality.

Frankly, the resume is full of 1 year hopscotches. That... doesn't really tell me they are battletested. I get IT is an industry with zero respect for the neckbeard, and yeah they went to Yale, so they are of a minimum floor of hard work and intellect.

There are people out there with 40 years of experience in IT, and probably 30 years of management, with stories of massive failures, grace under fire, and the usual stories Machiavellian fake smiles to navigate.

And plugging a "Organizational Health" book is hilarious when you are a startup. Yeah, there are lots of unhealthy startups, but the really hard organizational health problems are long standing companies with the "dead pool" effect that chased away the best people, long standing feuds/grudges, sociopathic/paranoid wars over diminishing resource pools and budgets, and deep problems with legacy systems that need to be updated.

A startup? That's peanuts in comparison.

1) Is this process working to the satisfaction of the team?

2) Anyone have anything else to discuss about it?

And it should be perfectly fine for it to be less than one minute most weeks.

If you're looking for a revolutionary approach, this article does not describe it. It is very very very unlikely any article titled "I am VP of XXX" will describe anything highly divergent from the general managerial consensus on how to run things.

A hierarchy and "salaried emmployees" (which a 7 year / 200 person company will now start to have because there is no tangible ownership % available) are going to involve the usual monetary-extraction / exploitation model of companies: employees take salary and some (actually:none) security and forgo any real economic incentive/reward if they deliver truly valuable/transformative work.

If an employee makes a company a billion dollars, he gets a plaque. If an executive does it, they demand stock options and other "rewards".

Thus, employees cease to care about the company. The next step is the creation of middle management, which ALSO have no aligned incentives except the more abstract "one day will be an exeuctive" but have no real production / creation to point to.

But, orgs and execs know that this hierarchy can be somewhat controlled with "bureaucracy and ceremony" and with sufficient scale, rent seeking, and regulatory capture, will produce an effective profit extraction system.

Some kind of lightweight performance cycle for instance. If it takes more then a day offsite you are probably overkilling it

Similarity for quarterly planning. You better be doing it at 200 people but the people that need to be there for that will fit in a room and you should get it done in a day

This doesn’t sound like toe dipping it reads more like a full on swan dive. Like someone said “hey shit is getting crazy we need some processes” and just whole hog adopted “what google does” or some such. The processes that are evolved for a 20,000 person org are overkill for a 200 person one