51–60 of 131 posts
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I used to believe that, but no, at this point in my career I have no confidence that anything I say won't be used against me in the future, or misconstrued in some embarrassing way.
So knowing that, can you still be candid? I guess I make a habit of it, and therefore just do not particularly care about any given instance.
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The consultant is being paid by management. S/he is beholden to them. If anything can be traced back to a group or individual, it will be, and it won't be pleasant for anyone who believed the request for honest feedback.
The article is describing a case where what you describe did not happen--he, the consultant, was able to convey feedback from working level people to management, that the working level people were unable to convey themselves, and management liked the feedback. And the article says other consultants have described similar experiences. Of course there are companies where consultants do not have this happy outcome--eith…
Yes, and if the consultant fails, s/he's off to the next gig. The author did not mention any cases where his approach failed.
The author also says "One week later, I will schedule a meeting with executive leadership, and during that meeting, I will read back a very lightly edited version of the transcript of the previous meeting"
Dandy. If one has a recognizable voice - style, usage, etc. - it will be recognized. And dealt with.
I don't think the solutions he's presenting will "scale." He says "[if you need] event-driven distributed systems consensus algorithm implemented using Twisted, I’m absolutely your guy." He's a young guy with a pretty narrow niche and is making some pretty big claims for a large world outside of it.
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The majority of managers I have encountered have a superiority complex. Because they are the manager they know better. They have a misguided idea that they were promoted on the basis of some meritocracy instead of being good political operatives or shameless sycophants. That is why only the advice of very expensive consultants is valued. Many times I have had after work drinks with staff who complain that they have b…
> The majority of managers I have encountered have a superiority complex. Because they are the manager they know better. They have a misguided idea that they were promoted on the basis of some meritocracy instead of being good political operatives or shameless sycophants That is usually true. One fix for that is to play into it. Guide them towards the idea but make them think they came up with it and the praise them…
I will, however, increasingly simplify the explanation of the concept until the conversation reaches acceptance or frustrated dismissal of the topic altogether. This has had patchy success over the years.
Many years ago, after a number of failed explanations, I demo'd to my boss, the IT Manager, the ability to access work emails from a mobile device and how Managers and Salespeople would love it for their productivity and customer relationships. "Nah, I don't think they'd be interested. That's what their laptops are for".
Surprisingly, that particular horse never died of dehydration. I think that's because the next levels up were also thirsty horses.
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> Can you reasonably expect for there to be a true “safe space” in a professional setting? My experience has generally been that, even if a leadership level person is being sincere when they say they want honest feedback and it is safe to offer it, the junior level person they are meeting with doesn't believe it. (An economist would call this an example of the "market for lemons" problem.) That is a big reason why ou…
The consultant is being paid by management. S/he is beholden to them. If anything can be traced back to a group or individual, it will be, and it won't be pleasant for anyone who believed the request for honest feedback.
Quite the opposite. One of the reasons people go into consulting (and I don't mean working for a consulting company), is precisely because they're not beholden to them. They have much more freedom to set the terms than employees do.
If a company wants them to reveal the individual, they'll be happy to give them the middle finger and let them know their morals are lacking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you reasonably expect for there to be a true “safe space” in a professional setting? My experience has generally been that, even if a leadership level person is being sincere when they say they want honest feedback and it is safe to offer it, the junior level person they are meeting with doesn't believe it. (An economist would call this an example of the "market for lemons" problem.) That is a big reason why ou…
The consultant is being paid by management. S/he is beholden to them. If anything can be traced back to a group or individual, it will be, and it won't be pleasant for anyone who believed the request for honest feedback.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest this is what I usually see, not what GP describes. I've never worked with anyone who was ignorant of the people problems around them. Interns, maybe.
I would argue that all of the ideology-based advocacy for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is/was advocating to solve a people problem with technology.
“We don’t like how bankers do their job or their relationship with government, so the community will create a shared ledger.”
All the discussion around technology is just details of that process change in banking.
> your ICs won’t have the full picture. They really may not understand why certain priorities are set the way they are. You’ll need to take that as feedback for improving internal comms rather than “fixing” the perceived problem, and you certainly don’t want to make empty promises. One time, my manager gave me negative ratings out of nowhere. In his review, he wrote that I rolled a feature a few days late. I chatted…
It's especially relevant in B2B work - you have to know what the actual personal goals of the decision makers at your customer business are, because your job is to address that; you're not there to bring them in more revenue or satisfy their customers, your actual goal is to help the manager signing your checks to meet his quarterly KPIs/OKRs/whatever, so you'd better know and prioritize the exact things on that list.
My suspicion is that a lot of this comes down to budget pressure causing management to constantly discourage efforts by technical teams to invest time in the quality of their systems rather than push out more features. Then the same problems start popping up and the manager loses faith in their team. The times they said "no" to infrastructure development and working down technical debt may not even enter their mind.…
Anecdata follows but I’m certain this has been getting better in recent years. It’s more common today for management to be swayed by data - my recollections of the 2000s were interactions more along the lines of
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years son, whatever your little spreadsheet contains, I’ve already accounted for just by feeling the air in the room through my superb gut”. - management at that time had gone from playing with Sinclair spectrums in their bedrooms to leading huge multimillion dollar teams, partly because software development had exploded and someone needed to lead those teams. So several managers I ran across seemed to see their position as a result of their greatness and not really anything at all to do with growth in the industry leading to bigger roles needing filled. This is a long way to say it used to be very hard to penetrate a charismatic self-aggrandising tech leader’s thought bubble.
Today I definitely see it as different. E.g. if you rock up with a download of CI job runtimes and a couple of off the cuff quotes from team members about what they do when waiting for CI builds (I.e. not much of value), I’d expect you to pretty easily succeed in establish a case for investing in speeding up that feedback loop and the outcome / measured results chart of that work would likely make its way through at least a couple of senior management slide decks over the next few weeks.