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What you've got is in fact a people problem

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Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#71

Post by vaylian »

PeterisP wrote: post #56
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pattern that I have seen in consulting is that management has already heard of that feedback, but don't consider it credible for various political reasons (and they're not generally wrong in many cases), so when the same feedback is confirmed by consultants as a 'disinterested third party' as valid (and the opposite is also often the case), then they finally believe it and it can get implemented.

People with different professional backgrounds speak different "languages". It really matters how you describe a solution to the other party so that they accept it. That's one of the skills that a consultant needs to hone: Speak different "languages".

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#72

Post by hinkley »

refulgentis wrote: post #15
cebert wrote: post #2

> Talk to your ICs, and — taking care to make sure they understand that you want honest feedback and that they are safe to offer it — ask them what problems your organization has. Can you reasonably expect for there to be a true “safe space” in a professional setting? It’s always good to be candid and transparent, but I’d never assume I’m in a complete safe space no matter which organization I am in.

I believed that strongly, to the point that it was borderline immoral to not share. Then I sold the startup and worked at Google for 6 years. 1 out of 4 managers hit the bar that I figured would be a floor, you could have a constructive conversation with them and they'd help you if something was up.

I don't think anything has hurt me as much emotionally in my career as working at a really great place as my first job, setting my expectations for the next ten years of my career to be anything like that, and then get curb stomped over and over again by mediocrity that thought it was objectivity or responsibility.

Trying to mold people who did not want to be molded resulted in a lot of Pyrrhic victories.

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#73

Post by m_mueller »

hinkley wrote: post #63
dang wrote: post #28

Jerry Weinberg's classic Secrets of Consulting has tons of hard-won wisdom about this kind of thing. " No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem ." - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... He posted once to HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1825352 - but start here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813443 ) Edit: There's also Gerald M. Weinberg has died - http…

Unless it's a DNS problem.

Or caching. Or both.

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#74

Post by godot »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #24
btbuildem wrote: post #4

It often is a people problem, and when it is, it's likely to be at the leadership level. What stumps me however is how to move past those problems -- when the decision makers at an organization themselves are what's dragging the ship down, how will things ever change? Blog author doesn't cover it, but my uneducated guess is... the consult ends with a technical recommendation, but the people problem remains unresolved…

I am familiar with a particular small business. They have this loop: 1. Product and Engineering cooperatively develop a project, scope milestones, cut tickets, do agile, eng writes the code and iteratively works with product to incorporate feedback and it's a grand ole time 2. They get about 80% done with implementation (so they're about 90% if the way through the entire project, impl is usually about half the time)…

This is probably most 50-200 people startups.

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#75

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zmgsabst wrote: post #16
PakG1 wrote: post #14

What is fascinating to me about technical people is the particular subculture that sincerely believes that technology will solve the people problem. I recently got into a long thread argument with someone on HN about this. The person was adamant that people problems can NOW finally be solved by designing technology to be able to handle adversarial and incompetent actors. But the problems that such software tries to s…

I’ve also seen the reverse: What’s presented as a technical solution is actually a process solution to address a people problem.

> What’s presented as a technical solution is actually a process solution to address a people problem.

A process is a class of technology. Even more so now that many processes are implemented or enforced by computers.

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#76

Post by arvinsim »

hinkley wrote: post #65
PakG1 wrote: post #14

What is fascinating to me about technical people is the particular subculture that sincerely believes that technology will solve the people problem. I recently got into a long thread argument with someone on HN about this. The person was adamant that people problems can NOW finally be solved by designing technology to be able to handle adversarial and incompetent actors. But the problems that such software tries to s…

I was watching some interview long ago when the guest hit it square on the head. My guess is that it was Joel Spolsky, but only because no other names come to mind as being plausible. Essentially the rant goes: So all of these people who were not particularly good at people skills in high school go into a career where they think people skills won't matter as much, and check out for 4 years while their fellow classmat…

Then it begs the question: how do you recover out of this mindset in an increasingly disconnected world?

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#77

Post by groestl »

hinkley wrote: post #67
BeetleB wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The consultant is being paid by management. S/he is beholden to them. 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…

The point remains that the messenger may deliver a message that invites retaliation, and even if their plan is to protect their sources, they may fail to do so. Someone who thinks they will protect you may be as big of a wildcard as someone who demonstrates clearly that they won't, because you haven't given anything really damning to the latter.

Usually, everyone knows. It's just that they need to hear it from somebody else (or will ignore it intentionally and did so up until this point).

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#78

Post by AnthonyMouse »

PakG1 wrote: post #14

What is fascinating to me about technical people is the particular subculture that sincerely believes that technology will solve the people problem. I recently got into a long thread argument with someone on HN about this. The person was adamant that people problems can NOW finally be solved by designing technology to be able to handle adversarial and incompetent actors. But the problems that such software tries to s…

> But the problems that such software tries to solve are tightly defined in scope and cannot deal with actually messed up people or organizational problems.

In many cases the solution comes in the form of "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script."

For example, suppose that you have regulator captured by construction companies who want construction to be labor-intensive because they're the ones who get the money. The problem here is not that we need technology to reduce construction costs, it's that construction costs are being artificially inflated by regulators.

But now you come up with a technology that allows construction to be performed in a factory and the local part is limited to taking the thing off the truck and putting it in the building, which takes ten seconds and can be done by the truck driver. Can this solve the problem?

Maybe. It depends on whether the incumbents have enough political power to have it banned or made prohibitively expensive. If they do then it won't work. But if they don't, the technology solves the people problem, by removing the problematic people from the operation. Or forcing them to improve their own efficiency so they can remain competitive with the new technology.

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#79

Post by antihipocrat »

BeetleB wrote: post #55
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consultant is being paid by management. S/he is beholden to them. 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…

Most large companies hire large consulting firms, whose lack of morals is a selling point.

Re: What you've got is in fact a people problem

#80

Post by candiodari »

zmgsabst wrote: post #57
atq2119 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d argue it’s a process solution to a people problem: “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.

It's more along the lines of "most world governments are actively sabotaging their own citizens. This happens for various reasons, from corruption, to dictatorial panic, ... and Bitcoin provides payment while avoiding to deal with them"

Of course that probably is not the concern Swiss banks have on Bitcoin, but it's still what they offer.

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