How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#91

Post by aorloff » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 5:36 AM UTC

dakiol wrote: post #23

It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive. It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care…

This is all BS baloney theater crap.

A real engineering manager, when the execs say "Its Wartime" says "Wonderful, is everyone on the c-suite taking on call rotations so the engineers can focus or just the CEO and CTO ?"

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#92

Post by AllegedAlec » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 5:38 AM UTC

johnea wrote: post #5

Pull the fire alarm and evacuate the building? Or, just stop using over-bloviated metaphors for first world marketing creating fictional scheduling crises. Not making you dev schedule is not a "fire", much less a "war". Maybe try getting outside once in awhile and clearing your head of this make believe bullshit...

As someone working for defense it's hilarious how civilians use this kind of wording without any real understanding of what it means. The constant use of the term in the Phoenix Project bugs the hell out of me too.

It's yet another attempt for software enginerds and managerial bullshitters to make themselves feel more important than they are, because god forbid they say it like it is and just call it "how to lead a team when the cushy years stop"

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#93

Post by aorloff » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 5:54 AM UTC

debacle wrote: post #12

> Decentralize decision-making authority as much as possible. Remove barriers in their way, slash approval layers, attack dependencies. This is awful advice. You can only operate in this mode for at best 2-3 months before your entire SDLC grinds to a halt because it's been the wild west in github. > Bias heavily toward action - it's better to decide and be wrong sometimes than to paralyze the team with analysis. This…

Thank you.

No amount of wartime valor is going to overcome a lack of product market fit.

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#94

Post by jamesfinlayson » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 6:05 AM UTC

hnbear wrote: post #45

wrs wrote: post #8

I have a shelf full of histories of British science and engineering during WW2, so I feel like I have some remote idea of what being an engineer in an actual “wartime mode” is like. Think about, e.g., working in the lab trying to improve radar to be able to stop the daily bombing raids. It’s hard to imagine “wartime mode” as being an appropriate metaphor for any US company, other than as a sort of fantasy role play.…

I had an ex-marine boss leading QA and Prod support. Every time someone would go nuts about incidents being the end of the world, especially our biz users, he'd just ask if anyone was at risk of getting shot. If not, focus up and solve the problem, but no need to run causing extra fuss and stress.

I like that - I've been at a company where a manager from a mining background would get panicked at a P2 incident, because in the mining industry a P2 incident meant that a person had been physically injured (and would probably be tomorrow's news) but where I was, a P2 meant some but not all revenue-generating systems were experiencing issues.

I think he eventually figured out not to sweat it so much.

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#95

Post by hi_hi » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 6:18 AM UTC

wrs wrote: post #84

hi_hi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. I came here to specifically recommend another RV Jones book, the Most Secret War ( https://www.amazon.com/Most-Secret-War-R-V-Jones/dp/01410428... ). I wasn't aware of his other book, so very much looking forward to reading this. I first read this book when I was starting out as a Dev some 20 years ago. It made a huge impression and is still relevant. Some things I remember off the top of my head. - It was t…

It’s the same book, just a different title for the US version. (We don’t have a “Most Secret” over here.)

Great to know, I was about to (re) purchase :-)

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#96

Post by foobazgt » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 6:36 AM UTC

move-on-by wrote: post #37

wrs wrote: post #8

I have a shelf full of histories of British science and engineering during WW2, so I feel like I have some remote idea of what being an engineer in an actual “wartime mode” is like. Think about, e.g., working in the lab trying to improve radar to be able to stop the daily bombing raids. It’s hard to imagine “wartime mode” as being an appropriate metaphor for any US company, other than as a sort of fantasy role play.…

I have an (actual) engineering buddy who occasionally has small fires flare up in the factory he works at. Ever since talking with him about it, I’m very much off put when someone at my cushy software company talks about ‘a fire’. No, some system is down or throwing errors- there is no fire.

You're definitely not in mortal danger as a SWE, but FWIW, I've witnessed (2nd hand) datacenter servers literally catch on fire and entire datacenters go out because a critter got crispified on some power lines. Sometimes "the server's on fire" is metaphorical and sometimes it's literal. In the latter case, at least you can get some interesting pictures of the aftermath.

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#97

Post by xeyownt » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 6:46 AM UTC

Simple: tell them to follow the fire exit signs.

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#98

Post by niedbalski » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 6:54 AM UTC

Building businesses out of debt, starting with negative balance and when approaching out of money, asking employees for a last minute war time mode. That’s plain terrible business practice, don’t work there.

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#99

Post by advael » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 7:06 AM UTC

screye wrote: post #79

dakiol wrote: post #23

It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive. It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care…

It's easy to validate the veracity of 'War mode'. If survival hinges on a critical deliverable, then the promised reward must be in line with the stakes. You can't have an employer offering a 20% bonus for keeping them alive. It's an insultingly low payoff or the crisis was a lie. There is definitely such a thing as wartime software engineering. But such moments offer a clear path to millions of dollars or generation…

Or you know, sometimes your boss just lies to you, you do the crunch time, then when you save their asses you get laid off because that's cheaper than the raises or bonuses and you're prolly burnt out anyway so you won't be that productive again for months

At will employment, baby

Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

#100

Post by esperent » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 7:17 AM UTC

hnbear wrote: post #45

wrs wrote: post #8

I have a shelf full of histories of British science and engineering during WW2, so I feel like I have some remote idea of what being an engineer in an actual “wartime mode” is like. Think about, e.g., working in the lab trying to improve radar to be able to stop the daily bombing raids. It’s hard to imagine “wartime mode” as being an appropriate metaphor for any US company, other than as a sort of fantasy role play.…

I had an ex-marine boss leading QA and Prod support. Every time someone would go nuts about incidents being the end of the world, especially our biz users, he'd just ask if anyone was at risk of getting shot. If not, focus up and solve the problem, but no need to run causing extra fuss and stress.

I've used a similar analogy a few times - do we make medical software where someone will literally die if we don't fix this in the next few hours? No? Then chill the hell out and we'll get it fixed without giving ourselves stress related diseases. In a week or a month no one will remember this particular "emergency" but we'll all remember the general level of stress we felt on this team for years.

I've said this out loud a few times. But I've said it quietly to myself far more often when someone is trying to make me feel stressed for no reason. It's very effective.