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How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

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

#151

Post by laasda »

efsavage wrote: post #146
codeduck wrote: post #106

This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…

Is there a German word for the feeling you get where you want the opportunity to apply a hard-won skill, but also kind of don't? I feel that reading this all-too-accurate comment. Like many/most of us, I've been through this, but by virtue of luck and experience, haven't in a while. I think I've learned to spot the symptoms early enough that I avoid the companies/teams/projects that are on that path. For those who th…

[flagged]

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

#152

Post by jdiez17 »

efsavage wrote: post #146
codeduck wrote: post #106

This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…

Is there a German word for the feeling you get where you want the opportunity to apply a hard-won skill, but also kind of don't? I feel that reading this all-too-accurate comment. Like many/most of us, I've been through this, but by virtue of luck and experience, haven't in a while. I think I've learned to spot the symptoms early enough that I avoid the companies/teams/projects that are on that path. For those who th…

Fähigkeitsanwendungssehnsuchtsunerfülltheitsgefühl?

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

#153

Post by jdiez17 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #144
pjc50 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is slightly OT, but I believe wartime in the UK and US forced a number of cultural changes towards egalitarianism and what would nowadays be called "diversity" because things had to actually work . Being upper class in the UK would not save you from Ge…

> The normally exclusionary system had to let a gay man break codes and a woman design Spitfire engines because those were the best people actually available I don't know enough about Spitfire engines to comment, but is that true about Turing? I thought he kept his sexuality a secret.

The government definitely knew.

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

#154

Post by talkingtab »

koonsolo wrote: post #101
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…

I really don't understand the hate for Agile, so let's make it concrete: which things to you not like about the Agile manifesto? 1. Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Value working software over comprehensive documentation 3. Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. Value responding to change over following a plan And then there are the 12 principles: 1. Customer satisfact…

Many, many, many, maybe most people have implemented Agile as a recipe. Without understanding how it could work or why. Since they have no idea what they are doing, people who are forced to use this cargo-cult implementation find it onerous. Just another stupidity forced on them.

The question is how can people collaborate? That is the question. Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) begins to help us think about how we can do that. Simplistically we can just throw bodies at problems and we get "the mythical man month" mentality. Or we can do it with militarism - we all get marching orders. Unfortunately, good programmers do not do well with this mentality.

So is there another way? At this point, as a community, we do not really understand how people work together. Despite the face that millions of people can live in a large city, we have no clue as to the mechanism that allows this to happen. $. The city does not degrade as the Mythical Man Month predicts, nor are the people ordered about in a militaristic manner. So what gives? How does that work? $.

Why do I keep putting $ in this post? Because $ is a "messaging bus". (You tell me a better word - signalling system?). Everyone can read (get money) and write (spend money) on this messaging bus providing signals to other people.

Agile is a very fuzzy attempt to provide a messaging bus. But if you have no clue as to the mechanism, you can descend into madness - for example "If one scrums are good what if we do ten a day?".

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

#155

Post by throwway120385 »

everdrive wrote: post #126
screye wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. I've told my direct reports something similar. "Don't stress out about this. If it were a real problem, someone would have noticed 3 months ago when it broke / was never completed before [employee] left." Most of these crises are painfully fake.

I also often say "this is the scope right now but we can cut portions of this if we need more time. These are the critical elements that we need before the deadline. But the rest of this stuff is us using this opportunity to not ship a pile of garbage we can't support. If we have to do that, we'll fix it as soon as the deadline passes." But also I actually have the mandate to do that.

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

#156

Post by wkat4242 »

codeduck wrote: post #106

This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…

This gif would seem appropriate: https://imgur.com/a/T8q5oUg

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

#157

Post by wkat4242 »

jdiez17 wrote: post #152
efsavage wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a German word for the feeling you get where you want the opportunity to apply a hard-won skill, but also kind of don't? I feel that reading this all-too-accurate comment. Like many/most of us, I've been through this, but by virtue of luck and experience, haven't in a while. I think I've learned to spot the symptoms early enough that I avoid the companies/teams/projects that are on that path. For those who th…

Fähigkeitsanwendungssehnsuchtsunerfülltheitsgefühl?

I guess scrabble is really popular there:)

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

#158

Post by engrmgr2024 »

codeduck wrote: post #106

This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…

What is worse, once you get promoted enough, you learn that throughout your career when these things happened, senior management often had some juicy completion bonus or other perk tied to delivery. Yet when you are doing this you are expected to just comply because the company is in trouble.

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

#159

Post by Wurdan »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #103
Wurdan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also an engineering manager, currently working in a department that feels on fire, and I think there is good wisdom in the article. The part about not fostering a "us vs them" mentality was good food for thought, as I do find it tempting to build short term camaraderie. When faced with big picture issues that can't be changed (believe me, they can't) it's easy to reach for a "We all know that these exec decisions…

It sounds like you are trying to rationalize a toxic environment. Most of us don't actually have to stay at a company that is on fire. Plenty of companies (and managers) will try to convince us to stay at a company that "feels" on fire. That's what I hate about this "wartime software" bullshit. Like, if you enjoy being at war, cool, go at it. But if you don't want to feel horrible, find a different job. There is no p…

Rationalise - maybe. Romanticise - definitely not. If people want to leave I wouldn't blame them at all, and will happily write them a reference. But there's no point in me optimising for that decision, I need to optimise for the scenario where they want to stay.

I can say that I'm staying because I hunted for this job last year through the "winter of tech" and that nearly broke me as much as this toxic workplace does. So I have reasons not to jump ship, and I can't imagine I'm the only one. So for anyone reporting to me who would also rather not leave, I should do what I can to reduce the shittiness for them as much as possible.

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