If you're building drones in Ukraine, you're in war mode.
If your business required zero interest rates, you're not in war mode. You're in stupid mode. It was never a successful business. (See WeWork, etc.) Get out.
How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
181–190 of 214 posts
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#182This 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…
> Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members
This signifies a weak CEO.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#183Never a bad time to remind yourself of what is at stake in a literal war, versus a company in survival mode.
Literal war: Many human lives - both combatant and non-combatant - and the future prosperity or collapse of all societies involved
Company in survival mode: for most employees, their income level this year.
Describing the operation of a software business as "Wartime" is nonsense.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#184Earlier 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.
Reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Shilling with a bit of hyperbole.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#185Speaking as an engineering manager, this is wish-fulfillment. According to his own LinkedIn, the author has never been a first-level engineering manager. His blog is accordingly heavy on cliches and mostly free of actual work experience. Taken at face value, the article is a recipe for burning out first-level managers, while the building is burning down. It neglects to focus on stopping the fire, because the author w…
It's essentially an ad to promote their career.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I told you to stop talking to my wife! She has 35 years engineering, now a quality manager, and the new boss has been hair on fire all weekend, cosplaying that a top down intense low bid culture can adapt, and uh, oracle is in the mix. This is not what we signed up for.
How does low-bid mash with Oracle?
Corp jumps into the trunk, Oracle slams shut the lid, and the usual story ensues. There's a process bug now, not Oracle's to be sure, and to fix it will cost real money.
Edit: make things more clear.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you work that you get to avoid agile, scrum, and war mode? I'm jealous. Then again I've always just been stuck working for startups my entire career. I have a family and desperately need something more stable.
Just sharing my own experience..I used to work for start-ups and now I am working for a seemingly boring, profitable company that is not venture funded. By boring I meant there is not alot of media news about them. They just bunker down and do the work. There's way less craziness - more focused, mature approach towards problems.
How do I find jobs like that?
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you work that you get to avoid agile, scrum, and war mode? I'm jealous. Then again I've always just been stuck working for startups my entire career. I have a family and desperately need something more stable.
Are BigCos any more stable in the US? At least in a startup they probably actually need you because you already know their system. Overseas BigCo means permanent contracts and being very hard to let go, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in the US (e.g. Elon Musk Twitter).
Twitter is exceptional in the exception sense.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#189This 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 is painfully accurate. I'm not sure how companies fall prey to these problems, but they seem to be incredibly hierarchical. What I means specifically is that the lower level employees and mid-level managers seem almost rabid to praise, cater to, and and be swept up by the useless whims of nearly anyone in the executive suite. It's sickening, and not because of the impacts on work. Why do so many grown adults act…
It's simple, at certain point at certain growth in a company, the "yes man" virus is going to infect the whole corporation. Why? Because there's one spot where the virus is going to spread, and around this spot only "yes men" will get promoted and they will only hire, reward and promote other "yes men".
It starts from a person or persons who don't know what they are doing, but are really good at selling themselves. So their only goal is to show themselves in a good light to leadership and fool them by surrounding themselves with people who will agree with everything they do.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#190Earlier 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.
The crisis is orchestrated around someone in the middle layer who thinks they get fired if they don't deliver anything this quarter.