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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

#201

Post by advael »

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…

A lot of tech industry mythology is written from the perspective of a technical lead as imagined by an executive, or from the perspective of an executive who views themself as primarily a technical lead. In practice, this mythology is usually exactly just that

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

#202

Post by amne »

wkat4242 wrote: post #156
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

the obvious follow-up to the obvious solution is you don't need to feed 2 extra horses after you're out and you end up with websites counting how many horses are suddenly starving.

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

#203

Post by berniedurfee »

noitpmeder wrote: post #165
foobazgt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah we've had to evacuate the office several times because our in-house "lab" DC started smoking.

Our admin used to just prop the door open with a fan and blow the “something’s burning” smell out into the hall.

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

#204

Post by zbentley »

b_t_s wrote: post #179
ang_cire wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah, I work at a Fortune 100 company right now that is in "War Mode"

yea things are crazy now. We're in war mode but nobody knows why. We've been reliably profitable for a decade. And yet we're doing super high risk cost reduction projects that have significant risk of burning down the entire business and have already destroyed what used to be a very skilled and mature engineering team. I get the impression that's a fairly typical story now.

Have private equity types been seen entering the building?

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

#205

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

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've told my direct reports something similar. "Don't stress out about this."

I too do that often to my direct reports. Not worth the stress. But of course it helps to pretend that one is working hard and stressed :) .

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

#206

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

atoav wrote: post #164
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…

That is like young media professionals who think being stressed is a badge of honor that shows how important they are. As a freelancer I had to interact with these people and was constantly annoyed by their lack of efficient communications. If you are a freelancer your own time is actually valuable to you, wasting time is not a luxury you might be willing and/or able to afford, depending on your agreement. If your co…

Kinda describes most of the people (loosers) in the corporate world I'm aware of.

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

#207

Post by LambdaComplex »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #121
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide me an actual way to practice these things? Like, specific, exacting ways to execute each of these? Or any of these? Because they don't make any sense. "Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools". So, rather than put an update in a Jira ticket, DM it to a single person in Slack? "Value working software over comprehensive documentation". So, never write documentation? And how do you de…

> “Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools". So, rather than put an update in a Jira ticket, DM it to a single person in Slack? Stand up. Walk out of office. Get on train. Arrive at user’s office. Go sit next to user. Spend afternoon understanding how they use the software you are supposed to be building. Bin the sprint planning, retros, gantt charts, standup and whatever fucking sprint poker is.…

Wow. Someone who ACTUALLY understands the Agile Manifesto. This is one of the best comments I've ever read on HN.

It's mind-boggling that people can be confident that they're building the right software for their users without ever actually talking to their users.

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

#208

Post by ang_cire »

zbentley wrote: post #204
b_t_s wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea things are crazy now. We're in war mode but nobody knows why. We've been reliably profitable for a decade. And yet we're doing super high risk cost reduction projects that have significant risk of burning down the entire business and have already destroyed what used to be a very skilled and mature engineering team. I get the impression that's a fairly typical story now.

Have private equity types been seen entering the building?

The executives would never deign to enter the offices that house our unwashed technical worker selves.

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

#209

Post by Nevermark »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #182
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…

> Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members This signifies a weak CEO.

I read it more as, nobody under the CEO, from the C-suite down, that isn’t also on the board, is setting direction.

Not that the board was collectively trying to be CEO.

But in a wartime/survival situation, I would hope the board had some opinionated members. If only to make sure the right CEO was in place.

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

#210

Post by dijksterhuis »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #207
dijksterhuis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools". So, rather than put an update in a Jira ticket, DM it to a single person in Slack? Stand up. Walk out of office. Get on train. Arrive at user’s office. Go sit next to user. Spend afternoon understanding how they use the software you are supposed to be building. Bin the sprint planning, retros, gantt charts, standup and whatever fucking sprint poker is.…

Wow. Someone who ACTUALLY understands the Agile Manifesto. This is one of the best comments I've ever read on HN. It's mind-boggling that people can be confident that they're building the right software for their users without ever actually talking to their users.

It's fairly easy for me to get to grips with agile tbh because I live daily with another 12 principles thing.

Had a big "oh shit, hell yeah, this makes perfect sense now!" moment when I re-read the manifesto one day.

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