A few years ago, my manager at the time explained to me how our company had acted as an incubator for 2-3 of our competitors.
It worked like this: Our company would design a product over the course of a few years and once it was in the pipeline (being bought) it would have a life of a few years.
More than once, the then current CEO of the company would decide to cut the engineering staff to save money and move on before the next product to fill the pipeline would be needed i.e. the lack of new products wouldn't show up on the bottom line for a few years. In the meantime, the talented engineering team (that they layed off) would go out and start another company to compete with us....
"The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
101–110 of 119 posts
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear nightmarish stories of micro-managers all the time. They feel that in order to do their jobs they have to tweak EVERYTHING that crosses their desk. One memorable anecdote I came across was about an animation artist who was in charge of animating the queen for a 3d chess game. Because he knew his manager's weakness he threw in a duck... Yes, a duck. Fully animated with sound effects and everything. Sure enough,…
The duck story is battle chess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Talk:Battle_Chess#The_duc... I've often had the opposite problem: companies where the CEO is so disconnected from the company (usually by working remotely 80% of the time) that the company doesn't have direction and languishes.
Speaking of managers ignoring things, I'm reminded of the last episode of the 90s sci-fi tv show 'Sliders', apparently the producers thought the network exec werent reading the scripts, so they deliberately broke a rule, and wrote a scene where someone was shot in the head and it wasn't picked up on.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#103In this case, the downside to saving money by laying off expensive experience is clear. Unfortunately, the downsides are rarely clear before the upsides, and by the time the mistake is obvious, returning to the previous state is difficult, and an incentive has been created for short term savings at the expense of long term ones. By way of example, several years ago I sold tools at Sears. Sears had spent decades build…
>In this case, the downside to saving money by laying off expensive experience is clear. Unfortunately, the downsides are rarely clear before the upsides The general heuristic of pointing out information asymmetries even when they seem obvious is a good one. In fact I'd say my experience has been that most people could benefit by explicitly saying more obvious things. The reason people don't is for fear of looking ba…
Overcommunicate, overcommunicate, overcommunicate. Also, overcommunicate. It's remarkably helpful to overcommunicate-by overcommunicating you'll clear up a ton of miscommunications due to different assumptions you and the other person are making, even when things seem obvious. So again, overcommunicate.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really sure how you're implementing scrum. Our scrum standups are always just the programmers, once a day in the mornings, and are used to keep all the programmers on the same page and talk to each other to find out if features might have a codependency, or if other blockers can be solved by something else another dev is working on. There's no "watching" of people or "intimidation". You might want to speak to…
A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other w…
10 people seems like a very large team for a single project, do you have multiple teams in the same standup? If that's the case then you're certainly wasting time as cross project communication is only rarely going to be useful.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone is worth 10 million/year no matter how "good" they are. Viscerally, I agree. On the other hand, if we go back to 1995 or any time before it, no 25-year-old programmer was "worth" $100,000 per year. Now that's a typical salary for a strong engineer. I'm cautious about saying people "make too much" money because, ultimately, no one really knows what work is worth. That's why we have markets, and th…
You're making a simple mistake: valuing the worth of something by its impact. But that's not how worth is determined; you need both supply and demand. If providing something has high impact, but that something is very common, then it has low worth, irrespective of how high impact it is. People would die without oxygen and water, but neither of these things are expensive. The market for CEO compensation is clearly not…
> If providing something has high impact, but that something is very common, then it has low worth, irrespective of how high impact it is. People would die without oxygen and water, but neither of these things are expensive.
With employees the heuristic is (very roughly) market price + VORP (value over replacement player). If an average programmer typically adds $300k of value to your company, and market price for an average programmer is $70k, and you find one who is twice as effective-you can pay them a lot more than $140k.
> The biggest reason CEO compensation is so high is because they are in a pyramid peak position where they can skim off a small percentage of a lot of people's productivity and claim it as their own.
This isn't a bad thing. If the CEO can boost the average employee's productivity by 1%, that can be enormously impactful. The difference between a CEO who makes a 1% impact and a CEO who makes a .5% impact translates to huge sums in large corporations.
So assuming that we had the ability to distinguish between good and bad CEOs, and that good CEOs were rare, it would certainly make sense to pay good CEOs huge sums and average CEOs much less. Unfortunately as you said, no one has gotten good at evaluating CEOs yet.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#106As fun as getting out our tribal aversion to managers who don't respect geeks is, let's focus on the actionable career point: do not work for cost centers.
Or better. Turn the perception of being a cost center into being a producer. Most managers wouldn't dare tuch you so long as you say for every dollar put into the department, we save the business x dollars. You could even argue the margins too.
A similar tack is to get yourself perceived as an incremental value adder, as opposed someone filling a role.
For example, IT is generally seen as filling a set of necessary roles where each person is more or less interchangeable. Sales is generally seen as incremental value adds, and sales people get paid accordingly.
So how can you get seen as an incremental value adder if you're working in IT? Simple: start projects and clearly explain the impact to the bottom line. If you show the executives that you've saved the company $2MM/year forever, and that project wouldn't have happened if you hadn't dreamed it up, that's going to get recognized. Even at large, highly bureaucratic companies.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#107I am brought to mind a quote by a god like galaxy: " When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all. "
For a long time, that was my email sig. Then I realized the problem with it. Now I still try to do things right, and then try to make sure that a few key people knew what happened.
Step 1 is to start bragging.
Step 2 is to have other people brag about you.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#108Everytime I see a "for folks from HN" message at the top of a post I feel like I'm part of a school trip. Can we stop littering the web with these?
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#109In this case, the downside to saving money by laying off expensive experience is clear. Unfortunately, the downsides are rarely clear before the upsides, and by the time the mistake is obvious, returning to the previous state is difficult, and an incentive has been created for short term savings at the expense of long term ones. By way of example, several years ago I sold tools at Sears. Sears had spent decades build…
Ah, I was buying my tools at Home Depot and Lowe's (how the heck it's supposed to be pronounced?) and was thinking that may be I should now shop at Sears since I can afford it. But looks like may be it's not a good idea anymore.
>For instance, I've heard it suggested that companies use long-term equity, say 15 years out.
Not going to work, they will just trade whatever they got on some secondary market.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#110Efficiency rarely correlates with headcount and budget. 9 years ago, our IT budget was $11 million. Today, it's a hair over $60 million. Adjusting for inflation, we should be around 13 million.
Most of the added budget has gone to bloated off the shelf software applications, retaining duplicate/redundant staffing from a pseudo-merger, and mismanaged consultants.
The OP has added a lot of facts in replies in this post, indicating that his staff was relatively lean (1 staffer for every 50 users).
But be careful in drawing too many conclusions from one instance of anectdata.