Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like the parent would have accomplished nothing in the 10 years. I think they are just talking about framing it in language palatable to the interviewer across the table.
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Getting things “done” in large tech companies
101–110 of 228 posts
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#102I feel the author’s telling us to play politics without using the word politics.
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#103I fundamentally object to any notion of done-ness that is solely focused on pleasing the few people who happen to be in positions of power. Are we all embedded in absurd structures of primate dominance? Sure. Primates gonna prime. But that is no more the root of what's going on than being able to mark something done in Jira, or getting a compiler to stop complaining. Proximate hurdles are not ultimate goals. Nobody g…
> that was 40 years well spent making a rotating series of bosses and grandbosses happy
Isn't that the definition of being employed? pleasing the persons who pay you to do what they ask?
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#104> If you want to get things done you can’t be a gardener.
Unless you are selling your own product or service that you yourself are working on (possibly indefinitely).
Which is surely an enjoyable position, as long as you don't mind having no like-minded coworkers.
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#105While I understand the point being made, and have experienced this reality first hand, I still object to it.
I have seen countless projects spun up, the company declares the problem solved (done), and then the team is disbanded to go work on new problems.
What happens next? The product they built has issues, new features are needed, the rest of the company keeps evolving… all the while, there is no one to actually maintain that “done” project and it becomes technical debt.
Eventually a new manager comes in, sees this mess of an old project and builds a new team to solve this problem all over again from scratch. They have to learn everything all over again and repeat a lot of the same mistakes of the first implementation, and the cycle continues.
This doesn’t seem like an effective way to run anything. If I can use an air conditioning metaphor, it is more efficient to set the house at a temp and keep it there, than to keep turning the AC off, letting the house heat up, and trying to bring it back down from 90.
I had a little side project at work that upper management didn’t care about, but was immensely useful to various support teams. At one point it had over 500 unique users internally, through word of mouth, as it was only designed for one team of about 50. The initial build took some effort, but once it was running it still needed care and feeding to keep it relevant. I managed it personally for over 10 years, and my priority was always responding to organizational change to keep it relevant and as a trusted source. The second it fell out of date, people would lose trust in it and start looking elsewhere, which is when tooling starts to fracture. It didn’t take much time. Sometimes I’d go months without touching it. Most updates took 5 minutes, some more involved changes might take a day here or there. But that was important work to prevent needing to re-invent the wheel down the road once it became too painful to use due to lack of maintenance.
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#106Shallow content slop red flags abound. Might as well keep moving the definition of done goalpost-- nothing is done until it provides utility that a customer exchanges money for. How about until there are enough customers are paying to make the system profitable? How about nothing is done until you hear it referred to as "legacy"?
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#107I've been trying to figure out what bugs me about this advice. I think it's narrowly tailored to people with zero technical leadership on their project, but also doesn't give them enough groundwork to really succeed either.
Someone fresh enough to think anyone cares about the backlog deserves a manager that knows to meet them where they are, not expect the employee to meet them in the arena of management games. In practice, this often doesn't exist. Rather than the lowest rung of management bridging the gap into the tech, it's usually on seniors to "manage up" and shadow manage the team. Seniors good at this are more common, but time strapped with the rest of their dayjob.
The target audience of this article needs a powerleveling guide to all the management skills of a senior, because they're in a vacuum with no seniors and their managers are not leaders. But instead it's the tiniest taste of the management world needed to orient someone towards being a better cog.
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#108Is this sentiment the reason why a lot of "engineers" will provide terrible quality in code / tests (lack thereof) / documentation / etc.? If all that matters that someone at the top sees it and is happy about it at this specific moment in time, why bother writing code that can last and doesn't leave behind an absolute unmaintainable ball of mud? We don't need gold plating and yet billions could be saved by having in…
More and more you run into people who simply don't care about craft and quality. I can already hear the chorus of people that will scream "I'm not paid enough to care" or "it's just a job for some people", and those things are often true; but, nonetheless, people used to take much greater care in their craft even when they were paid less. There was a sense that, even if it was just a job, it should be done well. A ce…
The level of respect that the typical manager or C-level has for the developers' efforts and time spent into keeping up-to-date with the industry has decreased, and now with the big promises of AI it will become even lower. Professionalism demands a certain baseline level of respect for one's effort and expertise.
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I left the government for corporate work, and we didn't have project managers as a specific role. Of course, people were managing projects, but it was nothing like it was in the government. In my short experience, project managers: - Have no understanding of the technology they're "building." - Don't understand who is responsible for what. - Would have NO idea if things were set up incorrectly. - Are solely working t…
product, not project :-)
Same pathology, different symptoms. They are professional proxies.
Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
By shielding decision-makers/customers and engineers. To give an example of when I had to burn political capital: I had to "skip rank" a few times and go directly to CEOs. They are appreciative when you provide concrete facts, such as "I worked for two weeks on the redesign of this page that zero people use and I'm frankly tired of this bullshit".
CEO's and VP's and customers appreciate this type of work, but YMMV. Speaking from experience, you'll be surrounded by more enemies in your day-to-day when the side effect of your customer obsession negatively impacts the KPI's that are used to stack rank your direct management chain against other teams and managers. it is quite kafkaesque to be treated as the black sheep after you save $10m a year for the org, then…
Your reply sounds too ironic and too real at the same time. :D
But you're 100% right. You have to know when to use the nuclear button. And sometimes you can't press it, which means you take a backseat and watch the company burn money for no reason. This is the point where I start agreeing with _fat_santa's post [1].