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Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

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Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#111

Post by splittingTimes »

hprotagonist wrote: post #2

https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-unive... Wadge’s Law (of Meetings). Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made. This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisi…

Manager Tools has a whole pot cast on how to pre-wire meetings

https://files.manager-tools.com/files/private/podcast/mp3/ma...

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#112

Post by whateveracct »

atypicbiped wrote: post #110
whateveracct wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm married and have pets :shrug: Use your free time post-covid to build up something worthwhile. A cat is a good start! Love for its own sake is more than enough. But it takes a suspension of disbelief that modernity may have beat out of you.

I’m 22 and a senior+ developer at a BigCo. I optimized my whole life to be able to escape from the big capitalist machinery as quickly and cleanly as possible. Maybe a cat’s a good idea to get me through the next couple years.. but honestly a pet rat seems like a lot less commitment given they live 2-3 years yet are still affectionate creatures.

Love is love and pets are pets!

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#113

Post by siliconc0w »

To challenge this a bit - this actually sounds like a bit of a dysfunctional culture where you have to handhold stakeholders in 1:1s or risk knee-jerk opposition to change. This isn't to say this doesn't work. It certainly works and there are many companies with this kind of culture that will pay you to do this well but it isn't a fast or scalable way of making decisions.

Ideally you can document the pros and cons of, say, moving to EBS storage vs instance backed and stakeholders give you comments with their concerns and you document and incorporate these and given enough stakeholders you can say, this is probably good enough for now and you trial using EBS-backed instances, improve your tools, document your learnings, and go from there. This can happen asynchronously, includes anyone interested, and can probably happen in around 1-2 weeks in a healthy culture. You do this so when there is the next EBS-outage you can point to this and say this was a deliberate decision and make an informed evaluation if the argument still holds rather than avoid going in reactionary circles. 1:1s don't document anything and only incorporate the views of people you think you should be consulted which is likely a subset of the people who want to be consulted.

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#114

Post by rleigh »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #94
whateveracct wrote: post #10

"Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber. I've recently joined a BigCo (as a senior+ engineer), and the culture here isn't building consensus (out of authentic building blocks) - it's a toxic "we must be consensus after every meeting." There's always a "champion" idea (but you can bring a "challenger" idea so people feel heard), there's always a need to "be in alignment" after every 45 min chunk of…

> a toxic "we must be consensus after every meeting." What are the consequences of failure to establish consensus?

An organisation where decisions are not arrived at, and where people work at cross-purposes to the disadvantage of the organisation as a whole.

In a previous position, a failure to commit to certain key decisions led to over a decade of drifting in some aspects because they were unwilling to draw a conclusion and get on with development. For some of these, the cost of actually designing and implementing the solution was far, far less, than the total cost of all the meetings we had about them, not to mention the lost time. I'm not even slightly joking. It's a management failure at the highest level in not considering medium- to long-term issues, by focussing only upon short-term needs. I would also put some blame, in part, upon Agile as practiced by some organisations.

Consensus is important because you have to have the whole team, or whole organisation, on the same page. Even those who don't fully agree with the decision. You have to have everyone commit to following the decision, even the naysayers. That is to say, the organisation as a whole has committed to a certain action. Which is not to say it can't be revisited or re-evaluated down the line, but that right here and right now, we will all follow the plan.

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#115

Post by UncleMeat »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #38
vishnugupta wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because there was no advance warning or discussion. As a manager I learned to keep my senior engineer pre-informed the hard way. Personally, when I was an IC, I was totally fine not being kept in the loop because I was impervious to such news or changes. So I just assumed that’s how it’s with everyone. Clearly I was wrong. That said, it is important to release that pre-information in an informal fashion lest they s…

Are you really impervious to changes though? You're almost certainly going to be affected in some way. Also, I don't really see the point in hiring supposedly intelligent engineers and then cutting them out of the decision making process. Btw I'm not even a senior engineer, I'm a _junior_.

> Also, I don't really see the point in hiring supposedly intelligent engineers and then cutting them out of the decision making process.

It is infeasible for literally everybody to be involved in a decision. So then the question is, how do you communicate a decision and when?

If you communicate "we are thinking about doing X" then this often causes problems with interpretation. People read these as big shifts in direction and experience whiplash or get overly excited and then disappointed when X doesn't happen. If you communicate "X is happening in 3 months" then the people negatively affected by X just get more stressed for more time even though they can take no action.

This can be different for different individuals. If somebody is especially bothered by not knowing things ahead of time you can adjust. But I find that if information isn't actionable then it is often in appropriate to share it way in advance of an actual change.

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#116

Post by yccs27 »

andrewem wrote: post #17

I used to work with an engineer who would have a loud negative emotional reaction the first time they were told about some new thing that would be happening at our company, and after a little bit would be totally fine with it. After one or two instances of this pattern, the manager learned to talk to the engineer ahead of time, so the upset reaction wouldn’t happen in a big meeting. I suspect that more of us are like…

I like the solution in this story. At first it sounds like the manager is just working around or “tricking“ the engineer, but the engineer simply gets what he likely wanted in the first place.

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#117

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

hprotagonist wrote: post #2

https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-unive... Wadge’s Law (of Meetings). Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made. This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisi…

Thats why it is often hard to follow a meeting! Often they mention acronyms and concepts without bothering to explain them. So it is just a setup because decissions were made in advance, so why do they bother to hold these big meetings? I mean all these commoners could do something productive instead.

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#119

Post by sgtnoodle »

lklset wrote: post #52
anonytrary wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is how you end up with an entire engineering team that has no idea what the hell is going on. Don't be a "10x engineer". Empower 10 other people around you. That's what the real 10x engineers are doing.

It is not easy to find a team that wants to be "empowered" by a 10x engineer. Usually the 1x engineers focus on irrelevant or counterproductive issues, inundate the 10x with non-feasible suggestions and play office politics. Upon which the 10x moves to inner emigration and gets work done. For which the "team" gets the credit. Where are those teams that you speak of? At which companies?

I've appreciated the culture and how it's evolved at Zipline over the past 5 years that I've been there. If you want to work on a UAV based medical delivery system, it's a pretty cool place.

If I weren't at Zipline, I'd probably be at Reliable Robotics, but that's more because I know the founders and lots of other employees there, and they have a strong team that's set up for success.

I'm biased towards robotics companies since I'm an embedded software engineer, though.

Re: Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)

#120

Post by _y5hn »

vincentmarle wrote: post #39
cle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep exactly. If you go into a meeting and you haven't talked to at least a few of the people there about the topic beforehand, IME it's not going to be a productive meeting. I usually start with getting feedback from one or two subject matter experts, building consensus with them, and then slowly expand my circle of people I get feedback from, until we have "the big meeting". Having a "big meeting" with no pre-establ…

Also known as: consensus driven decision making

Bias through established group-think.
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