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If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

jamesshore.com

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Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#111

Post by InitialLastName »

switch007 wrote: post #70

> We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers I've worked at various places where this was supposedly the system. Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? Yeah not the ICs. It usually just means the C level will smile and nod while "listening" to your feedback instead of ignoring you completely Has anyone work…

> Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites?

To be clear, those are strategic decisions "what are our goals and how do we allocate resources to achieve them". Tactical decisions are "what specific actions do we take to use available resources to achieve goals".

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#112

Post by 9rx »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #34

Saying that you can’t measure productivity is a pseudo-truism and a cop out of doing your job. How do you measure productivity = how do you decide whom to promote; how do you decide whom to fire; how do you decide how to distribute bonuses; etc. If you can’t measure productivity, you can’t do your job as an engineering manager. It’s not a question that should have been asked 3 months into a job. It’s a question that…

> If you can’t measure productivity, you can’t do your job as an engineering manager.

Why not? You could feel productivity instead, which is also arguably the better approach as it more emotionally appealing to those paying the bills than measurement is. That is how people do it in the real world. Nobody is measuring productivity in this business, even if they want to pretend to themselves that they are.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#113

Post by snapcaster »

9rx wrote: post #88
infomaniac wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon does not use relational databases This is false, at least in my very thin exposure to the company: I interviewed for a team last year which was maintaining EC2 SSH keys using MySQL.

SQL, and therefore MySQL by extension, isn't relational.

He typed smugly, confident that everyone reading this will appreciate his pedantry that totally contributed to the conversation

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#114

Post by ryandrake »

Xcelerate wrote: post #83
wodenokoto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it have bought instagram and whatsapp? Would it have identified major social media trends in competitors that couldn't be bought and outcompeted them at their own game? Would it have suggested developing your own ad platform or just should banner space per cpm? There is a lot to not like about Meta and Zuckerberg, but saying he's a bad business man is a little silly. Metaverse was a wrong and expensive move, bu…

Exactly. I’ve never understood this criticism. A good CEO (in terms of the business) is able to make significant, groundbreaking decisions but is also able to reverse course quickly if those decisions aren’t working out (anyone remember the Facebook phone)? Unless the CEO is psychic, they’re necessarily going to make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. The key is being able to recover quickly and move on to the next thi…

I think questions about whether a CEO is "good" or not are kind of impossible to answer, because you can't test the answers. All we can observe is the current reality and the decisions they've already made. There is no way to observe the other alternate universes where Zucc didn't buy Instagram, and/or the universes where he bought something else. Did the company do better or worse in those universes? No way to know.

Also, sometimes people say things like "Only [ceo's name] could run [company]. Look at their results!" This is just survivor bias. Who could know whether someone else could or couldn't run Facebook (or Tesla, or whatever)? Who can say with certainty that out of the 8+ billion people on the planet, only one particular guy could run the company, and that particular guy happened to be the guy who indeed ran it? What an improbable coincidence!

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#115

Post by 9rx »

snapcaster wrote: post #113
9rx wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL, and therefore MySQL by extension, isn't relational.

He typed smugly, confident that everyone reading this will appreciate his pedantry that totally contributed to the conversation

A lot to unpack in this comment.

1. Wherein do you find the smugness? It does not speak to any person, let alone the first person.

2. What would give the impression that comments on the internet are written for others? Carly Simon once recorded a popular song about this type of falsehood.

3. It remains that SQL isn't relational. That is why it "won", after all. Relations are too complex for the layman to understand. Tables are much more familiar to the people in charge and arguably a better model for most business problems.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#116

Post by pc86 »

ryandrake wrote: post #114
Xcelerate wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I’ve never understood this criticism. A good CEO (in terms of the business) is able to make significant, groundbreaking decisions but is also able to reverse course quickly if those decisions aren’t working out (anyone remember the Facebook phone)? Unless the CEO is psychic, they’re necessarily going to make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. The key is being able to recover quickly and move on to the next thi…

I think questions about whether a CEO is "good" or not are kind of impossible to answer, because you can't test the answers. All we can observe is the current reality and the decisions they've already made. There is no way to observe the other alternate universes where Zucc didn't buy Instagram, and/or the universes where he bought something else. Did the company do better or worse in those universes? No way to know.…

Not being able to test alternate universes sans Instagram acquisition doesn't mean that it's not impossible to tell whether a CEO is good or not, you just have to make a qualitative argument for why they are or not.

Buying IG was a good move because it has paid back Facebook's shareholders multiple orders of magnitude. Isn't the goal of the CEO to steward the company and to make shareholders returns (wether public or private)?

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#117

Post by pc86 »

mempko wrote: post #96
Xcelerate wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I’ve never understood this criticism. A good CEO (in terms of the business) is able to make significant, groundbreaking decisions but is also able to reverse course quickly if those decisions aren’t working out (anyone remember the Facebook phone)? Unless the CEO is psychic, they’re necessarily going to make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. The key is being able to recover quickly and move on to the next thi…

The assumption that hierarchical organizations are inevitable blinds us to more effective ways of organizing. When we look at companies today, their feudal-like structure means CEO decisions naturally have outsized impact - but this is a product of the system, not inherent necessity. Take Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp under Zuckerberg. While these proved strategically valuable, framing them as evidenc…

This is a common refrain I've seen on HN when this topic has come up before, but there's a problem with it. The is a huge difference between (1) "flat organizations can work" and (2) "groups make better decisions than individuals, and this disparity is even larger on complex issues."

If #2 is true shouldn't an organization like Valve run circles around every single competitor it has since they're all dinosaurs with hierarchies and Valve isn't?

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#118

Post by jdlshore »

pc86 wrote: post #117
mempko wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption that hierarchical organizations are inevitable blinds us to more effective ways of organizing. When we look at companies today, their feudal-like structure means CEO decisions naturally have outsized impact - but this is a product of the system, not inherent necessity. Take Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp under Zuckerberg. While these proved strategically valuable, framing them as evidenc…

This is a common refrain I've seen on HN when this topic has come up before, but there's a problem with it. The is a huge difference between (1) "flat organizations can work" and (2) "groups make better decisions than individuals, and this disparity is even larger on complex issues." If #2 is true shouldn't an organization like Valve run circles around every single competitor it has since they're all dinosaurs with h…

Valve does run circles around every competitor it has.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#120

Post by miki123211 »

Zanfa wrote: post #84
miki123211 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO metaverse was a bet. It's perfectly fine to take a bet that you're not 100% convinced will pay off (professional poker players and traders understand this on a very deep level), as long as the potential upside is massively larger than the downside. Zuck understood that Meta could take the hit if the metaverse bet didn't pay off, but that they'd be massively better off if it did, and they had their own platform. A…

> IMO metaverse was a bet. It was FOMO. They had no vision, they had no plan, it was clear that it was only a thing because it was a buzzword at the time. Just like every other company stuffing crypto-adjacent things everywhere. It might have been a bet, but it was obvious that it was a really terrible one.

> It was FOMO.

> Just like every other company

What other companies (besides Apple and a few startups that were specifically in the metaverse space) went in on the metaverse?

I think this was very much unlike AI and crypto, where everybody wanted a piece of the pie. Meta seemed a lot more invested in this than most of the other tech players, which makes FOMO an unlikely explanation to me.

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