121–130 of 168 posts
Excellent advice for the 'House of Cards' politics of big tech, but it’s essentially corporate pacifism. In any other setting you can't afford to watch money and motivation burn just to stay 'politically solvent'. (Lalit is very good at fitting complex corporate dynamics in a single blog post though.)
Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” It does take a lot of energy to keep some people afloat. My hope has always been they learn to swim as it were, but sometimes it’s just effort better spent elsewhere. I know one project did not have my involvement and couldn’t have succeeded without my knowledge. They were so bad they would work in questions casually to their actual…
When executives fail, unfortunately, they don't blame each other. They do postmortems, then hire consultants to layoff senior engineers.
Forced executive churn has been higher than for individual engineers at a lot of my past jobs. Especially for disciplines like marketing/advertising/sales.
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It seems there's a difference between unethical projects and projects that are just a bad idea. If someone wants to pay someone else to work on Uber for cat socks, but with AI, I don't think there's much of an ethical dimension.
Yes, that's certainly true. I guess what I was alluding to is that I think ethics should inform all decision-making, including business. A bad idea isn't necessarily unethical, although the execution of it (or even a good idea) can be. Unless the idea harms unconsenting others. Generally, it's not what you sing, it's how you sing it.
There's a good chance that when inevitably fail, the team will be laid off.
So beware of shiny new projects until they've proven themselves.
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I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?
For me it's the people. I've been at my current company for ~4 years. Every January the upper management folks kick off the same project and every year it dies in the planning/discussion phase. Maybe one or two other "big" projects or initiatives will "start," but it's always the same: lots of meetings between the managers without the engineers or designers, lots of hype about the "big project," meetings start to get…
Before the pandemic, I used to work doing software for a manufacturing startup and _loved_ that part of it.
I loved hacking something up for the folks on the floor that helped them automate some tedium. They were always so appreciative, not just of the result but also the attention we paid them.
Most of them came from "traditional" manufacturing backgrounds and the way they told it, it was like we were the first software people to ever pay attention to them and the issues they were experiencing.
We weren't even building crazy stuff for them. Most of it was pretty simple, but the bar was _so low_ they were always amazed whenever we were able to give them _anything_ that helped. It was awesome.
The reality is that a lot of people put ideas forward solely for the purpose of getting attention and trying to get promoted. A lot of those ideas are full of hope and enthusiasm and lacking in fundamentals. But to shoot it down makes you come across as a nay-sayer, or a Debbie-downer. Even though you are sure it’s going nowhere, the reality is that it’s a lot easier to let the market prove you right.
Less hurt feelings and interpersonal drama that way. Seems wasteful, but at the end of the day you got data and learnings that you didn’t have otherwise. So hey, silver linings.
> It’s important to point out that for much of the lifecycle of a project, whether it’s “bad” is highly subjective. I can’t emphasize this part enough. I’ve been part of some projects where someone external to the team went on a crusade to shut our work down because they disagreed with it. When we pushed through, shipped it, and it worked well they lost a lot of credibility. Be careful about what you spend your reput…
I went through this at a corporate job not too long ago for the first time. One of the more insane things I've dealt with so far in my career. I know life isn't always sunshine and rainbows, but up to that point I'd never seen that level of naked, antisocial self-interest in an org that was ostensibly created to allow people to cooperate toward solving some problem for our customers. Call me naive, but it was really disheartening.
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I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?
The paycheck? The vast majority of software projects fail. Honestly, I can't remember ever in my career working on a project I really believed in. Sometimes I do enjoy the challenge of doing the impossible. Turning a doomed project around or at least minimizing damage. I had some where I thought "this worked out but if anyone but me had been in charge, yeah this would have been a disaster". That feeds my ego. Though…
The one time a project was heading to failure I went to the VP and explained the sabotage I was seeing. This was a very lucrative contract and failure was not an option.
He pulled that manager and his team so far off they had a new office on the moon. They were pulling non-sense like submitting the pseudo code I white boarded as a commit.
Two weeks in and I’m still explaining to them the plan.
Despite the setback I pulled off a mammoth project and strategically moved in devs to areas where they could succeed. If they slowed me down they were given the boot.
Success sometimes just takes drive.
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The paycheck? The vast majority of software projects fail. Honestly, I can't remember ever in my career working on a project I really believed in. Sometimes I do enjoy the challenge of doing the impossible. Turning a doomed project around or at least minimizing damage. I had some where I thought "this worked out but if anyone but me had been in charge, yeah this would have been a disaster". That feeds my ego. Though…
That’s crazy sauce. I don’t lose. The one time a project was heading to failure I went to the VP and explained the sabotage I was seeing. This was a very lucrative contract and failure was not an option. He pulled that manager and his team so far off they had a new office on the moon. They were pulling non-sense like submitting the pseudo code I white boarded as a commit. Two weeks in and I’m still explaining to them…