21–30 of 123 posts
If you rock up and go, "we're doing this big thing tomorrow and oops sorry we didn't mention it before" of course you're going to encounter more push back.
On the other hand, if you get people on your team before doing something then they will trust you and possibly even become advocates!
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…
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As someone who used to work at LittleBigCo, I think this beats having great ideas and then having them given to people who are in the inner circle with the founders. At least BigCo isn't super fratty like LittleBigCo tends to be. Or I could be wrong, please tell me if I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. Lots of LittleBigCo's these days are pushing overhyped products and are mostly just having fun with corporate money.
oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to get paid more to do less at BigCo. BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're remote. Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's a single small tree.…
One can use Nemawashi to lay the foundation for consensus. An even more powerful technique is to use Numerology to identify the consensus that already exists. See https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/s... and https://justine.lol/ape.html
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oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to get paid more to do less at BigCo. BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're remote. Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's a single small tree.…
You sound like me. Cheers. I hope it works out for us.
Consensus doesn't always exist. Its great to build it and its great to seek it.
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oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to get paid more to do less at BigCo. BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're remote. Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's a single small tree.…
What do you mean by BigCo? Fortune 500 non-tech? Faang?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to get paid more to do less at BigCo. BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're remote. Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's a single small tree.…
You sound like me. Cheers. I hope it works out for us.
You too! Let this be a lucrative but minor (ergo efficient) period of our lives :beers:
10x engineers get it done without others even knowing about it.
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.
New folk in other parts of the company ask me what I do, and the best way I can describe it these days is meta-engineering. Rather than take long term ownership of any part of the system, I take temporary ownership of the scary parts that need the most attention, refactor them until they're as boring as I can using a suitably large sledgehammer, and then release them back into the wild to (hopefully never) be someone else's problem again. When I'm not doing that, entire weeks go by just reviewing coworkers' PRs, writing architecture documents, and interviewing job candidates. I'm widely known for bluntly (but hopefully respectfully) giving my opinion when weighing in on technical subjects I think I know about, and it seems to be well received. Pretty much all direct and indirect feedback I get is to keep doing that more. Many coworkers even send me their designs and PRs with an explicit request to mercilessly tear it apart.
I've been addicted to watching episodes of "Kitchen Nightmares" this past month, and I just realized that it's sorta like what I do at work, but with less swearing and the undercooked chicken is lack of regression test coverage. Also, the restaurant doors haven't closed up 6 months later yet!