31–38 of 38 posts
It’s not wise to be against the direction of an executive. You will be labeled combative, misaligned, or even uncooperative. It’s not worth it. Unless you have a strong political ally, it can be career suicide in your company.
It also really depends on whether you pick your battles or not. If an engineer complains every detail of a system then you get a "boy who cried wolf" effect at some point.
I was an independent contractor for a large bank. My contract kept getting rolled so I ended up there for a few years even if the original piece of work was an 8 month job. A new CIO was appointed during my stint and a huge new IT initiative was launched to replace the decades old core banking system with a "modern" off-the-shelf "bank in a box" product that Oracle had recently purchased. This product was new and had been "successfully" launched by a tiny 8 branch bank in Ghana. The bank I was working for had hundreds of branches in multiple western countries. The product did not fit in any way/shape or form the existing processes in the bank, it's technical infrastructure, the regulatory regime, its retail products nor employment law (employee time is expensive in western countries - so solutions involving throwing bodies at menial repetitive tasks are not viable).
I had been at the coal-face for nearly a month of day long meetings with the vendor to try to get a single niche savings product supported on their system and it was torture. I could see it was never going to work. I had no notions that my lowly opinions would have any sort of impact but I made my opinions clear to my immediate manager - especially over lunch and when we would occasionally go to a nearby bar to watch sports after work. I eventually convinced him of the folly of the entire enterprise.
At some stage, he then spoke up to his manager expressing reservations who then called me in for an aggressive grilling on why I thought the new strategy was bound to fail. I explained - but he seemed unhappy with me and I was sure my contract would not be rolled - not that cared at that stage, I was hating the work at this stage.
I later found out that I must have had some impact because this manager brought up some of the reservations and issues at the next C-level meeting. He was promptly told by the new CIO that either he was either going to be a team player and get fully behind the initiative or else he was out as there was no room for saboteurs and passive blockers.
He got in line. I left of my own volition anyway. Two years later, the project was cancelled, the CIO fired and an $80m lawsuit with Oracle was the result. No real "moral of the story" - just that at some point up the hierarchy "push back" will meet the "owner" of the initiative and the pushback will quickly die.
Unfortunately, the clowns get in those higher places because they own the circus already. I stopped counting the amount of times CEOs and CPOs told me "No more meetings to plan out what will happen, there's too many of them, let's dev it and see what happens" (most of the time, this is a world destroying, change-half-your-data-format-under-your-feet event). But make no mistake: this is also a result of so many countr…
There is no incentive to speak up. Why go against the grain and expend your social capital when you can just do exactly as you're told and not cause any trouble? There is incentive to stay quiet: getting the paycheck and a stress-free evening with my family.
Would it be a stress free evening if you were working at Boeing? Or writing medical software? Or designing airbags?
Unfortunately, the clowns get in those higher places because they own the circus already. I stopped counting the amount of times CEOs and CPOs told me "No more meetings to plan out what will happen, there's too many of them, let's dev it and see what happens" (most of the time, this is a world destroying, change-half-your-data-format-under-your-feet event). But make no mistake: this is also a result of so many countr…
In what country wouldn’t you get fired for that?
This article is written atrociously. It's geniunely unpleasant to read the basement tier slop like this. It doesn't matter if it has a salient point because this article could have been a comment.
> The information existed. It just never traveled. Nokia sold its phone division in 2013 for $7.2 billion.
(Incoherence)
> It's not saying "this is wrong" — that doesn't work. Real pushback is making problems visible: putting a price on the decision, naming what can go wrong, making the tradeoffs concrete.
(Excessive vagueness, and no awareness of irony)
> It's not that nobody knew. Everyone knew. Speaking up just wasn't a rational choice.
(Apparently drug-inspired denouement, whiteboard assumed)
There's more that's off, and I "enjoyed" reading that about as much as being molested by the large language monkeys that apparently created this text. (Because it is text - mere sequential characters with no value - rather than an expression of useful thought.)
You could also think of this as "AI is the toddler that's eaten crayons and shit on the wall." Sometimes the results are funny and worth sharing, but an adult creative director is required.
Here it seems the toddlers have acquired brethren and no adults are to be found.
Unfortunately, the clowns get in those higher places because they own the circus already. I stopped counting the amount of times CEOs and CPOs told me "No more meetings to plan out what will happen, there's too many of them, let's dev it and see what happens" (most of the time, this is a world destroying, change-half-your-data-format-under-your-feet event). But make no mistake: this is also a result of so many countr…
In what country wouldn’t you get fired for that?