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No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

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Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#311

Post by jghn »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #261
exabrial wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Alibaba employee for a season of my life. I have to be careful with my next sentences because on the internet because it's easy for people to read things in a vacuum and interpret in the worse possible way, so don't do that because thats not how I mean it. The 996 hours are not useful work. It's appearance over productivity.

I've worked with a few coworkers who came from a 996 environment and kept doing it out of habit. As I was young and impressionable, I started doing it also. I'm not going to be careful with my sentence: these people were absolutely NOT getting more work done than others, in fact they seemed to move glacially, because they had so many more hours to fill up. It's a total footgun, and it chases away good people once the…

This has been the case for these setups long before 996 came in vogue. For the extreme majority of people there's an upper bound on what they can actually get done over a period of time. Trying to squeeze more out of that becomes performative.

As a similar anecdote, when I was at university a few decades ago there was one major where students were pretty insular. They were well known for very long hours in their building, some people would stay there a few days at a time even.

Then I had one as a roommate. He kept normal hours. he didn't work any more or harder than any of the rest of us. He explained that in their building it was mostly socializing, parties, and playing around. He went in, did his work, and left.

After that moment I approached it with eyes wide open and saw this play out over and over again in my life.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#312

Post by Izkata »

acdha wrote: post #239
bob001 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are those who can provide 10x output in certain kinds of problems. Either due to experience or however their minds work. If their output is as a tech lead then even a 2x can provide an overall 10x increase through second order impact via their team. There are also those who provide 0.5x and 0.1x output on a wide range of problems.

> If their output is as a tech lead then even a 2x can provide an overall 10x increase through second order impact via their team. This is something the 10x mythology tends to leave out: there are a vanishingly few people who are significantly above the 90th percentile in terms of individual productivity but if the discussion shifted to team dynamics, that’s where you can actually see really big gains by helping a la…

10x came from actual measurements a few decades ago, getting people to implement the same project and seeing what the result was. The two parts missing from the modern usage of the term: the measurement was within a given team (not overall), and it was a comparison of best and worst, not best and average.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#313

Post by tptacek »

titanomachy wrote: post #304
tptacek wrote: post #144

We're apparently back to making psychoanalysts out of interviewers: I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation during hiring, but in short, look for: the obvious one: evidence that they indeed exhibited these external signs of motivation (in an unforced way!) in past jobs; signs of grit in their career and life paths (how did they respond to adversity, how have they put their past successes or…

So do you think there's no useful strategies to identify highly motivated prospective employees, or just that these aren't good ones?

I'm not optimistic about scalable strategies to identify "motivated" employees, but I'm not certain. I am pretty certain these strategies are bad. They're what everybody did in the mid-2000s.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#314

Post by player1234 »

pessimizer wrote: post #283
philipallstar wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no such "reason" You share that with no justification.

It stands to reason that if gravity can make things fall down, it can make things fall up. It stands to reason that if an earthquake can collapse a building that it can build one. It stands to reason that if rat poison can kill rats then it can make them stronger. ("reason" left to be worked out by the reader as an exercise)

[dead]

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#315

Post by Herring »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #307
Herring wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol good luck. Both of those are way harder than paying union dues. And there's no guarantee the empire won't find you wherever you go. War is an excellent counter to inequality, it works much better than progressive taxation or collective bargaining.

It’s a lot easier when you make 3x the comp of the average developer in the EU and I am not even in BigTech (anymore). I can absolutely guarantee you that the average enterprise CRUD developer living in a 2nd tier US city is better off than a developer in the EU. Let alone the top 10-20% working in BigTech or equivalent.

The empire will find you wherever you go. https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying...

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#316

Post by johnfn »

friendzis wrote: post #187
johnfn wrote: post #156

> Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books. This seems entirely false to me. To be honest it is so incorrect it significantly puts into question the rest of the article. 1. I have absolutely had managers motivate me to work harder. I have also had managers completely demotivate me and cause me to quit. How on earth can anyone who has worked in the industry for…

> A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company Your definition of a "good manager" is essentially "does not actively sabotage work of subordinates". That's not motivation, that's merely absence of active demotivation. A person knowing how and in what ways their work contributes to the success of t…

Not really? At a small startup, sure, this should be obvious, but a manager who is able to articulate how my work bubbles up to company success at a 1000 eng company, in a way that makes sense, is a pretty rare breed.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#317

Post by JTbane »

pyrale wrote: post #27

> I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned. A few years back, on this board, 996 was something people made fun of when it was reported that some Chinese companies did it [1]. And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? That the issue with working on saturdays is…

The fact that 996 is coming to America is an ill omen for worker's rights and, well, society in general IMO.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#318

Post by nebula8804 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #305
nebula8804 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Good luck fighting offshoring. I always wondered why they don't try tariffs on this? American companies that produce overseas get tariffed regardless of origin. It changes incentives and forces production closer to areas of consumption. I suspect we are going to get there eventually, leadership needs to become more left progressive like Mamdani. >That means nothing. I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what h…

> that have already passed this in his first week. It's always easy to pass laws to give people free stuff and it works well initially ... until you run out of money of course. That's how Venezuelan leadership also got popular. Who doesn't want more free stuff? It's how elections are won is most of Eastern/Southern Europe too. Until the bill is due and the next generation has to pay.

I do agree that the bill has to be paid. I don't what we are going to do with the trillions of dollars of debt as a result of tax cuts for the rich, handouts to countries like Israel and so much more that does not directly help regular people. The US has been a piggybank for all the world to just loot and take advantage of. Given that this is the environment we are in, I am all for providing these breadcrumbs that Mamdani is proposing to regular people.

Sooner or later there will be a reckoning with all the money that has been stolen by the upper class. Without these small programs, that help people that reckoning will come faster but it will come either way.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#319

Post by bob001 »

nebula8804 wrote: post #141
bob001 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having talked to Occupy Wall Street people at the time I don't think many on the ground differentiated as much as you think they did. I used a generic word because from my experience that is how they saw the world. I got told I deserved to have everything I own set on fire for saying I spent $100 on a nice dinner once. That was on the more extreme side but the sentiment seemed to not differentiate.

You missed what I said in my first paragraph. Occupy was after the capital class but they did not express it well. Looking back, a common criticism was that the movement was leaderless and thus unorganized. It was the early days of a new generation (Millennials) getting a first taste of the coming disaster their lives were going to be. The last time there was really a movement like that was the 1999 WTO protests...mo…

> Occupy was after the capital class

White washing history doesn't change the reality of what the people actually making up the movement wanted. Not what the self-elected spokespeople who had no actual power since there were no leaders said to make it all sound less threatening.

> From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years.

Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#320

Post by acdha »

bob001 wrote: post #242
acdha wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how unions work negotiations work, and the younger worker getting paid less is 100% thinking that they’ll be the senior guy some day.

"Senior". Looks like you've already made it a tenure and not output based pay system. Which I think proves exactly what people don't like about unions or those who push for them. In an output based system the number of high level people is relatively small and terminal level is far from the top level. It doesn't take much for people to realize that there's little chance of them becoming an L8 so why shouldn't an L8 g…

You’re welcome to try to get the entire industry to stop referring to junior and senior developers, engineers, etc. but most people know that experience is a distinguishing characteristic. The other huge mistake you’re making is assuming that compensation is based on performance in non-union shops. It certainly can be but almost everyone will collect counter examples as they get more career experience.

I would suggest considering who stands to benefit the most from the belief that high-performers don’t need unions, and whether the same companies which have been found guilty of wage-suppression would be above funding amplification for that sentiment. Tech workers gave up a ton of bargaining power for decades and while we certainly aren’t badly paid it’s worth remembering how, say, that settlement with Apple, Google, et al. didn’t fully make up the difference, not to mention the number of former high-fliers who hit things like the ageism wall long before they wanted to retire. In an uneven market with a huge imbalance in data visibility and negotiating power, unilateral disarmament by the weaker side doesn’t seem like the winning strategy.

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