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How to be a leader when the vibes are off

chaoticgood.management

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Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#61

Post by serial_dev »

Retric wrote: post #57
dylan604 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the hol…

Paying 2x as much per server means you need to drop well below half just to break even. But you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests. So at small scale there’s zero benefit from dynamic loads.

> you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests

You don’t always need a server, you could also just go serverless, get charged 10x while you make your architecture a distributed, slow, hard to debug mess.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#62

Post by tschellenbach »

The other part of this is the AI wave. Every SAAS company in the world is vulnerable to someone with higher AI driven pace, or better AI features to overtake them.

Even Google is an example, it seemed like the most defensible business. They could coast for years, but now they are literally at risk of losing vs openAI.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#63

Post by watwut »

marcosdumay wrote: post #24
theideaofcoffee wrote: post #20

> Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment. Naw, man. Do your work as you were hired to do, as an expert, disagree and push back against idiotic and clueless decisions, loudly and publicly. None of this militaristic, jingoist "the C-suite always knows best and we have to follow their 'orders' blindl…

That will put you ahead in some contexts or completely destroy your life on different contexts. And even make you ineffective for fighting against the problem. Apply it smartly, and evaluate if forcibly changing your context isn't the right move for you. Blindly sticking to the anti-jingoist approach is as bad as blindly applying it.

> And even make you ineffective for fighting against the problem.

We are not discussing someone who has any potential or interest to be effective in fighting the problem. The proposed alternative to what you call innefective fighting is complete support of that thing.

And second no, it will not destroy your life. People really love to exaggerate risks management or C-suite or teamleaders take.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#64

Post by itsnowandnever »

This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't seen in 15 years.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#65

Post by serial_dev »

moffkalast wrote: post #48
motorest wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed. There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why. The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowe…

There's a lot of ignorance in yours as well, because the actual point of cloud isn't to be cheaper (and it's not), it's to be standardized in terms of workflows. AWS or Azure or whoever will cost more in the long run, their entire business model is built on top of making it impossible to migrate and then jacking up prices. Of course OAI and Anthropic will become more expensive once enough people get locked into their…

It makes workers easier to replace, but it also makes switching between companies easier.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#66

Post by darkwater »

dylan604 wrote: post #56
Retric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies. > The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a ce…

Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the hol…

The only thing that cloud brought is the possibility to spend less for smart people/companies that have the right workload. At the (hidden) expenses of the other clients that are not so smart or don't actually need that elasticity. Yes, there are economies of scale at AWS but in the end there is fixed capacity that either gets used or not.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#67

Post by elzbardico »

nsedlet wrote: post #26

Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US): mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have to be a multinational company with global entities and offices. Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country. When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market. Tha…

Small scale offshore outsourcing existed way before the pandemic and the big shift to remote. They used to call it software factories.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#68

Post by bob1029 »

> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven

The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.

I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.

I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#69

Post by itsnowandnever »

tschellenbach wrote: post #60

There are literally subreddits about how to abuse the trust of remote work, but there have always been people doing that. I think the main thing that changed is that amazing revenue multiples that made it possible for companies to ignore these issues are no longer there. Meanwhile the costs of everything, including salaries has skyrocketed. So I think it's lower valuations + higher costs -> more pressure on efficienc…

well, and let's be honest - most CEOs and boards get the same advice from the same advisors and peers. and the advice since Elon took over Twitter (not that I can say he "started it" but it was around that time I started hearing C-suites say he was right to let everyone go) has been to implement more draconic policies at your software companies.

that interest rates have been higher and liquidity in general has been tight created a perfect storm of bias that these policies are working or could be beneficial. in better times, a company with good funding and a healthy customer base would come through and eat everyone's lunch if their competitors were treating their devs like that. but because of the temporary complete collapse in competition as we've known it, especially amongst startups, this has gone on far longer than it typically would.

it'll get better soon but we've lost an entire generation of technical leadership now (due to burnout and other factors) so it'll be a slow and turbulent recovery.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#70

Post by elzbardico »

ajkjk wrote: post #4

Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"; explanations on how best to not fight the ways everything is going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it. For example, buying into the company message…

Yeah. Be the fearless revolution leader in a corporation during a tricky job market era and not only you'll be fired, your subordinates, by association, will be tagged as radioactive material.
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