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Employee 1: Yahoo

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Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#71

Post by kevinwang »

jshen wrote: post #10
overcast wrote: post #8

"I went there with a positive attitude. The work was interesting. It was rewarding and intellectually challenging. But after a few months, I remember looking at my boss and my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss, and saying to myself, “You know what? I don’t want any of their jobs.” I saw how they spent their time and didn’t find it interesting or very rewarding. They spent their time managing meetings and office pol…

I think it's fine to decide you don't want their jobs, but it's a mistake to frame it as "bullshit" which he does after the section you quote. Human nature isn't bullshit, and any endeavor which requires a large number of people to accomplish requires the management of human nature.

Human nature is definitely bullshit.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#72

Post by maxxxxx »

cableshaft wrote: post #53
overcast wrote: post #8

"I went there with a positive attitude. The work was interesting. It was rewarding and intellectually challenging. But after a few months, I remember looking at my boss and my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss, and saying to myself, “You know what? I don’t want any of their jobs.” I saw how they spent their time and didn’t find it interesting or very rewarding. They spent their time managing meetings and office pol…

Hmmm....That's basically where I am now. I look at what my superiors are doing and it's just constant meetings with the occasional writing up tasks and doing code reviews, pretty much nothing else. I'm not sure I want to get promoted into that role. I've had project management roles before, but the meetings were minimal and I still got to code at least 40% of the time.

I am going through that right now. For a long time I was working more on infrastructure in the background where we just had to make things working for other engineers without execs paying much attention. Now I am working on a product and the whole process is a nightmare.

- Long meetings with directors and project managers who never read any previous reports so you spend hours explaining the same thing again and again.

- Demanding precise estimates while requirements are nebulous

- There is always one more manager who pops up from nowhere who derails a finally reached agreement with bringing up another nonsense issue

- There are plenty of managers who come into a meeting who monopolize the first half hour asking questions that have been asked and answered a long time ago. Then they monopolize the second half explaining the stuff they learned in the first half with an authoritative voice. They forget everything soon and three weeks later it's the same.

- Creating more teams to make "quick decisions" consisting of insiders who spend weeks deciding how often and when they should meet.

- Some VP inserts another angle into the project that gets refuted several times but somehow keeps coming back.

It's insane. The only explanation I have is that some people are just social and political animals that enjoy talking for hours and getting nothing done. They view work's purpose as having meetings, talking about things and looking good in front of their own manager.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#73

Post by sgk284 »

abpavel wrote: post #48
sgk284 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what do you think is absurd about working at Instagram and moonlighting at the same time? (Note: Many Facebook employees do exactly this.)

Because if you're good, today 40hr is not considered the norm. 9 to 5 is coasting.

I don't find that to be true at any place worth working at (and I've worked at Google, Microsoft, and Twitter among other places). All had fairly reasonable work/life balance, though I imagine it depends greatly on your team and tolerance for bullshit.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#74

Post by maxxxxx »

gohrt wrote: post #26
overcast wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sitting in meetings all day, essentially accomplishing nothing really is bullshit. Granted, there are some super productive management teams out there, but the majority of time is spent dealing with nonsense politics, and having meetings to schedule meetings. Stereotypes have basis in reality.

OK, so imagine that middle-manager person stopped dealing with nonsense politics and took on a role in eng or sales or whatever. Would the nonsense politics disappear?

I honestly think it would decrease. There are more managers than management work so they start creating their own work. That applies to all roles when there are too many people. Designers will redesign constantly when they have nothing else to do, programmers will refactor evertyhing, bureaucrats will create rules.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#75

Post by danieltillett »

ryandrake wrote: post #30
overcast wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point was that he was emphasizing the bosses bosses bosses boss. Many levels of nonsense, leading to politics. Managers do need to exist, and I agree they have a purpose, but often times, even in the company I work for currently. There is more management than there is workers.

Well somebody has to manage the managers! The whole flat org with minimal managers "ideal" has been tried lots of places and always failed. I think even Google tried it at some point. Let me tell you a few things that happen when your org gets flatter: 1. Decisions get bottlenecked Typically, the "flat org" thing gets tried without empowering the rank-and-file to make big decisions. So decisions that would normally g…

I have been thinking about how to solve this problem and have been wondering what AI can do to help. There must be a way of using AI to help empower workers to act in a co-ordinated way to run the business effectively.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#76

Post by danieltillett »

pc86 wrote: post #49
douche wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a continuum between hand-to-mouth and fuck-you-money. The closer you can get to the latter, the better.

I think that depends on your definition of FYM. For me it's $1.3MM. For others it might be $5MM or $750k. I make a good living for my area but have nowhere near $1.3MM liquid or even my entire net worth. Getting and extra $500k would not give me any peace of mind or security that I don't already have.

This is a rather precise number - why $1.3M?

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#77

Post by nostrademons »

danieltillett wrote: post #75
ryandrake wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well somebody has to manage the managers! The whole flat org with minimal managers "ideal" has been tried lots of places and always failed. I think even Google tried it at some point. Let me tell you a few things that happen when your org gets flatter: 1. Decisions get bottlenecked Typically, the "flat org" thing gets tried without empowering the rank-and-file to make big decisions. So decisions that would normally g…

I have been thinking about how to solve this problem and have been wondering what AI can do to help. There must be a way of using AI to help empower workers to act in a co-ordinated way to run the business effectively.

Most of the "sharing" or "on-demand" economy is based on this value proposition. Replace a manager's job with software and suddenly your taxi drivers, hotel workers, cooks, delivery drivers, administrative assistants, artists, visual designers, computer programmers, etc. can report to software instead of a person.

You could argue that the reason Uber etc. have found success recruiting workers for pretty shitty wages is because people are willing to give up that much money to not have to deal with a boss.

This trend also has a long way to go: for one, wearables will open up electronic coordination to people whose jobs normally require having their hands full, and two, improved AI will allow the automation of increasingly complex managerial tasks.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#78

Post by bpyne »

sverige wrote: post #19
overcast wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sitting in meetings all day, essentially accomplishing nothing really is bullshit. Granted, there are some super productive management teams out there, but the majority of time is spent dealing with nonsense politics, and having meetings to schedule meetings. Stereotypes have basis in reality.

Having held a few of those jobs, I understand the sentiment, but that doesn't mean those positions are unnecessary, especially as organizations get beyond a certain size. I understood his take on it to be that it just wasn't for him since he likes to be able to see something he has built in a fairly short timeframe, and at a place like Motorola in the '90s, middle management and probably many of the executives wouldn…

I'd like to commend you on a well-balanced reply. The following line really struck me, "..., a lot of the bullshit is created by people who want their own way after a decision has been made." That plays out daily in my organization.

I've come to appreciate how little I know about management over the past few years. I stayed friends with an IT Director who led my department around 1996. He used to say, "If you want to be successful as a manager, you have to remember that your main job is managing personalities everything else falls in place if you do that right." Having run a very small organization for the past couple of years, his message was on target.

My experience with teachers is that the really good ones tend to know. Students come back to say so if a teacher really helped them. My daughter's teacher has former students coming back all the time. My father's former students came back to say thanks. My brother-in-law's students come back. So, it's not quite the tragic, post-mortem recognition that Van Gogh received.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#79

Post by phamilton »

bluedino wrote: post #7

>> Come out to Silicon Valley and get a regular 9 to 5 at a place like at SGI [Silicon Graphics], and then you can moonlight with us. And we’ll see where it goes. That sounds so absurd. Today that would be like, "hey come out here and get a job at Instagram, and them after-hours we'll work on our own thing"

I knew a half dozen people at Yahoo in the last year doing a 10-4 and moonlighting on a startup together.

These were mostly resting-and-vesting post acquisition types.

Re: Employee 1: Yahoo

#80

Post by ErikAugust »

brianpan wrote: post #34
hitekker wrote: post #5

Excellent article; I thought the section copy-pasted below to be a rather non-trivial, unintuitive, and meaningful lesson: > Craig : How was it to ride that wave, especially when the bottom fell out in 2000? > Tim : When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything. > Craig : For sure. > Tim : It’s really true.…

I don't know if it's apropos to talk sports, but in a very real way this is what happened to the Warriors. They had an historic, record-breaking season that allowed them all sorts of bad habits. In the Finals when they are on the verge of reaching their goal, those bad habits showed and contributed to their falling short. Coach Steve Kerr talked about recognizing those mistakes during the season but it is hard to cor…

Patriots, when they had the undefeated season, come to mind.
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