Which companies do things "right"? How do I select for them when interviewing?
Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong?
Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
71–80 of 482 posts
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#72I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not. It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organiz…
I have gone oppositional direction younger me was kinda yes-man and now I am more jaded and see systemic failures all around me.
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#73The most jarring thing about entering the workforce to me, and it seems to the author as well, is the nigh-pathological lack of pride (or “passion”, which I think is a loathsome term) most people put into their jobs.
I don’t accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and disengaged coworkers. I know this for a fact because I’ve witnessed it happen to many people as they mature as workers and also noticed it in myself. I can’t prove it’s not related to age, or position in life (eg a young single person eager to prove themselves at work, vs someone who prioritizes family) but I know firsthand that there are at least some experienced workers with families, responsibilities, and hobbies that manage to stay focused and engaged for a long time.
I expect some pushback against this, but I really do think this phenomenon - whatever you want to call it - is the basis for ageism. It frankly is a real, observable thing that life has a way of beating the passion out of people into a point they see their job as clock-in, clock-out. It doesn’t happen to everyone of course. One of the reasons I love working with interns and recent college grads is that, despite their lack of skills or knowledge in many areas, they mostly haven’t gone through that transformation yet.
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#74That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow t…
> I've known a few company owners long time ago who ... swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news
It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems.
If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#75While I don’t disagree, I think labeling and calling people “bad” is wrong. Derek is doing the best he can. He hired you to help make the company better, more profitable, etc etc. He’s trying anything to get you to understand that you need to deliver value, a product, a service, research output, something so the Bob’s have something to sell/offer/justify grant money. I’ve met a lot of engineers that think they were h…
> Derek is doing the best he can.
Yup. Few people go to work every day to do a bad job.
Like the OC's epiphany about Sturgeon's Law, I chilled (a little bit) once I realized that most people are already playing at their highest level.
> ...start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help...
Back when I was doing proper product development, eg burning CDs and printing manuals, this was a pretty good strategy.
Something changed. And I'm not smart enough to see it.
My best guess is that most dev work is now "IT". Agile. Everything is make believe. Nothing ever really ships or is considered done. Then 18 - 36 elapse and its time for a do over. Any knowledge, culture, or lessons learned sent to /dev/null.
I've been binging the Oxide Computer podcast. They're actually making something. Concrete, real, shippable, useful. That'd be nice.
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#76I agree with the core point of the article but the bit about unused bar charts reminded me of a weird reality.
You don't know the bar charts you need when you make them. Not in a "you didn't do enough research" way (waterfall isn't the solution to everything) but instead in a "until it breaks no one notices" fashion.
Sometimes a chart points to an exact problem. You may only look at that chart once every other year but if 1/10 it avoids an outage that is a win for the chart.
The problem is knowing which charts work like that vs which ones are superfluous.
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It only takes someone in management to realize that you increase the revenue by selling more of an existing product or raising its price. You reduce your costs by firing people or renegotiating the prices with suppliers. "Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without viable products in development to validate such dynamic.
> "Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without viable products in development to validate such dynamic. That really depends on the business. I worked with a manufacturing client a few years back, and millisecond process improvements could translate into millions of dollars increased annual profits. They manufactured parts that would sell for about $0…
I think the OP meant worker productivity, not efficiency of production.
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#78That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow t…
That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally also explained in the article, why.
Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#79> My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of maintaining our team was approximately $1…
It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money. What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a co…
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Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
#80So TL/DR, the author works for a large org with a less than perfect culture? I’d simply move. Even in keeping to companies of similar scale, there are definitely highly successful enterprises out there that wouldn’t entertain entire departments doing meaningless work, and have a generally good culture of accountability and feedback. This before even considering smaller businesses and startups where there’s simply no…
I feel this is one of the most interesting tradeoffs of the modern day. No, seriously.
Imagine the kind of flexibility an ordinary person has to build into everything else they have going on to make "I'd just move" a viable long term strategy. Buying property immediately becomes way more hassle than it's worth, because you might have to move in 6 months to the next place anyway. Providing a stable schooling situation for your kids just became a lot harder. Want to avoid those issues? Are you willing to pay for rent or a mortgage in a city large enough where you can keep running this strategy, over and over again? What about the situation where the culture is actually fine, but you yourself just want more money or more responsibility than they're willing to pass down to you? It's an interesting example of how when you hold one thing fixed in place, everything else has to orbit around it. Very few people get to have it all without putting in a lot of work to get there first.
Like a lot of societal ills, I think this is one place where remote working is going to make things a lot better for people even while a vocal minority will bemoan how it's all worse than ever. Many, many, many talented people would be thrilled to live in a world where they can live in the same gorgeous small town in the middle of nowhere they call home while also feeling like they aren't running a serious risk of unemployment if they give up the one job they managed to claw out of the aether.