Getting things “done” in large tech companies

> In large tech companies, this fact is a trap for competent but unagentic engineers. They see an infinite queue of tasks that they’re capable of doing, and they start delivering a stream of marginal improvements to a particular subsystem. From their perspective, it feels like they’re crushing it. After all, they’re putting out work at their top speed: no downtime, no waiting on other teams. But they’re not doing their actual job, which is to deliver the most value they can to their company. From the perspective of their manager and skip-level, they’re not getting anything done.

I strenuously disagree with this premise, not because I don't think this ever happens (it definitely does!), but because it's not the responsibility of an individual contributor to attempt to divine the organisation's priorities: that's a core management function.

My employer buys forty hours of my time each week. It's my employer's responsibility to allocate tasks to me in order to best suit the organisation's needs and goals. Recently, I spent an entire week waiting for a specific person to review my code. It's my responsibility to (tactfully) inform my managers of this problem, but it's not my responsibility to solve this problem on my own initiative. The person might have a temporary backlog of tasks, they might be dealing with personal issues, they might have some workflow problems: in some of these cases, the root cause is something I shouldn't know about.

This isn't to say that I'm just the monkey at the bottom of the tree being shat on by those further up: I do pass my (frequently misinformed) opinions and observations up to my managers, but it's up to them to decide whether and how to act upon them. They have more information - feedback from more people for a start - and consequently can make better decisions than me.

If you feel that you have to fight your organisation to serve its needs, something has gone seriously wrong - possibly with you, but more likely with the organisation itself. Organisational pathologies are themselves Chesterton's fences - they exist for some reason, even if the reason is stupid - and are consequently difficult to fix. Perhaps making things difficult for you makes things easier for everyone else. Perhaps fixing the issue will involve so much change to the way the organisation is managed that it's actually better to leave things as they are.

yes! The best PMs I've worked with have been founders.

They can also get completely nuked by market forces a lot easier.

Also, pay is usually a lot less.

My previous PM was ultra valuable. Put devs in contact with the customers, got out of the way of deciding what to build, and then sheltered the devs from the chaos of customers. He was also smart about what could be done and in what timeline, always working from the estimates engineers gave, working backwards and deciding what scope could be cut and where, who if another team could loan us people. He was the right balance of umbrella, partner and pass through. It was magnificent.

My company, being more than a little bit toxic, he got transferred to a new manager who took an instant dislike to him and he was pulled off all his projects and then fired for not delivering anything. (bit of an exaggeration, he got put onto one of those "all responsibility, no authority" type projects where he was responsible for making sure everyone at the company stopped using the VPN, but he had no authority to force teams to build or migrate services to be available outside the VPN, and there were 2+ decades of services to migrate, and he couldn't direct people to stop connecting to VPN if they needed something that was inside the VPN)

The PM that came along to replace him described himself to all the engineers as "the next Elon", wouldn't let engineers talk to customers, personally decided what features to build with no input from the dev team, even when making technically difficult decisions. He asked for estimates from devs but never used them. Often giving us both half the time asked for, and half the engineers asked for to deliver a project. He never deflected chaos from customers, just added a translation layer that made it impossible to make the customers happy. Everything was an emergency, every feature necessary for an MVP. He'd constantly harass people for status updates, forget what they were working on and harass them again. He constantly asked for documents to be written for himself that he never bothered to open the links too.

He was actively toxic, wrong and an impediment.

He'd send out launch announcements to the org celebrating the projects that were completed and it was customary to list key people who delivered the project. He'd forget whole teams of people that worked on the project. One time he left me off of a project that I lead, got everyone in our sibling team that was helping out though. One person he never forgot to list as being a key person involved in the project was himself. Even in projects he had never heard of before having to write the launch announcement.

That behavior was rewarded, for whatever reason. Although he finally left the company when one of the many rounds of "you must work from the same office as your manager" bullshit caught him up and he wouldn't relocate from canada to the US.

So you’re saying the only time you were satisfied with your work is when you took the role of a product manager who stepped in between the engineers and the rest of the company and had all their contributions filtered through your ego?

Yea, that sounds pretty satisfying…