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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

mattmanser wrote: post #83
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…

Before the cloud you bought a VM for $5 p/m. You installed apache, MySql, php or whatever and you ran your app. It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before. If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL. When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers. For most companies, all the cloud did is get…

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by smcg »

gtowey wrote: post #89
apercu wrote: post #17

The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass. 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. AI wil…

> The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. So true. Notice how everything got really expensive after COVID? All the companies cited "supply chain" or cost of labor increases but then were reporting record profits which means they were lying. It was all to punish us for having the audacity to ask for living wages and better work conditions.

You must be a paranoid conspiracy theorist, because that's what I got called for saying this since then. /s

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

#93

Post by vkou »

gitremote wrote: post #86
vkou wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism didn't end in 1964, but people sure have gotten better at dog whistling about it. (Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot. Because no matter how much a black person will ever achieve in this country, some mouth breather who hasn't done a day of honest work in their lives will insist that…

> Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot. > All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides the pilot's skin color were out. It's worse than that. The pilot was actually white. Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because they crashed. When asked why he thought DEI cause…

Incredible. I wasn't aware of that detail.

> Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because they crashed.

This, my friends, is the behavior of the supreme leader of the right-wing political party of the US.

'Racism from the political right is a boogeyman' indeed.

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

#94

Post by kmeisthax »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #54

checking in as someone who successfully ducked two rounds of RTO by just getting a different job. The first one absolutely outright told us they were bringing us back to an office where there isn't enough room for all of us. They justified it by saying we're hybrid 3 in 2 out and can figure out amongst ourselves who will be in when in order to optimize desk space, and on days where we have all hands or some other rea…

> We eventually figured out that our employer also owned the parking garage adjacent to the building and was counting on us as a $12/person/day revenue stream

I suspect a nontrival % of RTO-obsessed businesses have conflicting real estate investments like this.

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

#95

Post by neilv »

nitwit005 wrote: post #87
neilv wrote: post #51

> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new policy sucks, [...] If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there? I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things,…

If you're too careful about how you phrase things, it can backfire and seem dishonest. People will interpret it similar to "you call is important to us". Technically true perhaps, but intended to deflect.

You have to mean it, and you have to follow through on your words with actions.

Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make people think you are being sincere, people will eventually realize you aren't being straight with them.

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

#96

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

bob1029 wrote: post #68

> 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 char…

> Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak

... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the resulting longlevity of valve.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

apercu wrote: post #17

The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass. 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. AI wil…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by Prcmaker »

itsnowandnever wrote: post #64

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 see…

A very good synopsis. I recently had the chance to put myself as the intermediate member between those expectations and our technical team. It raised the expectations on me, but helped reduce the unrealistic side of those from impacting my team.

It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased. I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.

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

#99

Post by Aurornis »

bob1029 wrote: post #68

> 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 char…

> 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.

This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.

The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.

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

#100

Post by jdlshore »

tschellenbach wrote: post #62

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.

I think this is the fear, but I haven’t seen any evidence that AI is making companies more productive. Lots of anecodotes, pro and con, about individual effects, and a small number of studies, pro and con, about company effects, but nothing definitive, and certainly not the kind of groundswell of new products and releases that I would expect.
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