I've seen another type of "let projects fail" in my career done by middle managers in a large project. Essentially it takes the form of them saying "the larger project we are working under is probably going to fail. When it does, I want our component to be useful for whatever comes next". And, the surprising thing is that this often worked. The project itself fails, but most of the work done on it still ended up being used.
Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
91–100 of 168 posts
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#92Letting it die is the self-serving, career-optimizing, amoral take. But it's more ethical to stand up for what's right even at personal cost. A bunch of people wasting years of their life, not to mention all the resources, is a tragedy worth avoiding. Of course, the wisdom of taking the person risk is a continuum. In some cases it is and in some it isn't. But.. To omit the ethical angle entirely seems like a bad take…
You can voice your concerns, but should not go fighting, especially at personal cost. It could be that you may be wrong in your assessment, and the project turns out to be successful, or it could be that you may have been right for the wrong reasons, or it could be that you were right all along. In any case, you are part of a company, and that means recognizing that yours is only one of many opinions driving strategy…
the point of expertise and intelligence is, in part, to be able to know what's going to happen BEFORE doing it. Perhaps without even doing it. You could be wrong, sure -- but there has to be a rate of that happening, and the more intelligent people are wrong less. At some point there are situations where you _know_ what's going to happen and then it happens, inevitably, providing no new information. And in my experience this happens _all the time_ in big tech. It is not hard to predict the failures. But things happen for social and political reasons, not intelligent ones, and so the predictions don't matter.
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#93I disagree, and I think this advice can be actively harmful. You shouldn’t ignore a problem when you’re in a position to help. At the same time, you also shouldn’t take on the emotional burden of other people’s projects. If I see something heading toward failure, I let people know they may want to consider a different approach. That’s it. There’s no need to be harsh or belabor the point but it’s better to speak up th…
I think this is the best take. If you know better speak up (assuming you don't get penalized for that). But anytime you feel the pain, refrain. Don't carry the weight of the world upon your shoulders. You spoke up and if they did not heed your advice that's not your problem.
> assuming you don't get penalized for that
Don't assume that. Why would you assume that? The entire thesis of the article is that you do in fact get penalized for that. Even if you don't care about anything else, you're penalized by loss of ability to make people to take you seriously on other problems.
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#94Its almost never correct to rip on a project from a distance. Only two things can happen, one, you are wrong, and the project succeeds. This is a personal catastrophe for your career at that company. Two, you are correct and the project fails. Its rare this will get you enough credibility to make the risk worth it. There are always others that will show up and dogpile as if they "knew" the entire time themselves. You need to be consistently correct about failure to get truly noticed, but then it asks a lot of questions. Why are you still working there? Why don't you have enough influence to prevent it in the first place? "I told you so" rarely accomplishes anything good.
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#95Every time I read this guy's blog posts, I'm very glad i don't have his career.
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#96Thanks for the insights
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” I often say "Sometimes, you have to let the manager fail." Some managers don't like being told their ideas won't work. If you refuse or argue, you are seen as the reason his idea failed. I've found what works best with them is to proceed with the work, but keep them informed very frequently, so they can see how things evolve, and w…
I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?
Not sure motivated is the word on these projects.
Needing money to pay the bills/mortgage and getting good money at that, then fulfilment out of personal projects get’s me through.
Not good for mental health when you know your work can be better but sometimes needs must and a job is a job.
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” I often say "Sometimes, you have to let the manager fail." Some managers don't like being told their ideas won't work. If you refuse or argue, you are seen as the reason his idea failed. I've found what works best with them is to proceed with the work, but keep them informed very frequently, so they can see how things evolve, and w…
I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?
Every software has bugs. The best course of action to avoid introducing into they world yet another piece of buggy software is to never write any software. But nobody pays for not writing software. Then writing software that will completely fail is the next best thing. You don't introduce into the world another piece of buggy software, but you can write the software, which is fun and rewarding and also get paid.
I'm always delighted if the software that I wrote ends up on virtual scrap heap.
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?
We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing. "Fulfilling" work is a rarity afforded by a fairly unique time and place in history. For the rest of us, work is a means to an end and ideally a fulfilling life outside work lets you keep plugging away on some rich idiot's hare braine…
thank you for writing this <3.
Re: Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
#100If one person thinks this way, many more do. This is typical in large organizations, especially government institutions, because expense of running entire teams at massive costs for no reason is not born by the team but by someone with a much larger budget that has more money than care or completely wrong incentives (the more people I manage, the more important I am, type of orgs). This is organizational gangrene des…
Humans think this way. This isn't a cultural thing, it's human nature. We like positive people and dislike negative people. Ignoring the fact that political capital is a thing won't make it go away.
imo it's a cultural thing specific to organizations which are raking in money, as many tech companies are. The less actual competitive pressure there is the more everyone is pressured to just shut up and take their cut. Whether it's more or less than it could be is less important than just not rocking the boat.
Whereas if real existential need is on the line then people are incentivized to give a shit about the outcome more.
Tech is so rich in general that the norm is to just shut up and enjoy your upple-middle-class existence instead of caring about the details. After all, if this company blows up, there's another one way that will take most of you.
Not that this excludes the same behavior in industries that are less lucrative. There's cultural inertia to contend with, plus loads of other effects. But I have noticed that this attitude seems to spontaneously arise whenever a place is sufficiently cushy.
Also, this take doesn't (on its own) recommend one strategy or the other. Maybe it makes the most sense to go along with things or fight them for personal reasons, uncorrelated to the economic ones. But it's good, I think, to recognize that the impulse is somewhat biased by the risk-reward calculation of a rich workplace. Basically it is essentially coupled to a sort of privilege.