How do you scale a more human management system when both the manager or the managee can be incompetent or malicious.
I'm aware that incentives are often counterproductive or insulting for white collar workers where there are elements of creativity in the job, but I feel like to get it to work you need trust which IMO cannot be scaled to big companies like Google.
Firstly, I have met very few malicious people in my career. Most of the really destructive people are products of their environments. It is complicated, but it is normally an incentives problem, most commonly status/ power rather than monetary. Often they have created blocking processes that the company sees as some sort of control or policing. It tends to be rather easy to change that if you are their boss. It is harder, but not impossible as a colleague. Often the application of cold hard rigorous logic, an understanding of the real controls etc. Can unstick them.
I work in a 100k person company at the moment (admittedly I'm not in charge of that many of them), so I understand the problem of scale, but I would counter that the changes neede are rather subtle. I think much can be achieved by focusing on the 20 people at the top. Culture cascades. For example if you dig in over a KPI not being achieved, when someone explains that it is counterproductive, or conflicts with another KPI, how do you think they will manage their team in future?
> Firstly, I have met very few malicious people in my career.
Few people are openly malicious. That doesn't mean they are altruistic or motivated by some concept of "greater good". Most people will go along with the general sentiment though their actions are typically focused on their own benefit. This makes a lot of sense.
Honestly, your perspective feels a little out of touch. If you had some private conversations with individual contributors at multiple levels of your organization, you may get a different perspective. In my experience, most "leadership" is about maximizing the leader's personal gain. They are running their own company within the company and will compete in whatever internal currency the company culture has. This is why incentives are difficult.
Perhaps the simplest way to manage is to a P/L and employee retention. So long as those are healthy, the group is healthy.
> Honestly, your perspective feels a little out of touch.
As does yours too me. I have been a senior manager in finance and IT at companies from $15m and a middle-manager at a mega-corp (on the senior management team of a business unit with 600 staff). I have had staff in several countries, I work with people in many more. Honestly most people want to do a good job without their boss shouting at them.
> will compete in whatever internal currency the company culture has
>> will compete in whatever internal currency the company culture has
>You seem to be agreeing with me.
I'm saying this is a bad thing. The "currency" is often based on perception of what the leader likes. My suggestion here is instead focus on actual dollars and cents. Does the sub-org bring in more than they spend? It will change the way you think about organizations. If the group has no source for income, you have to wonder why it exists.
I have been mostly in tech but also in companies that are not solely tech companies. For you, it seems like "senior management" means you talk to VPs. I have been a "senior manager" but it speaks mostly to my depth of experience. I talk to VPs and directors when I need to, but mostly I'm speaking to folks that are doing the work. I think this is why our perspectives are different. When you're two or more levels away from the point of execution it's very easy to be out of touch.
> The "currency" is often based on perception of what the leader likes
As a leader we could start by making the currency a positive thing? I make it clear that stopping late more than once a twice a year is negative, for instance. People stopped doing it.
>When you're two or more levels away from the point of execution it's very easy to be out of touch.
It is, so make an effort not to be out of touch. I left one job and the cleaner sent an apology for not being able to say goodbye, since she was off. She didn't work for me in any way. Why? Because I talked to her, and listened to her. Last week someone had a tough time who works for someone, who works for someone who works for me. I went and sat with them for a couple of hours.
I don't know everyone's name at the coal face, there are hundreds, but I know what they do and ask them about it. If their area has made an improvement, I go and see it, and say well done. I saw someone limping down the stairs one day, I asked them what happened. When I saw them walking well the following week I remarked on it. They stopped and chatted for a few minutes, then told me all about a problem with one of our systems. It confirmed what I thought. Every time those conversations happen they tell me a bit about what is going on in the real world. I'm careful not to criticise, and to use the info against anyone. I get my tea from the main canteen on the other side of the campus so I bump into people, not just managers. When I get asked to approve spend, I write and ask if I can visit the area so I can understand. If I support it I write to the next person in the approval chain (if there is one after me) and tell them why. I take my team to visit people in other departments, and introduce the other person, and explain what they do, so they know I know. I'm famous for having the longest ever tour of one of our sites, because I asked so many questions about the technology, and spoke to every one I met. I think I have a pretty good idea what is going on.
> As a leader we could start by making the currency a positive thing?
Maybe. I personally feel it lacks sufficient grounding in reality and is prone to bias. How do you value work in a virtual currency that has no external tether outside of the company?
> I get my tea from the main canteen on the other side of the campus
It seems like we're in different geos which may be a factor. I can tell you in US corporate IT organizations where I have worked, there's very little cross-mingling. Leaders may be sent on visits to other orgs that are often planned/staged rather than spontaneous. I'm glad you take an interest. Good leaders often do. In my personal experience, that behavior is atypical. Myself I have never had to more than 1 layer between me and individual contributors and prefer it that way. When I do speak to middle managers, their goals are to avoid causing waves while finding their niche, mostly by ingratiating themselves to some person two levels up and gain enough aforementioned "currency" to advance to the next level. They produce headlines and nothing much of measurable and durable value. A few companies have elaborate internal accounting and review org P/L that way. IBM did in the 90's (not sure if now). AMZN may have some kind of internal recharge model from what I've heard. Most companies just have "budgets" though the allocations rarely have any bearing on any actual or perceived fiscal benefit.
Disclaimer: This is an N=1 opinion. Feel free to take it with as much salt as you like.
> In my personal experience, that behavior is atypical.
Absolutely it is. I am atypical. My atypical behaviour gets results. That is the point of wanting to write about it!
I think you got in a bit deep with the currency thing. People try to show they are doing what the boss wants, that is where we agreed. Unfortunately that is often behaviour that is negative for other people and the team, and I suggest the company as a whole.
Imagine I set a KPI that I want x lines of code per person. A manager will stop being impressed by the team member who refactors pages of nonsense into 1 line, he wants bulk. The best member of the team gets disheartened and leaves. I set a bad KPI, but I also set an expectation that the KPI mattered to me, and therefore meeting it at all costs was what the manager needed to do. This is the currency you described.
Remove the KPI and just take a 'measurement' of lines of code. Next time I meet with the manager he proudly states his team created x lines of code. I ask why. I ask what areas needed more code. I ask what improved. I ask if the code is more stable, needs what resources etc. I ask how the lines of code moved us towards our goals. Do these lines of code make us money? How?
Now the manager sees that I value them not as a stick-bearer, but someone I require to be intellectually engaged in the work their team is doing, and able to summarise that effort so I can run a bigger team. I made the currency based on positive factors. KPIs are a lazy attempt at management.
Others asked about scalability. It is perfectly scalable. If I was the CEO, the questions I ask the CTO are what shows them what I value, the currency if you will. If I am lazy at that, I will generate lazy behaviour.
Measuring anything is fine, but measurement has a cost and you need to be intellectually honest that it is only part of the picture, and your real interest should be what made the measure move, and what does that tell you. I could measure the number of features added, for instance, but I need to understand how hard each feature is and hours much value they add. Same when my PM suggests a new feature, I should interrogate them about why, talk about the cost of maintaining it. I should ask them to weigh that against the fact that our biggest customer is complaining about down time and speed, an incidentally they are not interested in that feature.
You see what we did? We made it clear that I value intellectual rigor in peoples decision making, and understanding of what it is we sell. I created a currency that is more positive than being cocky, good at PowerPoint and meeting KPIs.
You are correct that I'm not in the US, but I have twice worked for US headquartered firms, so I have some insight into how they work. I would say they have informed my view that they tend to fail at motivating people, and especially motivating them to do the right things.
I'm actually not good at traditional corporate climbing. My PowerPoints deliberately have few words on them, because I concentrate on speaking. I also have a bad habit of saying inconvenient truths outloud. I am deliberately exluded from lots of meetings where I might reveal how little they know. I get promoted because just sometimes they need someone to actually get the work done that the company sells. I'm contained and restricted though.
I agree that culture cascades but leadership is not the top of the food chain, their decisions or culture is often influenced by the capital.
The meta recently has been to ignore everything and only focus on maximizing the stock price, which is aligned with their incentives (stock based compensation, bonus based on stock performance) and the modern investors (money quick now).
I wonder if the rotten feeling I have on management is linked to western societies moving from high trust to low trust and from patient to impatient.
Yes, that is the excuse I read for a recent accounting scandal at a listed company. However, it is a weak one. Yes their incentives have slipped from long-term shareholder value to short-term share price, and the market loves to be irrational...especially about AI and Musk.
Except only some of the market does, and the incentive can be met in other ways. Most capital is less worried about how you run the company than the returns. They worry about fundamentals, ROCE etc. If you have too much inventory, then yes you will get pushback. But encouraging your employees to be creative won't get you in trouble. This is just an excuse. I mean, being polite to your employees, having dedicated inspired staff, won't hurt your share price. I think assholes getting to be CEO is a symptom of a failing meritocracy, bad career development, focus on loyalty over ability. I think it harms the share price by lowering productivity.
But capital is conservative. Board members are chosen from a tiny select group of people who have done it before, or at least sent to the right elite schools.
When I worked in PE, the biggest thing I learnt was that PE partners (as a whole) know very little about running businesses. They only know about balance sheet fundamentals, and whether you answer their questions convincingly. They were specialists in the pissing contests, but could be easily fobbed off if your ratios were good and you met your forecast. Imitating their behavior inside the company is a choice, not an inevitability.
Sorry, a bit 'stream of consciousness' rather than a well argued response, but you seem smart enough to see what I mean.
I see your point, this reminded me of the incompetent/malicious section.
Yes, leadership could do the right thing, but the right thing is difficult to measure by shareholders and can only grasped by shareholders until it is too late (Disney for example), but why would they?
I agree, people are not malicious but the system currently selects for people that ignore the difficult to measure right thing to do (in SWE it’s doing the grunt platform work that no one will appreciate) and skip to things that are rewarded (cool feature tm that users hate by gives a cool slide to the CEO), it might seem like people can do both but it’s not in practice due to having limited energy.
Also stream of thought answer, but I feel like we are back to the trust thing, the right thing to do is impossible to measure, so we can only hope they do it because they care about doing the right thing, but incentives punishes them and makes them scarce at the top and the only solution is to go back to a high trust society (maybe like Japan where CEOs care and the incentives are set so people are often doing the right thing).
Intersting you mention Japan. The accounting scandal I mentioned was in Japan! So again, no hard rules.
I suppose my biggest takeaway, is that all I know right now, is every time I was given a dysfunctional department to look after it got better very quickly, both according to staff, colleagues and my seniors. I don't know exactly why, and would love an outside observer, but I have my theories. I'm loath to put bits of it out there because you get a couple of categories of negative response.
1) 'That is just obvious'. All of my best work ever was obvious to everyone afterwards!
2) You are naive. It would never work in x company. You give people too much credit etc.
Yet here I am, unexpectedly at home feeling ill, with 100% confidence that everyone in my extended team is coping just fine, doing as much work as if I was there, and getting along with each other. The only message I got today was one asking how I am. Meanwhile my colleague mangers will be answering emails while on holiday, because their world would fall apart without them.
Again, this is why an outside observer would be so useful, they could testify to the results as well as the methodology.
What I'm getting from you is that, given competence (and here it's a manager being able to make himself dispensable) things "work out".
I tend to agree but I have a feeling that it takes a certain number of bad apples min-maxing KPIs to destroy the system.
When the manager evaluates you based on how many lines of code you submitted because the VP decided that the teams with the most code submitted deserve a bigger bonus, then you stop doing the rational thing and start playing the game, it may be possible for the middle manager to play around a bad VP but from an IC level it's rarely worth it, you might invest your small political capital only to be burned afterwards.
I've seen way too often in my career benevolent IC ignoring the politics, getting things done only to be last to be recognized when it's clear things would be falling apart without them. Even worse, doing the right thing might keep/hide the dysfunctional system for longer.
Sorry for being overly negative, I like the theory but failure points while rare are common enough for me to have seen them a few times, if things are not rotten it probably holds water.
Ironically, if your setup is too niche (e.g. browsing privacy configuration) you can be easily tracked, though no one will bother, but captcha's will certainly not miss you.
This is the rub, tech is able to track you based on your browser, viewport size, os, location (a vpn still has a location if you aren’t rotating) and more. I use Firefox for privacy and just that measure alone rules out 97% of internet traffic and zeros down who I am within 3%. How private am I if I default to that 3%. 1440p monitor and a half screen Firefox viewport? Now we’re building an advertising profile!
If targeted advertising is your main threat, then you are lucky to _currently_ live in a country whose government _currently_ does not consider you an enemy or potential enemy. Many people are not that lucky and many people will become unlucky despite not changing anything about themselves.
My next low hanging fruit is certainly to make my LLM usage local, my queries contain much more sensitive information than what is mentioned by this post.
In the past I dropped off privacy when it was too inconvenient. For example I dropped protonmail because of bad search, left Linux desktop for Windows due to missing software, etc, I still haven't found the sweet spot for LLMs yet.
For the rest, I'm currently running the full macOS, iOS, safari, Apple passwords and I'm decently happy with this middle ground.
The absence of solutions for LLM privacy on that list is telling. We’ve figured out how to have private communications with other humans via end to end encryption but arguably we’re leaking a lot more to chatbots about ourselves in a few sessions than we do to even our closest friends and family over Whatsapp
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