To be honest, I'm wondering where all these cartoonishly unhealthy companies come from. I've worked in a bunch of companies in my career, and sure, at pretty much all of them at one time or another I may have thought "are you f'ing kidding me?", but that's really just the nature of large organizations.
And perhaps I've just been lucky, but in 25 years in tech I've never seen the level of gross incompetence described in this post. I'm truly envious of the vast majority of senior leaders and execs I've worked with - not because they're geniuses or anything, but because they excel at things that I find very challenging (and I know from my stint in management) and I learned a lot from them. Again, not everyone, but I've certainly had more good bosses than bad.
> To be honest, I'm wondering where all these cartoonishly unhealthy companies come from.
Simply take the norms of one industry, and apply them in a radically different industry.
Take a manager from the construction industry who knows a bricklayer with an assistant can lay 2 tonnes of bricks in an 8 hour shift, and if they didn't it's probably because they took a 3 hour lunch break, and apply it to the software world.
Take a manager from the food service industry, who expects workers to clock in before their shift starts, and that a worker who's even two minutes late is letting down the team and needs immediate attitude adjustment.
Take a manager from precision manufacturing, where Zero Defects is the norm, and "bugs" don't exist, and failing to deliver precisely what was promised is a big embarrassment.
Take a manager from the call centre industry, who thinks if you take a lax attitude to sick leave people will start falsely calling in sick all the time, anyone who calls in sick should be interviewed by HR upon their return.
Take a manager from a paperwork-heavy industry where work is simple but precision is important - like data entry for paper forms, where a worker who makes even minor typos just isn't cut out for the work.
Take a drill sergeant from the army who knows the most important thing in inducting a new employee is yelling in their face and bullying them, thus letting them bond with their peers....
Perspective matters IME. I held both perspectives, this org is dysfunctional and healthy, at the same position, organization and exact same circumstances.
In one I was sure I was right and in the other I entertained the notion I actual might not be and things are not that simple.
Yeah, I've generally had good bosses and colleagues, including some outstanding great ones. (Actually, I had such overall good colleagues earlier in my career, I was totally unprepared the first time I ran into someone dishonest. It took too long to believe they would behave like they did, which ended up extremely costly.)
Despite overall good experiences, I've heard of dysfunction like this article describes, and even worse, in numerous real-world companies. Talking about particular instances can be very delicate when you have insider info. But I think there's enough frequent dysfunction in industry, and some very common tropes that we keep hearing from people at other companies, that senior engineers will tend to be able to immediately recognize some of it.
Have you mostly worked for younger tech companies or were they "traditional" businesses who had to be forced to adopt technology? The places I've seen with the biggest challenges are all large old and well established companies. Think insurance, transportation, agriculture or healthcare. Places where the people who managed the entire system out of file cabinets a decade ago now manage the document repositories they don't understand and they are still bitter about it.
The insurance company was known for hiring contractors and keeping them on the bench for months to years just in case they needed them. I also remember while working there a particular Big Three consultant kept showing up in people's meetings and never speaking up. No one could figure out what he did or why he was there, but the agency was billing $500 / hour for his time and no one could figure out how to get rid of him. It was a complete shit show. This doesn't even touch on some of the major technical blunders they made throughout the years. Just a few small personal anecdotes.
The transportation company was even worse. Literally the worst company I've ever spent time at. It only employees around 15k people, so it's quite a bit smaller than the above insurance company. All signs indicate that this company was well run by the founder. But not by his sons who inherited it. They had a driver turnover rate of over 100%. If they needed 100 drivers for the year, they would have to hire 105 drivers throughout the year. They just constantly churn through brand new drivers, train them up and lose them to other companies through incompetence. One of the consequences of constantly burning through brand new CDL drivers is you have higher accident rates. The project I was brought in to consult on was a driver monitoring system. So if the driver braked too hard or swerved too fast it would create an incident and the driver would have to talk to someone after their route to explain what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. I can't imagine why they had turnover problems! Their entire IT org was run in a similar dysfunctional way.
> we can all aspire to work in a company where people wouldn't be outright lying, nor feel that they needed to.
I think you should consider this might be antithetical to the very concept of a company - although don't misunderstand me to mean I think all companies are "dishonest" (even if many are).
"Working" in a "company" implying making some profit, usually implies something proprietary, which implies some secret, or with-holding of information/resources. So then, most, if not all companies, function off of scarcity-of-information/resources, and probably wouldn't be successful without.
Withholding of information or resources, is awfully close to the next step i.e. "lying". In fact, it is frequently requisite to "lie" i.e. tell half-truths in order to conceal/confuse/distort whereabouts, processes, etc. So while the stated goal of many companies may be transparency, this is actually incompatible with their own goals in many ways. And so this can be seen repeated internally, where "resources" usually imply "promotions", "sales leads", "job responsibilities".
This may explain why nearly every company seems to slowly become worse over time...
Many of the top companies you know were that healthy company once. You basically need to be one at that magical inflection point where the growth will crush you if your engineering is not empowered and on point. Especially back when clouds didn't exist, or were far less featureful, so turning dollars into horizontal growth was not a thing.
The dark secret is that being a healthy company is just a moment, not something a company is at all times. Staying a healthy company as you grown when you are actually successful is very hard, and once the health is gone, good luck regaining it, because now you have a lot of people that thrive in unhealthy environments.
Bang on. This is why I find these other comments which amount to "work in an unhealthy company? Just don't!" to be so naive. You're only ever one departure away from a shakeup which can totally change your work environment. If you aren't equipped or prepared to play the big game, then your options are
I have close to 15y of experience now, and I've mostly only worked on healthy companies - I can think of 1 that wasn't. I have worked in ~8 companies give or take.
I mean, nowhere's perfect, but I don't think I've ever worked anywhere as dysfunctional as the company depicted in the article. That's really quite bad. If the place you work is like that, consider applying elsewhere; this is not typical.
hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago
And perhaps I've just been lucky, but in 25 years in tech I've never seen the level of gross incompetence described in this post. I'm truly envious of the vast majority of senior leaders and execs I've worked with - not because they're geniuses or anything, but because they excel at things that I find very challenging (and I know from my stint in management) and I learned a lot from them. Again, not everyone, but I've certainly had more good bosses than bad.
michaelt|1 year ago
Simply take the norms of one industry, and apply them in a radically different industry.
Take a manager from the construction industry who knows a bricklayer with an assistant can lay 2 tonnes of bricks in an 8 hour shift, and if they didn't it's probably because they took a 3 hour lunch break, and apply it to the software world.
Take a manager from the food service industry, who expects workers to clock in before their shift starts, and that a worker who's even two minutes late is letting down the team and needs immediate attitude adjustment.
Take a manager from precision manufacturing, where Zero Defects is the norm, and "bugs" don't exist, and failing to deliver precisely what was promised is a big embarrassment.
Take a manager from the call centre industry, who thinks if you take a lax attitude to sick leave people will start falsely calling in sick all the time, anyone who calls in sick should be interviewed by HR upon their return.
Take a manager from a paperwork-heavy industry where work is simple but precision is important - like data entry for paper forms, where a worker who makes even minor typos just isn't cut out for the work.
Take a drill sergeant from the army who knows the most important thing in inducting a new employee is yelling in their face and bullying them, thus letting them bond with their peers....
pmlnr|1 year ago
From MBA people.
huygens6363|1 year ago
In one I was sure I was right and in the other I entertained the notion I actual might not be and things are not that simple.
neilv|1 year ago
Despite overall good experiences, I've heard of dysfunction like this article describes, and even worse, in numerous real-world companies. Talking about particular instances can be very delicate when you have insider info. But I think there's enough frequent dysfunction in industry, and some very common tropes that we keep hearing from people at other companies, that senior engineers will tend to be able to immediately recognize some of it.
tstrimple|1 year ago
The insurance company was known for hiring contractors and keeping them on the bench for months to years just in case they needed them. I also remember while working there a particular Big Three consultant kept showing up in people's meetings and never speaking up. No one could figure out what he did or why he was there, but the agency was billing $500 / hour for his time and no one could figure out how to get rid of him. It was a complete shit show. This doesn't even touch on some of the major technical blunders they made throughout the years. Just a few small personal anecdotes.
The transportation company was even worse. Literally the worst company I've ever spent time at. It only employees around 15k people, so it's quite a bit smaller than the above insurance company. All signs indicate that this company was well run by the founder. But not by his sons who inherited it. They had a driver turnover rate of over 100%. If they needed 100 drivers for the year, they would have to hire 105 drivers throughout the year. They just constantly churn through brand new drivers, train them up and lose them to other companies through incompetence. One of the consequences of constantly burning through brand new CDL drivers is you have higher accident rates. The project I was brought in to consult on was a driver monitoring system. So if the driver braked too hard or swerved too fast it would create an incident and the driver would have to talk to someone after their route to explain what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. I can't imagine why they had turnover problems! Their entire IT org was run in a similar dysfunctional way.
justinclift|1 year ago
neilv|1 year ago
For starters, we can all aspire to work in a company where people wouldn't be outright lying, nor feel that they needed to.
smaudet|1 year ago
I think you should consider this might be antithetical to the very concept of a company - although don't misunderstand me to mean I think all companies are "dishonest" (even if many are).
"Working" in a "company" implying making some profit, usually implies something proprietary, which implies some secret, or with-holding of information/resources. So then, most, if not all companies, function off of scarcity-of-information/resources, and probably wouldn't be successful without.
Withholding of information or resources, is awfully close to the next step i.e. "lying". In fact, it is frequently requisite to "lie" i.e. tell half-truths in order to conceal/confuse/distort whereabouts, processes, etc. So while the stated goal of many companies may be transparency, this is actually incompatible with their own goals in many ways. And so this can be seen repeated internally, where "resources" usually imply "promotions", "sales leads", "job responsibilities".
This may explain why nearly every company seems to slowly become worse over time...
hibikir|1 year ago
The dark secret is that being a healthy company is just a moment, not something a company is at all times. Staying a healthy company as you grown when you are actually successful is very hard, and once the health is gone, good luck regaining it, because now you have a lot of people that thrive in unhealthy environments.
000ooo000|1 year ago
Bang on. This is why I find these other comments which amount to "work in an unhealthy company? Just don't!" to be so naive. You're only ever one departure away from a shakeup which can totally change your work environment. If you aren't equipped or prepared to play the big game, then your options are
A) suffer
B) leave and roll the dice on the next joint
antod|1 year ago
aprdm|1 year ago
mewpmewp2|1 year ago
rsynnott|1 year ago