Sorry, the story totally lost me after she was describing the interaction with the FBI. I did not easily take away some conclusion about what she had done wrong or what deep pile of shit she had just created for herself, or what on 2 paths she had just chosen incorrectly, or daringly?
(The paragraph ending, "I trusted the FBI to be good at their jobs." The next paragraph jumps right to generalizations, and I didn't clearly understand from her writing what problem did she just cause without knowing it?)
Without that spelled out, I have a hard time really being on board with the rest of the essay. Actually, it's almost like they're 2 different essays broken at that point above.
Anyone else experience the same issue in reading it?
I think she's saying that it's odd to her, as someone who innately enjoys doing highly consequential work, that other people don't share in her enthusiasm. Similarly, coworkers must find it odd that she doesn't actively dodge such work or deal with it in a robotic, CYA manner, devoid of enthusiasm. Her realization about them and their realization about her are asymmetric in consequence. Even if she judges them it won't affect them, because they're more of the norm (a tribe of like-minded people). However, she stands out, and that makes her life harder in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The occasional "joke" or compliment about her enthusiasm might actually be underhanded trivialization. Clearly she finds the fulfillment to be worth it though.
I assume it takes working for the government to fully understand. Risk averse people pile into cushy government jobs. After they shoehorn themselves into that career, they become even more risk averse. Then every few years they see people take risks and get fired for it. The aggregate effect of this is that not only might they be dismissive towards those whom they perceive as risk-takers, they might be actively hostile towards them. This is for two reasons. One is that the "risks" might pay off in a visible way (more on that later), making the other bureaucrats who are vying for a promotion look bad. The other is that they fear the risk will affect them in some way, and they want no part of it. They imagine either more work on their plate (God forbid) or adverse consequences because of this "naive troublemaker who just doesn't get it." To make it even worse, it’s way easier to just promote the people you like in government. Guess who risk averse people will tend to promote? Guess what type of work is made more visible to senior management? So hard work is not rewarded as well as at corporations, unless it’s a very narrow kind of hard work that adheres to the most literal interpretation of one’s job responsibilities. Those are my 2 cents, I could be way off about the author’s intent there.
Thank you, I had no clue what to get out of the story.
English is my second language and sometimes it feels like a lot of people go out of their way to make their texts long and convoluted because it's cool. Same in my native language but it's another barrier to get through when it's your second or third language.
A quote from Mark Twain - "I apologise for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one".
Distilling an intertwined set of thoughts down into the single point you are trying to make and then expressing that concisely and clearly is difficult and takes effort. When text is convoluted it's usually because the author didn't know how to do anything different or didn't try because they didn't realise it was necessary.
For those of us for whom English is a native language the problem is less, and I enjoyed the colour provided by the FBI story. You're right though that it muddied the waters of what was actually a coherent and interesting point being made. It is a useful lesson to me that clarity is even more important for non-native speakers.
> Those are my 2 cents, I could be way off about the author’s intent there.
You have, however, correctly summarized some aspects of my experiences working for the government, more succinctly and dispassionately than I could have. Thank you.
Difference is big corps sometimes get reorganized or their cash cow falls on hard times and they need to optimise or perish. They don't succeed often but the incentives are usually profit driven - politics are a luxury that big corps can afford to absorb because they are usually entrenched in some position and can afford to accumulate inefficiency.
Government on the other hand is always political as their output isn't valued in market terms but in political points.
So yeah - from my experience - big corps (especially those working with government) can be political, bureaucratic, etc. But it's standard operating procedure in government work.
It's definitely a continuum depending on industry.
In more monopolistic areas (insurance, banking), my experience has been closer to government. In more cutthroat areas (tech, retail), it's been on the other end of spectrum.
I've seen this happens in big companies as well.
The bigger the company, the closer it resembles a small government.
Bureaucracy is a function of size.
This is why we should focus on increasing economy decentralisation if we want less bureaucracy and less waste of resources.
The main problem is that, once you grow to a certain level, you're big enough too lobby the government into maintaining your market position and be bailed out by the government if you fail.
Thank you very much for taking the time to explain this from your interpretation. It helped me understand more about jobs is large organizations I never though of before.
She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with.
She sees herself as someone who enjoys the trappings of a job well done and doesn't mind her slow progress of ladder-climbing because she's brave and takes risks that her superiors won't reward with promotions.
I liked and identified with the writing in the second half, and it sounds like she had a good scenario to act as a substrate for her thoughts, but I don't think she did a good job merging the two.
Like you said, they feel like two distinct pieces which got bolted together. I found myself with the scroll bar near the bottom and wondered how she was going to tie back in to the original story, and was disappointed to see that she never did.
> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with.
I get that this appears to be the conclusion the author wants you to draw. But what's missing, to me, is that she has provided no evidence whatever to support it. The only evidence we have about her boss is his reaction--and I can see a boss with a high tolerance for risk saying exactly what she describes her boss as saying, as a kind of whimsical recognition that the very thing that makes her a valuable employee is that she will take on these things that none of his other employees will take on. So on the only evidence she gives us about her boss, it could go either way.
What I expected to see (and apparently you did too), at some point later in the article, was some kind of follow-up to that specific story she told--some way in which either her boss did or didn't support her in some subsequent development related to what she had already told. And there wasn't one.
The missing piece of the puzzle is that we never meet the idiot manager in the story. She's in an organizational situation where her team has oversight over a team in the government implementing on a project but does not have the ability to directly set policy, constrain goals, or otherwise apply direct managerial leverage. The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Matt Cutts, meanwhile, is the head of her department, and also has no managerial oversight over the team she just called federal law enforcement on.
Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).
...the team she just called federal law enforcement on.
That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.
It's not precisely that she called law enforcement on them, poor choice of words on my part. It's more that, if you will, she turned the "eye of Sauron" on the project. If the team she had oversight on thought they were going to meet deadlines with open security holes, having the FBI actively looking at what they're doing pretty much torpedoes that hope.
It seems like the team wanted it torpedoed as well. Every higher up was aware but tied in bureaucracy. The team basically washed their hands and tried to deliver in order to pass the buck. Messing with things codified in federal law seems like a very poor career choice.
Your obsession with the token Racists in this essay is very funny. AND Sexism? There's an interesting conversation about "Humanity" happening, isn't there?
We have literal 17 year olds hacking the twitter account of Obama and a ton of other high profile people.
How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat? You need only one marginally competent one to wreck your entire platform.
>You need only one marginally competent one to wreck your entire platform.
Yes exactly. Ultimately security is deeply involved with threat modeling. It is likely that the author's boss did not prioritize her pet security issues because they were a low risk in the threat model.
>How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat?
Domain expertise. Frankly I am somewhat surprised that people with what is apparent to be a television soap opera level of understanding of american dissident activity make public posts on the topic with the confidence they do on here. Not you, of course, but others.
Unfortunately, the most believable interpretation of this story is very boring office politics: Our author, having failed to make a case to her boss, drummed up some internet post in an attempt to get her way. We've all known people like this... they have varying amounts of self-awareness. It is characteristic of such actors to manufacture exactly the sort of attack they imagine to be the most relevant. This is likely to be such a case. What gives her away is that this is some fantastical story that makes sense only in pop culture: if there is even one WS cyber attack on an american federal platform for every 10,000 chinese attacks I will eat my hat and livestream it. These are simply not people with competence in the field of cyber security.
I would also say that assuming that white suprematists are inherently stupid is wrong.
It takes a certain amount of rough intelligence to go against the modern norms (I.e. to justify your beliefs to others, to read just the right books) to keep these beliefs.
Thinking they are “just” idiots is an entirely wrong take if you are trying to play against them.
It’s like saying that Putin is an idiot because he’s against gay rights in Russia. But if he was really stupid he would probably be dead by now.
She never actually outright called her boss an idiot. The most literal interpretation of the title is "if you feel this way about your boss, then here is why you may feel that way." I certainly hope that was her intended meaning, because the counterfactual is very risque. I did think the title was unnecessary though, and the naming.
To bait a story with such a spectacular plot, the author could have us reading tenuous managerial pontification for pages on end, just to get the juicy revelation at the end.
That the narrative payoff never comes is such an infuriating let down, you actually end up confused over what the heck you just read!
I think the fact that the story comes with bespoke cover art just serves to raise expectations even further.
> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault.
We're talking about Matt Cutts here who took what was likely a massive pay cut to work for the government after a long career at Google. Neither does this inference seem credible, nor does the characterization of him as "idiot manager" in the article
> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with.
I seriously doubt that it was the intent of the author to accuse Matt Cutts as someone who spun blame onto others and avoided responsibility.
Yeah, it's not clear unless one understands what USDS does.
USDS is the federal government's first attempt to recognize the fact that the United States has no cross-department best practices for software engineering at the federal level. It's an organization tasked with running roughshod over various software engineering projects, but in its first iteration, it served an advisory role, and had no "teeth." So it ran into a lot of challenges where it would try to provide best practices for various government orgs, and the orgs, convinced that they knew best because they've been doing this for decades (wrong) already, could just ignore them.
I believe they have some teeth now, and it may perhaps be because a couple of interactions like this occurred. I know Mr. Cutts himself built up a bit of a reputation as a skullcracker, because it turns out he was quite good at figuring out how to apply bureaucratic leverage (mostly by figuring out how individual team members were incentivized and then aligning the relevant incentives to make them care about getting the job done the right way).
I know what you mean, but no. It wasn't that she had done something wrong, it was just amazing (to her manager) that she had done something so (apparently) brave as reaching out to the FBI. The point of the essay is -- some people are brave in this way, and some aren't.
I'm not sure if it's a good essay, but what I loved was the way she described connecting people as "just" doing her job. She didn't see it as brave. I'm not sure what degree I would need to take, or what job title I would have to have, to see "making connections" as my job.
Connecting people, she'll gravitate to being a natural leader. You could say she might already be a leader, and she even recognize people can act as a leader without having the position.
People are cut out for different things. You have "brave" teachers, and you have "brave" managers. We all recognize them, but don't appreciate them as people enough, even when these breeds are rare gems.
Even for someone shy, with experience and hard work, one might end up becoming a death-defying samurai.
What the text doesn't recognize is that many people just don't feel all that much or have that much empathy. So there's less of a spur to actually do the work to become a natural leader or go into enough depth.
> it was just amazing (to her manager) that she had done something so (apparently) brave as reaching out
I don't think that's the case, since Matt Cutts kinda had the same role in Google before joining USDS. Or maybe he's gotten used to unexceptional employees there.
Yes! I was at the edge of my seat wanting to know what happened with the FBI. I expected her to loop back to that story at the end to tie the two threads of the post together and explain how they relate. But then it just ended. I really liked both threads but feel a bit disappointed that I don’t have closure on the story.
Same for me. I feel like the essay makes some good points about the type of people who gravitate towards middle management, but I'm unable to make the connections myself because the essay jumps around. I'm still confused -- is Matt Cutts the "idiot running my engineering org"?
I think this could and should be a lot clearer, but I doubt it.
When you're bad mouthing your former boss, you usually don't state their name. Even better if you can leave the circumstances ambiguous enough that few people can guess.
If you do name them, that's scorched earth. I'd expect a lot of clear anger directed towards Matt if he was the idiot.
So I read it as her having a good working relationship with him, he was just impressed how much certain scenarios always involved her.
Yes, I also didn't think there was much ambiguity as to her relationship with her boss - a risk averse manager wouldn't have laughed off her situation or enabled her to continue on with her continuous outreach - she would've been deemed long ago as a trouble maker to confine. The point of him laughing it off anecdote is to show the trust in their relationship.
My read is that Cutts is several levels above her (all the way at the top, perhaps), and by contacting the FBI she was doing the job someone in the hierarchy between them was supposed to be doing but avoiding for some reason or other. And the "only you" comment by Cutts indicated that it wasn't just the people in line between him and her, but all over the organization that would avoid contacting the FBI.
The first part of the essay was a very interesting view into bureaucracy and overcoming it via personal connections. The second part seemed to be very hand-wavy armchair-psychologist-esque. The thesis seems to be that:
- Some/many workers care more about job stability, as opposed to making a difference at work
- Such workers are suffering from "real psychological damage"
- They are constantly hounded by imposter syndrome, because they aren't respected by anyone else, and they know it
- They often end up as senior bureaucrats/leaders, because of their risk aversion, and because they are trying to overcompensate for their low self-esteem and psychological damage
- They also "end up in startups more often than you might expect" (which seems ironic since startups are far more risky than being at a BigCorp)
At the risk of putting myself out there, I suspect the above conclusions are quite a reach.
The part that they "end up in startups more often than you might expect" was a fascinating line for me and one that resonates with me quite well based on my experience.
I've often been shocked by how conservative an unprofitable/stagnant growth startups will be with engineering time. I've seen growing teams locked in incremental product/platform investment with no major new customer features in the roadmap.
I wondered where the conservatism came from given that at a business level the status quo was failure. This seems like a plausible explanation.
Yeah, I've been quite puzzled too, and figured perhaps they were anecdotal but perhaps they are not. I really like this definition of engineering process as "a decision making process (often iterative) in which the basic sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources optimally to meet a stated objective" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_design_process) and have met too many, by their unwillingness to commit and take ownership of a decision, pretty much stall the entire engineering development progress.
> ...he closes the door and takes out his badge. “I have to show you this first.”
This job is not near the level of encountering FBI interviews as an actually critical part of work. "How about we circle back when I have legal counsel present" is the least perilous interaction at this point.
> “Oh wait, I forgot something. Could you raise your right hand for a minute?” Confused. I did so. “Everything you told me today is true to the best of your knowledge?”
I mean, the badge part was enough. The 18 U.S.C. § 1001 anvil has already been suspended over your head for 6 years. This is simply cruel.
Always lawyer up. As we’ve learned in the last few years, the FBI loves to catch people “lying” to agents as a precursor to persecuting them for political reasons.
I love how commenters on HN and elsewhere often make the blithe recommendation to "lawyer up" as if normal people can just speed dial some white-shoe senior partner and get them on a $10k/m retainer stat.
Unless you are sitting on some real family wealth this idea that you can just "lawyer up" against the friggin' FBI is just laughable. Might as well advise people to "always call the president and get him on side".
"Always"! Like it's checking tire pressure before a long drive or something. "Oh yeah I always bring a couple of $1000/hr lawyers with me to important meetings. Better safe than sorry. What, you don't?"
Well maybe there was an annular region there in the 90s when the FBI's mission was still in-between 'try to assassinate black activists', and 'give fake bombs to muslim teenagers and then arrest them for it'.
I don't see how the title or the concluding statements are justified by this story whatsoever. And publicly blasting a former manager for this when their described behavior doesn't support it at all? I don't know who the author is so maybe there's some context I'm supposed to know, but this just seems distasteful, on top of the confusing writing
The story describes a bureaucracy -- an organization of people averse of risk and therefore irresponsible: they did everything to be able to say "it is not my fault". They didn't tried to find a way to stop attacks.
Big bosses were paralyzed by the threat of becoming responsible for a coming failure, and were unable to think straight. They didn't even try to think about avoiding failure. They though about keeping themselves away from risk of becoming responsible of failure. Completely incompetent people.
The story with FBI shows that she did try to solve the problem, and that she took the risk of million years in a jail.
> this just seems distasteful, on top of the confusing writing
I agree, it is confusing. It is not enough to read the article, one needs to stop after reading and think. It took to me five minutes to understand. The title is the most confusing thing: it meant to be a generalized question from an average person, not a question the author asks about her boss, but it is not obvious.
I believe she was using the concrete experience to speculate on why she ended up being different enough from the rest of her peers that her manager could know that it “could only be her”. Escalating this issue to the FBI went beyond what was called from her.
You have grasped all the points. Yes, there's a break at that point. Anecdote's over, time to go into the next part. No, she didn't do anything particularly daring or shitstorm-causing; in fact it was a fairly obvious thing to do, but things like that tend to be perceived by cowards as too risky, so she or someone like her always ends up being the one to do it.
I think the point of the story was to demonstrate what non-risk-averseness looks like. It was probably hard to find a way to make that explicit because it's basically a form of bragging.
Fucking amazing. This was sitting right under my nose my entire life and I sensed it but didn't understand it. Now somebody finally wrote it down. I consider myself pretty courageous or at least indifferent to consequences (which may or may not be the same thing), but yeah that always seems to be the missing or limiting ingredient in every situation. Not that I'm biased or anything! Anyway this is going to be one of those rare days when I read something that's going to be a life-changer. And those don't happen that often at my ripe old age.
The conclusions are painted with too broad a brush in my view. People don’t split binary into thrill-seekers and conflict-avoiders, it’s more of a spectrum, and people can exhibit both qualities in different circumstances.
In my opinion the real difference in leadership style derives from theory x (top-down) vs theory y (bottom-up). If you haven’t read up on that you definitely should. I’ve noticed I can work with managers regardless of their risk profile, but I do not thrive under theory x leadership because it is too stifling.
Well, theory Y vs X probably isn't broad enough here. The article depicted a fairly complex management scenario, therefore broad strokes are appropriate.
The young-uns didn't get much out of the article, it seems. If you've been around a certain amount and variety of management failures or conflicts, you can see how much depends on the personality dimension of risk aversion. We often need to step back to understand that being courageous is rarely valued outside the military.
Maybe that's because you were enveloped in it. It's equally hard to see how weird your culture could look to others, until you actually visit some of those others and watch them operate, think it's weird, and then realise the feeling is probably reciprocal. For me a case in point was how a society could function without being very proscriptive, because where I live (Australia) where everything is that way. You will occasionally see people say Australia is a nanny state because the way we are expected to behave is often written down, and often policed.
One way that stands out is road rules. The French tourism operators have cottoned onto this, and plonk us ozzies by the bus load in front of the Arc de Triomphe for 1/2 an hour. And we just sit there memorised, unable to tear our eyes away. The fact that any OECD country would operate like this defies our preconceptions. The fact that such uncontrolled chaos actually works defies belief, it's like we've visited a different Universe.
And so it is with workplaces. I worked in a series of companies where the operating assumption was that if you weren't trying new things and failing occasionally, you weren't trying hard enough. (Actually, a more reasonable description of the expectation is you must be racking up successes at a reasonable rate. But as everyone knows you can't rack up successes without failing occasionally.) It's been that way for my entire working life.
Until a year ago that is, when I the company worked for was purchased. And then it was like I was in France, watching the Arc de Triomphe. The decisions seemed inexplicable, the words used to justify them like "enterprise grade" were literally meaningless to me. I went through denial, thinking a much bigger and clear successful company couldn't operate in ways much different to what I learned worked over the course of decades. Then confusion, after acknowledging it clearly did operate on different rules, and those rules must somehow be understandable to all the players, except me, apparently. And then, finally, a month or two ago the oh shit moment, "this isn't about the best decision for the corporation, it's about minimising personal responsibility and risk". Just like the article says. How unoriginal that thought turned out to be. Unlike you I was oil watching water make its way into my world. It wasn't my unchallenged normal. It was in my face, sudden, and painful. In that situation I could not be a slow boiled frog; this thing demanded an explanation.
After that moment of clarity, understanding the games being played was much easier. Approaching a problem with "I'll see what I can do without bothering too many people. Experiment a little, try 3, and ask the users I inflicted in what worked out best" is utterly untenable. Firstly, I've actually chosen something without consulting _all_ the stakeholders first (or wasting their time in fk'ing endless meetings). Heaven forbid - that would mean I'm clearly responsible for the outcome. I can't palm it off as "the committee" made the decision, or cast the decision as a shared responsibility. This choice to spend the time, effort and expense is all on me. Then there's the little matter of 2 out of the 3 experiments could be painted as failures by enemies. And finally, by actually letting others way in on which experiment was best, how on earth could I justify my "the decider man who gets paid the big bucks" position. In this process I'm little more than the bunny doing the leg work. Project must be my idea, with all the decisions for the good outcomes owned by me.
No, the way this must work is hours of meetings speaking in tongues. Hidden criticisms, white anting the existing setup, but nothing overtly back stabby like "this is shit - it's costing us money". The initial task is to create the politics for change while minimising the risk to me by keeping a small profile, then once the winds for change are strong I can sail in with the magic bullet and vanquish the remaining naysayers.
But this magic bullet can't be created by me - that would make me unquestionably responsible for the outcome. No, there must be wriggle room. It must be something purchased from outside, someone to share the burden of responsibility. That has several advantages.
Firstly, I don't have to sell it. The vendor has a well oiled sales team that gives me all the materials I need. Brochures, slick rehearsed demos where nothing goes wrong, written guarantees with SLA's no less (that offer to refund the $10 you have paid for the service was down for the day and stopped 50 people working). As I have recently discovered that well oiled sales team will be happy to be my mercenaries, using their connections (they are sales after all) to have quiet words here and there. (Strangely, it hadn't occurred to me that this would happen in the corporate world.)
To add to the air of enterprise grade it can't be cheap either - I don't want to be responsible for risking a few bucks for years by using a fly by nighter. No, if this company fails, no one could have seen it coming, certainly not me. It's irrelevant that it's a commodity like an internet link I could get from anywhere if my el-cheapo failed, as it's the failure in my choice of vendor (because it was undeniably solely my choice!) that reflects on me.
The second advantage is if it has hairs, that's the clients fault for not seeing through the demo's. We showed them what they were getting after all. And better yet, I can't fix the hairs, so I can't accumulate responsibility for fixes that don't work. The specification for those fixes must come from the client, and of course they bear full responsibility. I just sign the cheques. In fact I can probably avoid paying for the fixes out of my budget.
The third advantage is it came with a big legal document, so if all turns to shit we have recourse, and perusing that isn't my job - it's legals. Never mind the cost or perusing it is prohibitive. Never mind the vendor's legal team had years of time to fill it with more holes than swiss cheese, whereas I demanded an answer from our legal team in a week. The failure to obtain recourse can't be mine - I did a perfectly good job in getting the paperwork signed. Legal said so, and now it’s their job to see it through.
I reckon I could play the game now, if I could bring myself to do it. The problem is unlike the Arc de Triomphe, I see how it would work in anyone's favour, except mine. But I guess if I can't see that's what matters most, I'm missing the point entirely.
Right now I’m not playing it, and as the article says those who don’t play by those rules are treated as a threat. That’s a new development. To see it written on hacker news as truism when I’ve just learnt it after being in the workforce for decades is more than a little unsettling. I even didn’t notice it was happening a few weeks ago. I was probably just too wet behind the ears to notice, but in addition now we’ve outright rejected their “enterprise grade” solutions for something that is cheaper and clearly gives better service, and worse we have done it twice, in quick succession.
Now reputations are on the line and the game is on. My supreme confidence they are indeed a bunch of idiots naturally makes me believe if this is allowed to continue there is only one possible outcome - the accumulated successes will be noticed and the failed experiments eventually forgotten as that has always panned out. That is surely my hubris speaking; hardly something that could be taken seriously. But still too many successes could undermine authority, and risk personal reputations. Risks can’t be tolerated.
I’ll concede the outcome of this type of stoush would usually be a foregone conclusion, the big company culture will always squash the new acquisition. But in this particular case the big company wasn’t doing so well, the newish CEO recognised he had a bureaucracy problem and bought us to shake things up. So there’s hope. Maybe.
In a way you're better off than I am -- I'm already accustomed to being surrounded by these assholes. (Didn't say I accept it though.) Keep the faith buddy, seems like simply doing things right ought to give the doer a huge advantage, right? Well we can debate whether that's true in the real world, or we can just refuse to believe it's otherwise and see what happens. You seem to be in a go-for-broke situation. You probably need to reach past several layers of shitty middle managers to reach the CEO who agrees with you that things ought to simply be done right. Get some support from the top. Or if you don't succeed at that, maybe you have to get the hell out of there. Obviously getting used to the "new normal" isn't an attractive option - life's too short. But that's coming from the middle. Those people don't like reformers, but they do respond well to having their asses kicked by their supposed superiors!
> Actually, a more reasonable description of the expectation is you must be racking up successes at a reasonable rate. But as everyone knows you can't rack up successes without failing occasionally.
This is a big question that is unlikely to be an easy answer, but what can you tell us about how your previous organisation incentivised this behaviour and produced a productive culture? Also - how big was it (these things become harder to do the larger your org gets)?
The article starts with "This is one of my favorite USDS stories:"
Such a hassle when authors just assume everybody is also in their bubble and know all thr acronyms. I'm not in or from the U.S. I have no clue what USDS is. Bad start to introduce me to your article.
> Such a hassle when authors just assume everybody is also in their bubble and know all thr acronyms
Yes, totally agree.
And for those who say 'well you got Google don't you?' or similar, my searches found United States Department of State and United States Digital Service. Both of these seem plausible but who knows.
This is one of the reasons I hate acronyms so much, they have a place when definitely put in context (previous conversation, or spelled out first), but if it's an article (kind of paywalled btw, but that's another thing) and not follow up on something nor quick letter to someone, as article it is designed to target broader audience who are out of context what it will be about (especially with that clickbaiting title) it has no place for acronyms right from the start and so ambiguous ones.
The whole thing looks like a rushed rant written to get some views on Medium and not to share "favorite story".
> When you are in a work situation where you are respected and admired, that is often its own reward. If you don’t have that, the components of your job that give you a sense of value and satisfaction are all connected directly to the career ladder. What is your title? What is the prestige value of your projects?
My current official job title is "Code Contributor". I was quite proud of coming up with something that would be evergreen even if as my projects changed, yet emphasized what I consider key.
But it seems to confuse people that it doesn't have "Senior", "Lead", "Chair", or "Manager" in it. Maybe I should just stick all those at the end? :)
About 20 years ago I was a newly minted CS grad and a new software engineer. I told someone a lot older than me what I do and she said "Oh, that's a great start!". Which threw me because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do next. That's what I wanted to do. Today I am a "programmer", because I realized software isn't really engineering. That's still what I want to be doing today, and I still don't know what she thinks I'm supposed to do next.
> because I realized software isn't really engineering
Competently writing software will involve applying engineering principles and a project management methodology: things like TDD, design-patterns, your system's architecture - they're all part of software-engineering.
Writing software is "programming" in the same way that writing a bestseller novel is "typing" or doing mathematics is putting fancy symbols on paper.
Couldn't agree more... and to add my own thoughts, why the heck are we so hellbent on dropping the engineering part from software engineering?
I get that it is a discipline that allows one to self-learn up the ladder to the title but why the hate? I do just as much highly-complex/critical work as my other engineering friends, so why is what I do not engineering all of a sudden?
I am aware of a few people in my social-circle who put "Software artisan" or "Purveyor of artisanal technology experiences" (etc) on their LinkedIn profile - so I believe you.
And who is the idiot? It was really interesting until it became extremely general and vague. It almost makes it sound like Matt Cutts is the idiot since he's the only specific manager mentioned.
She kind of talks about it in the last paragraph. I don't think she was talking about someone specifically (although she may have somebody in mind) but in general.
"Eventually you end up spending all your time trying to look busy, avoid responsibility and save face by scapegoating others. "
"The end result of this is that it often feels like everyone at the top is maliciously incompetent."
This, according to her, is how you end up with an idiot running an engineering org.
Short summary: Woznaik vs Jobs. The technical guy vs. the smooth talker.
Longer summary:
Some people are perpetual resume builders. They want quick promotion, bigger job titles, higher salary...
The ladder growth is their reward. And they'll avoid anything that jeopardizes their career path. They'll grab the glory for good stuff and push the blame for bad stuff.
The hacker, risk taker on the other hand does not optimize for career growth. Does difficult, critical stuff often without knowing that what they've accomplished is actually a big deal.
Even when know they've accomplished something big, they won't toot their own horns. They do it for the 'love of the game.'
I don't get that at all. Woz vs Jobs is not an apt analogy at all. Jobs was never risk averse. He saw what could be done and how to make money off of it. Apple is a Trillion dollar company as a result and Woz is a billionaire.
To build on that: Jobs was absolutely someone who did everything "for the love of the game." It's just that the game that interested him was marketing and design, not engineering.
I can't imagine Jobs as someone motivated put his head down and do busywork to collect a brass nameplate with a fancy title after twenty years.
I don't know much about if jobs pushed blame, but I read a book written by someone who worked closely with him. He actually had a really great talent which was understanding the consumer. He knew how to market and sell the products and forced through changes to do so.
> Fleeing death doesn’t just hurt the people they throw under the bus, it also hurts them. They want to be respected by their employees and often know they are not. They want to be admired and often know they are not. They also feel guilty screwing people over to survive.
Wow, I never considered there must exist some people who know they are bad at their job, feel bad about it, and yet have to continue doing it to keep paying the bills. This has to be true considering the sheer number of people employed by large organizations.
I would be in the same boat as you a year ago. But I since found myself in a job I was definitely not good at. It sucked very badly. Amusingly enough, most of the reason it sucked was because it was completely dominated by bad faith actors busy keeping their jobs at any cost. Fortunately, I was let go from that job before my probation period ended. Having been in a bad job, it truly feels terrible. It causes stress and you feel like you are always running to catch up but you will never actually make it. It is not difficult to see how this could lead to very negative feelings about the politics of one's workplace as well.
According to the author, it’s not just to keep paying the bills. It seems like a lack of self-awareness (or maybe courage) prevents them from realizing that avoiding risks results in self loathing.
all of them know. some of them invent and believe intricate fantasies in which everybody is faking it, nobody is comptent, and is actually secretly behaving like them.. to justify their behavior.
> "No one else gets into these situations. It’s always you. If someone had told me that one of my employees was hunting white supremacists with the FBI I wouldn’t have to ask who it was because, of course it’s you. It’s always you. Why is it always you?"
> The way you process risk and handle fear has more impact on what kind of career you have than any other single factor.
This actually plays out different than you may think.
The likely reason the author is the one who always ends up in these situations is because they eschew fear and are willing to take on difficult issues. Most other people, rationally, run from those issues.
From my personal experience, this actually works out well for everyone usually because people like me who are happy to wander into difficult things are doing it precisely because those things don't have other power players trying to lord over them. Everyone is running from it, so you can get a good amount of independent autonomy in dealing with it.
>The end result of this is that it often feels like everyone at the top is maliciously incompetent.
What's really going on is that a torrent of digital change is being unleashed on the world. That change is significantly changing the skills needed by leaders.
I'm not sure if the flood of wildly successful leaders having a technical background is correlation or causation, but I am looking forward to knowing someday.
I share your opinion, but I think the digital change leads to more data-driven decision-making which in turn tends to highlight where nothing is actually getting done. In effect, digital change exposes the people who like big titles but don't actually like doing anything. In my personal opinion, this is also why those people prefer voice chats over written or recorded communication. When proof of work is open and transparent, it becomes glaringly obvious when your record is empty.
Someone downvoted you for this comment, but that was the wrong action. I am personally skeptical you are right about digital change exposing bad leadership. But I value your ideas here and think it is a shame to see them obscured because they appear controversial to others.
It's really hard to take a positive story away from the FBI interaction. Accidentally ending up in an FBI interview without a lawyer present or briefing you on how to avoid perjury is the stuff of nightmares.
Her "mistake" was assuming everyone in the federal government is on the same side, including the FBI and whatever org USDS had oversight on in this story.
> The way we fought the bureaucracy was to build networks of people whose goals were aligned and whose skill sets or resources were compatible.
During my stint in a bureaucractic organisation I always considered this types of people as a huge part of the problem.
Instead of being candid about what they wanted, open to dialog, and making the whole system better, they forced through ideas that aligned with their own world view via back channels.
This meant that instead of getting the best outcomes, we got the ideas pushed by people who had longest tenure or were the most political.
It's a fresh take on "The Peter Principle" [1] and the author even references the formulaic expressions of it (if not by name). I found the article refreshing because it kind of backs into the topic by pondering an inquiry that might sloppily be expressed as, "I wonder why I have not yet succumbed to complacent fiefdom-ism?"
This may seem obvious to older people that have navigated highly structured organizations for a while, but it's a good insight.
I've used a similar "bushido vs bureaucracy" dichotomy in the past. Leadership necessitates accepting that failures will occur, planning on how to handle them, and learning from them. Sadly in the US at least, we've had decades of implicit training otherwise and it shows up as a paucity of adults in the room when problems that aren't bullshittable come around.
The "don't rock the boat" mentality that makes people accept all kinds of personal risk aversion and cognitive dissonance is rife in any organization that is putting money in people's wallet. Delaying the consequences of any decision or event until after your last paycheck works when enough people buy into it, sort of a meta-Ponzi scheme of responsibility that facilitates the real Ponzi scheme of getting paid today on tomorrow's bill.
I’d put money on this lady coming from a privileged background. Story was a person who works recreationally being disgusted by having to interact with all the filthy proles who need to put food on the table.
Not necessarily. She was a talented, young, attractive, single person who was in the adventure phase of her career, hopping from job to job around the world with no expenses of note, working in government with older staid stable people.
what are you talking about? I’ve had to prioritize money over meaningful work since my early twenties due to complex and upsetting elder care issue. Adventure phase? Get real. If your life contains an adventure phase please stop and acknowledge you are in some overwhelmingly small group of extreme privilege.
I think you're overstaying things a bit, but you do have a point.
She probably has never experienced poverty, and no doubt believes (probably correctly!) that she could easily walk out and get another job for a similar (or higher) wage.
I think she contacted the FBI in the expectation that they would just do a preliminary, informal assessment of whether an investigation should be started, without realizing they would immediately start one upon her contact.
I am all for leaders taking risks but talking to law enforcement without a lawyer or without contacting HR first (for professional matters) would probably be outside my limits.
US Digital Service (whom this person worked for) is under/within the Executive Office if the President. USDS folks have latitude others do not (this is from coffee with those who had a tour of duty and from interviews for a role within).
Some people ( like Marianne ) have the capability to stick around a bit longer and effect much greater change. Its exhausting, but there is a strong community that helps you make it though the really hard days.
My friends at USDS have indicated to me it's a highly politicized agency. (Though it's unclear to me what exactly they have been doing for the past ~4 years, besides releasing a new sans font.)
Awesome article. Every now and then someone introduces a concept that helps me understand the world a little more. Shitty out of control managers running from anxiety and death. The idea that being in charge of a team where you can't control it being like being in charge of your life but not in control of it...amazing. How you deal with that inherant anxiety is key. Thanks.
This is a good analysis of a very common issue in organizations that do not actively fight this. I wonder if there are tools to counter this effectively though, such as evaluating managers based on how they are perceived by well-calibrated reports, or collegial evaluation of manager performance
Her observations on risk are really right on. It helps explain why so many incompetent people with sociopathic risk taking psychologies end up in senior positions while incredibly capable people hit retirement in middle-org positions.
> If someone had told me that one of my employees was hunting white supremacists with the FBI I wouldn’t have to ask who it was because, of course it’s you. It’s always you.
This is obviously heavily embellished by the sort of person who’s really into Harry Potter as an adult.
Good post. Lots of realness here about the nature of employees and the employed... Also confirms some of my negative beliefs about the government so I love it for validating my biases!
hehehe. chuckle. it's like giant orgs make an art out of dysfunction, more sophisticated and sophisticated levels of dysfunction. as if refinement of dysfunction to its highest potential was the ultimate aim.
Because capitalism is broken. And the SV work ethos always has been, to a large extent, part collective hallucination, part massive con game. Whereby the vast majority of us are shoehorned into donating our souls, our creative potential and time away from our families -- for the benefit of the comparatively very few who actually call the shots.
In this context, the real question to ask is: why are you still working there?
I feel like the author is really clueless and has never worked in a startup.
You can't not get work done and survive in a startup. There's too much visibility into who is doing what to hide. That's not true in the US Government. I've met lots of losers in government who haven't done a bit of useful work in years.
The whole story seems like a concocted ... "oh look how badass and cool I am" scenario. The author is so full of herself.
Speaking of USDS, how come in August of 2020 we _still_ don't have a government COVID19 website that doesn't suck? One that's trustworthy, that has accurate data, and decent statistical analysis.
Maybe you guys should look into doing your jobs instead of "fighting white supremacists" on taxpayer dime?
> Maybe you guys should look into doing your jobs instead of "fighting white supremacists" on taxpayer dime?
Wait a moment, you can argue about whose purview exactly this is, but are you saying that fighting white supremacists isn't a good use of taxpayer dollars? It's certainly a cause to which I'd be happy to know my taxes were going.
We already pay for law enforcement and the judicial branch. USDS should be handling technology problems (which US government has a ton of), not be political vigilantes on my dime.
> We already pay for law enforcement and the judicial branch. USDS should be handling technology problems (which US government has a ton of), not be political vigilantes on my dime.
Ah, yes, that was the argument that I hoped you were making—based on purview (these people aren't in the business of fighting white supremacists), not on whether fighting white supremacists is itself a good idea. Note that, initially, the white supremacism was irrelevant—the issue was just that a government website (which definitely does fall under the purview of USDS) was expected to come under attack—and that, to the extent that it was relevant, this USDS employee immediately reached out to the FBI, whose job this definitely should be. The article gives no indication that any more USDS resources were spent on this than the author's being interviewed by the FBI.
Why do people still use the term white supremacists to imply some nefarious group? The term has lost all value and is now used in mainstream best selling books and media to describe every white person. It literally now has no meaning and whenever anyone uses it I just think they're hunting the boogey man.
> Why do people still use the term white supremacists to imply some nefarious group? The term has lost all value and is now used in mainstream best selling books and media to describe every white person.
What is an example of mainstream best selling books or media that use it that way? (I mean which specifically, not just in the sense of "it feels that it's used so much that it might as well mean that.")
I'd argue, even if you are right about this useage, that "white supremacist" should still be used to describe white supremacist activities—responding to the dilution of a word by refusing to use it at all does no-one any good—and that activities properly so described should be regarded as nefarious.
Based on a quick search through it, White Fragility mostly but not completely avoids the term "white supremacist" (as applied to people), instead using "white supremacy" or "white supremacist culture". In that context, she says:
> White supremacy in this context does not refer to individual white people and their individual intentions or actions but to an overarching political, economic, and social system of domination.
Note the specific disclaimer about not so referring to individuals. In this context, it is true that much of the world is part of a white supremacist culture. As the author says:
> … within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do.
Pointing this out does not, I think, dilute the term; it rather insists on confronting the fact that "but I'm not racist" is not a sufficient response to claims of systemic racism.
(The author does use the phrases "explicit white supremacists" and "avowed white supremacists", thus referring to individuals; but, as far as I can tell, she does not define the term, and I think that it is clear that she means by this to separate out people with overt white supremacist ideas from those of us who are merely a part of the culture—a clarification, rather than a dilution.)
The word racist has lost all meaning? Could you provide evidence of that? I anecdotally still see the word used often enough and correctly. No doubt it is sometimes overused, but considering there are a lot of racists in the USA and that racism is a currently an important social issue the USA is widely discussing on a very regular basis, one would expect to see the word used a lot and for people to be actively trying to work out what is and what is not racism.
(The paragraph ending, "I trusted the FBI to be good at their jobs." The next paragraph jumps right to generalizations, and I didn't clearly understand from her writing what problem did she just cause without knowing it?)
Without that spelled out, I have a hard time really being on board with the rest of the essay. Actually, it's almost like they're 2 different essays broken at that point above.
Anyone else experience the same issue in reading it?