As the company grows a certain proportion of new engineers - by law of averages - will be self motivated to seek out and understand how things work, what makes the company tick and how people go about getting things done. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to acquire this knowledge - for they will be standard bearers in carrying the culture forward to the next generation. Record videos and documetns from greybeards and leaders on war stories, architecture, general rules for making decisions and really any other topic that is germane to how culture is defined.
Circumscribed of course as my opinion only, and what I've seen in my career.
The example argument is very weak, the fictional organization has a goal of "increasing revenues and profitability", isn't that a tautology? I mean are there any firms where that would not be the goal. Any reasonably competent leadership will go atleast a few levels deeper and have goals that have demonstrable product outcomes, which translate to increased profit or sales. At least that has been my experience. I'd like to understand if there are any orgs out there with such simplistic goals as stated in the article.
Eg. A company looking to divest certain products or divisions would not be looking to increase revenue. A company looking to improve margins by eliminating low margin or even money losing products may not seek to improve revenue for a certain year.
And the increasing profitability part should be pretty obvious. The vast majority of startups that make it to the HN pages don’t even attempt to make a profit, never mind increasing it.
You’re joking right? I honestly can’t tell if you’re trying to be ironic or if your working experience is limited to some sort of management nirvana.
In case it’s worth stating, yes there are firms where these sort of simplistic impact statements make it into OKRs and leave much to the imagination about what real desirable outcomes are.
I don’t mean it negatively. My own experience is limited to firms with no commitment to stated goals, vague goals (grow and profit), and leadership that want to dictate outputs vs outcomes. So unfortunately through my eyes the parent read like satire.
I appreciate that you didn't mean it like that but it does read quite disrespectfully. That can happen sometimes though, unfortunately I know that all too well! I'm also a bit touchy of late as so many comments on HN lack basic respect, it's not people getting into an argument and getting too heated, it's the very first comment people reply with, so perhaps I'm overreacting.
I think it makes reading the chain easier, I had the exact same thought reading the message that was responded to. Knowing that the chain recognises this thought and tries to addresss it helps me absorb the rest of the discourse.
I think that’s fair enough too. I’m not saying it can’t be said, just that it looked more like a dismissive swipe to me but I acknowledge that mistakes can happen in both the writing and the reading of any comment. I’m happy being wrong about my first impression.
I just increased my revenue by $10 but decreased my profitability by $5. Now pretend that $10 was spent on ineffective advertising and sales, so I actually gave it to Google and my sales guy Bob, and $5 is the price I charged you.
> I don't know of anyone who likes high pressure time crunch interrogations except maybe the ones getting to do the interrogating part.
As someone who has been through this early career I agree with the sentiment. But being mid-career it is kind of fun to go through one now, the catch being that you shouldn't give a sh/*t if you get through or not. Think of it more as two-way courting instead of a one-way interview, not all of them pan out.
Logically, shouldn't the compensation for a worker be a function of both leverage and risk?
CEOs have enormous leverage to affect change in their company, with proportionate increase in company returns. An average worker or even an excellent one has fewer opportunities, and even then influence is usually limited to a single team or product.
An example of leverage would be, investing $x million in product line x instead of y. While anyone theoretically can make this decision, the larger $x is the more you want someone owning this who has made these type of decisions before. Which requires someone who has progressively taken more risks in their career and made the right calls.
We had a term where I used to work - Promotion Oriented Architecture. In most places progress in the engineering org chart is heavily influenced by delivering software for complex usecases. Unfortunately IME most developers correlate complexity in the problem domain to complexity in the solution domain. This becomes a very strong driver for adopting novel solutions, even when a simpler one would have sufficed.
A second factor is the difficulty in measuring success. Once a solution is adopted it is very hard to demonstrate the opportunity cost incurred by not selecting a simpler solution. And the costs themselves may not be evident until long after delivery. And since measurement is hard, the lack of data also makes it difficult to articulate effective counter arguments to gratuitous complexity
Why the purple? Dont know if its just me, but found the styling to be a distraction. The content is good enough to stand by itself without the font and color gimmickry.
I hired 5 different artists to design the page decorations, and they delivered cool and interesting assets. But then I decided this doesn't really align with my vision and decided to do the decorations on my own in "my usual style".
So yeah, this is what you get when a programmer does page design. Sorry :)
P.S. Actually it's even worse - I kinda like the outcome, so it will probably stay.
Don't apologize for it! The varying fonts, the purple header and footer, they all add character to it! Thank you for the effort you put into this! It's amazing and truly captures a wonderful old-school zine with new-school content vibe.
I purchased this. I've been trying to brush up on CS fundamentals (it's been a long time since college), but I get stuck just on trying to understand what I'm being asked to learn.
This may seem somewhat out there, very uninformed or misanthropic, but I've been thinking about basic human needs(emotion,ego,the desire for companionship - both spiritual and otherwise) as vestigial evolutionary artifacts. Evolution and the survival of the human race required collaboration, those who did not died and failed to pass on their genes.
In the modern age though, I could argue that close collaboration is not a necessity for survival or even success, and as such why cant a portion of humanity thrive without the need for extensive social contact?
Some portion of humanity can undoubtedly thrive with limited/no social contract, but for the majority of us these "evolutionary artifacts" are still very real and consequently still exert a very real force on our lives.
Until the day comes that we are able to (if we are able to) remove these drives, neglecting them will continue to have deleterious effects.
Circumscribed of course as my opinion only, and what I've seen in my career.