A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

Re:A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools by afarrell on Saturday February 29, 2020 @01:42PM (#22452136)

So my understanding is that you're right to say that the manager has a responsibility to listen keenly for the impacts of their decisions. I'd say it is one of their primary responsibilities as part of their responsibility for the health of their team. The

But my understanding is that in general communication is a 2-way street: Both people in a relationship should be listening with the intent to understand the others' perspective and to watch for misunderstandings. Up and down a larger organization, I think this communication tends to be harder because

1) It is often indirect -- multiple hops from individual contributor to CxO.

2) The communication that can possibly happen grows with the size of the organization.

3) People work on things that are more and more delegated. So the day-to-day problems of an accounts admin are very different from the day-to-day problems of the CFO. So the gap of "understand each others' perspectives" becomes wider and harder to jump.

All this doesn't diminish a leaders' responsibility: it raises it. But it also makes it that much harder to execute if the signals from people in the org are hard to interpret.

> A series of easily-digestible info-graphics

Are nice, but "I've noticed a serious problem. Here is a 30 minute screen-capture of it." is faster to produce and send to a direct manager and then you can (ideally) collaborate on how to raise that to the wider business.

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All this comes with the caveat that I'm an individual-contributor-level software engineer who has never managed a team for an endeavor more complex than a care-package-drive... and I might in fact be far enough on the autistic spectrum that I massively misunderstand how any of this works. (See other comment)

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Re:A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools by DangitBobby on Saturday February 29, 2020 @02:28PM (#22452452)

Sure, you're not wrong about any of this. But in GP, the commenter was essentially saying that if the CxO was not listening, it was because they didn't come with proof and business impact explicitly outlined in a convincing presentation, while I am arguing that in an emergency software-behaving-dangerously situation, it should not necessarily be the duty of the person bringing the claim to write a full report and presentation ahead of time.

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