As a very expensive consultant I am frequently appalled at how management teams completely ignore their own employees.
Forget about wasteful, these companies can afford consultants. It is just disrespectful to their own staff. Developers and operations guys already know the solution but can't get through layers upon layers of management. And so it takes a guy with salary high enough that he can be allowed to talk to the a high level manager directly, to get the message.
Sometimes they were blindingly obvious things. One employee would drive two bolts, quickly change heads, then drive a third bolt. While the carcass advanced to the next station, the emloyee would change back to the original head and be ready for the next carcass. That employee's suggestion: Make all three bolts the same size so I don't have to change heads.
Of course, that is just a fun anecdote. All such efficiencies have been implemented long ago... for auto assembly. But the point is still valid. Your employees know a ton about your business. Even the ones who do the most mundane tasks. Listen to them. Or... pay a very expensive consultant to listen to them.
While a good manager can mitigate the problem by cultivating mutual trust, individually and culturally, the problem gets compounded when hierarchies become nested, and the org scales beyond the Dunbar Number.
a consultant can talk to the ceo as an equal.
however, a consultant can also talk to the mail clerk as an equal.
One of my friends runs a market research firm that works for big retailers. She says 90% of their work is about producing evidence for the decisions that have already been taken - so they can be implemented without causing complaints.
It is not humanly possible to be knowledgable in all the fields of people working directly or indirectly under you. Good managers are not always technically knowledgable . It is useful skill to have, neither it is most important nor is it even essential.
While bad managers tend not to have the knowledge, the worst managers are strong technically but don't have other critical skills needed for the job.
But as a manager, you need to know what your organization is doing and you need to know who to ask.
That is, by very definition, the job of a manager.
Some maintenance guy who works the floor knows they don’t need two of them but no one will listen.
There is still room for a highly paid consultant.
Large car companies like GM or Ford hire automation companies to build automation equipment that meets a very specific spec for assembly steps, tolerances, rates, etc. They design components with ease of manufacturing as a significant factor. How something will be assembled is a constant consideration while designing. The product being run on these lines never really changes and human are only used when the the operations are so complex that the equipment doesn't pay for itself in (typically) 2 years. This is very rare, mostly people are only there to keep the machines filled with parts.
In the sequence of
design -> automate -> manufacture
Fictional employee. Fictional scenario. But you still assume that the employee isn't smart enough to know why bolts are different sizes and whether a bigger bolt could work in the place of the smaller bolts.
You assume you know more about this fictional car than the fictional employee actually (um, I mean fictionally) building it.
You should apply for management.
Reductively it's CoW snapshots + chroot.
Guess I need to find a new job.
People don't have to hyper-specialize to one specific role.
> There's really no reason to think the person turning the bolt necessarily knows what size the bolt needs to be.
and also steel-manned the final sentence like this:
> In the same way a web dev doesn't need to know how docker works
As such, the (claimed) existence of one person who regularly uses very different skills doesn't disprove what I think jacobsenscott was trying to say.
Example using the same logic as the post we're discussing: Someone flips a coin in another room. It doesn't necessarily have to be heads, so we should assume it's tails.
It sounds like you are not familiar with this disaster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
There may be a very good reason things are the way they are.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-...
Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company.
The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.”
I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees.
In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures—they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations.
This might have been nothing more than a previously hard job becoming easier, Hallelujah. But most print companies took it further. Talking to the people who understood the technology became demeaning, something to be avoided. Information was to move from management to workers, not vice-versa (a pattern that later came to other kinds of media businesses as well.) By the time the web came around and understanding the technology mattered again, many media executives hadn’t just lost the habit of talking with their own technically adept employees, they’d actively suppressed it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140122141413/http://www.shirky...
I wonder if some parallels to this story (listening, without contempt) exist within the sphere of political polarization.
That is to say, he did executive level work. I imagine he’ll do similarly great work at Twitter, setting them up for long term success, just as he did at Stripe
They have a long experience of asking the right questions to the right people , filtering out useless inputs, creating the right abstractions strategically from tactical inputs, there are very niche skills, it may be easy for us, but for the non technical manager it is black magic
As a very expensive consultant I'm surprised the reason is not more clear to you. Most managers like to pay consultancy firms so that they can cover their asses.
If they just followed the guidelines of what the McKinsey team said then surely they weren't in the wrong. Whilst if they followed the advice of a subordinate or god forbid made a decision it's on them.
i think you hit the nail on the head here. the problem is that the upper management usually arent clueless, they are just better leaders than they are doers...
I've had highly effective managers before, who were trying to get promoted. Just like I've met highly effective developers, who were trying to get promoted. That's orthogonal to making a good product.
They wanted to get promoted because they wanted to be able to be more effective; everything they had control of went very, very well (we were empowered to make decisions, he helped us navigate organizational obstacles, and was the sacrificial lamb for useless meetings). All the issues we ran into were from outside his circle of influence; product had its own reporting hierarchy and they were a mess. Integrations with the rest of the org were more bureaucratic and less capable, and getting them to do anything required getting VP level support on our side, etc. Had he had more sway, we could have executed faster. We directly benefited when he got a title bump.
I think what you mean are those who are putting individual success over team success, and yes, those managers are either evil or incompetent.
You need tools for your group.
IT wants to use tool MSFT.
Everybody has been using tool X for a while. They like it, but there is issue Y.
How does upper management resolve this?
Tell me about it. On one of my previous jobs I would constantly speak out about what we were doing would cause people to lose hundreds of thousands of USD, and every time I was laughed out of the meeting for "overthinking" things (I guess that's what wanting to do things right is called these days). When one of our customers lost US$200k and nobody had any idea why or how or when I knew that company would be the death of me, and coincidentally I was on the same meeting I planned to use to quit my job.
If anything it taught me that working in finance is not for me :p
There's probably a little bit of housekeeping for infrastructure and operations security. I imagine all of the fun stuff is customer-facing.
And for Mudge, for why it might be worth taking on relatively 'simple' problems - money. Money is nice.
If those are the hard business/technology management problems (and they are), then try solving those while also securing them.
Security by itself is relatively straightforward: 0days, red teaming, scanning for known vulns, etc. Just like every other aspect of the business, you hire someone to do one specific thing and you've got lots of options.
But then try to infuse security into every single aspect of a business and product, in a way that increases both velocity & quality of product dev, without sacrificing efficient organizational management. There are already a ton of inscrutable complexities between all facets of the organization and its products. Trying to add security to all that is like teaching a juggling elephant to ice skate.
So you need someone who's very good at managing security in the context of all those other problems. That's hard to find. It helps to have people who've seen problems in the same general space from a lot of different angles.
You don't hire security personnel to address previous breaches.
Speculating on what kind of problems Twitter would need that calibre of person for, maybe detecting inevitable AI driven botnets and deepfakes?
Could also see how they need leadership with that tangible cred as a decider function, e.g. the personality cult around Jack might make delegation and scaling their management team a challenge if everyone is trying to find a way to compete for his attention, so they need someone with enough weight that he can legitimately defer to on security issues.
Congrats to all involved. Interesting times.