I rarely find the "people will be confused by full transparency" line very convincing. To me it seems like there is some other, unstated reason to be less transparent - because confusion is easily remedied by prioritizing certain information while making the rest just accessible if someone wants to look.

Here's a non-conspiratorial reason: many engineers are not used to the uncertainty involved in day to day business negotiations and sales, and allow themselves to be stressed out what they see how the sausage is made. The reality is that lots of deals fall through, and that is normal. But if someone hasn't had a front row seat to that, they start wondering "are we failing?", "am I not doing a good enough job?", "is our product a failure?" etc etc.

I say this as someone who leads a team that handles the promotion and enablement of engineers into a role where they have a lot more visibility into sales and strategy, and have learned that they really need to have someone reassure them until the point that they realize that things are working out just fine.

That being said, I'm not sure of the wisdom of inflicting that stress on employees that don't have a need to see the Backoffice negotiations. Is there anything productive they can do, other then getting stressed?

> many engineers are not used to the uncertainty involved in day to day business negotiations and sales

7 person startup, right? Presumably they hired people who can wear lots of hats and who can deal with uncertainty.

> they start wondering "are we failing?", "am I not doing a good enough job?", "is our product a failure?" etc etc.

Good. Questions lead to answers where there's transparency. I'd hope that the people making the product would understand the product, the business, and the customers.

    7 person startup, right? Presumably they hired people who can wear 
    lots of hats and who can deal with uncertainty.

Not necessarily! Or not necessarily all of them. As a small startup you also don't have much money so may hire very junior people as that's all you can afford.

    Good. Questions lead to answers where there's transparency.

Only they don't always ask these questions - especially if they're junior. Sometimes they just keep it to themselves and worry instead of asking for clarification.

This. Additionally this should lead to more responsible decision making when questions like “is my re-architect gone wrong going to sink the company?” are pondered at all levels. This could lead to more stress sure but if someone can’t handle it probably best to go work at big corp.

If you work for a company so small that it's possible to have that transparency, the assumption that your job is safe should never have entered your mind. Startups that small are always a risk. Anyone joining a company like that must know that going in. Making sure people are aware of that risk is part of full transparency.

This is some very SV-centric view. That kind of transparency is possible with up to ~50 employees and plenty of businesses in the 10-50 person range are stable enough you can assume your job is safe. Not everywhere is searching for PMF-to-hyperscale.

My first real job was at a company in Pennsylvania with a few dozen employees. They laid off half their staff and implemented mandatory overtime. Many of my college friends that never left the area lost their jobs during the pandemic working for exactly the kinds of companies you describe. Every five to ten years of my adulthood has been marked with economic downturn that overwhelmingly shutter small businesses. What kind of stability is that?

In corpspeak of companies I've worked for, "this will cause confusion" is a codephrase for "we want to prevent someone complaining and making a fuss about shadier parts of our work".

It's the ultimate "let's hide this because we know people won't like it" phrase.

It's not necessarily about anything shady though, it can just as easily be legitimate differences of opinion, too many cooks in the kitchen, bikeshedding, or landgrab concerns.

You are right, I'm a bit cynical here. But that's what makes the phrase brilliant - it can be used for both and it's hard to figure out which one it is on the spot.

How did you verify this was the case every time you heard it?

What sort of information could cause confusion in the workplace, exactly?

Excluding private HR data obviously.

You go from focusing on executing a well defined strict set of tasks that closely fit your brag worthy skills to pondering a partially defined set of fuzzy "more important" goals that poorly fit your skills while unsure if your noob input would either make you look like an idiot or be very valuable.

The problem is that it's very hard to convey subtlety & uncertainty. Sometimes the truth is "we may go in one of these 3 ways so we have to cover our bases to be able to go in either once we do know" but people (especially programmers) want to hear "we will do exactly x and it will not change in the short term".

EDIT: I think this is a good way of phrasing it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32630650

I also used to think this way, until I tried being fully transparent with my team. There really are people whose mindset is 100% "what should I do?" and never "what are we doing?" I think the mistake is assuming it correlates with seniority or skill or something; it seems to be independent of both.

On the other hand, I'd never want a "what should I do?" person as an early startup hire.

My experience has been that there are employees who don’t really want to understand the big picture and just focus on their work.

I have never seen transparency hurt the productivity of these employees. They know they can look and see the big picture any time, they just don’t bother to look:

"Transparency" means different things to different people. I suspect we agree, because my solution to the problem is to make it clear to everyone that they can ask me anything and I'll tell them everything I legally can.

But for some people "transparency" also means a more active communication of this information, and this definitely confuses some (other) people because they will consistently interpret "we want to do X" or "we are going to do X" as "I should, right now, do (sub-part of) X".

I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make between "what should I do" and "what are we doing". Are you talking about people making decisions that prioritize themselves over the company? People not being willing to go along with existing decisions? Big picture vs small picture? Something else?

Sounds like people who passively waits for orders before doing anything ("what should I do?") instead of actively seeking out and doing things that aligns with the team's current goal ("what are we doing [now]?").

> On the other hand, I'd never want a "what should I do?" person as an early startup hire.

This doesn't apply to tanks or healers, only dps. Playing tank as an infra person I would do my team a disservice if I didn't make myself available on a dime to unblock my team. Big picture is fine for the planning meetings but on small teams I'm usually the only one, I have a bunch of cooldowns to keep track of, and don't always have the context because I have a separate workstream that has to telegraph out ahead of the dev work.

I am always asking what I should do that has the most impact for my devs.

Healers don't go around asking who needs healing, they see low health and prioritize. That is not asking "what should I do?", that is being proactive about the needs of the team.

Two points to that:

* Looking for people who caught aggro and getting out ahead of it is the bulk of my work. It's how I prioritize my workstream. The problem, and where the metaphor breaks down, is that I'm not omnipotent or have Grid2. If my devs don't tell me their pain points or I don't pull it out of them by asking what deliverables they would like to see out of me I would miss out lots of higher priority items than what I can see.

* The whole reason I'm on a team is because I have a specialized skillset and am but one stakeholder among many who want things from me. I will never run out of stuff to bring to planning but ultimately it's a group discussion about what I should do next. For larger companies s/me/the infra team.

This framing is extremely stupid and misses the point entirely.

That's pretty uncharitable of you. I am an infra person myself and while I appreciate the parent's point about making themselves available to pick up other things on a dime, I was trying to point out that you can also proactively identify needs and address them as an infra person, often in ways that can be applied to other teams and that this is very much not asking for what they should be doing.

Independently of the framing being stupid, that anyone thinks this is about an infra person being available to unblock a dev team or not is a perfect example of the confusion that can happen when "what should I do?" people get "what are we doing?" context.

> To me it seems like there is some other, unstated reason to be less transparent

Hiring, mostly. If you hire people that don't want, care, or are able to understand the full picture, the transparency won't pay off. But at small sizes, you generally want to hire people that both can and are eager to understand the whole picture.

If you have cash and you're transparent, your employees are likely to ask for it if you have a personal relationship with them.

I would say this is frequently even the case for big picture employees.

I'm saying this also as the lowest compensated person at my company for ~5 years.

To me it's more of an ideal world vs real world. Ideally you can share everything, in reality the outcome is likely to have a negative impact on both employee satisfaction and profit. Ie most likely giving employees a raise and them still thinking they aren't getting enough due to them seeing the big $ in the bank.

My preferred approach is budget level (we can spend x on y, I am open to your ideas) and number light executive summary (we have x months runway, not we have y in the bank). You can also give someone a smaller piece of transparency and see how they react if you think the employee could be someone with the skill set to manage a budget in the future.

We have plenty of money in the bank and our company is profitable. I’ve employed over 100 people during our 13 years of business. Not once have I ever had an employee say “hey man, I noticed you guys have more than the bare minimum level of working capital in the bank! How about you give me some?” Never.

If you were telling everyone you were broke, asking them to believe in the mission and endure low pay for the cause, and then it leaks out that you have plenty of cash, then yeah, I can see this question coming up.

My team is all well compensated, above top 5 US metro average, full remote and all highly technical.

It's surprising to me that out of 100 people no one asked for a raise after seeing a pool of money, although there's a lot of industries and types of employees out there.

It's a smart thing to do from the employee perspective-- I would do the same in their shoes, I don't hold it against them, I'm actually a big fan of ambitious employees, and I've granted their requests (maybe not the full value of their ask, but at least part) every time.

Your mileage may vary.

I just don’t understand that point of view.

Why aren’t employees at Apple asking for a piece of their massive cash horde?

If the only thing keeping an employee from asking or demanding they be given some of the companies property is the knowledge that property exists then you probably don’t want them in your company.

They don't frame it as “hey man, I noticed you guys have more than the bare minimum level of working capital in the bank! How about you give me some?”

It's a "coincidence" that occurs a short time period after seeing the information.

I don't relate to this. It seems like there may be a lack of understanding of or alignment on the long term path if this is a problem. I'm at a very transparent fairly early stage company right now and when I see how much money we have in the bank, I think "that's great news for our roadmap and long term path to profitability or further investment", not "how can I get me more of that sweet cash".

My company would widely be considered as stable, I'm personally 100% long term on our company. So it's past the "great news for our roadmap and long term path to profitability or further investment" phase. Although we're not massive either (few mil, rapid growth). Also bootstrapped from $300, so I could see it being different for venture funded situations.

Different companies/team compositions might have different best paths.

It's more "why are you hiring someone, when you could give everyone a bigger bonus" vibes. Where my goal is to say, give 2x the bonus in the future via the hire instead, but an employee could justifiably, for their own reasons, want more money today.

I'm saying that^ in the context, of, in my opinion, big picture employees as well.

I agree there's sometimes misalignment, everyone has their own goals/aspirations/career, and they sometimes aren't the same as the company goal/timeline. At the end of the day, that doesn't mean that they aren't capable of making valuable contributions or that we don't want to support their goals. That is ok, it's impossible to be everyone's everything.

Yeah this makes sense. I still think it might make more sense to be transparent, and also capable of having those conversations with the team about why people are being hired instead of bonuses being juiced. Maybe you're right that it would be bad for morale, but I feel like owners / executives should be able to tell that story compellingly.

> "why are you hiring someone, when you could give everyone a bigger bonus"

Or even "we just invoiced $5k for that project, I didn't get $5k, that seems unfair". Some people find it difficult to see all the different places that gross revenue has to go in order to keep the lights on and the wheels turning.

In my experience, people that actively don't want full info are usually not the same people who are interested in being early employees at a startup.

> knowing the full version might be confusing to people working on today's stuff.

Are those really the sort of people you want joining your <10 member startup?

Yeah, I’d agree with you and say absolutely not.

You obviously don't have to force people to care about it. Just share the information. They can ignore it if they like. I have no idea why you think anyone would find this sort of information confusing.

Yeah, this is an extremely weird take.

Sometimes "the full version might be confusing" is the same as "I haven't done a good job of explaining the full version," whether that's the roadmap for a company or a department or even just a team.

I think ‘don’t firehose them with all your startup’s problems’ (or: use common sense and follow professional and conversational norms) is built into OP’s point. I don’t even think you’re disagreeing.

If they're confused you've hired the wrong people

> If they're confused you've hired the wrong people

If they think their people will be confused, they don't trust their people.

That's not necessarily the same thing as hiring the wrong people.

I have never had anyone become negatively confused by our transparency.

They ask for clarification, you provide it, and they are that much more effective.

With a bigger company, you need to manage communications. This is a huge tax to pay. Defer it as long as possible.