In a small startup with a fairly high degree of trust and emotional safety your CEO is more likely to notice that you prevented damage/loss by saying no.
A large org where so much is lost due to the telefone game, misaligned goals, hierarchy and increased complexity is not an environment where this is (usually) noticed or appreciated.
Good ideas at the wrong time, or good ideas if only we had the heads, skill, money.
Say Yes to those and you can screw things up, say No and you might not be forgiven.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudai,_Iwate
However to prove your point, years after his death.
This is the source of so many problems at large companies. The employees part of the day to the day understand how much of a positive impact this has but the people in charge of the cash don't see that.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or the new product launch gets the promotion.
A few years ago I saw a promotion announcement e-mail come into my inbox for a colleague who sat a few steps from my desk. It was filled with the usual "did this, did that, made an impact, etc." statements but it also had a large section dedicated to the analysis this employee performed and presented to kill a huge initiative before the organization rolled it out. The initiative was very innovative but it ultimately wouldn't have achieved its goals. It was encouraging to see this in a promotion announcement and indicated to me that some organizations do explicitly reward for preventing bad things.
This was at AWS.
It's also possible that people are getting praise for these sorts of "negative accomplishments" in private, or on performance reviews. Which is better than nothing, but I think it's still valuable and healthy to remind people that part of the job isn't just building stuff, it's also making sure the right things get built. And public praise for killing bad things is a good way to do that.
So someone responds by assuming it's a negative: "...applaud an underling who usefully twisted the knife". I mean maybe, but quite possibly maybe not. But some people seem wired to find the worst.
This article from three days ago: “'Stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere': An internal Amazon study slams the company's culture.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-earths-best-employer-...
Akin to not being rewarded for deleting lines of code.*
* unless the deletion measurably improves performance and you get rewarded for the improvement
That's intriguing. I would love some examples of these projects / products.
> The hallmark of these is the last minute surge in resourcing when management figures out they got it wrong.
Got what wrong? That they've heard the yeas and nays and chosen to undertake the project sounds like mang got something right?
It's literally the definition of skunkworks projects. Many companies have been saved by a small few ignoring all the "Nos" and just doing what they believe in at personal risk.
I really disagree with the general notion of people saying No. This is actually, imo, the death of big companies and very common. It is not heroic to say no, it is maintaining the status quo. People who talk about such things with glowing eyes probably have spent their careers only at big companies.
Experienced people tend to have narrow vision and will shoot down ideas because they can't think outside of their worldview. That's why new ideas are so rarely born at large orgs. And the most innovation tends to come out of scrappy startups from kids who don't know that what they're doing is impossible.
I don’t think Carmack - or the engineer you describe - is likely to be one of these - but anyone hoping to emulate them should be conscious of what they’re doing.
Yes, I've also seen this as well. At some point you need people who will go off on a limb and do something crazy. I've seen in multiple times in my career. In particular I remember an architect who'd ruthlessly attempt to take scope out of projects but while we was in charge, we were nearly never innovating. Just delivering features on time and budget. Existing customers were always delighted but we had a hard time reaching new markets.
After he left, there's been a fair bit of projects that "didn't work" but there's been a couple of absolute home runs that would've never gotten off the ground because they were pretty wild.
There's I've heard a few times that resonates with me and I reiterate to all senior engineers I work with when they get into conflicts. "It takes all kinds of people to make a great company" You need dreamers, the people who worry about the money, cold and calculating execute at all costs types and folks and the folks who are happy to toil in a small but critical corner of a massive system to keep the lights on.
In my experience you can get into trouble when you try to play multiple roles at the same time because it's mentally exhausting trying to to do things like sell a vision while being the person trying to keep the economics of the thing from completely falling apart.
Price's law is what constrains scope, and the boundary between engineers can often be the luck of having the right opportunity. As such, all the stupid things emerge trying to invent scope. I'm guilty of this, but that was the game.
There is no solution except accept that big companies kind of suck and are slow.
I think it is entirely possible to be truly focused on the customer, to have a vision and a strategy, and to balance working toward this goal with experimentation.
It is of course also very hard work, it’s easy to make mistakes, and nothing is perfect. But I really don’t see that this is all doomed from the beginning just because of bad incentives and structural forces.
As you get higher up, the politics and limits become very visible. Strategy and focus are really hard to scale up which creates limited scope for continued growth.
Meetings where the elephant in the room is not mentioned, because nobody wants to loose face. Really bad practice not commented on because (I guess, I am bad at this) some form of "mutually assured destruction". I will not point out your mistakes so you do not point out mine.
That, in case you are wondering, is from business.
I am really pleased to see people commenting here about business experience that go against my experience. And in my little group (of two, we could easily be five) we are straight with each other. But in the wider group? Rank incompetence, and dreadful mistakes that could be corrected if someone would point it out.
The point is technical excellence, good scientific practice, that is not required for being successful at business. It is al about "people skills". I.e. convincing somebody that they got what they were promised when they did not.
The university system in my country (Aotearoa) has been hobbled by people with business fetish. The meme was in the 1990s that "business is the most efficient". I believed it, until I saw the waste, inefficiency, downright lying and dishonesty, aghh I am triggered, that is business.
The same thing happens to some degree in academia (especially in commerce. My academic experience is science in the 1990s and commerce in the 2010s) but only "some degree". I see it at every nearly business meeting I attend.
I said before, I will say again, how pleasing it is to see comments here from people with different experiences than me.
It might sound easy to "just don't give a fuck sooner" but it's exhausting. The constant uphill struggle is not something I want to live with.
You could slow down other players by attacking them with “bad idea” cards that would tie up one or more of their engineers for an amount of time. To defend against bad ideas, you need a good manager (one type of employee card).
I could be misremembering some of the details, but the wisdom of the above game mechanic has stuck with me :)
One of the most important things an organization can have is a "no man". A project that I was involved in when I worked at Google was completed on time primarily because we had a very senior (DE level) engineer tangentially involved in the project. He was near the end of his career, and he just didn't give a f* about politics. He'd sit in design reviews and rip stupid features to shreds, with accurate estimates of what they'd cost in terms of headcount and project delays. He was probably the most valuable member of the team because he was respected enough that his objections kept the project focused and on scope, and it was a 20% project for him.