This is the sort of ladder-climbing VP behavior you see from someone who is too concerned about avoiding failures that they don't actually do anything productive.

Don't launch any projects in a firm direction because if they fail, it's a failure of commission. Wastes lots of time churning what-if scenarios, blocking things & generating reports no one wants in case he gets asked for them, so he can't be accused of a failure of omission.

It's the 3d chess played by someone who forgets what their actual day job is - getting shit done.

If I’ve learned anything, the only people who care about doing things are at the very, very bottom. No one up the chain actually cares about doing things. They talk about doing things, present grand slidedecks internally and at conferences about doing things, have project/product/engineering managers constantly planning on doing things and thinking about better/faster ways to do them. But really there’s an entire pyramid of people in the company just kind of keeping themselves busy while the grunts at the bottom turn out as much as their hands can muster while desperately hoping to one day be a non-doer (or move to yet another company where they’re promised they’ll _actually_ do things but really it’s the same exact company with a different logo).

You guys have it so wrong. Their job is to get you to do things. With slide decks. Presentations. Speeches. Roadmaps. Stories. Visions. Carrots. That’s their job. As well as to aggregate the litany of statuses into an über status at the end of the week/month/quarter so that their higher ups see work being done. What they do is different from what you do so you only see them not doing what you’re doing, not what they are doing. However, if we are going to generalize, yes - you are correct on the fact that they spend their time thinking about better/faster without making it better nor faster (mostly the opposite).

They have context into why you are doing something, even if you don’t.

You're describing the theory of managerialism. Or maybe it's better to call it the dogma. But it's definitely not always the reality.

Large companies have huge inertia. And these days we also have low average CEO tenure and frequent executive position changes. The upshot being that what a given executive does can be almost entirely disconnected from productive improvement without notable short-term harm to the company. In that kind of an environment, an ambitious executive can put the bulk of their energies to seeming effective without much worry as to actual effectiveness. Or just to indulging their personal predilections, like feeling important or in control.

That’s why it’s a theory and not a law. You can attempt the same management game and get wildly different results depending on the team, the ask, the tenure, you, the company, you name it. Often what works one place, doesn’t work elsewhere. Not because they lack the understanding but because of Conway’s law.

I think it's a theory because that's what's useful for the people with power to believe and have others believe. It's the same deal with any elite; their first task is to secure a tacit belief in their superiority. CEO salaries have rocketed up in recent decades. Is that because they're wildly better? I don't think so.

What's funny to me having watched some executive hires flame out is the runway they are given.

It's generally assumed/understood that the higher you go the more control you have, but conversely the slower any change you try to effect is. So it's sort of like the old 3 envelopes school of management joke. They get 6-12 months to settle in. Then they do a reorg to bring in their team over the next compensation cycle. Next compensation cycle their team brings in their teams, and so on. About 3 years in and then people may start taking a long hard look at the progress or lack thereof. Finally because C-suite doesn't commit fratricide, they are given a tap on the shoulder and managed out with a nice severance, a process that may take another year.

So I've been at shops where the guy at the CTO was clearly not succeeding, didn't have stakeholders buy-in, and lacked the grunts respect. Nonetheless they got 3-5 years of very fat paychecks during which they hobbled the entire org.

At the IC level I've seen people bounced within their 90 day probation.

>At the IC level I've seen people bounced within their 90 day probation.

Or worse. Yet what you just described is something I recently witnessed at a Fortune 5000. So I can corroborate your point of view entirely.

Also, I once was let go the day after coming back from Christmas vacation (planned, whole office was out) as well as let go once a couple weeks before Christmas. The more time you spend in the industry, the more BS like this you’ll come across. These incidents were 13 years apart, but it goes to show that it’s the same, no matter when.

In a working org you are right.

In many orgs measurement of work takes precedence over actually achieving work.

All hail the oracle KPIs and OKRs to save the organization and steer us towards redemption…

This comment opened my eyes in a strange way to my boss (dir of infra). This is so on the nose for how he operates it was almost painful to read.

Most folks (certainly not all!) at the Director level and higher by definition spend their entire day talking about work other people are doing rather than doing it themselves. It's the nature of the beast, especially if you operate with a manager only having one or two small (3-6) person teams to manage. You can get a flatter org chart where managers have 15 or 20 direct reports, which makes it impossible for the manager to both be a good manager and GSD, or you can have managers who still GSD but you have so many of them you start to add layers so that the C-level can still do what they need to (get investment, or drive revenue, or strategic partnerships or whatever depending on your scale/stage).

It's depressingly easy to end up in a situation where the line employees are overworked and underpaid, the first level managers are stressed out trying to really manage well their half-dozen direct reports while still producing work themselves, and the Directors and VPs end up passing reports back and forth all day, every day.

Studying span of control, managerial time allocation, and corporate promotion criteria becomes more interesting the further I get into my career. They literally define (or change) companies.

“Getting shit done” is 3D chess we play to convince ourselves there is a goal when it’s just more low effort toil.

Work is work they give me a paycheck to write code.

Rather write some code than deal with a chickenshit leader who wants 100 iterations of project plans for work we will never do or generating reports that no one will ever read.

Being paid to sit at a computer and not doing real work all day is more torturous than simply having actual tasks and work to do.

Excellent; thank a for sharing the rules of the 3D chess you’re playing; belief your output is meaningful relative to others.

The person generating project plans is motivated by the same. They need to look busy outputting to obfuscate how busy you are.

No one cares that much about your code, either. You engage in vacuous attention seeking toil just like management.

Ah, and what are the rules of your game, where you create new accounts to make shitty comments?

What you're missing is that organizations ultimately have people that they serve, human needs that they fulfill. There is actual meaning to them, and we can measure various labors by how much they help create value for people.

Code can of course be pointless or valuable. As can managerial activity. But the further we get from direct value creation, the more skeptical we should be about value creation, because the feedback loops get more tenuous and corruptible.

You can float measures but they’re always incomplete models.

I did not say all code is useless.

You generalized based upon a specific conversation. Generalization I have heard over and over from speakers who, when measured, do not measure up as highly as they think they should.

I am aware of various studies that measured what technologies are increasing productivity. The variables were too numerous to make meaningful conclusions.

We cherry pick and make small models at jobs to obfuscate and debate who is pulling their weight. But it’s just toil to stay employed. The future value of any given for loop is zero; it’s just hustle to crank them out regardless of their use case, and denigrate others cranking out senseless reports.

There is no model that says the poster I replied to, or you, are outputting more value. It’s just toiling to make it appear so at a small scale (within the business).

14% of working adults in the US has better than a bachelors. Public opinion polls indicate the public thinks it’s almost 40% of working adults have better than a bachelors.

What your missing is how deluded the general public is about its accomplishments.

Those are not the rules of your game.

If you thought logins didn't matter, you'd create one and stick with it. You're going to extra effort because you know they do.

And still, you dodge the question. You claim to be incisively dissecting other people's motivations via various negative assumptions and broad-stroke insults. But you can't even glance at your own motivations, even as you work to hide them under a series of new accounts. Which tells us a lot about your game.

That's my view. Going to pointless Zoom meetings and updating associated spreadsheets is much worse than actually doing real work. Of course, much of the "real work" is also quite uninteresting, but that's life.

Reducing risk, yes, but I think the VP just sat around thinking of project ideas that sound useful without asking around to see if relevant stakeholders are actually interested

Thanks for the additional context.

Agree that leaders should definitely be ready to motivate stakeholders and collaborating teams to act on this kind of info before spending significant time gathering & producing it.

I'm dealing with the same type of nonsense currently, as an internal audit team sees security groups being flagged by the scanning software that are open to 0.0.0.0/0 which is automatically "bad", even though the hosts have no public IP's and are being automatically managed by EKS to setup links to k8s NodePorts and the ELB.

Same with security groups. Gartner has some "best practice" doc somewhere, someone loads that into a security tool, the tool flags things, and these checkboxes must go from red to green. The technical hurdles to comply or actual value do not matter.

I'm still on the platform side, out of K8s and the like - but this is so painfully true.

They try to tailor a lot of these things to the OS/distribution, but fail in the most wonderful ways.

A recent example: they're aware of RHEL. They're also aware of 'firewalld'.

However, they have not managed to realize that this is simply a management interface to other firewalls -- imposing standards on a long-deprecated backend; iptables

Meanwhile, using incredibly inefficient and 'portable' command lines. ie: using find in such a way that an LDAP query happens for every file

Refusing to use the arguments available to the operating system they 'tailor' for. Ultimately timing out once you hold a certain number of files.

Also having to explain to checkbox checkers, that yes in fact we are using AMI's that are not owned by our organization, and that in fact shouldn't be showing up as a risk. We are in fact using the AWS managed AMI for our EKS cluster, because that is the entire point.

I find interesting the last example with find and ldap queries. I'm not too familiar with ldap, but i do use find frequently. Could you expand on the example and what happens and why it's bad?

Certainly! In this case, they were interested in files that were too permissive.

I don't have a good example of the command, but it was basically looking for 'worldly' permissions that were too open. It's important to note the users/groups could be discarded/ignored.

They were using 'find ... -exec ls -ld {} \;', which does an LDAP lookup on each result.

They could have made the process far more efficient with either the native '-ls' argument built into find, or adding '-n' to the exec'd 'ls'

Either would skip the domain. At a certain number of results/files the expense is too high, causing the job to time out

Conincidentaly I just found a book in the office on understanding and deploying ldap directory services, seems like today is gonna be spent reading!

Best of luck to you! I've been around them for over a decade now, and still can't commit the various services to memory.

I like to call what I do "taking the coward's way out" -- using FreeIPA

My team setup the infrastructure in question and I've been too slow to learn it. FreeIPA is nice for quick/easy deployments.

I'm not sure how well it "scales", but it's great for getting comfortable with the "Domain Language" (sorry, pun)

I think correctly configuring nscd should prevent this, ie it should cache some of these name lookups for a period of time. As long as it is properly setup for LDAP to hook into it.

https://linux.die.net/man/8/nscd

I suspect you're right, I'm not as familiar with our configuration (or the service) as I'd like to be

Sounds like a spectacular self-DDoS on your LDAP infrastructure if that thing ever got deployed too widely and ran at the same time everywhere.

Dumping audit reports with a sea of red on delivery teams for things largely low-risk in reality and out of their control rarely does any good.

I'm not up on EKS-ELB these days, but if the nodes only allow ingress to NodePorts from the ELB, then it seems like those findings should be suppressed in most orgs.

If the SecEng team was partnering with the delivery team they'd know that before sending the report.

Often creating work is a goal in itself. You gotta justify all those people somehow.