And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs.
What you really want is:
- every team working to improve the customer experience
- guided by leadership priorities and initiatives
"every team working to improve the customer experience - guided by leadership priorities and initiatives"
The fundamental issue is that in almost all larger companies, upper management does not trust that their employees are either intrinsically motivated to do a good job, or are smart enough to determine what "a good job" is.
So rather than having a chain of trust from upper management to middle management to individual contributors, they seek to create a measurable control system. This inevitably replaces people's intrinsic motivation to do a good job with an extrinsic motivation, which only poorly represents the company's actual goals. At this point, most people are no longer trying to do a good job, they're instead trying to make their numbers look good.
Upper management has effectively replaced real, meaningful work with a game where everybody tries to score points, and the people who don't participate in that game are eventually stackranked out of the company.
A less cynical take is that communicating consistently the priorities and tradeoffs the company wants to make as they get larger is a hopeful use of OKRs.
In small teams/companies “the right thing” can be obvious and the team can operate in a shared headspace with low cycle time to discuss and decide tradeoffs when they arise. This gets really problematic at scale.
Now back to the cynicism — it’s also tricky when you want to hide the ball and make teams feel ok about doing bad things: make time spent go up is the goal, who cares if there’s addiction along the way.
I just fundamentally don't believe that most people in most companies have an understanding of the company's priorities that is worse than what an OKR encodes. In fact, my experience is that most people in larger companies believe, and are correct in believing, that they are forced to intentionally make worse decisions because better decisions have negative impacts on their measured performance.
I've been part of an extremely effective 200 people company that got acquired by a 4000 people company. We all understood why we were acquired, we built a platform that solved a fundamental problem the larger company had.
After the acquisition, this larger company's OKR and measurement system was implemented for our teams.
We initially all ignored the system and went on as usual, starting to implement our platform. Initially, things went well, we made steady progress and started migrating legacy projects to out platform.
Then, the annual stack ranking firings happened. Some of our best engineers were fired. Seeing this, many other top performers started looking for jobs immediately. The ones that got hired elsewhere started poaching even more top performers. The ones left started playing the numbers game to avoid being fired.
Within a year, most people went from trying to solve the larger company's problem to optimizing their numbers. Within another year, the platform initiative had completely failed and was abandoned, with most of the remaining people being fired or integrated into other teams.
that was the end result the company wanted. they bought out a competition and didnt intend to mometize it. so the engineers working on improving the acquisition were doing the opposit of what the buying company wanted
“The fundamental issue is that in almost all larger companies, upper management does not trust that their employees are either intrinsically motivated to do a good job, or are smart enough to determine what "a good job" is.”
That’s what i have concluded a long time ago. Upper management has a deep distrust of their employees and acts accordingly. They will hire consultants or external people before they will listen to their employees. I think part of it is that a lot of them don’t really believe in anything themselves and only blindly try to fulfill goals set by their CEO or board of directors.
Consultants also provide political cover if things go sideways. Conversely, if the consultants operate well, the executive sponsor might be promoted and thus there is value delivered. But really the question is, "Are you working someplace where there is a culture of promoting from within?"
Ideally management is working with IC teams to set good Key Results. Management shares context of what's important (objectives) and IC teams propose good quantitative measures (key results) of how they'll achieve it.
Yes, “ideally”. I have never seen meaningful numbers as targets. Sometimes it works for a short term effort but in most cases you have ten different measures tha5 are important
For some reason, this is a controversial idea but: it's hard to argue that multiple layers of management can become anything other than bureaucracy.
Corporations reward an individuals tenure and experience with increased decision making (often, this means manager title). That increase in decision making means that less senior IC's become less autonomous, even when they inevitably exceed their superior's experience on the topic.
The level of autonomy is at odds with the number of managers. Some people argue this is a good thing. I argue that those people are just managers justifying their jobs.
I've been at hugely decentralized companies (several thousand engineers, one level of management between me as team lead and the actual executives). Each team was fully empowered to solve their problems in the best manner and they went off and did it. It had downsides. In particular, teams often encountered similar problems, and each team solved that problem differently. There was no one in a position to see that Team A and Team D were both solving problem theta, and that Team D's solution was better, and Team A should just use Team D's (or, more often, that we needed to detail an engineer to solve problem theta fully and get both teams to use that full solution rather than the jury-rig that each team had built). There was also no one to keep us informed that Team Ssang-giyeok had already solved the issue months ago and we could just use their solution.
Internal communications like that are a scale problem: in a small company, the matrix of personal relationships is basically full, but as companies get larger, the matrix gets sparser and sparser. By the time you have a 100,000 employees in time zones all over the world your matrix is almost all 0's with only occasional 1s. And so information will travel quite poorly without people whose explicit tasks are to convey information to the right people. That's what managers and internal bureaucracy are supposed to do. Sometimes that information is "we need to build this and not that," sometimes it's "employee 24601 is great and should be given more responsibility," sometimes it's "this project is a Kafkaesque nightmare of un-ending pain that will never be delivered as scoped." But identifying this information and sharing it with the correct other people- that's what middle-management is supposed to do.
Believe me, I am not generally a fan of bureaucracy (as I type this I'm supposed to be fixing a problem that is somewhere in the interface between my 100k employee company and another 100k+ employee company, and it's goddamn terrible), but it does have value beyond just fief-building.
> In particular, teams often encountered similar problems, and each team solved that problem differently. There was no one in a position to see that Team A and Team D were both solving problem theta, and that Team D's solution was better, and Team A should just use Team D's (or, more often, that we needed to detail an engineer to solve problem theta fully and get both teams to use that full solution rather than the jury-rig that each team had built). There was also no one to keep us informed that Team Ssang-giyeok had already solved the issue months ago and we could just use their solution.
Convince me that this duplication of work is worse when you have to shoehorn solution X into solving problem theta poorly, because someone 2 degrees (or more) removed from the problem thought that problem iota (which X actually solves) was "basically the same thing" as problem theta.
> There was no one in a position to see that Team A and Team D were both solving problem theta, and that Team D's solution was better, and Team A should just use Team D's (or, more often, that we needed to detail an engineer to solve problem theta fully and get both teams to use that full solution rather than the jury-rig that each team had built)
I've seen it many times that forcing teams to use the same solution doesn't work as imagined. Often times, teams are solving similar problems. But similarity isn't grounds enough to merge a solution imo. A programming analogy is DRY. Everyone has seen what happens when you take DRY too far.
Some level of management and bureaucracy is necessary. But I think nearly every single company that's ever existed, takes this too far. There are far fewer examples of companies that under manage. I'd argue that all else being equal, under management has less downsides than over management. The reason we don't see companies with too few managers is because of individual interests.
Basically, imagine that a company has the perfectly correct number of managers (contrived example for sake of argument). Then imagine that you can choose to either add or a subtract exactly 1 manager. I am willing to bet that in the vast majority of cases, subtracting the manager leaves the company better off than adding one.
The interesting thing is that we have solved this. Groups of people much larger than single corporations work together effectively using systems like GitHub, Wikipedia, or npm, without overloading the social graph. I don't know why companies don't use similar systems internally — although I'm sure some do, but perhaps they don't advertise it, because it's a huge competitive advantage.
The modal OSS project is a one man band, or at most 2-3 people involved. By the time you get to something large scale there is also quite a bit of bureaucracy there too. Look at something like, to pick something mostly at random, a single project of the Linux Foundation, KernelCI, devoted to building CI for the Linux Kernel. And that has a Technical Steering Committee, ad hoc working groups, differentiation of responsibilities, etc. It has, for all practical purposes, just the sorts of middle management that I'm talking about.
I don't really think we have. There are many open source projects that duplicate work for a variety of reasons. Perfectly fine for stuff you want to do, but probably not an optimal allocation of resources
> Upper management has effectively replaced real, meaningful work with a game where everybody tries to score points, and the people who don't participate in that game are eventually stackranked out of the company.
This. Got managed out of a previous employer as I didn't want to participate in the numbers game by focusing on the customer.
If you are senior enough, you can get away with it for a long time. Customers liked me, account managers too (as their customers increased spending), and my manager (at the director level) had my back. That was all good until the day they put another management layer between the director and me...
i worked at a FAANG co and managed to make it 3 years focusing on solving problems that widely bothered users. there were several instances where i had to -fight- to ship critical bug fixes because the fixes so-happened to regress an obscure metric someone was baby-sitting…
the first time this happened, i felt like my brain was going to explode -- so wait, you want me to leave the main app feed broken and people pissed off because the comment-notes-experience-home-ex team's weekly comment rate is slightly regressing?
writing this out, not sure how i lasted as long as i did.
This reminds me of when we introduced Yammer at a company. Initially, it worked great, everybody loved it, it was super valuable to share information internally. Then, at some point, the feed broke and it somehow started demoting the most valuable posts, requiring much more time to be sure that you had caught up on everything relevant to you.
Then I read an interview with the CEO where he bragged how they were data-driven and were optimizing for engagement. My guess is that somebody had figured out that hiding important information created more "engagement" because people now had to spend more time searching for the stuff that was relevant to them.
This person probably got a promotion, and we switched to a different system half a year later.
Yes, exactly -- the fixation on "metrics-driven development" created perverse incentives (i.e. cobra effect). People would ship bugs and broken shit because it'd bump engagement, like you're referencing; nevermind the fact that the engagement win was because people were clearly flummoxed by a meaningfully worse user experience and it took them longer to do shit. I saw this happen many times, gaming metrics by doing backwards things would definitely get rewarded.
Although what happened was slightly different. I was a developer. Came in fresh faced and worked my ass off. Took on additional work, went to copious amounts of conferences, networked outside of team constantly, always finished my Sprint work ahead of time. Did everything a high performing dev would do. On a scale of 1-5, I was ranked a 3 (meeting expectations), barely any bonus, barely any salary increase.
I was like, "WTF?!?!" and was naturally pretty pissed. Next year? Barely did anything. Came into the office for morning standup, left, worked from home rest of the day. I constantly took afternoons off, Still got work done on time, did the absolute minimal amount of work. I was "silently quitting" before anybody ever coined the phrase. Next years review? Yeap, you guessed it, another 3.
That pretty much confirmed to me that nothing was ever going to change if I was working my ass off or just doing the absolute minimal amount of work. This lasted another two years before they finally offshored my team and I left the company with several great references.
It was a great lesson to learn that its just a game, and you either do everything to stand out which has a high mental and emotional cost, or you simply refuse to play the game, retain your sanity, and look at your job as simply a means to an end as opposed to a satisfying career.
Intrinsic motivation is great, it's a powerful force and can enable amazing accomplishments. But it's not something that management can necessarily rely upon. Sometimes there's shitty work that just has to get done for legal compliance or to meet customer demands or whatever, and to make that happen management needs a control system to create extrinsic motivation. In any large organization it's not possible to have everyone doing interesting, meaningful work.
I've never seen that actually be a problem when people were motivated and empowered to make decisions on their own. In my experience, people by and large don't mind doing boring work if they feel that it is necessary or valuable.
I worked at a small company when GDPR was introduced, and people volunteered to read up on it, and work with an external lawyer to write specs on what we had to do, because they knew that it had to be done and wanted the company to succeed.
$400 a tonne CO2 tax ($4 on a gallon of gas) is enough to modify behavior and encourage real CCS. This could be rebated to consumers (everybody gets a $6500 check a year) to make it revenue neutral. Two problems:
(1) A legitimacy gap. People think taxation is on ratchet and wouldn't trust it to be revenue neutral and not a money grab.
(2) It's a global problem. If there is a carbon tax in the US and no carbon tax in China that's unfair for our manufacturers. People will complain about the fairness of any particular rebating scheme inside the US, but there will always be much worse complaints about a system which embraces all nations from Luxembourg to Burundi.
For #2, most proposals I’ve seen aim to put domestic products on a level playing field with products from countries without an equivalent tax with a “border adjustment”, a sort of tariff that’s based on the carbon intensity of the product (with a pessimistic estimate if they don’t know). This has the side effect of encouraging other countries to adopt similar carbon taxes.
The EU is implementing something like that, and we’re seeing an uptick in appetite in the US to implement a border adjustment here, partly as a result, there were a few bills put forward in the last Congress, though nothing has gotten very far yet.
you forgot (3) an efficiency gap. No government or quasi-governmental organization can deliver this program without massive leakage. Look at Canada: carbon taxes go into general revenues, and some portion of it gets paid out of general revenues. It also doesn't matter if the payment is a redistribution or an ad buy for a terrible commercial on the CBC - it's all fighting climate change!
You'd wish instead of "seeing like a state" organizations would learn to "see like a consumer" and be able to recognize that a terrible commercial is a terrible commercial!
I think the efficiency gap is less than with other approaches. Rather than privileging electric cars we should reward people the same if they save carbon by buying an electric car or riding a bike or if an industrial process is replaced by one that is naturally carbon free or if you take the carbon out of the stack or if you take it out of the atmosphere. The market should decide what is the most efficient.
(Note another 'efficiency' concern people have is that you don't want to pay people $400/ton to store carbon from fermentation at an ethanol plant that is unusually cheap at $40/ton because you get nitrogen-free CO2. People seem to have a moral problem with that, first fundamentally, second because the ethanol plant is problematic in other ways)
It's better if the tax revenue goes back into fighting climate change but the point of a carbon tax is to punish bad behavior. Just by implementing the tax you're fighting the problem (in a small way).
Besides the tariff on imported products the sibling talks about, you can also rebate the tax paid on exported products.
It's not simple to manage those adjustments, but governments deal with much more complex taxes everywhere. It's not a big deal.
And yeah, the UBI cancellation of the tax, the tariffs on imported products and the rebate on exported products deal with every single problem I've seen people post about a carbon tax, except for "expensive gasoline will destroy our economy!", that is almost always pushed by people that live in a place with some of the cheapest gasoline prices of the world.
There is an add-on that some people push where you don't cancel all of the tax in an UBI, but use a part of it to finance carbon capture projects. I do really like this one, but it's not something that is required for things to work.
Something I appreciate about small workplaces is that, often, people have a shared sense of the purpose of the organization and strong teamwork.
It manifests in little things. We were waiting outside the conference room last week for our manager to get the keys to unlock it. Nobody told me to, I wasn't responsible for snacks, but I picked up the trays of pastries and brought them in and put them in the right place and joked "It's my New Years resolution to squat anything I can get my arms around." I got thanked.
In startups you often have to get things done quicker than you can hire new people to do it. A lot of people have the attitude that they have a certain circle of responsibility, which is necessary and appropriate in a large organization, but in a small organization I like it that people have internalized the goals of the organization and are willing and able to pinch hit.
I think people often get this attitude working in small businesses, like a little shop that sells knick-nacks at the beach or the summer that I got re-hired at a supermarket that owed me a favor despite not really hiring at the time. I worked about 50% at the front end and the other 50% doing odd jobs directly under the store manager which meant they'd have me paint a metal line that ran around the outer wall of the store or sub for people in the deli (learn to work the meat slicer) or bakery, etc.
In a big organization you need some rigidity, but big organizations can also be seen as a collection of small organization (e.g. "employees don't leave companies, employees leave managers")
It's a pet peeve of mine when people in a startup don't have a flexible attitude.
100% and people in startups tend to have more of an ownership approach vs "not my job, nor in my job description" attitude. Not suggesting here that options are the answer, just echoing my experience in the small workplace vs large.
>And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs.
You highlight the danger of goal setting - where the goal becomes an end onto itself. I disagree with your adjustment however. It's too vague as written, and if you attach KRs to it, you'll end up where you started (with a KR like 'improve fps performance of game X by 25%')
Ideally, you fix the issue, but you track it as having impact on achieving the OKR. Achieving OKRs should not be seen as a "be-all and end-all" ... Failing an OKR should be seen as a opportunity for improvement. If the corporation sets a goal of improving game FPS performance but is unable to meet it because of technical debt, that is good information that needs to be managed.
> the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs.
Oh, someone will fix it. But it won't be the glamorous team that does the "lead" development. It will be a less desirable team that is relegated to "maintenance coding" and is paid substantially less than the premier team that created the big and got the bonus
This only happens if people are evaluated based on OKRs, which is not what this tool was originally about. High Output Management, as far as I can remember, says that such a tool must be used solely for communication, i.e. to avoid having people ask the same questions over and over again (and to enable descentralized decision making).
Exactly. So a productive employee is one who identifies a problem and knows which of the following to do:
- fix it themselves without anyone asking
- bring it up to higher management
- deprioritize it based on severity and leadership initiatives
This is the pattern taught by Jethro to Moses in the Old Testament:
every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee.
But it can’t function any other way. You are a filter of small problems for everyone in the org higher than you. If you bring up everything up the chain your level may as well not exist.
There are many places out there where individual contributors are agency-less executors.
I don't think it ever worked. (Remember when Japan destroyed the world's car industry just by changing that single thing? And that's industry work, highly repetitive and formalized.) But that never stopped managers from doing something.
What I find odd, is often the biggest proponents of the free market - with it's decentralised decision making process ( and redundancy of effort ), decide that total centralized, top down control is the best way to run their own company - as they think top down decisions and minimising waste through duplication is the way to go.
That's a slightly different angle - if I understand correctly it's about why firms exist at all - and if I were to summarise it's because lack of trust costs - a firms boundaries are created to balance transactional costs ( within the firm it's low, between firms or individuals it can dominate ) versus the costs of perhaps not being market efficient.
My argument above is about not what shapes a firm's boundary but how it operates internally - too much top down control potentially risks exacerbating the risks associated with being a company and also potentially increases internal transactional costs as well - worse of both worlds! - all that ceremony around decision making, time spent justifying existences, inability to just act.
Obviously as I said above - it's a balance - just as it is with country/international systems.
> In a “free market” you can choose what firms you work for and with, except the government.
Eh? Nobody ever leaves one country for another?
> The government would be more efficient in an autocratic leadership. But government efficiency is not the societies efficiency and well being
I think the free market proponents would say otherwise - one key problem is the myth of perfect information - you are imagining it's possible to concentrate all the required information to make any correct decision into a very small group of people at the top ( and assuming these people are competent and not corrupt). One of the ideas behind why distributed markets work is the information about what is needed is communicated by the mechanisms of the market itself.
And to bring it back to the original post - does the CEO have all the information required to direct others to meet the customers need across all areas - or is it better to use the collective intelligence of the entire organisation?
And in the real world, not even this is true, due to the cost of satisfying OKRs--opportunity cost is one kind of cost, but optimizing an OKR can of course negatively impact other valuable things that aren't represented by OKRs.
What you really want is: - every team working to improve the customer experience - guided by leadership priorities and initiatives