The worst problem is, every success will be credited to CTO and every failure will be aimed towards the manager because it's a disobedience. In this case, the CTO also reward the credit to his friend because he/she doesn't know the backend.
In the short time you may save the company, in the long time you'll lose and the company will lose too.
"Because the CTO had a yearly turnover of his direct reports, every status call about the project took some variation of “great idea, boss” even though literally no one involved thought it was even a good idea.
Or even a mediocre idea. It was a bad idea"
But if everyone confirms his bad decisions instead of pointing flaws out, then they are all part of the problem.
> But if everyone confirms his bad decisions instead of pointing flaws out, then they are all part of the problem.
They are part of the problem but they don’t have to be part of the solution. It’s the CTOs job to realize they’re not getting accurate information from below and work to fix it, that’s why they’re getting paid the big bucks. It’s not like it’s especially hard to figure out but building the trust to create an atmosphere of psychological safety is the job of executives and takes a lot of hard internal reflection but that’s what you sign up to when you sign up to do the job.
Thats the key. If a CTO doesnt set a stage of “look be fully frank with me” then nobody will just say “look bossman, we could have finished this three months ago.” When it really could have been less effort.
Viewed from another angle, the CTO successfully psychologically manipulated his team and almost literally beat a working, cheap solution out of them, and will almost certainly get full credit for this victory done on the backs of others. SO, was he truly not competent? Or was he extremely, dangerously competent?
Not only that, but while the CTO is busy counting his bonus money and accepting his new shares of equity from a satisfied performance condition, he managed to get the rest of the team to simply be proud of doing it for a pat on the back and the feeling of doing "live theater" or whatever.
Yep, the whole article was infuriating, yet I kept expecting a big windfall for the team in the end to justify it all, but instead we got:
"But you also want to feel like a rock star when all your hard work hits real users for the first time and you feel that thrill of I did that. People like what I did. I overcame the impossible."
Y'all got rewarded with an attaboy and a 'rock star thrill' while the CTO probably blasts off in his career and collects his $millions. Well done!
>> every status call about the project took some variation of “great idea, boss”
I read that in two ways.
1. The CTO / management let that fly, instead of reflecting and challenging people when they repeated receive nothing but agreement.
2. People were apathetic, which means they weren't really engaged in meetings, which means the meetings were the wrong format shouldn't have been happening.
Good companies encourage engagement (say the uncomfortable thing), empowerment (servant-leader), and reality (if anything is said that's not true, say something).
That is true, but the times I have seen such dynamics happen it was usually do to... emotional instability. If every time a subordinate brings you anything other than stellar news you get all emotional, angry and start blaming people guess what:
Nobody is going to give you the truth anymore — as A) it seems you can't handle it anyways and B) there is no incentive for them to give you the truth while there are many incentives to not give you the truth.
This is just bad leadership. The most important thing to make good decisions is correct and meaningful information. If you punish people for telling you things that you don't want to see, you will from now on never have a good picture of what is going on. Good luck making decisions that way.
And this isn't even rocket science, it is basic common sense.
Yes, that is bad leadership. But the article does not say that this CTO did this:
"If you punish people for telling you things that you don't want to see"
It is implied, but I rather see direct evidence of a culture of yes saying and grumbling behind the back, something I learned to hate. Most people in reality do not face a existential crisis, if they speak up and the boss gets mad. It might cause inconvenience, but this is already enough for many to just nod along and venting out that frustration later. And wondering why nothing ever changes.
Agreed, this is all speculation and I have seen corporate culture that worked despite bosses like that, but these were also corporate culutures which would have worked even better without the interruptions and "great ideas" from the top.
The main thing a boss can do is ensure the incentives for the behavior you want to see are there and there are disincentives for behavior you don't want to see. And with this over time corporate culture can be changed. But the peculiar thing is that you are part of corporate culture, and a part with special reach and importance — so you better act as you say.
>But if everyone confirms his bad decisions instead of pointing flaws out, then they are all part of the problem.
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
If I'm in that position, my first priority is keeping my job. Correcting my boss in a culture where they are not accustomed to that is not helpful to job security.
I report to a CTO and certainly can point to people who are more like this, but even the most agreeable still pushes back sometimes. If you understand how CTOs think and what they want/need, it's not someone to poke holes in their plans, but propose adjustments and alternatives that fill the holes you see. It's almost like good improv
Also CTOs (especially in supposed F500 companies like presented here) don't typically drive the project execution and interact with the development team in a more than cursory basis. THis is another reason I'm super-skeptical of the entire story. The smallest company on the current list is over 16K employees.
Depends on the problem to solve. If they are trying to solve the problem of improving the CTO leadership skills, then yes, they are part of the problem. If they are solving the problem of putting food on the table, like most people are; then you might argue that this is sub-optimal, but I don't think putting their heads on the chop block is a better way to solve it.
I worked at a shop where 2 layers of management decided they didn't like to see red on RAG status reports and wanted to discuss "changing the definition of done" for projects to preclude you know.. actually shipping them to prod.
I have run into many people that work for companies, where vendor relationships are based on That Guy With the Really Good Coke at Burning Man, or, in more staid organizations, That Guy With the Prada Pimp Suit at the Country Club.
Many times, the higher-level managers are working on a culture, where they are The Big Decision-Makers, With A True Knowledge of The Big Picture, and everyone else is an interchangeable peon.
This is usually reinforced by their peers, and the culture is embedded like a tick. Pretty much impossible to dislodge, without damaging the entire company.
>I have run into many people that work for companies, where vendor relationships are based on That Guy With the Really Good Coke at Burning Man
This is the cynical view, but you're right.
But why does this surprise developers? The more optimistic view is: people want to work with people they like. I want to work with people I like.
There's a trope in the tech world of the ornery IT guy that everyone tolerates because he's smart. Well, a lot of times these people aren't as smart as they think they are, and will be the first to be replaced when it's possible. Life is too short to work with these kinds of people.
I believe in teams. I was a manager, for many years, and having a strong, healthy team was of paramount importance.
My team was pretty damn good. Almost everyone in it had decades of software development experience, but it was also difficult to manage. I had to deal with every member, individually, and had to sometimes be Bad Cop, but it worked.
When I interviewed candidates, I don't think I ever made a technical mistake, but I did hire people that broke the team, and they didn't last.
Teams are how we do big stuff. Individuals can be extremely productive, but there's an upper limit to how much they can do. If you can get a good team working, there's really no limit.
Being self-centered, dishonest, not taking responsibility, blaming others, etc.
Each person had to be very reliable, and that included admitting challenges, and asking for help, as long as it wasn't asking all the time.
Selfishness, where they would not compromise for the team, was a dealbreaker.
I gave each of my engineers a great deal of agency, and expected them to deliver, as opposed to having to ride them. They were grown-ups, and I needed them to act as if they were.
Personal Integrity and Honesty was a big deal for me, as was a sense of accountability.
Most managers "cop out," and only hire people that "fit the culture."
The problem is that homogeneity breeds mediocrity. If you want good, innovative stuff, you need to hire and manage people that don't "fit the mold." That's a challenge.
Everyone seems to get caught up on technical merit, but a good tech can generally be trained to do anything. During my tenure (almost 27 years, 25, as a manager), we went through many iterations of technology, programming languages, etc.
When we want a good, heterogeneous team, we need to hire for team cohesiveness, as well as technical merit. Almost no one we hired was able to just do the job, out of the starting gate. The tech was too specialized. We needed people that could be trained, and that would stay around (When they rolled up my team, the person with the least tenure had a decade).
Which points a larger problem: The vast majority of people are incapable of wisely handling the complexities of modern life.
>Pretty much impossible to dislodge, without damaging the entire company.
You are correct, the only way a good company can be built (if it can be built) is ground up.
In practice this does not happen. A sort of boiling frog phenomenon. The creep sets in because the founders hired or promoted people who have better soft skills (and sometime low on principles and hard skill) over people with hard skills. Sieving and assessing multitudes of prospective candidates for a job is a very time consuming, exhausting work, and people are often willing to settle for less, especially if the organization is really successful and the founders feel the need to expand rapidly.
Nope - Well run companies want to know the truth, expect mistakes, and want people to learn from them. In most of the teams I have been on, being a yes person is no t rewarded because yes people cannot deliver.
They were well run when they were small, then as they grew large they could live on just being large and dominant and started to accrue organizational debt like this. After a couple of decades almost no company is particularly well run, they grow until they are no longer well run or until they captured the entire market.
If you ever find yourself in a company like this, start looking for a new job.
It's impossible to fix rot that bad at the top, and they're not going to make you CTO.