So, act accordingly.
Mental health issues are for life. It's not worth the risk.
However, the bonsai in the picture are the real deal. Those are absolutely priceless. That fir tree wants to create needles that are about three to six inches long. It has been pinched religiously for decades. The moss and lichens on the stone are phenomenal and the stone itself was probably licked for years (I am only partially joking). It looks sea worn and looks like it has some wormholes. The sand has been manipulated with tweezers and probably with a microscope involved. The creator of that thing is getting on a bit now and their eyesight is probably like mine.
Note the "weighting" of the main elements - the way the tree and main rock leans very carefully to the right and the weight of the left and right main portions of both.
That tree and setting is worth studying and striving towards.
I am toying with getting back into bonsai. I'm now 53 and might have enough patience to do quite well. I planted a few trees a few decades ago that I might find useful as some raw material. Who knows?
If you fancy a dabble you can get a very easy good first result. Don't buy a "bonsai" from a garden centre - please don't. The materials are very cheap but you do have to invest with time.
Unless engineering managers are promoted to the board, it's unlikely they can make any change possible. Since the article doesn't mention that, it's just marketing fluff.
Sorry, no. I don't know your story but it feels unlikely you have real experience with this. Even with right-minded people there can be many, many reasons and dynamics that an organizational problem is difficult to solve.
Good intentions - even from the most senior leadership - can be slow to manifest in real change based on market forces, client forces, cultural dynamics, norms (especially the unspoken ways things "just get done") and capability (e.g., making the wrong decision on a change management strategy which sets the whole change effort back years). There are a near infinite number of contextual considerations, and they are not all rendered null because the executive committee wants to do the right thing. Unexpected second-order effects may be likely given what is being changed, bringing great risk on its own.
The CEO may not know how to effectively organize an [engineering,marketing,sales,whatever] team. That doesn't mean any company with a team that's adrift due to poor organization suffers from leadership dysfunction at the CEO level. Yes, it's the CEO's responsibility to fix that, but in many cases they don't have the direct ability to fix outside of hiring and delegating to the right people.
Organizational problems are also fractal: a data org of 100 people may not be working in the best way with an infrastructure org of 50 people. But within the data org things might also be bogged down because a team of 5 people is not working well with another team of 10 people. And within that, two people on that team of 10 may be in totally the wrong role for their skillets and preferences.
(And conversely, sometimes you have well-organized, smooth-running teams let down by capricious management.)
And most ironically, if your company is doing a reorg every 6 to 12 months... your organizational issues probably aren't getting fixed any time soon. Organizational issues that affect execution and delivery are too complex to be fixed by moving some lines around on a singular hierarchical org chart.
I believe HN policy is to post actual titles if possible, is that right @dang?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's also a giant pile of additional title lore in the mod comments.
@dang doesn't do anything but there's emailing which does work.
"did you use ChatGPT to write this"
"this is so bad it must have been ChatGPT"
"this is so good you must have used ChatGPT"
* How to manage people.
I realize this is snarky in tone but in 2023 this still rings true for many people.
Much of management doesn't know anything about engineering. Many engineers don't know anything about managing people.
The worse the management the worse the politics.
It's at the bigger or more dinosaur companies that you'll have a better chance of reporting to someone with some actual managerial experience
The (capable) managers were rewarded
As Software eats the world, more and more workers in the systems are CPUs and GPUs. And the coders are the new managers.
More and more of what a business is and does, especially day to day BAU, is done in software - for some industries like finance and comms (FNG) almost exclusively in software.
And that means that if you have an organisation "above" the coders, you are asking how do we organise the managers of the managers?
At some point you have to ask, why do we have them there? History has shown time and again some central bureaucracy trying to co-orindate and control ends up inefficient and detrimental - and I think traditional management structures have simply been rendered unnecessary
Maybe the answer to engineering the organisation is ... dont
Now that sounds a lot like microservices / and or two pizza teams.
And the allocation of resources is much more a financier problem - in short there exists a layer of "managers" who don't manage the actual work being done, and have hierarchical control over something that is a financial non hierarchical problem.
in short managers who don't code are dinosaurs
Edit: to try and build a very simplified model of management
- allocate (scarce) resources to desirable projects [financier]
- organise resources to ensure success of project (engineer / planner)
- improve quality of resources (training, maintenance)
- something something read more Drucker
Once the work sits in software (ie search engine) then it's just coders and servers except when you want to create a new business function. And that is to all intents a VC / financier role.
I mean look at how Drucker refers to managers (bestriding the business world) to how google does (8 rules for "coaching" coders)
Google recognises the chnage I think
> Anxiety, low abilities
I was once a software engineering manager at a company in the financial services realm. This was a low margin business that had suffered a decade of layoffs when I joined. It was a morass of low effort, punch the clock, do just enough to get by teams and leaders. Making any sort of forward progress was nearly impossible. I gave it my best shot though, and managed to find like minded people throughout the organization. We had a good couple of years and made some real progress. Then the next round of layoffs saw some of these key people let go.
It was very disappointing, but I too left after a time. After the layoffs, 75% of my remaining team quit for better pay. My boss, a director, gave me some support people who could spell "java" and told me to train them up, because we weren't hiring (no one would work for the company anyway, horrible reputation). Yep, that was it for me, I resigned.
All that to say, at some point it's a business problem. I hope others in similar situations don't stress as much as I did.
Edit: words
It is easy for a company building single page app to form an API, an analytics team, an infra team, QA, slapping incremental solution to solve their incremental problem. After having specialised team, it is far harder to merge things into good old Django with nginx where you can parse the log for analytics and just serve fully rendered html. At this point people will start saying their organization is different, we do it for "scale up" sake. They are probably right and the WhatsApp/instagram path is probably not for everyone.
Organization is the human version of software architecture. Do it too much, too early, too little understanding will all have long term, non-immediate, non-numerically justifiable effect. People love to talk about these.