[steveBK123]

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.

[vrosas]

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).

[gabereiser]

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.

[wpietri]

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.

[gabereiser]

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.

[wpietri]

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.

[steveBK123]

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.

[steveBK123]

In a working org you are right.

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

[gabereiser]

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

[itorcs]

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.

[pc86]

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.

[ethbr1]

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.

[pjtn8]

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

[steveBK123]

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.

[icedchai]

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.