[ztratar]

Sounds to me like he made a couple unfortunate moves:

- Propose a 5 year plan (lol) - Don't lead the incident with leadership, but with blame - Speaking about problems more than solving problems (hard to do) - Lack of relationship building

On one hand, I empathize with Chris. On the other hand, this sounds to me like he just didn't know how to perform in this environment. And that's totally fine! Not everything should learn how to perform in the bureaucratic knots -- startups are simpler in this way. And there's a reason the big guys lose their edge over time, and then some exec in a board room is faced with -10% YoY loss without any truthful VPs around the table.

[mjburgess]

I go back and forth on how to interpret people like Chris (and likewise, myself).

I've been in this situation, and it's psychologically disorienting: I seem to be right, but am I? Are the people around me really as incompetent as they seem, as totally disinterested in learning from their colleagues, etc. etc.

Then a few years after leaving, you look back and: oh, all those people have been fired or left; they still cannot do X as an org; the agility and competence of teams I then joined really does exist etc.

So, on the one hand, it's true that there's a sort of arrogance, political incompetence, and inability to cope with environments with a pathological practice culture --- but, on the other hand, maybe that's the right reaction?

Maybe the institution is undergoing a pathological cultural period, and maybe talented, considered, passionate people should be driven mad by it. Maybe the people who arent driven mad by it are either irrelevant to productivity/growth, or worse, net deadweights.

Who knows? That's what makes being in this environment such a psychodrama -- is the situation really this bad, or am I over-reacting? "Everyone tells me...."

[pm90]

Its very hard to affect real change without power. The people who are genuinely interested in solving problems generally don’t want to deal with the political intrigue that comes with power. So we’re left with a situation where the leaders suck for the most part.

[J_Shelby_J]

Playing politics is hard. It’s literally the job of business management and the only way they get a paycheck. So they’re well practiced and beating them at that game is difficult.

If you’re technical, you can get a paycheck just by doing the work. Sure, you can play politics and tech, but is it worth it? Unless you are rewarded as a stakeholder, I’d say it’s not worth it.

[camgunz]

A friend said something to me years ago that I find more and more wise as time goes on: almost everything is about aesthetics. Any given group of people (a company, a band, an advocacy group, a family) is pursuing its own sense of aesthetics. What does this look like in practice? Let's say using Elasticsearch would save $1M of engineering time and infra costs over using PostgreSQL for search but the people in charge of search have a vague aesthetic belief that Elasticsearch is garbage and they're willing to spend $1M of the company's money to not work with it. Is that nuts? Is that rational? Is that good engineering? Is that judicious use of company resources? Their bosses are the ones who make those decisions.

More frustratingly, this works the other way. You might skunkworks Elasticsearch into your org. You might have cost-saving metrics up the wazoo; you might have multiple engineer testimonials; you might have satisfied customers or growing sales; you might have better velocity metrics; you might have built profitable services on top of it. An Elasticsearch-hating engineer can convince your boss that it's a ticking time bomb--with no evidence whatsoever--and your boss can say, "hey I found out you're using Elasticsearch for all this, which is a big no-no. I love what you're doing here, but you need to migrate to Postgres".

(I know Elasticsearch flunked Jepsen; it's just an example)

You might think a few things:

- can't I show all my successes and change hearts and minds?

- isn't this how we evolve as a company? we skunkworks things, see if it works, build more on top of it, repeat?

- if we don't take risks, won't another company out-compete us at some point?

- won't some manager take notice of the inefficiency and do something about it?

Sometimes the answer is yes! But it's almost never yes for the right reasons; it's merely the case that you found a manager who hates the PostgreSQL team, or hates one particular PostgreSQL advocate, or finds it advantageous to be seen as a manager who's spearheading new initiatives, or thinks that a homogeneous tech stack is a vulnerable tech stack, etc.

This is the way we all work. We all have our irrational heuristics built up of lifetimes of experience that we hate interrogating; we naturally gravitate to others with the same irrational heuristics because they spare us that interrogation; we assault others who force that interrogation upon us because it's painful. You'll see this dynamic in political tribes, in technology choices at work, on reality TV, everywhere. You can watch us tie ourselves into knots in real time, selectively forget events or facts, or wildly misinterpret things, all to defend our aesthetic preferences. This is the psychological disorientation you're experiencing. It's not common to find people who are aware of these tendencies and--successfully--employ strategies to compensate, and it's even less common to find groups of people who do that. The probability is inverse to the number of people.

Like you (and I guess OP), I've fallen victim to this over and over again on both sides. There is no justice, because there is no God and nothing even approaching perfect competition. Some of those groups are doing great, others are deceased. I've only relatively recently figured this out, so I've now added some things to my interview questions like "tell me about a time you were very wrong" and "how do you reevaluate decisions or longstanding beliefs you have". I also try to check myself whenever I react a little too positively or negatively to something, because that's usually an indication that it's aligned or across my aesthetics and something I need to dig into.

The good news is I've had success instilling this into people I've worked with. It's sort of "a minute to learn; a lifetime to master", but it starts creating a culture of psychological safety where everyone relies on the others to help them be the best they can be.

[yard2010]

Don't gaslight yourself. Believe! Remember that shit floats, and you have to pick your battles.

[dade_]

Scum rises to the top.

[chriskrycho]

A bit of clarification from some of the nuance that (reasonably) had to get cut from the episode for time:

- Propose a 5-year-plan: yeah, “lol” is about right. It was never going to win any hearts or minds. It was also our least favorite plan. But it was also the only one we felt we could actually bring to our executive leadership given what they were telling us prior to that, which was basically “Even for a migration we are asking you for, do not slow down product iteration velocity at all.” How do you do that? Welllll…

- I’m not really sure what you’re referring to about leading the incident with blame instead of leadership. It’s possible something got lost in translation with the amount we cut, but I actually aimed very much to do the opposite. We didn’t blame the people who lowered the memory thresholds, the people who typo’d a bad value in YAML, or anyone else. I just insisted that we actually solve the root issues instead of leaving them to fester for the next poor person who happened to be around when it inevitably blew up again.

- “Speaking about problems more than solving problems”: really not sure what you mean here. I didn’t spend a ton of time bragging about what I had pulled off on the show because wow would that ever have been in poor taste, but… I did pretty well in the problems I solved there.

- Lack of relationship building: yeah, I called that out on the episode! It was my weakest area. I had a really good rapport with engineers, and failed pretty miserably at building cachet with management, especially with management above me.

I wouldn’t say in the end that it was just down to not knowing how to perform in the environment, though. Some of it was also a choice, in the end, not to perform in ways that I could see would be successful in the environment but which I simply did not believe in. I think a lot of the engineers I respect most are like this: can and will do the political dance for something they believe in… but not for things they don’t believe in.

[vhiremath4]

Strong +1. Also hi Zach!