"I just want to know what he needs done / and let's go make the thing."
I think this is the problem. It's really really hard to do that at scale. Different people require different types of messages in order to get it. You need to repeat your vision of what needs to get done again and again and again. That can be hard for an introvert. It doesn't mean you can't be shy, but I think that's why it can be a challenge.
Jack Walsh, one of the most successful CEOs ever at GE, where he grew stock capitalization from $12 billion to $417 billion, and revenue grew from nearly $28 billion to $170 billion said his job mainly was repeating his messages and goals all the time. Giving speeches. You'd think a powerful CEO like him would just snap his fingers and order people and they would do it, but no. If someone wanted to gum up the works, there's nothing he could do about it, even as the CEO. This is what he said.
When Welch took the helm of GE in 1981, he built the company’s own pit — a large lecture hall with a pitched floor — at GE’s corporate learning campus in Crotonville, New York, and made it the beating heart of the place. He would hold court there every other week and use it to foster a generation of managers who, in turn, helped him grow GE into the most valuable company in the world.
So it was the constant education and re-iterating goals of the company.
I'm not the original poster, but I agree with the sentiment and can explain how it's not easier:
Take any number of "fundamentals" of management: having regular 1-1s, regular reviews, having planning meetings with the team, long term goal setting, operations reviews, etc, etc (yes, management is a lot of meetings).
If an office setting, you can feel like you're doing these on an ad hoc basis, and maybe you or others can do successfully this in an ad hoc way (although if this is the general way of doing things, and your org is large enough, I would guarantee there is a manager that isn't doing this well). But this way of managing completely falls on its face when people start going remote. If you aren't regularly scheduling this stuff then it's just not happening, or people are getting left out.
So I would say that remote management isn't easier, but it makes it very apparent who is doing the management basics, and who is not.
I have a theory that how good someone is at something (soccer, the piano, programming) is directly tied to what they can put into their subconscious brain. The more that you can do subconsciously the better you are.
I realized this after thinking about skills like dribbling in basketball where first you get plain dribbling into your subconscious, then more complex dribbling, then entire moves.
Athletes always talk about when “the game started slowing down” and I always wondered if this was pushing a lot of faculties into their subconscious so they could operate at that speed.
To me this all depends on how it's implemented but you're right to be suspicious.
If all they do is give you 1/4 of the equity they were going to give you previously, then yes it drastically reduces employee upside to the benefit of others (execs, investors).
But they probably can't do that because it would be harder for them to attract talent against a 4 year vest company. Instead they'll probably have to bump up that initial grant so that when employees do the math there is still the big upside if the company improves.
I'm suspicious of this as well, but would this be better for a lot of employees? Go to Coinbase, get your 25% stock in 25% of the time, then "just" go somewhere else and get more. It's not unheard to return to a company later (Coinbase in this case) and get a better title, additional grant, etc.
A a great podcast that has started a personal hobby/interest in linguistics and etymology.
I love that history is able break your notion of what is or isn't possible and this podcast is great at that; it repeatedly shows how no language is set in stone, it is a human construct, and how languages are interrelated.
"I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power is if the single thing that grants them their leverage (to strike) is off the table from day 1."
While they can't strike, they can do the absolute bare minimum, which is what happens in a lot of professions (police, fire) where they can't legally strike. I'm not saying it's as effective as an actual strike, obviously, but with how much extra time teacher give beyond normal working hours, cutting it down to just working during business hours makes a school noticeably worse.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Does everyone else remember The Great Coffee Shortage of 2016? Because I don't. This smells like a PR story funded by commodities traders that are long on coffee. Better stock up now!!!!!!!!!
I thought the same thing about that quote. He is mixing up events with these two professions.
Nobody wants an engineer who is passionate while they are literally writing code, screaming at the computer and flailing his hands[1]. Much in the same way we wouldn't want a judge to be passionate when he's handing down a sentence.
But a judge should care about our laws, our constitution, and be opinionated about them. I want a surgeon who understands how the practice of surgery is evolving and stays up to date on best practices. I want a bridge builder to get ABSOLUTELY passionate about the type of materials used on a bridge and not settle for anything less. Similarly I think the best software engineers care deeply and are knowledgable about the craft of software engnineering.
[1] Well, I've had a coworker who did this and it was actually really comical and we were all entertained, but he was the exception that proved the rule.
Jquery - abstracted away tons of cross-browser inconsistent behavior, both with the dom and javascript, and added new selectors to make dom manuplation easier. I think there was a reason it was adopted as fast as it was, it really was a 10x improvement in working client side.
Boost for C++ likewise. It was a necessary bridge in the long wait for C++0x, but once the language started updating again it's no longer as necessary.
Absolutely it has run its course. There are a now a litany of javascript frameworks to suit the variety of projects being done in javascript (both server and client side), and browsers are now far more compatible (I think partially because browser makers realized with the popularity of jquery how in demand that was) but I was only recognizing what an innovation it was at the time.
I'm most curious about how the experience was, both for the atlas team and the product team, around this quote, "Atlas is “managed,” which means that developers writing code in Atlas only need to write the interface and implementation of their endpoints. Atlas then takes care of creating a production cluster to serve these endpoints. The Atlas team owns pushing to and monitoring these clusters."
Does this imply that the atlas team gets into the weeds of understanding the business and business logic behind these endpoints to know the scalability and throughput needs? Is the autoscaler really good enough to handle this? If it's transparent to the product team, are they aware of their usage (potentially unexpected)? I imagine the atlas team would have to be very large with these sorts of responsibilities.
From a product team perspective I imagine they are still responsible for database configuration and tuning? Has the daily auto-deployment led to unexpected breaks? Who is responsible for rollbacks? And is the product team responsible and capable of hotfixes?
Maybe a more broad question which all of my questions above speak to: how are the roles and responsibilities set up between the atlas team and the product engineering team that owns the code, and how has the transition to that system been?
I think this is the problem. It's really really hard to do that at scale. Different people require different types of messages in order to get it. You need to repeat your vision of what needs to get done again and again and again. That can be hard for an introvert. It doesn't mean you can't be shy, but I think that's why it can be a challenge.