Landing rockets on barges, metaphorically speaking. Thoughts on engineering masterpieces and catastrophes alike.
Los Angeles
Joined February 2009
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The worst part of this (aside from the blatant deception) is that if those promoted employees were able to assume their former manager's role and responsibilities without trouble, it means those managers that were fired had been doing an excellent job. Why? 🧵
Elon Musk asked managers at Twitter to nominate their best employees for promotion, then fired the managers and replaced them with their lower paid nominees inews.co.uk/news/pressure-co…
Any manager who cares about being promoted should be able to answer the question of who will assume their duties in that event. A manager who can't answer that is another 🚩
So yeah, this is another terrible shame in a long string of shames surrounding Twitter and @elonmusk. These managers did the right thing. They cleared SPOFs in their orgs and prepared their successors. And they were fired for it.
Also, the worst software engineers often have zero online presence. Another way of putting this is that online presence and engineering aptitude are not correlated, and that engineers with an online presence represent a trivially small subset of all engineers.
The Greenhorn CTO retweeted
So, rather than screaming into the void regarding my thoughts on Platform Engineering, I thought I'd just scream those thoughts into a blog post instead - Don't Call It A Platform: samnewman.io/blog/2023/02/08…
I thought this went without saying but...
Don't manage laterally or upward the same way you manage downward! They require different approaches and communication styles!
The Greenhorn CTO retweeted
Of course that's your contention. You're a first year engineering manager. You just finished some human centric leadership guru, Rands prob'ly.
A former boss put me through several of these over a period of several years. He was (and is) a kind person and a mentor. He did it for the most well-intentioned reasons.
Still, these tests are highly problematic, and not for the reasons you're probably thinking. 🧵
The reason why this former boss is a mentor and a friend to this day is because we did get to know each other outside the parameters of personality tests. He and I navigated the complexities of critical projects and corporate politics.