notes-management

people aren't immune to advertising even when they consciously fight it

same with flattery

At Microsoft, management was extremely hands-off. In general, everybody was given some area to own, and they owned it. Managers made no attempt to tell people what to do, in fact, they saw their role as running around, moving the furniture out of the way, so their reports could get things done.

There were some great examples of this. Managers always refused to resolve conflicts. Typically what would happen is that a designer would get into an argument with a developer over what a feature should look like. They would argue back and forth, discussing the issue for an hour, and eventually, failing to reach agreement, they would stomp into some manager's office hoping for a resolution. Now you've got three people in the room: a designer, a developer, and a manager. Who's the person who knows least about the problem? Obviously, it's the manager -- who was just hauled in at the last minute for Conflict Resolution. At Microsoft, the manager would usually refuse to make the decision. After all, they have the least information about the problem. The manager would generally force the designer and developer to work it out on their own, which, eventually, they did.

At Juno, quite the opposite was the case. Nobody at Juno owned anything, they just worked on it, and different layers of management happily stuck their finger into every pie, giving orders left and right in a style which I started calling hit and run management because managers tended to pop up unannounced, give some silly order for exactly how they wanted something done, dammit, without giving any thought to the matter, and leave the room for everyone else to pick up the pieces. The most egregious example was the CEO and president of the company, who would regularly demand printouts of every screen, take them home, and edit them using a red pen. His edits were sometimes helpful (spelling and grammar corrections), but usually, they demonstrated a complete lack of understanding as to what went into the screens and why they said what they said. For months later, we would have meetings where people would say things like "Charles [the CEO] doesn't like dropdown list boxes," because of something he had edited without any thought, and that was supposed to end the discussion. You couldn't argue against this fictional Charles because he wasn't there; he didn't participate in the design except for hit and run purposes. Ouch.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html

http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/kathryn-britton/2010083013051

" * Inquiry: Asking questions that create ripples of meaning. The internal social dialog of an organization involves what people remember and think about, how they feel, and what they talk about. * Inclusion: Involving all sorts of constituents and using the power of improbable pairs – getting people to talk to people they wouldn’t normally meet * Illumination: Developing the ability to appreciate, becoming a strengths spotter, cultivating an appreciative vocabulary. * Inspiration: Unleashing the creative spirit, generating the large amounts of positive emotions, energy, and enthusiasm needed for change. * Integrity: Making choices for the good of the whole. "

a hackernews discussion in which ppl complain about needing too many sign-offs at microsoft and speculate that it stems from having a bunch of managers who have no other way to prove their worth:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4775922

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benihana 2 days ago

What was his idea of an ideal organization?

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snprbob86 2 days ago

I can't be positive what the parent post was referring to, but it's likely it has something to do with re-balancing the dev/test/pm/manager roles. Microsoft had started to get top heavy, so Sinofski had a lot of managers demoted to individual contributors and invented this odd "triad" system of dev/test/pm to try to keep things more balanced. It struck me as a passive aggressive and politically correct way to force some under-performers out. It had the positive side effect of preventing runaway PM orgs, but had the negative side effect of encumbering some well balanced teams. I assumed that it was an interrum strategy to get a handle on organizational complexity. However, other orgs around the company started being "Sinofski-ized" without any real understanding of what that meant.

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randomfool 2 days ago

Precisely. From what I experienced, everything became decision by committee with the triads.

I much prefer the single BOTL (Butt on the line), with every meeting having a single decision maker.

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He was a big fan of the triad- Dev, Test & PM, at every level. From what I experienced, at every level you'd have to get sign-off from all 3 for any features to be implemented. That, combined with Microsoft's incredibly deep org structure created a massive number of 'committees' to go through to get signoff for any work to be done.

He was also one to dictate things from up above and it was extremely difficult to understand the reasoning behind them or offer any form of disagreement. Anyone who didn't follow exactly what he wanted, was out.

So basically you'd have committees of 3's (Dev, Test, PM) filtering and relaying every decision. The people who could work the politics would get promoted and the people who understood the details would get frustrated by the top-down ambiguity and falter or leave.

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snprbob86 2 days ago

A friend of mine (another ex-softie) described the genius of modern day Microsoft to be taking C players and reliably producing a B product. The triad model seemed to fit right in line with that ideal.

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001sky 2 days ago

Definition of a BigCo? ...

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broham 2 days ago

"...you'd have to get sign-off from all 3 for any features to be implemented." "...created a massive number of 'committees' to go through to get signoff for any work to be done."

Did you guys call him Signoffsky? :p

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abhimishra 2 days ago

IMO the sign-off culture would be a problem at MS with or without triads. When you have such a large middle-layer (especially ones with ranks like 'partner' who seem to mostly be faking it) there are going to be loads of people whose chief role is to be a gatekeeper who needs to 'sign-off' on something. There are going to be layers of management who want to perform that filtering and relaying you mention, even though it does nothing for the company. And until some kind of purging happens, that won't change.

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cookingrobot 2 days ago

Honestly it wasn't so bad. PM's with vision and proof could force their will, devs with talent and credibility could dictate the approach, and testers with open eyes could hold the team to their commitments. It's ok to specialize and lean on your partners.

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utopkara 2 days ago

This is probably how things work in most big old software corporations. It is not open to big surprises, like a revolutionary new product, or a catastrophic failure. If the company is on a profitable turf, I would say, it is the way to go.

For individuals though, it makes the utterly limiting environment, where gatekeepers and not the ones with merit flourish.

On the bright side, my unscientific observation is that, in the best case, such an organization can go on like this only for one career time (~20 years). So, if you are coming in towards the end of that period, you are in for an adventurous ride.

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sbilstein 2 days ago

Microsoft was all about this while I was there. It was incredible how much permission you needed to do anything. When I left I found an almost uniform response from other ex-MSFT employees that they "just couldn't get shit done" while there.

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