Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 411: We have a secret org chart and I'm a big fish in a little pond

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi :-) I work as a Senior Data Scientist, and about half a year ago I joined a start up that was founded by a large corporation. And while this job comes with the perks of a bigger company - like good salary, paid overtime, … , - it also comes with its organizational overhead and politics: We are only about 30 people but already a quarter of us acts as managers. I write “act” because the official org chart is flat (with the CEO at the top and the rest of us directly underneath). The unofficial org chart is hidden and depending on who you speak with, you get their view point on how roles and responsibilities should look like. As a result, I’m left with putting together the pieces to build a picture that somewhat resembles the truth. So far, I’ve concluded that we have multiple (!) management layers, that there’s a power war taking place in the middle management layer, and that you can make up your own titles that mean NOTHING, because no one has any official, disciplinary authority over any one, but that are still to be respected! What a great opportunity for job crafting :-D To make things worse, I prefer and come from organizations that have a truly flat hierarchy. For example, I’m used to step outside of my role should the situation require it (like doing some managerial tasks, supporting sales, …) and that I can speak my mind, irrespective of what the title of the person is who I’m talking to. While this was beneficial in my previous positions, this does not work well here! And while I understand that adapting my behavior would be more in line with the company culture, I find this extremely difficult. On the one hand, because of the hidden org chart, on the other because we are all fully remote and I rarely see people from other teams. To avoid accidentally stepping on anyone’s toes, my current solution is to stick my head in the sand and focus on my coding. However, this leaves me disgruntled because I feel like I’m not being myself, and that I’m withholding a viable part of my skill set: to see the bigger picture and serve the company as a whole instead of just implementing tickets. Please help, I do not understand how this company works :’-D How would you navigate the situation? I don’t want to quit because, individually, my coworkers are super nice, and the work is really interesting. All the best <3 Hi, I’ve been working at a well-known multinational company for a few years now. The entire time I’ve been here, the company has been well behind what I believe to be industry standards, but they have some great perks, which means it’s been really easy for me to create “wow” ideas (just do the same thing that everybody else has been doing for a few years). At the risk of sounding full of myself, I’ve noticed that I’ve created a critical person risk. There’s not only no push for me to train others in my work; things I thought were standard knowledge is entirely new to this team! I don’t want to become the trainer for a team that has no desire to learn new skills, and I don’t want to dumb down my work either. Is there a happy medium where I can build exciting new things and not create an absolute craphow when I leave? Should I even care about it since no one else does? Show Notes The Tyranny Of Structurelessness - https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

it takes more than repeatedly typing ampersand asterisk and dot get until it works to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 411 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who just haven't ever bothered learning exactly what all the different c++ pointer operators do and so you just try them until they work i feel like i mean computers operate on binary and turning stuff off and on again is essentially binary and randomly sticking in ampersands and stars and like that's you could think of that as sort of like a flipping a bit somewhere there's bits being flipped yeah it feels it feels like a binary-ish type of operation

i'm just turning off the ampersand and turning the ampersand back on again you just have mechanical sympathy yes sympathy for the machine i don't know try another star you've dereferenced it once but crazy referenced it twice one more star maybe the bug is this was supposed to be a quintuple dereference reminds me of the hotline it's like you've had one asterisk yes what about the second asterisk yeah ah dave should i thank our patrons i was hoping you would then i will thank you to chewy ted timbrel testing is documenting but my co-workers don't test dave smith will you marry me become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable objectionable dan from drone to play chase w norton level up your type script with type

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invite to our slack team maybe tom waits is in it maybe maybe tom waits is there he did sue the frito-lay company for making a parody out of one of his songs so oh maybe he's gonna sue us for did he win yeah he did oh boy way to go james and you just killed the podcast all right let's get out of here before before he listens anymore all right tom please forgive jameson i didn't say it it was jameson just sue make sure you only sue him okay should i read our first question please yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi smiling emoticon remember when they used to be called emoticons oh yeah oh yeah this does okay Okay. I haven't written a smiley face with the dash in it in forever.

Yeah, colon, dash, close paren. It's a very, very friendly emoticon. It's super friendly. All right, continuing. I work as a senior data scientist, and about a year and a half ago, oh, no, sorry, about a half a year ago, I joined a startup that was founded by a large corporation. And while this job comes with the perks of a bigger company, like a good salary and paid overtime, it also comes with its organizational overhead and politics. We are only about 30 people but already a quarter of us act as managers. I write act in quotes because the official org chart is flat with the CEO at the top and the rest of us directly underneath. The unofficial

org chart is hidden and depending on who you speak with you get their viewpoint on how roles and responsibilities should look. As a result I'm left with putting together the pieces to build a picture that somewhat resembles the truth. So far I've concluded that we have multiple and this is where There's an exclamation mark in parentheses, which is one of my favorite pieces of punctuation in English. Multiple management layers that there's a power war taking place in the middle management layer. You have a middle management layer with 30 people. Yeah, and there's a power war there. And that you can make up your own titles that mean nothing because no one has any official disciplinary authority over anyone, but that are still to be respected.

What a great opportunity for job creation. I was going to say, that sounds reasonable. That's what I did at one of my first jobs, but we did not respect them. That's a step too far. That's, yeah. Inflated titles are great until you make someone respect them. Yes. Okay. What a great opportunity for job crafting. To make things worse, I prefer and come from organizations that have a truly flat hierarchy. For example, I am used to stepping outside of my role should the situation require it,

like doing managerial tasks or supporting sales, and I can speak my mind irrespective of what the title of the person is who I'm talking to. While this was beneficial in my previous positions, this does not work well here. And while I understand that adapting my behavior would be more in line with the company culture, I find this extremely difficult. On the one hand, because of the hidden org chart, on the other, because we are fully remote and I rarely see people from other teams oh curveball oh boy that's challenging okay let me get let me this a little bit long but bear with us we're almost done to avoid accidentally stepping on anyone's toes my current solution is to stick my head in the sand and focus on my coding however this

leaves me disgruntled because i feel like i'm not being myself and that i'm withholding a valuable part of my skill set to see the bigger picture and serve the company as a whole instead of just implementing tickets please help i do not understand how this company works how would you navigate this situation i don't want to quit because individually my co-workers are super nice and the work is really interesting all the best heart emote icon oh boy so much here we're gonna take a big company and we're gonna pluck the people out of that company we're gonna staff a startup what could possibly go wrong yeah i just i can't help but think that if this were truly a startup as in someone went and raised their own money and i don't know started it themselves

you would i mean don't get me wrong you can have plenty of problems at startups but you might not have these problems of like weird hierarchies of made-up titles and politics and or at least not to the same degree this feels like an artificially supported environment where the company would just be dead if the fact that they're being externally funded allows this sort of behavior to continue where it would just have ceased to exist. Yeah, especially, you know, it's interesting with startups. So here you've got a bunch of people with juicy, big salaries and paid overtime. And that's a big clue to me about what's going on in this company. And if this was a true, I'll use true, like the true Scotsman, a true startup,

then these people would have very low salaries and no one would care about their titles or org chart because they know this company is going to die if they mess up. But somehow these people seem to have strong assurances that their salary will continue flowing. And thus it is worth fighting over the org chart because you're assured. Yes. Cementing your place in the kingdom. Yes. That's a really good point. At a startup, no one cares about the org chart because if if the company dies who cares what the org chart said yeah the ceo is also out of a job exactly we're all dead i i'm a i'm a senior director and i'm unemployed along with everyone else oh the remote part is definitely it's got to play into this it's so much easier to

bicker and misinterpret and stuff when you have never seen them in person right or when you've only seen them in two-dimensional pixel versions and only when they show up on a block on your calendar yeah yeah you gotta like run into them at the playground yeah maybe you should just make an org chart and pretend like it was given to you oh i got this org chart from hr and just circulate it i mean we're missing a clear answer which is you just have to win right like there's secret org charts there's battles fighting everywhere people jockeying for power if you are on top you get to tell everyone i use the power i have won through backstabbing and betraying you all to declare politics are now over yes you rise there will be no more changes to the to the

hierarchy or power structures they are perfect when i am at the top yes i will only seize the power so that i can dismantle it or it's more like so i can because i can organize it to use it wisely yes yes only i can be trusted to organize it properly yes i've never heard of that going wrong so much like the ai that maximizes the amount of paperclips yes i will organize the world yes nay the entire universe i just need to invade this country in the other hemisphere because one of our key employees in the neighboring country lost power because of some conflict yeah i don't know oh boy why can't they see my vision exactly boy i would i would be very i would be very frustrated in this situation because this feels intractable when i when i

think like okay what do you do to fix this it's like you got a bunch of people who have been forbidden from setting up a hierarchy and yet they're so accustomed to operating in a hierarchy that they just created several competing hierarchies it's time to refer to the tyranny of structurelessness which i have not referred to in a while t i have to spell it now it's this essay from the 70s i think that was it's by this famous feminist i don't know anything about anything so i don't know the history very much of it but i think it was kind of like this anarchist or or distrustful of authority kind of adjacent community that didn't like having hierarchies and formal power structures and the author wrote this essay that is sort of like but you have them

anyways like you just they're just informal now they're just they're just shadowing like you still have structure and someone is in charge and it can be much less just and equitable when it is air quotes flat or structureless is the general idea that it's impossible to operate as a group of humans without structure like sorry without hierarchy maybe it better stated yeah and it's it's also like by trying to ex i mean i don't know i'm guaranteed i'm misremembering this but i think part of the point is like by really committing to saying that we are flat and structureless you're you're like almost reinforcing the like you cannot have a well-behaved structure that declares that it does not exist or a well-functioning hierarchy that that like

someone has to say it and other people have to believe it and there's a structure yeah i'm gonna write a book called the tyranny of misremembering social commentary from the 70s i mean yeah it sounds like you have the worst of both worlds though because you have flat and you also have middle management and that feels i mean part of the benefit of a flat org is like you you don't have exactly management and nobody likes middle management but someone has to be middle management right like it i wonder if it's like the middle class where everyone's like well i'm everyone's middle class no one's upper class or we're all middle class so we have 30 middle managers no one's middle management like yeah no i mean i may be a manager that i have managers

below me and above me but i'm an in-between manager i'm not a middle manager i'm part of the shrinking middle management yeah i just don't know how you i mean okay think about this you got a whole company consisting of just 30 people think about all the functions that must exist in here sales marketing finance engineering product so that's like five functions you know if there's eight if there's like six people in each of those functions where's the middle management i just think these people are addicted to middle management based on i'm assuming that this thing was staffed from people at the mega corporation and they just can't imagine working in a world where you are just responsible for doing a job and not reporting three levels up

it sure is stressful to work this way but i'm just going to harp back on this point that there's something so clarifying about we will cease to exist in six months unless this works not like i will not get the promotion in four years to this department i've been angling for that i need to impress these like it it just cuts through all the junk or it can cut through all the junk yes existential threats and that's why i'm motivators the best prioritizers they are yeah yeah maybe you need to manufacture an existential threat that i guess that is a time-honored way of seizing power someone's coming to destroy us and only i can save you exactly i will establish a new flat hierarchy with me on top and you all fighting amongst yourselves to decide who's in

middle management it will have two levels me and everyone else oh i so the the part that i mean we've complained a lot about this the part that stresses me out the most or makes me the most disappointed is like i'm used to trying to step outside my role and speak my mind but it doesn't work well here that feels like a killer because it feels like anything you do to solve this will require you stepping outside of your role and speaking your mind to say hey this isn't working well and and if anyone is going to say well as the chief executive officer of the data scientist babysitter like that's my title and oh you're just a senior data scientist oh okay uh looks like i don't have to listen to you yeah i i really don't know how i would navigate this i mean it's like

this when you have an implicit structure in place which by the way only only 98 percent of this structure is implicit there is a ceo right so the rest of it is implicit but but that ceo is an explicitly placed hierarchy. And so I think only that CEO is equipped to solve this problem and declare a structure that people can work in. And so to me, that is the solution here. You've got a bunch of people who are vying for position because they don't appreciate the existential threat looming over them because maybe it doesn't exist. And then people don't know how to operate within the lanes that they've been assigned. They don't know where they're supposed to put their metaphorical or in the water in row and so there's only one person that can solve it and it seems

like i'm concerned that maybe that person thinks that the current situation is good but i have a hard time you know taking this perspective at face value of our question asker here i have a hard time perceiving this as good because there's confusion about who does what and who's responsible for what i yeah i don't know it feels like people are defensive like so i'm trying to imagine how this might play out and maybe i don't know you're a senior data scientist you talk to someone on the engineering team and say like hey it sure would be nice if if we had a database instead of floppy disks and they're like seeing that as some kind of power grab you're trying to tell them what to do and like yeah if you can if i don't know it it feels like this could go one of two ways one is

you can be very open and kind of like you'll you'll be like this first seed that blooms and spread this this uh like open and honest and collaborative attitude or you will be very open and get crushed as everyone else is like, a seed, kill it, quick. But I don't know what else I would do besides try to just say the thing that I see happening out loud. Like, hey, I'm not trying to criticize you

or tell you that you're bad at your job. I'm telling you that I think we need, that we need to achieve this outcome and it will be easier if you solve this problem that I have described to you. if you don't agree that it's a problem let's talk about why but you shouldn't like tell me if i'm doing something wrong i don't know i want to know i want to do the the thing that will make us successful and you've got a bunch of people who who are probably disincentivized from acknowledging

that something is wrong because they are vying for power and money and influence probably within this organization trying to seize control of the chaos and emerge as a top earner top influencer or that's just human nature. There's going to be people doing that. And so that's a headwind against you. But good news, this question asker literally reports directly to the person who can fix this on the org chart. And if I were you, the conversation I would have with that person is I would... So clearly if you've... So let me back up. Clearly, if you have got these concerns, you have seen specific examples of behavior that you think is counterproductive and is caused by this flat hierarchy with an implicit structure underneath it. I would write those experiences

down, the things that you've observed. And then I would ask for some time with the CEO and I would say, I believe that our organization as currently constituted is producing negative results. And I'd like to share with you three examples of this. And I'm sharing this with you because I care about this organization and I want to help it. And I feel like we are under utilizing my own contributions because I've got more to offer and I bet I'm not alone. And so here's an organizational structure I would propose, or maybe you don't even have to go that far. Maybe you don't have to propose a whole new org chart, but at least call out that an org chart is needed and an explicit hierarchy might be better. And then just see what happens. And I think that that's probably your best bet.

I like it. I think you've solved it. Surely this will work. And if it doesn't, just remember, Jameson endorsed it. it was it was my fault dave will you read our next question well i would wait if your name weren't on it no it's my turn yeah okay my cunning plan to get out of work has failed you caught me this is from a listener named david hey yeah what a good name hi i've been working at a well-known multinational company for a few years now the entire time i've been here the company has been well behind what i believe to be industry standards but they have some great perks which means it's been really easy for me to create wow ideas just do the same thing that everyone else

has been doing for a few years at the risk of sounding full of myself i've noticed that i've created a critical person risk there's not only no push for me to train others in my work things i thought were standard knowledge are entirely new to this team i don't want to become the trainer for a team that has no desire to learn new skills and i don't want to dumb down my work either is there a happy medium where i can build new and exciting things and not create an absolute crap show when i leave should i even care about it since no one else does that's awesome i was just thinking like what are some of these you know revolutionary wow ideas and i was thinking of someone coming up to the the boss and saying what about the internet what if we get on it

You know, you've heard about computers. What if we had one? What if we... Just think of what we could do with one computer. Think of all the calculating. We could have it check over our manually prepared spreadsheets and make sure we didn't make any mistakes. Yes, I certainly wouldn't want to let go of all our 400-person spreadsheet team, but it could check their work. Yes.

created a critical person risk i don't want to train people huh i like that critical person risk it's that's like a very formal way of saying lottery risk or bus factor risk yeah join the circus yes ran away with the circus become a beat farmer risk exactly should i even care about it since no one else does yeah that's interesting that part kind of threw me i thought oh here you are creating all these wow moments for everyone but apparently everyone else is just not really interested that's a bummer kind of i mean they're interested enough to say wow i got something going for you here did you okay this is going to be a stretch but that's fine that's what i do did you see that thing going around twitter where there was like a meteor shower and some

camera in portugal captured it and it's this view of like it's like a camera on the ground it looks like some kind of gopro or something and there's a bunch of ducks walking around i didn't see the duck one but i saw several others it's yeah it's kind of it feels like that so it's these ducks they're just being ducks it looks like a i don't know a camera to monitor ducks and there's this bright flash in the sky and they all stick their heads up and look up and they're like and then they kind of just go back down and do duck things and i wonder if that's what the people around you feel like when you do these things they're like version control oh like a bolt from from the heavens incredible well back to there's i mean no one could ever duplicate that because

how i'm just a duck how am i gonna like understand back to ftp-ing our source code directly to the production server yeah exactly yeah wow what an incredible moment that i got to witness all right time to go flap around that's an awfully dim view of these people part of why i it's in my head is because there are all these delightful like fan art drawings of it because yeah of the ducks looking up nobly at the sky that i appreciated i gotta look up this meme now it's pretty good i it it made me happy no push for others to train I mean how could you how could a meteor train a duck uh that's amazing

I'm looking at the video now it truly is exactly what you described ducks doing duck things these might actually be geese I I mean they look like geese to me I could be I'm not really a duck expert but yeah big flash in the sky look up then waddle off i don't want to dumb down my work either back to my spreadsheet as a book yeah you i'm gonna say something i don't know maybe okay i'm gonna preface this editors take this out if dave doesn't want me to say it after i say it but okay we were talking before the show and you said something very profound which is that you think in a way all engineering problems are actually hiring problems and this feels similar right like you have this problem but the problem is really

like the team is not equally yoked you you i don't know you don't have you have one really engaged person trying really hard and a bunch of really unengaged people maybe or i don't know like if you if i feel like if you had an ally or an apprentice or something someone who's just pumped to bounce stuff off of you or or kind of explore with you it wouldn't even have to be the whole team it just have to be like your your your buddy i don't know i'm trying to think of something your fellow you just need you need a your duck herder buddy yeah yeah maybe you have two duck herders instead of just one i think you're right i yeah there needs to be a name for a duck shepherd I'm sure there is. I think you're absolutely right. If you can get some more people on the

team like you who are excited by, I don't even want to say new technology because there's that trope of the engineer who's always distracted by the shiny new thing and creates a mess for everyone else. That's not even the case here. This is like three-year-old technology that is pretty well, I'm going to assume just a proven industry track record of reliability and productivity gains. Yeah. And it's great. You bring more people on the team like that and those teams grow more people like that. They do. And I've noticed that people who have no interest in learning the new hotness or figuring out more productive ways to be or more efficient ways to do their work, they tend to be kind of repelled by that. And they'll go seek out other jobs where

their fitness function or what's the machine learning term? Fitness function is more about maximizing comfort than about maximizing, you know, learning and growth and the accompanying risk. Yeah, it, it just feels good to be around people who want to do great work. And that can look a lot of different ways. But I get the sense that that is not super important to the team. And Maybe I'm misjudging it. When you say, I create these wow ideas, I feel like you want to produce high-quality stuff. This is one way of doing it, and it's convenient that it's very easy to just look at stuff other people have figured out and say it, and then that helps you produce high-quality stuff. But like, yeah, that would be very lonely if no one cared. And I really think it's interesting that this question asker is looking ahead to the moment where they eventually leave this company and it creates a huge mess where these people

who have expressed no interest in learning this new technology or new patterns or new whatever, and they have no ability to manage it when you're gone. And I think it's awfully thoughtful of you to consider what will happen. And because, yeah, you're right. You might have some short-term glory, but these people will hate you when you leave and they have to hold this bag. Suddenly, it'll go from wow to the opposite of wow. Angry, resentful quacks.

The ducks are displeased. The displeasure of a duck. You brought them this car and they're like, get this stupid thing out of here. it's covering up the grass. Yeah. So I think, I think you're right. I think it's the path you're on is a dangerous path, both if you care about the future of your company and coworkers, and if you care about your reputation, because you'll get, you could get this reputation as a hotshot. And then when you leave, you'll have a reputation as being resented for the mess you made. And so lots of, you know, lots of reason to go about actually bringing more people on the

team so how do you do that you know and i and i would suggest i'm sorry when i say bringing more people on the team i mean bringing people on the team who are like you interested in new stuff interested in efficiency and wow projects um and i think what you ought to do is ask your engineering manager if you can be involved in the hiring process to try to attract and and identify people like that i think there is there is an interesting kind of pitch that appeals to some people which is like do you want to make something way better than than the current state this is actually really appealing to me it's like looked at it looked at in a different light you could say hey do you want to come somewhere that is like just a mess it is horrible but another way to

say that is like do you want to be able to solve a whole bunch of problems like see a bunch of stuff and be able to make a big impact that can that can be exciting it can be fun to it's it's a different kind of exciting than like do you want to like push the state of the art forward and join somewhere where you will be like very i don't know challenged by the excellence of everyone around you which it doesn't sound like is might not be happening here as much but yeah yeah you don't need it to be everyone around you just yeah one person exactly and i think over time you can grow it to be that you know where you've got a whole team of just amazing people who you respect and love

and don't just quack and poop when you tell them new ideas. So I like that suggestion because it's a guaranteed change to the team. If you change, add a person to the team that has the attributes that you want. It might also be kind of out of your control. Yeah, a little bit.

I have some dumber, less exciting suggestions. that i mean if you create these wow ideas i there's a lot of ways you could do it you could give a you could create a proof of concept and throw it out there and say look at what's possible and then maybe it's up to others to take it forward it sounds like again they're sort of like wow bright lights in the sky i guess we'll never know what it was so you could you could do a bunch more work to actually like document it and produce a durable thing that people can refer to so that they can at least continue to operate it or dive into it once you're gone and and they might never like take it up while you're there but if you get it into if you get some piece of technology or

pattern or decision into an important enough place it's gonna be hard to take out so you you could you could learn to speak duck i think is how i'm going in this analogies you translate to the ducks leave them in their writing system i don't know what that scratching the ground yeah yeah artfully arranged bugs or something and i mean let's let's also remember these are um not actual ducks and so because of that fact they are capable of learning and growing if put in the right incentive system probably and so one other one thing you could do is you could arrange a situation that requires them or incentivizes them to come up to speed on your stuff so that they're not left high and dry when you're not around and one way to do that is take your idea jameson of documenting

things well so that they can be followed by people who are not as exposed or experienced in this area and then go take a vacation for a week or two yeah succeed by not by not coming to work i had a boss once who said that their goal was to do nothing at work because they had kind of set up everyone around them so they just knew what to do and would do the right thing and they could sit back and sweep the shop floors and stuff that's i love that i love that idea it's kind of unobtainium but i still love it you could also create some yes you could also propose creating some kind of process like an on-call process but maybe you know just i'm just reading a little bit into the group here that the mindset might not really be favorable to an on-call scenario,

but maybe you do like a daytime on-call where it's like, hey, we're going to take turns being in a rotation where while we're at work during working hours, we're going to each take a turn being responsible for this particular system that David, name of the question asker, David created so that we can all become more familiar with it and make sure that we don't have a critical person risk. And set that up, let that rotation run for a while. You're always there, happy to help with a smile on your face to support them and see if that builds, if not interest and appetite to do more of it, at least redundancy. Yeah. Yeah. There are, yeah, there's a couple of different problems. One of the problems is the critical person risk. And I think we've focused a lot

on the problem of like motivating the team to be really engaged, but you could, I mean, yeah, there's a lot you could do to just make it easier to understand the why behind stuff if you are not there running it for them yeah exactly and at least how to keep it from burning down to the ground that's much more within your power yeah all right have we answered this question i think so good luck enjoy being a big fish in a little pond of ducks quack quack oh yeah it was right there the whole time the metaphor yeah although ducks eat fish so i don't know i guess you have to be a really big fish yeah you'd have to be like a musky or a i don't know some kind of shark whale shark what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and

click the ask a question button thank you so much to everyone that does that we have a question a let's just say a healthy backlog of questions which we love reading and we really appreciate it every time one of you submits a question jameson actually has a rube goldberg machine installed in his house every time a question arrived arrives in the spreadsheet a whole sequence of uh increasingly hilarious and unpredictable acts takes place in this machine i saw this product launch on twitter where they hooked up a like the mario ding coin sound every time someone downloaded their product nice kind of like that nice except 10 000 times more complex and more active because obviously way more questions yes

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