The older and more jaded I get, the more I realize this is just not true. The most important metric is the meetings and visibility, for a larger org.
If you just get things done, the effort won't be perceived or understood. .
If you just have meeting about what you did, they'll be forgotten the next day, because it's some complicated detail that can't be bothered with.
If you have periodic meetings of what you plan to do, and allow people to comment/participate, they'll see themselves as contributing in a small way, which helps them remember, which helps them understand the effort.
Worst, if you plan well and prevent future problems, nobody can know your good decisions. So, the optimal route seems to be, have periodic meetings that high ups can participate in, to some extent, and let "unforeseen problems" happen, so you can be in meetings with higher ups, fix the problems, and be the hero. This isn't even really my jaded opinion. In the org I'm in now, it was such as widely understood phenomenon that a special reward package, and recognition, had to be put together for people who prevented problems from happening.
You are very right to call out that in a corporate environment getting things done is judged by the eye of the beholder. This, imho, makes this article even more naive because posthog is pretending they don't do that, and no organization is immune to it.
Ironically, GitHub started having lots of problems when they enbraced the holocracy, i.e. flat management. No one was in charge and no amount of "empty PRs" as I described above could mitigate the vacuum of leadership.
That this article made it past posthog's leadership means they might be having a leadership crisis.
>The older and more jaded I get, the more I realize this is just not true. The most important metric is the meetings and visibility, for a larger org.
Well we can divide it in 4 ways:
- the "sales engineer" (not a literal sales enginer, but one who wants to sell themself) wants to maximize visibility.
- the startup engieer wants to pitch just enough, but mostly wants to ship
- the craftman engineer (or the researcher) wants to get things done "right"
- the blue collar engineer wants to check off tickets.
Your metrics of success will vary, and some engineers are more punished in some spaces than others.you'll need different skills to navigate depending on your environment
The older and more jaded I get, the more I realize this is just not true. The most important metric is the meetings and visibility, for a larger org.
If you just get things done, the effort won't be perceived or understood. .
If you just have meeting about what you did, they'll be forgotten the next day, because it's some complicated detail that can't be bothered with.
If you have periodic meetings of what you plan to do, and allow people to comment/participate, they'll see themselves as contributing in a small way, which helps them remember, which helps them understand the effort.
Worst, if you plan well and prevent future problems, nobody can know your good decisions. So, the optimal route seems to be, have periodic meetings that high ups can participate in, to some extent, and let "unforeseen problems" happen, so you can be in meetings with higher ups, fix the problems, and be the hero. This isn't even really my jaded opinion. In the org I'm in now, it was such as widely understood phenomenon that a special reward package, and recognition, had to be put together for people who prevented problems from happening.