When an SVP asks you to do something in a mass email, it's very much optional. Dave Treadwell is an SVP, his org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.
My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.
> org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.
Ok, this is pretty off-topic, but is this still true? I get that you can't have 10K people all actively participate in the meeting at the same time, but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?
Doesn't X/Twitter have a feature like this? (Although, to be fair, the last time I heard about that it was part of a headline like "DeSantis announcement of Presidential run on X/Twitter delayed for hours as X/Twitter's tech stack collapses under 200K viewers")
But still - nowadays it seems like it should be possible to have 10K employees all tune in at the same time and then call it a meeting, yes?
Yes, but at that point it's an all-hands presentation, and you are basically doing a very careful presentation, thinking about every minute, because of how many hours the "meeting" is costing you.
Very different from the typical weekly/montly outage meeting, where discussion is actually expected, instead of being a ritual.
> but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?
They have webinar/event support for 5000+ participants, viewers can raise hands/use chat feedback for questions etc. and the meeting host can invite people to be visible.
The meeting isn't the hard part—after all, shareholder meetings have huge audiences too. Enforcing mandatory attendance for myriads of employees is the hard part, so it's more likely mandatory in name only.
Right, but if you say something essential in a meeting with 10 people and it has to percolate through five levels of management to reach the front-lines and gets watered down, that could be much more lost, even millions.
Scale cuts both ways.
What matters isn't how big the meeting is, it's how important the material is, and how well presented it is.
I don't think I've ever heard a top leader say anything essential in such a meeting. The stuff they work on is not related to my job at all. It's all gartner level strategy stuff. In our company they do take time talking about it in large calls but it's always boring and never relevant. And a lot of political spin you have to poke through to see the real message.
If I ever attend it just put it on mute and look at the slides while I do some real work. That way my attendance gets registered and it doesn't stress me out later with too much stuff left hanging.
That percolation is also translation of what they say to things that are relevant at my level. Like what we will be working on next year, if there's going to be bonus or job losses.
I couldn't give a crap about the company's strategy as a whole and that's not my job anyway. Why should I. I'm not here because I believe in some holy mission. I just wanna do something I like and get paid.
Most of those meetings are pretty damn fluffy. No one goes back to their desk and does anything different because they've introduced new company values and the acronym is S.M.I.L.E.
But this meeting is a course correction for how they're using AI, which is a huge initiative. He'll be trying to sell the right balance of "keep using the technology, but don't fuck anything up."
Too cautious, everyone freezes and there's a slowdown[0]. Too soft, everyone thinks it's "another empty warning not to fuck up" and they go right back to fucking everything up because the real message was "don't you dare slow down." After the talk, people will have conversations about "what did they really mean?"
[0] If you hate AI, feel free to flip the direction of the effect.
Well this is the main problem with AI right now isn't it? How to use it successfully without having it fuck up.
How are they expecting some juniors to do this when the industry as a whole doesn't know where to begin yet?
Like that Meta AI expert who wiped her whole mailbox with openclaw. These are the people who should come up with the answers.
Ps I mostly hate AI but I do see some potential. Right now it feels like we're entering a fireworks bunker looking for a pot of gold and having only a box of matches for illumination.
What we need to know from management is exactly what you mention. Do we go all out and accept that shit will hit the fan once in a while (the old move fast and break things) or do we micromanage and basically work manually like old. And that they accept the risk either way. That kind of strategy is really business leader kind of work. Blaming it on your techs when it inevitably goes wrong is not.
Because the tech as it is right now is very non-deterministic. One day it works magic and the next day it blows up.
And yes that SMILE thing was a good example. Been in too many of those time wasters.
Unless that 30-second stupid joke is what gets the audience to take your request seriously. Sometimes people will help you when you don't come across like a self-interested corporate tool.
I have never in my long life heard a joke from upper management during a meeting/presentation that wasn't awkward and cringe. Just get to the point - tell us how many people are getting fired, so the people who aren't fired can get back to work, and you go back to running this company into the ground.
I was thinking about this in recent weeks and I think I’ve actually changed my mind on it.
It’s not really possible to measure how much it would cost to not have a meeting, and I think it’s pretty obvious that if there were no meetings ever, it would hurt a company a lot
Yeah, I agree it's a silly metric. But it's kinda also a good reminder that meetings do have a cost associated with them, so they should stay short, focused, and held only when necessary.
"This could have been an e-mail" should never need to be said.
are you saying SVP’s words are not important and should be ignored? This is not what I remember back in the day when Bezos sent his email with a question mark (or maybe !)
> are you saying SVP’s words are not important and should be ignored?
Personally I would say that an SVPs words are not important and don't need to be ignored.
It's like a politician talking about abstract policies. Yes they do sort of affect me, but they don't require any affirmative action on my behalf any more than the wind does.
The front bump out leaks when we get driving rain. I installed some flashing but that wasn't enough, it's still leaking. So I'm working on that so I can close up the big hole in the ceiling some day.
The prior owners filled in the old coal chute with literal bags of cement sort of artistically placed in the hole in the brick foundation. So I'm trying to figure out what masonry tools and skills I'll need to close it up proper.
I'd like to build my kids a playhouse of some sort, sketching out some designs for that.
Not sure if you're correct, as the market is betting trillions of dollars on these LLMs, hoping that they'll be close to what the OP had expected to happen in this case.
The GP’s point was about LLMs generally, no matter the interface. I agree that this particular model is (relatively speaking) ancient in AI the world, but go back 3 or 4 years and this (pretty complex “reasoning” at almost instant speed) would have seemed taken out of a science-fiction book.
Don't ask a small LLM about precise minutiae factual information.
Alternatively, ask yourself how plausible it sounds that all the facts in the world could be compressed into 8k parameters while remaining intact and fine-grained. If your answer is that it sounds pretty impossible... well it is.
Oh I saw it, you still have a fundamentally flawed comprehension of LLMs.
The size of the model does not factor as tiny models can use Internet to fetch factual information.
But you think they are accurate repositories of knowledge, even though it's physically impossible unless lossless infinite compression algorithms exist (they don't, can't and won't).
It's a call to have his ICE goons (armed to the teeth and trained to escalate to violence of course) operate voting stations because of all of the "illegal" voters and for DHS to administer elections instead of leaving it to the states.
I am an EM that manages several senior engineers currently. I find it super common for senior engineers to get promoted mostly on technical merit, we end up thinking the rest "can be coached". Or it's coaching to the next level. Here are some areas I coach them on:
- influencing without authority. Managing up. Leadership.
I was a little surprised by your list. Aren't these normally the responsibilities of a team lead or a manager? If I were hired as a senior engineer, I'd expect to be involved in group decisions about cross-cutting technical concerns (architecture, choosing languages and frameworks, the code review process), but changing my team's priorities would fall well outside the job description.
If somebody has the power to tell me what to prioritise, it feels topsy-turvy for them to ask me to tell them what they should tell me to prioritise. At that point, why have a leader at all?
I work at a large software company, senior engineers here are essentially technical leads for a team or a subsystem. They are my equals when it comes to level, often getting paid a lot more than me for high performers.
I'm here to help the team make decisions, but I delegate as much of the opinion having to my senior engineers. To have an opinion they need a bunch of inputs, sometimes getting those inputs isn't as natural as the technical inputs, that's where I come in.
Senior engineers are still involved in cross cutting technical concerns but for any work that is bounded by our team I'd be working with them scope out the work as requirements or use cases we give to mid level or early career engineers on the team to disambiguate with the senior engineer as a consult/negotiate.
Just a misunderstanding, then - thanks for taking the time to clear it up, I appreciate it.
Strange that your company calls its tech leads "senior engineers", when every other company is going through title inflation! Hiring for those roles must be a pain.
I've never worked at a company that had a "tech lead" role as part of official HR levels. Junior engineers (couple levels) -> Senior Engineers (couple levels) -> Principle/Staff (couple levels) -> some form of really rare role of Distinguished.
Senior Engineers should definitely do what I think earlier comment thought of as "tech lead". Should be able to run juniors, solve cross-cutting needs, etc....
Team lead manages the overall direction of the team (and is possibly the expert on some portions), but for an individual subsystem a senior engineer might be the expert.
For work coming from outside the team, it’s sort of upto your management chain and team lead to prioritise. But for internally driven work (tech debt reduction, reliability/efficiency improvements etc) often the senior engineer has a better idea of the priorities for their area of expertise.
Prioritisation between the two is often a bit more collaborative and as a senior engineer you have to justify why thing X is super critical (not just propose that thing X needs to be done).
I view the goal of managers + lead as more balancing the various things the team could be doing (especially externally) and the goal of a senior engineer is to be an input to the process for a specific system they know most about.
I agree, but I think that input is limited to unopinionated information about the technical impact or user-facing impact of each task.
I don't think it can be said that senior engineers persuade their leaders to take one position or the other, because you can't really argue against a political or financial decision using technical or altruistic arguments, especially when you have no access to the political or financial context in which these decisions are made. In those conversations, "we need to do this for the good of the business" is an unbeatable move.
I guess this is also a matter of organisational policy and how much power individual teams/organisational units have.
I would imagine mature organisations without serious short/medium term existential risk due to product features may build some push back mechanisms to defend against the inherent cost of maintaining existing business (ie prioritising tech debt to avoid outages etc).
In general, it is a probably a mix of the two - even if there is a mandate from up high, things are typically arranged so that it can only occupy X% of a team’s capacity in normal operation etc, with at least some amount “protected” for things the team thinks are important. Of course, this is not the case everywhere and a specific demand might require “all hands on deck”, but to me that seems like a short-sighted decision without an extremely good reason.
In my 30 years in industry -- "we need to do this for the good of the business" has come up maybe a dozen times, tops. Things are generally much more open to debate with different perspectives, including things like feasibility. Every blue moon you'll get "GDPR is here... this MUST be done". But for 99% of the work there's a reasonable argument for a range of work to get prioritized.
When working as a senior engineer, I've never been given enough business context to confidently say, for example, "this stakeholder isn't important enough to justify such a tight deadline". Doesn't that leave the business side of things as a mysterious black box? You can't do much more than report "meeting that deadline would create ruinous amounts of technical debt", and then pray that your leader has kept some alternatives open.
Architecture, choosing languages and frameworks, the code review process are all aspects where "influence without authority" comes into play. What if you want to introduce a new lint rule or CI process that might impact other teams?
Having technical influence across other teams of peers is exceptionally important for senior developers.
In a large company there aren’t enough teams to lead for everyone who wants to get more money (promoted) so management invents these meaningless (for a regular senior) hoops to jump so they can track kpis and can’t be accused of favoritism. Something like that =)
I interpret this comment as talking about prioritization across a broader org. A senior engineer should be able to prioritize inside of their team and adjacent teams. But there is a reason why there are levels of engineer beyond senior - beyond just increased technical judgement, there is increased influence in orgs spanning hundreds or even thousands of engineers.
There is always opportunity for growth in this dimension. For example even the CEO has to build the right skills to convince the board of their priorities.
I worked with someone who had 30 years of experience, and would routinely go down rabbit holes of minimal value that they thought were valuable. Days spending on local environment setup and configuration scripts, for multiple platforms, when it only took a few commands to start everything up in a few seconds. Or making custom patterns to "improve maintainability" of the code base, that were brittle, overly abstract, and confusing.
for the record, cpuguy83 was in the trenches at docker circa 2013, it was like him a handful of other people working on docker when it went viral, he has an extremely insiders perspective, I'd trust what he says.
This topic is interesting. I am on the condo board in a 20 unit association, mostly attached townhomes. The biggest issue is the person in the "owners" unit, the one with the most invested, not playing ball with the other units.
That said if anyone has tips on good condo management companies in the Boston area, let me know!
My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.
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