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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That's the Curtis LeMay approach to management.[1] He was famously into management by fear.

We see this problem in software, especially in DevOps and "agile" shops, because the process is so forgiving of delay. In a manufacturing plant, no product comes out until all the component parts are ready. So there's a "no excuses" culture about running out of parts, or having an assembly line station down unexpectedly. Software rarely has that.

Organizations with real "no excuses" cultures have spares and reserves. They have a backup plan if a key person is sick or unavailable, or something important doesn't show up. They have slogans like "two is one and one is none". This is seldom seen in software development.

[1] http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/digital/pdf/articles/2014-...

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Software business is different - that much redundancy in planning would make you loose customers or annoy higher levels of management. That is whole reason for agile - you trade safe planning for week by week transparency and tight estimates.

It us also price for doing bew things. Web shops that crank one similar project after another tend to be on time - they work like factory.

> He was famously into management by fear.

The article you linked to says precisely the opposite and is more in line with the blog post. LeMay made it clear that results were expected and got them.

LeMay almost started WWIII. I don't think he's a good example in this context.

I'm in the "tone deaf management bullshit" camp. It starts with the assumption that your people are basically incompetent losers and it's up to you to stomp around and whip them into shape.

It doesn't work in most areas, and it especially doesn't work in software dev.

If your people aren't acting like responsible professionals, either your culture is broken, or you're hiring the wrong people for the wrong reasons - or both.

Given the chance most adult professionals will be adult and professional. Some will even take pride in doing a good job.

If that's not happening, unprofessional management won't fix it.

You just argued for Steve Blanks approach. Trust your people to work independently and bring problems to your attention in a timely manner. And if they can't do that, release them back into the wild.

I ran a 40 person development organization that never missed a schedule with that philosophy. Everyone empowered to bring problems up for help, everyone trusted to work independently.

Steve Blank's actual approach is to shout at people who bring issues to him ahead of time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13846800

He was famously into management by fear.

What does that have to do with this article?

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