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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> As heartless as this may seem...

It's not heartless, it's just stupid. It's like screwing in a lightbulb with a hammer.

> And I didn’t want to do the task so, consciously ignoring Mr. Weinberg, I transformed the ordeal into an optimization problem, for which I wrote an application to help me with.

Treating people like robots is probably the worst way to solve people ops problems. It's like managers learned nothing from the failures of stack ranking, whiteboard interviews, brain teasers, and other similar "optimization" methods. These ill-judged solutions show a clear misunderstanding of the scope and context of the problem at hand.

In fact, it's pretty antithetical to being a good engineer.

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He needed to evaluate the team based on some criteria one way or another. He chose certain criteria and used the computer to assist him in the evaluation.

Another option would be to choose the team on who you just "like the most". Maybe this would have been more to your liking? It's more human, I guess. However, notice that there is still a criteria and still an evaluation phase, you can't avoid it (unless you pick by random).

None of this means that you have to use text-to-speech and have the computer read out the list of names who were fired. You can still go to each team member and talk about it, like a human.

Liking each other is a pretty huge part of a positive team dynamic. The line to unfair favoritism is thin but a team of high-skilled engineers that don't like each other will most likely perform worse than a team that likes each other but has a bit worse average skill level.

Sometimes a person that is regarded as low skill can motivate other team members to hugely increase their productivity by building a positive atmosphere.

>>Sometimes a person that is regarded as low skill can motivate other team members to hugely increase their productivity by building a positive atmosphere.

Umm - Isn't that just part of the job? Most workers are expected to at least not _negatively_ impact the working environment, while being at least as competent as their co-workers.

This actually sounds more like someone trying to get co-workers to cover their short-comings for them...

He should have realized that he lacked the knowledge and experience to tell his boss to fuck off because on day #2 on the job you simply can not make this decision in a way that won't kill the company.

It is pretty interesting how this conversation goes.

CTO: I can't do that on my 2nd day.

CEO: I thought your interests align with the company. It is your job to align everyone under you to our direction.

CTO: Yes, of course. Right away.

> CTO: Yes, of course. Right away.

If it's the best reply they can come up with, they're not competent enough for the position.

What’s a better reply?

CTO: "This is an important and disruptive decision. I feel that we need X more time to gather information and make sure we don't kill the company doing it incorrectly. What do you suggest?"

It's the CEO's job to be able to weigh different kinds of risks and make a decision. So bubbling up your concerns is the correct answer.

Spot on. This is surgery and requires precision, not axe work, and definitely not something that you're going to solve by coming up with some clever algorithm.

Intra-team relationships are super important, as are the degrees to which the team members have arrived at the company, how long they have known each other, whether they knew each other prior to their arrival and so on. Before you know it you have a mass walk-out on your hands with those that have options leaving first.

The best way to deal with this is to do it very gradually and taking great care to not inadvertently wreck the core structure of the tech department.

Basically any reply that buys you more time so that you can make an informed decision: this demonstrates you can act in the best interest of the company instead of blindly following CEO's orders in order to keep your post, with potentially disastrous consequences.

You can come up with a better reply of course. But can you really beat the "are we aligned in the same direction" from the CEO and the other executives? Especially on the 2nd day.

You can spin it however you want, come up with some great arguments, but if the CEO decided to fire people, I don't think he takes that decision lightly so when he/she presents that decision you can count that it really is the last option he has.

It all comes down to trust. Trust your CEO that he has no other choice, maybe explore alternatives. But if he is a really good CEO, even if you fight it and argue for it, you'll wind up at the same conclusion he did. In fact, 9/10 you'll wind up at the same conclusion he did. Remember, it's his job to convince and lead people so he's probably better than you at that.

No good CEO would offload that responsibility onto a rookie CTO.

As the CTO he was in charge.

It's absolutely fine to face à situation that is new and that you feel you lack knowledge and experience on. But as a leader and the guy in charge you should not refuse to deal with it, you need to find a way and people to advise you. Don't think that CEOs, Generals, Heads of States, etc know everything, no they know how to seek information and advice but the final decision and responsibility is on them.

> you should not refuse to deal with it

One the contrary, it is perfectly fine to ask for enough time to be able to accurately assess the situation.

That's not refusing to deal with it, merely saying that you may need some time to do exactly what I suggested (seek information and advice) but you are dealing with it.

Such refusal is a sign of maturity in an MT member. Taking a stand to protect your department from unrealistic requests is part and parcel of being a responsible person to begin with, at the management level it starts to make the difference between a company that will continue to function and one that will be dysfunctional soon - if it isn't already.

The complete lack of empathy on display here is proof positive for me that this person does not have what it takes to be a successful manager.

I've just taken my company through a 50% drop in revenues and we've survived, stronger than ever, not a single person got laid off and all our bills are paid. That didn't happen because I treat my co-workers, partners and employees as replaceable cogs and if I would give my second in command the order to get rid of 50% of our workforce I would expect some serious pushback on that. Not that I would ever do that.

You're making a different point.

If you don't agree with a course of action then by all means do make your point in a constructive way.

But once the decision is made then you cannot shun your responsibility and refuse to implement it. Either "disagree and commit" to the best of you ability or quit.

You can disagree with a course of action and still implement it in a way that won't gut the company. This isn't that. But let's give it six months, assuming they'll make it that far.

I assumed that it was an internal promotion. If it was an outside hire, yikes. Although to be fair, we don't know how much time he was given to make the decision.

The author was promoted to CTO, he worked for the company before. Given that the company has less then two dozend people, he likely knows it in and out, including everyone working for it. Also "Day2" is likely a metaphor for "story series entry number 2" and probably does not literally mean 2nd day at work.

The story does not give that background, I'm assuming he is an outsider because of his choice of words in the beginning and the fact that he seems to treat his apparently former buddies suddenly as cogs in a machine. Maybe that's just another way for him to fortify his own mind about doing callous things to other people. Regardless, the second day on a job you are not ready to make decisions like this until you have had a lot of conversations with different people in the organization. Any CEO that tasks a just-promoted former team lead, project manager or other non-manager to first time CTO and MT member and that then expects that person to take the axe to the team in a way that will not destroy the company is out to lunch.

This article is proof positive of that, it misses a whole slew of important considerations and will likely result in a mass exodus of the people that keep the company running within the next couple of months.

I've had to lay off people before, this is not how it is done.

> the story does not give that background

well i have no insider knowledge of any kind, i just looked left and right beyond the blog post instead of making assumptions.

In a way that just makes it even worse. Because a newbie that lands in a situation like that might be excused, a former team member isolating himself from his own responsibility by asking his computer who he should fire is an even bigger insult than if he came in as an outsider.

This company is dysfunctional. They have a CTO that doesn't report to the CEO but where the CEO will cross their lines of command to give direct orders to the CTO anyway, they treat their employees like they treat their docker images (like cattle, instead of like pets), they promote people internally and make their first marching orders to take the axe to the org chart, specifically the team from which they got promoted out of.

This won't end well.

I was only pointing out the context and that the first sentence is a rather obvious tell that it is part two of a series and should not be interpreted literally.

I have a pretty simple rule for evaluating articles: if not indicated otherwise I assume they stand on their own and that the article writer means what they say. It's on them to communicate any circumstances that are required to be able to read the article, at a minimum a link should be provided to such context if it is available.

Just read this thread and see how many people are wrong-footed by the article.

> It's on them

Honestly, i think your reaction to having an assumption collapse is rather terrible

Why is everyone talking about the computer like it has it's own agency and inhuman agenda?

The computer in this story was nothing but a human's pencil and paper.

> He chose certain criteria and used the computer to assist him in the evaluation.

I used better evaluation criteria when figuring out who to kick out of my World of Warcraft guild than this guy used on his employees. Anyone that defends OP's post clearly has never led a team of anything or been in charge of people.

Writing a program to "optimize" who to fire is bonkers and shows a clear lack of leadership strategy.

KISS. Let the coin to make decision, flip it.

You are all welcome.

That would have been just as good or better.

I don't think he treats people like robots. The way he "delivers the message" is humane. And the way he selects who must go is totally an optimization problem.

You cannot boil down humans to 5-6 attribute points.

What about personalities/coordination/how people actually interact.

Product A might be filled with people who are use to taking charge, and Product B might be filled with people who are more reserved about their opinions.

This is a dreadful way to solve this problem. If it were that easy, his job as CTO wouldn't exist and we could simply plug it into a SaaS AI that spits out optimal hiring strategies.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the insight/sharing publicly.

And yet we hire based on people's achievements and previous success. And the world keeps on turning.

It's very hard to build the perfect team from the get-go. However, you can probably build a pretty good team over time. In my opinion, it's better to make an average decision than no decision at all; you can improve from average to something better as you go along.

Yes but what tends to happen is - the risk is - youll probably just end up with a stable team, but not a good team. The best will have left or been pushed out. The ones that stay, desperate enough to be unethical to keep their positions, to lie to cover their asses. A barely functioning but stable entity floating in space not producing anything of value until the company slowly withers and disappears.

Did you read the article? He specifically says: "Most important, the application gave me a few starting points. Of those, I still had to consider the team dynamics, existing teams, personalities, seniority, potential, personal situation, future needs, …"

And totally missed on the friendship angle. So, here is my prediction: the people that got fired will find new places to work at where the management is a bit more mature, and will then pull their capable buddies left behind at their old company with them. That's how it usually goes when a new junior manager goes to town with an axe.

Isn't the friendship angle precisely addressed by "team dynamics", "personalities", and "personal situation" ?

Friendships can transcend teams, personalities are not going to be modeled in software and 'personal situation' is a great way to accidentally make a bad situation worse, for instance: by deciding to keep someone who has a family in favor of someone who does not but who is instrumental to the company in non-obvious ways.

So no, I don't see that particular part addressed well or even at all through those three sets of keywords and I've seen companies be utterly destroyed because they fired a guy they thought wasn't contributing enough who just happened to be the glue holding the whole thing together.

This is not a software problem, and it can't be approached with the same toolset that you would use to figure out register optimization, it is first and foremost a people problem. The OP is seriously out of their depth and too full of themselves due to their recent promotion to realize this.

That realization won't be long in the coming though, I predict that within six months there will be another blog post about how he left this toxic company behind to go somewhere else without realizing that he was part of the problem all along.

For reference, I give you his blog post from six months ago:

https://danlebrero.com/2020/06/10/you-dont-believe-in-clean-...

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