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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Revisiting ideas: Promotion from Within

Ages ago a friend of mine wrote a rather seminal post on "promotion from within". It is interesting to go back and read this post through the lens of hiring and leading a team for a few years. It is a great post, but I think that one major point often gets overlooked, and this point causes many companies who follow its advice to fail. That point is this:
2) Using either the few experienced managers you've been able to internally promote or failing that, outside executive coaches, intensely mentor your more inexperienced managers to develop their skills. Typically, because many of your management candidates were less than fully-qualified, they will demonstrate potential but still be unsure in their new roles. Until they are comfortable and practiced in their roles, both they, their peers, and their teams will exist in a state of some distress. 

This is problem I have seen both at my own company and also observed at others': We promote from within, but provide no mentoring or guidance to those so promoted. Great managers are truly not born. They are made, and usually made through both being sat down and patiently taught the ways to effectively lead projects and people, but also through observing both successes and failures.  They are also made by being called to task on their own personal failures, something that many startups are unwilling or unable to do. The cult of personality around founders and early employees can work against the one thing necessary to make "promote from within" successful: some form of external help.

Most of us in the startup world are working amongst people that have very little experience managing. And we've taken these ideas that Yishan so eloquently voiced, that culture is paramount, and elevated them to high status, while forgetting that there is a lot to learn to be a successful manager. I know that I came into this job two years ago thinking that given my natural willingness to be in charge and my strong technical skills I would be a great manager. Haha! Truthfully I'm only now getting to the point where I have an inkling of all the things I don't know, and a large part of that is thanks to a ton of coaching. I would not be able to lead my team successfully without coaching, and even with my own coach, I need a coach to help the managers that report to me.

So, promote from within. But don't cheap out on the process by forgetting that these new managers and leaders need help, need training, need to be held responsible for both the good and the bad that they will inevitably produce in their first months and years as managers. Otherwise you might as well hire experienced external managers, because my hunch is that the payoff is actually equivalent, risking culture vs risking unguided learning.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Please stop threatening me with Moore's Law

For as long as I can remember, Moore's Law has been one of the great tech bogeymen. It's going to end, we fret, and the way we write code is going to have to change dramatically! The sky will fall, and we need to prepare ourselves for this end times!
When you hear the same message for well over ten years, its efficacy starts to fade a bit. You start to wonder, when exactly is Moore's Law going to end any more than it already has? When is this going to happen in a way that actually affects me more than it did five years ago? What even IS right around the corner, if the foretold end of performance hasn't much affected me in ten plus years?
The truth of the matter is this: if you care about Moore's Law, you're probably already writing code that combats it, because you care about performance. The trick of Moore's Law, as we all have been beaten over the head about, is parallelism. But why would I wait for the end of Moore's Law to bite me? The times I have cared about performance, I haven't waited. I've parallelized the crap out of code to move performance sensitive code bases from few fast cores to many slow cores. And as soon as I could, I ripped most of it out in favor of a distributed system that was faster and more scalable. And then that was ripped out in favor of smart streaming from SSD. The circle of tech life takes advantage of the latest hotness as needed to get the job done, and I have no reason to believe that Moore's Law is anything more than a factor in that equation.
These days most of us are concerned about a much more complex interaction of performance issues than simple processor speed. We're network sensitive, IO bound, dealing with crazy amounts of data, or simply trying to deal with a ton of simple things at once. We already have systems built to make IO and network calls asynchronous. We're already processing completely separate work independently. Because we can, because even without the terrible end of Moore's Law we care about performance. There's no need to call up the bogeyman to make your case. He's sitting in the next cube, making sure we parallelized all our outgoing requests, and he'd rather you stopped getting so hysterical on his behalf.