Photo by Helen Lee.
We live in Canada. And right now Toronto is under a heavy-for-Toronto blanket of snow. Which led Melissa to tweet:
Snowy day reminder that about half of the folks living in Toronto didn’t grow up in Canada. If you aren’t accustomed to slippy driving conditions, it can be very, very scary. Slow down. Breathe. Be kind out there. ❤️
She’s right, of course. There’s a way that cars work and if you drive you learned it at some point. This pedal makes the car go faster. That one makes it stop. There’s a tight feedback loop that you learned and internalized and don’t think about any more. You’re not even really aware of it when you drive – your feet know which pedal to push, and how much to turn the steering wheel.
Driving in snow is a completely different job. It’s not just immigrants, plenty of folks born in Canada who won’t drive when it’s sloppy out. Because your instincts are wrong. The pedals don’t do what they’re supposed to anymore. And your automatic responses (push the pedal harder! Steer more!) get you into trouble, fast. When you slip on the ice, you hurt yourself. When your car slips on the ice, a ton of plastic and steel crashes into things. Your mistakes are amplified. And people get hurt, yourself included.
I’m sorry, does this sound like management to anyone else? No? Just me?
We promote good engineers into management. Good marketers. Good sales people. Good lawyers. But the pedals do different things now. Trying to be the smartest in the room doesn’t work the same as it used to. Grinding out the hard work yourself late at night doesn’t work any more. Refusing to work with people you disagree with doesn’t work any more. And your mistakes are amplified. And people get hurt, yourself included.
In marriage 1, my father in law drove a delivery truck. But not just any truck. His was filled with little lead-lined pots full of radioactive material. Medical isotopes. The need for those doesn’t go away in the winter. And nothing amplifies mistakes quite like a truck full of radioisotopes.
So every driver in that fleet went to skid school. The instructors had them accelerate their vans toward an oil slick or an ice patch, throwing them into a skid. And then they’d learn how to get out of it. They learned different techniques for handling a vehicle under these new conditions. They learned how to keep things under control, and recover when they aren’t. Every year they’d go back and re-qualify and get more practice.
There are no naturally great managers any more than there are naturally great drivers. We learn this stuff — the easy way or the hard way. But you can get better at it. The interesting question is whether you’re gonna learn those things before the storm, or during.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
The first time I heard Freada Kapor Klein talk about diversity and inclusion efforts in tech was in 2008 (I think). It was in the kitchen at Mozilla’s 650 Castro building. And I wasn’t nearly clever enough to follow what she was trying to tell us about the implications of the biases and exclusions that were rampant in tech.
This morning, Mitch Kapor was in my twitter feed with an ICYMI, sharing this link. I had missed it. Not only yesterday when the piece came out, but also a decade ago when Freada tried to capture the attention of a young and growing org. She was trying to save us from ourselves.
And here’s Freada, yet again, trying to save us from ourselves. She and her team are writing a series about the need to rethink VC. In the first one they talk about why our current structures for identifying and investing in businesses are broken, They also break down why a gender-first approach doesn’t work. It essentially hires pattern-matching women into a pattern-matching factory. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t eradicate the pattern-matching. It perpetuates it.
From the piece:
Will gender diversity on its own fix a dysfunctional VC culture? Maybe, but probably not if it means nothing more than new investors sharing the same backgrounds, experiences and mindsets as the men who already dominate the field. As it currently exists, venture investors all too often:
- Fund a narrow set of entrepreneurs — those defined by their pedigree rather than their skills,
- Invest in companies that cater to affluent customers rather than solving real problems that affect most people, and
- Push startups to create huge financial outcomes at the expense of the company’s long-term success.
The whole thing is a worthwhile read. But in particular, the third bullet here stuck out to me – about the need for outsized returns being at the expense of the company’s long term success. We hear this, too. So many of the management problems we see in scaling organizations are, in part, due to the funding structures and expectations that come with venture backing. And more founders tell us they are trying to figure out funding and growing their businesses, but worried about the management problems that come with hypergrowth.
As usual, Freada’s leading the way. We’d be wise to listen. And follow.
What Johnathan’s reading
Marco Rogers is stepping back from management for a while
First of all, if you care about engineering management and you don’t follow Marco, you should. He’s thoughtful, communicative, able to argue a point, and able to let it go. On my good days I try to do those things. He is, in a word, what you’d want more managers to be.
And he’s stepping back. And if you read his thread, he talks about how he’s struggling to make a good case for why any engineer would ever chose management. Yes yes, the go-to answer is usually impact. That’s a good and real answer. But he knows it and still he’s stepping back. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week.
This isn’t at all a complete answer to Marco’s question, but here’s part of how I think about it. Management is going to exist. It can’t be wished away. Google tried and failed. Medium tried and failed. Buffer tried and failed. So have plenty of others. We are social creatures, and even when we insist that an organization has no hierarchy, it does.
For me, and for the work we do at RSG, this is key. If management is going to exist, then it needs to not suck so hard. We’ve always been clear about where we stand. We started this business because we believe that it can get better. That it is terrible through ignorance more often than malice. We stay in business because we see it happen – we watch people get it.
Look, okay – the truth is that the good days of management are really, really good. When you see people flourishing, engaged, supporting each other it’s so excellent. A well-aligned team that knows they can count on each other makes me fucking giddy. And the moments when you really get to change someone’s life – job offers, promotions, an opportunity to do a thing they never thought they could – there’s a soul satisfaction there that is hard to describe.
But in the hard moments, the thing that got me through more than once was the realization that this job was going to be done either way. And that it wasn’t a place where I could be passive. I needed to do this thing, or get out if I couldn’t do it any more. I won’t pretend to read his mind, but I hear Marco getting out. I hear him saying his values weren’t aligned with his bosses. That is a feeling that will drain you. And for me it’s enough to be glad for him that he left.
But man, I hope he finds the energy and the enthusiasm to give it another go. Because we need more managers like him.
Oh, but also
He says he’s gonna write more about management because it’s easier when you don’t currently have a team who would see themselves in every post. That’s exactly what started Melissa and I writing the co-pour and the book. So I meant it when I said you should follow him.
