Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops

A lot of good information.<p>But my cynical worker viewpoint is that the problem is really that upper management doesn&#x27;t do the actual work and that is by design. It&#x27;s a class separation. They are there to crack the whip and collect the spoils.<p>The only way for upper management to really understand what&#x27;s going on and give useful input would be for them to be directly involved on a day-to-day basis.<p>In other words, they would have to do actual work.<p>That&#x27;s not going to happen. So the best they can do is to stay out of the way of people who are actually working, avoid making decrees, and maybe try to keep the other managers from interfering with the work also.<p>Maybe another approach would be for the workers to share more equally in the spoils so that they would be naturally inclined to integrate business improvements and goals. But that&#x27;s never going to happen.<p>The structure is much more directly related to a caste system than people may acknowledge.

&gt; and maybe try to keep the other managers from interfering with the work also.<p>I think that&#x27;s what good managers are supposed to do. As in, that&#x27;s their entire job.<p>Managers are not necessarily good at doing the actual work, but hopefully, the people they manage are. The thing is: running a business involves a lot more than doing the &quot;actual work&quot;, coordination, dealing with customers, etc... Managers are supposed to shield workers from all that, so that they can concentrate on the &quot;actual work&quot;.<p>For example, a somewhat idealized but not so far from the truth exchange with my manager could look like:<p>- The customers is unhappy with the latest release, he says that X doesn&#x27;t work as expected, can you tell me why?<p>- Uhm... X wasn&#x27;t in the specs so it wasn&#x27;t tested, but sure, it is a bug<p>- Ok, how long you think it will it take to fix it?<p>- Probably around two days<p>- Ok, let&#x27;s make it 4 to account for risk and management. It shouldn&#x27;t cause major delays but I may need to find some extra budget, I will negotiate with the customer since it wasn&#x27;t originally planned. In the meantime, work on fixing that bug and tell me how it goes.

This comment is in reference to the second to last paragraph (there&#x27;s something weird going on with that page that&#x27;s preventing me from copying text on my mobile). That paragraph says something like &quot;by being outside silos you can carry information around and tie it all together&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking about my role as a technical writer (TW) recently. I think TWs have a lot of opportunity to operate in a similar way. The real name of the game for my line of work is organizational knowledge management. For example, I&#x27;ve had some [1] success getting Eng teams to dump common Q&amp;A into Stack Overflow so that the next time the issue comes up they can just link customers to that answer. It often feels a bit more lightweight and less intimidating than updating the official docs. Also the Q and A nature of Stack Overflow keeps the docs request tightly scoped. And of course the end result is that the knowledge is much more accessible.<p>On the other hand, maybe there&#x27;s nothing special about SREs or TWs here and &quot;organizational knowledge management&quot; is the name of the game for every role in the org. We all just tackle the problem from a different angle.<p>[1] Emphasis on &quot;some&quot; here. Sometimes it works very well, other times it doesn&#x27;t go anywhere.

I like the fucking-around&#x2F;finding-out graph. It looks realistic to me (implicitly assuming the right kind of fucking around). And yes, tighten your feedback loops.

&quot;What do you know about proofs engineer?&quot;<p>&quot;Uuuh nothing, only that they are an impending thing in software :sweat-smile:&quot;