It's kind of deliberate. there's bullshitters, and bullshit-takers, and you are in the latter group. Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings. That said, quite a few managers are just high on their own supply and chasing a fashionable idea or doing a poor job of trying to explain whatever they were told in their last meeting. You don't have to assume malice.
You can try using some BS of your own; for example, say modestly 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?' which flatters the person running a meeting enough that they might be tempted to show off. Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.
Keep notes on different people/ideas and give them a BS score out of 10 (nothing complicated). After a while you'll get a sense for what actually impacts productivity or business outcomes vs what's just the corporate cheer squad.
This is a painfully cynical worldview. If you find yourself in a company where management is this ineffective, get out. Or at least move to a different department where people are genuinely working together. Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually last very long if management teams were as bad as you described.
> Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings.
No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think of things to chat about.
> You can try using some BS of your own
Please don't do this. Believe it or not, it's actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.
Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other people's ability to see right through it. You may think you're just playing the game, but I guarantee it's coming off as patronizing to the genuine employees around you. Those genuine employees are the people you need to build trust with, and these political manipulation games will only do the opposite.
> Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.
Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material. Doing anything resembling this will destroy your reputation at the company in short order. Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.
> Please don't do this. Believe it or not, it's actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.
Actually it’s been shown that ass kissing and flattery are quite effective unfortunately.
> Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other people's ability to see right through it.
Actually, engineers are often quite adept at manipulating social systems to their advantage. If you think engineers are just heads-down nerds without personal agendas they promote ruthlessly, you’re the patsy.
> Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.
Seriously? Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad behavior is often rewarded. Doesn’t mean you should partake, but I don’t call it cynicism as much as realism.
> > Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.
> Seriously?
Why do you doubt that at all? It's literally what the parent comment suggested doing: Keeping track of different people and getting a sense for who impacts business outcomes versus who is all talk. This is what people do in general. It's not some magical skill that only engineers can have. We all observe who gets things done and learn who can't follow through over time.
These ideas that only engineers can see how things work and that once we're promoted to management we just become dumb robots incapable of seeing reality is ridiculous.
> Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad behavior is often rewarded. Doesn’t mean you should partake, but I don’t call it cynicism as much as realism.
Politics isn't the workplace. If you're using hot-button public politics spanning the country as an analog for teams working together in a workplace, you're going to end up with some deeply flawed mental models of how management works.
>Politics isn't the workplace. [...] you're going to end up with some deeply flawed mental models of how management works.
I mean, I sort of agree... But on the other hand, it's literally called 'office politics' and is generally pretty analogous with 'public politics' (e.g. balancing diverse viewpoints to achieve a common goal). It's not really as binary as you are implying.
Ouchie, that's pretty nasty and uncharitable interpretation and feels like a needless attack to the poster :-/
There are people who decide early in their career to go technical and never change their mind.
There are people who decide early in their career to go management and never change their mind.
But there are a LOT of people in the middle, and that's been the overwhelming majority of people I (anecdotally) know in management roles - they were good at what they do so they were promoted to management - junior dev, senior dev, tech lead / architect... whopsie, now you're manager and you don't know how you really got there; or you found you are good at talking to customer, understanding their pain points, and are also good at helping and supporting your team, so you accept a promotion you never thought you would a decade ago. And any other number of permutations. But I do know any number of people who did not "make a different career choice". They simply were doing a good job and ended up a manager. Inertia is a more powerful career drive than many people acknowledge.
It seems to me people get tempted into management rather than promoted. It's a shitty job that they agree to do because the money is better and they like having power over others.
It feels we will have to agree to disagree. Very few people I know got into management for "power over others" - as most people and articles and lessons and training for managers will tell you - it's a common perception that managers have power.then you become manager and realize it's all constraints and targets and you have crap all power and you owe everybody everything - up down and sideways. I'm not saying that power-hungry sociopaths don't exist, absolutely they do, but I think by sheer numbers they are overwhelmed by regular folks just trying to do their job.
(Oh and, for many companies, project managers are paid less than senior developers, so it's not necessarily better money either)
It's a different career choice that leads to a higher salary ceiling and a higher status and power position in a way that is much easier to achieve than an equivalent individual contributor.
> Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually last very long if management teams were as bad as you described.
That is only true for companies in a highly competitive market. There are all kinds of markets, some are very competitive (e.g., the market for a commodity like gasoline or flour), some are total monopolies or oligopolies (e.g., the market for smartphone operating systems, or for electricity or water in your city) and many are some hybrid somewhere in between.
The less competition a company has to face, the more they are able to grow dysfunctional while still staying profitable, thus avoiding any serious pressure to curb the dysfunction.
Also, even in cases that are more competitive, managers are human and make mistakes, and the feedback cycle might be so long that a lot of dysfunction can happen before it's time to pay the piper and a whole division has to be sold off or laid off. This is most likely to happen at companies huge and diversified enough.
I think you have been fortunate enough to never work at a place like the one OP described. I have, although only once. If you find yourself in such a place, yeah, take it as a sign to get out.
Have you ever been management at a Fortune 500 company?
I have and, while the parent may be a bit on the cynical side, you're take is boarding on dangerously naive for anyone who wants to understand the non-engineering part of an org.
My experience is that the real path to success is to do cynical things naively. That is, if you cynically see things how they are, and act accordingly, you won't get very far. Management in large orgs (and many small ones as well) requires "true believers" so to speak.
Meetings are a lot about asserting power, but the most successful people in large orgs genuinely believe that those people asserting power are better than them, and hope to one day be as powerful.
Flattery works insanely well, but it works better coming from a true sycophant, one who genuinely aligns their personal success with your opinion of them. I've been the object of flattery many time, and to be honest, it does feel good and work even when you know it's some what BS.
> Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material.
I literally laughed out loud when I read this, since I was more or less told to engage in this type of behavior to succeed by senior leadership when I worked in a large org. Inject yourself into projects that didn't need you, find ways to make yourself relevant, do whatever it takes to grow your team (because your authority is directly proportional to the number of people under you).
Personally I think that entire culture is reclusive, so left that role very quickly and stick to IC work and smaller leadership roles on teams that do more resemble the world you're describing. But make no mistake, parent is accurately depicting the realty at the majority management roles in large corporations.
You are quite right that it is a cynical outlook, but (it seems to me) OP is describing an environment where buzzwords take precedence over making sure everyone understands the goals and path toward them, and has made extensive good faith efforts to figure out just what corporate is trying to say.
My suggestion is not that OP should play politics (which s/he would likely neither enjoy nor prosper at) but rather do some very basic tests to get a feel of what is actually going on and avoid possibly ending up as a convenient scapegoat if a manager's grand plans don't pan out.
I fully agree that anyone stuck in an actually dysfunctional corporate environment should look for an exit where they can focus on actually working as a team.
I have observed that even when all parties know someone is full of BS, it can still be quite difficult to fight against it. It takes much more energy to debunk than lie. Lies, once spoken take on a weird truth of their own.
This is such an important, lucid point. One of the most important skills I have had to develop is to see through "reality control", which constitutes a much larger part of communication than we're comfortable talking about in most settings.
> No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think of things to chat about.
I go so far as to reject meetings that don't have an agenda specified. Either that, or (if I'm feeling generous) reply to the meeting invite with a "Maybe" and ask specifically for an agenda.
If a meeting doesn't have an agenda, then it has no terminating condition, and is therefore an infinite loop until it times out.
Don't go to those meetings.
And more constructively, don't create those meetings.
An agenda takes ~3 minutes to add; there's no excuse for not having one.
E.g. Agenda for this comment: (1) express agreement, (2) clarify what's toxic about agenda-less meetings using computer science analogy, (3) appeal to reader to improve their own behavior, (4) preemptively rebut complaints about suggested behavior. Done.
I wish this was enforced in meeting systems across corporations unless all participants elect not to have one (appreciate certain sensitive or perhaps social meetings might not need this)
> it's actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.
How do you know you didn't just catch the people who are bad at it?
I think most managers are afraid to think how the people who like them are using them. That fear is intensified by past decisions around liking: when you've promoted someone who was good at manipulating you, terrible at the work, and now everyone associates their success with your success.
One reason why good judgement becomes essential the higher up you go. If you just "believe in management", managers below, above and across from you will saddle you with likeable and incompetent people.
Most bigger corporate meetings could have been an email with some bulletpoints on top with most important things everyone must know, and later then details for people that are interested.
But if it wasn't a meeting, where else would the management get a change to flex, pat their backs, do some ritual sucking up and self promoting and generally justify their existence?
OP: Just focus on your real work and responsibilities, ignore the corporate meetings as much as you can get away with. Unless you want to join management, in which case you have to start clapping loudly and play the game.
The fact that you're talking about "management" as some separate evil entity and not you coworkers who just want to help you and live their lives happily ever after, in the same way as you do, tells me a lot.
Sorry about that. Non-technical coworkers are just people with probably the same goal as you. Talking about management in this specific way tells me that they see their management coworkers as enemies, and not as equals. I don't think that's healthy.
Some managers are just team members with organizational skills, they're great. Others are ladder-climbers who use bullying and economic force to advance. The more hierarchical an organization,the more likely you are to find the latter type.
> Talking about management in this specific way tells me that they see their management coworkers as enemies, and not as equals.
How am I being a jerk here, pointing out the obvious truths. I don't treat other people as enemies. I'm just speaking my mind about systemic problems.
I don't book company wide meetings that are (semi-)mandatory and waste thousands of person-hour of work time for the company, just because I enjoy it and am in position that can do it. I try to be mindful about the communication I initiate and treat other's people time with respect. I write TL;DR in my emails and optimize for groups performance, not just my own self-interest.
The thing you should deduce from what I wrote is that instead of being self-optimizing stupid/naive/cynical person, I actually (possibly irrationally) care about my craft and efficiency of the group I belong to, and can do my own critical thinking, instead of accepting status quo uncritically.
"I really love your strategic approach, and I think we should seamlessly impact our intrepid cloud-ready technology with another meeting to go more in depth. I would like you, or John Smith from Marketing, to restore backward-compatible partnerships between our team leads. That way we can continually seize efficient human capital. That will really synergise with our stakeholders. What do you think?"
And you can respond to whatever they say with a thinking nod while stroking your chin. And street-kids would say "bet", you simply say "hmhm, very agile."
You see, I try to efficiently build stand-alone opportunities to enthusiastically architect frictionless adoption of our Turbo Incabulators, thus creating compellingly extended multidisciplinary potentialities across our interactively strategized low-risk high-yield web-readiness platforms.
Please stop this. This is the worst kind of technical cynicism.
Tech people are not the people with 'real jobs' while everyone else 'bullshits'.
Terms are above your head because they generally relate to operations outside the scope of your knowledge.
(Edit: 'omnichannel' could mean a lot of things, it's definitely a bit 'buzzwordy' but it almost assuredly refers to some cross functional project of some kind that the OP is not aware of. This immediate implication of 'things I don't understand are bullshit' is antisocial and a bit glib - maybe understandable for some young people (?) but still, it's a problem to default to this posture.)
The biggest 'bullshiters' tend to be on the tech side, who go on and on about technology that is not needed, this is because they can very easily talk past others on domain knowledge.
I sit on both sides of the fence, and as soon as I get on the business side, I immediately see it - tech people 'controlling' the schedule and much of everything else because of their domain knowledge, often without the self awareness to recognize what's going on, operating with the implicit assumption that their need to push back 2 months for some refactor is inherently more important that other needs.
And yes - a lot of effort is filler and inefficient - that is probably the real culprit here.
Do not heed any of this ridiculous Machiavellian advice (aka 'keeping notes on people'? WTF?). Assume the best, do your jobs, obviously some people will BS, oh well, move on.
> Assume the best, do your jobs, obviously some people will BS, oh well, move on.
The reason this is common sense on business side and much less on tech side is that tech side is much cleaner in terms of relationships. Otherwise said, bullshiting is less common and people are not used to it.
As you said, the moment you cross to in between or to management, bullshiting and lying becomes normal. Moreover, sales and management gets rewarded for lying and their words are rarely checked for accuracy. I have seen them lying with straight face about our progress or capabilities of our software one too many times. I have also seen them lying to damage other employees. The worst stab in back, lying about other people or situation I have seen were not coming from tech. Sure, I have seen tech people lying, but it is visible for higher up more quickly - and they are not in situations in which they can do as much damage in the first place.
Second thing, tech people controlling schedule is a good thing. Writing from place where tech people often dont control that and the delays and pissed off customers caused by that refactoring not being done are very very real thing too. Everywhere where tech people did not controlled schedule was hot mess - and even relationships got much much worst. Because business then blamed tech for consequences of unmaintainable software (meaning absurd amount of bugs, deadlines not really met etc) and tech people resented business for causing it all.
Tech people (or anyone) controlling the schedule is good in the sense that absolute monarchy is good... if the leader happens to be good.
Tech teams are just as capable of dicking around or diving down bullshit rabbit holes that don't deliver value as anyone else.
To parent's point, I find a productive skill is humility: the person on the other side of the desk/screen is assumed to be trying to say something useful, albeit in language or concepts I don't understand.
And specifically, humility whether it's tech or non-tech controlling the schedule: each know something the other doesn't.
> Tech teams are just as capable of dicking around or diving down bullshit rabbit holes that don't deliver value as anyone else.
You can dock around even when business controls schedule. It is just different dicking around - you make it seem as if you have done work, but skip on parts like "checking whether you broke something" or "testing it" and waste rest of time in discord.
Nevertheless, if actual issue is laziness then it is not that hard to eventually figure it out and address that. Even when tech co tools schedule, business tend to have way more control including political one. And genuinely, both dicking around and rabit holes are minor issues compared to what can happen when people bullshit in software development.
The question of schedule control is not about who bulshits tho. It is about systematic motivations and consequences either arrangement has. And business controlling it is in my experience as disastrous as having programmer to do sales.
"As you said, the moment you cross to in between or to management, bullshiting and lying becomes normal."
I definitely didn't say that!
I said 'the moment you cross to the business side you see the technical side bullshitting'.
Step out of the bike-shedding technobabble wars for a minute and you'll see technical organizations are more like cats than dogs ... refused to be herded or do tricks, they do 'what they want' and 'think it's right'.
I will admit there is a degree of overt candor in the technical side that is worse on the business side, but there's enough lack of self awareness among techies as to the level of the value of what they are producing, technical debt, trying cool new things, pie in the sky thinking etc.. 80% of technical work should be more or less like 'construction' not 'research' - admittedly that 20% is also quite rare and critical.
The kinds of BS-ing and inefficiency on 'both sides' are different and that's what the OP might be struggling with.
And 'Sales' - that's another dimension entirely - don't worry or even assume anything about 'honesty' there, they bring in the $$$, that's the fuel that drives everything else. Don't assume they are liars necessarily other, it's just a different form of communication.
Refactors of course come down to a tradeoff. I've always see it come down to, "do you want it on the deadline you set, or do you want it maintainable after?"
"By the deadline" is always chosen, and then management gets to complain about the incompetent developers who are just trying to deal with the hackathon-quality code they've been forced to write.
This seems good but I've never seen a manager who allows their subordinates to complete a two-phrase sentence. How have you trained yourself to speak fast enough to get this question out?
this is true. its also the case that the various 'business' people have very different goals, very different terminology, and a much squishier sense of success.
alot of the 'business' conversation is carried out largely in subtext. you can learn quite a bit about the internal machinery of the company where you work by just learning to read that.
there _is_ quite a bit of useless sleeze on the business side. but to believe all of it is, and that somehow you have a better view of inter organization struggle and market response than all of those who do it full time is naive and counterproductive.
It depends on the company. Some companies really are this bad. If you haven't been in one, you're lucky. If you are in one, it can be hard to recognize for a while (see OP) but the key is to recognize it so you can get out of there.
I completely agree. So many tech people defending their domain with some technobabble that most people are afraid to challenge because they think it'll make them look stupid.
Alternatively, this could be a comment written by management about developers, who when asked about why they are missing their delivery date, rattle off a list of microservices which need to be refactored, which they refer to by their Lord of the Rings code names.
Sometimes when people don't understand something else, it isn't bullshit, it's simply something they don't understand.
I have also found that people use [strategic thing] as a way of keeping something at a higher level without going in to the details. Because once they get in to the details the grand plans start to break down.
I have been a part of a number of these high level strategy type efforts at my company. I have often found that I seem to be the cynical one against an onslaught of relentlessly optimistic people.
The most important thing here is buttering people up. I've never seen any more of an effective strategy than that. Just being kind and saying you like their ideas is an incredibly effective way to influence their next steps.
Oh man, I would never start playing some sitcom-style communication game. That seems like it could go very wrong, and be stressful and annoying even if it goes right.
This advice is wrong on so many levels. All the engineers do the True Work, everyone else is just bullshitting. Yeah sure. Could it be that you don't understand their jobs in the same way "they" don't understand your job? Who knows.
I'd also add that the purpose of a lot of these "consultation" meetings is not consultation at all - they exist to announce a decision that was already taken before the meeting, or to give exposure (and thus clout) to the people who convened the meeting. Seems like the latter is probably the case here.
Based on post, those sentences had actual meaning and OP just did not understood. Take multichannel thing - it was real existing functionality. OP just had no idea what it refers to.
You are doing people disservice here. If op followed your advice, op would look like idiot to teammembers.
> 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?'
That is very transparent, by the way. If your goal was to hide that you don't understand it, you didn't achieve it.
You will probably get a better answer if you are honest, anyway. If you never worked with [the strategic thing], you should not be expected to know it.
Great analysis. Also, the level at which the OP is understanding the situation means that he is never going to leave the world of the bullshit-takers. Thus his best strategy is to work on continuously improving his technical competence so that he can be a higher-compensated bullshit-taker.
You can try using some BS of your own; for example, say modestly 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?' which flatters the person running a meeting enough that they might be tempted to show off. Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.
Keep notes on different people/ideas and give them a BS score out of 10 (nothing complicated). After a while you'll get a sense for what actually impacts productivity or business outcomes vs what's just the corporate cheer squad.