"In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency."
I recently wrote a small book for small startups called "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" and I have gotten a lot of pushback regarding my emphasis on intuition, pragmatism, and favoring direct action over process. And over and over again, people reach out to me with some variation of "So you think the people who run Google are stupid? You think the people who run Apple are stupid? You think all of these brilliant people are actually idiots?" And my defense has been: "No, I just think those companies are large, and my advice is for small startups. Small startups are different."
It should be common sense to say that small startups are different, and need to operate by other rules. But I have noticed, there are some people in the tech industry who seem to think that the way a small startup becomes a huge tech giant is by imitating that huge tech giant exactly, including all of that tech giant's "best practices." But what is "best practice" at a huge company will not work at a small startup. In fact, many of those processes would be fatal, at a small company. They'd cause you to move too slowly, and they'd also cause you to give up the few advantages that you actually have as a small company, such as the ability to trust one another (when the whole team is just 5 people, it is easier to trust one another than when you've a company of 10,000 people).
> My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”
I like this.
I do think it's possible to still have an effective meeting with more people (up to, I don't know maybe 8-10?) but it becomes increasingly important to have tight rules around how the meeting runs and what it's supposed to achieve.
Big meetings are often like everyone takes a turn to talk because they’re supposed to, and a few people argue poorly over some point derailing any plan.
I’ve often been in them in the baffling position of seeing two people try to discuss something in a way that’s abundantly clear that neither of them understands what the other is saying in more than a very basic way.
You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size. Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.
And really, do everything you can to kill the meetings where it’s just an obligatory “everybody figure out something to say”
> Big meetings are often like everyone takes a turn to talk because they’re supposed to, and a few people argue poorly over some point derailing any plan.
Yes! The meetings where a small number of people are just having a debate with spectators are particularly awful for everybody concerned.
> You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size.
One of the most frustrating meeting dysfunctions I've seen is where large numbers of people are mentally checked out of discussions they're actually needed for - they keep needing stuff to be repeated, which results in others mentally checking out.
Eventually it's like a punishment from Hades in which your meeting can never achieve anything but will never end until it does.
In the past I've actually run a (somewhat) larger meeting by applying pretty tight time constraints. Actually saying "we're going to get this process fully done in X minutes" focuses minds and makes it become true.
> Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.
Back when we were in a physical office I also experimented with banning use of laptops in larger meetings - I think it did actually improve the quality (and speed) of communication in the meeting.
But, generally, building that habit of good communication in a team feels really hard. And the shift towards massively more remote working over the last few years has changed the landscape a bit - it seems much easier to stay silent or check out of a video conference.
Any suggestions from HN for good principles / reading materials on this?
C. Northcote Parkinson, in his book "Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress", discussed the evolution of the British cabinet. Don't remember the details but each institution that served as a Cabinet inexorably expanded and was replaced by a smaller one that the King, and later the Prime Minister, used as the inner circle. And five was about the right size for that inner circle.
Here in the United States, the official cabinet has over 20 members, obviously too big to serve as such an inner circle.
This is an interesting observation - I decided to look it up, and indeed the first presidential cabinet (including the president) had five members: the others were the Secretaries of State, War, and Treasury, and the Attorney General.
I know from personal experience in volunteer work that I'm pretty comfortable orchestrating around 6 people including myself, and somewhere north of that I get overwhelmed by trying to keep so many plates spinning. I got blindsided with a group of visitors once and I thought my head was going to explode. We ended up having to re-do about a third of their work and another third over time. We came out net positive but most of the benefit went to them, if they had a good experience which I'm not sure I would have noticed either way. I really should have insisted on more help.
I don't actually know what my real limit is because I try a little too hard not to find out. Once bitten, twice shy. I'm sure at some point I'll be paid to find out, and I'll go as slow as they'll let me.
I’d say there’s a difference between orchestrating people and running meetings. You wouldn’t generally need to have a meeting with your whole team very often, presumably they have different roles and different goals that you can treat somewhat separately. And when you do need everyone in a room, you’d be better off running it as a presentation (ie, with all the prep and structure that comes with it).
(Stand ups, while arguably valuable, are like a series of short presentations, so IMO don’t count as meetings).
I've had several coworkers who felt strongly that the standup degenerates into repeating things that you should have put into the project management software.
I can't get the sentiment to stay put in the 'right' or 'wrong' column so it's always just sort of there bugging me, like a raspberry seed stuck in my teeth. As someone said either elsewhere in this thread or in another conversation recently, waiting until morning to tell people you're stuck is not an optimal solution. I tend to find that pain points are information, but I'm not sure what the clever solution is to this problem.
Both of these folks asserted we'd be better off spending some time discussing the ways in which we've gotten unstuck, as a counterpoint to talking about how we got stuck, as a more pro-active way of broadcasting hard-won knowledge to the group.
There's a lot of survivorship bias. For any given process or practice, it can be hard to tell whether Google is successful because of it or despite it. A profitable or well-funded company in an uncompetitive market can afford to waste staggering amounts of time and money indulging the whims of senior managers, or even just weird internal cultures.
> A profitable or well-funded company in an uncompetitive market can afford to waste staggering amounts of time and money indulging the whims of senior managers
For a while, even in a competitive market, they can waste money. I'm reminded of a friend who worked for a large national book seller in the late 90s. He was placed on a project to investigate the company branding (and possibly producing) their own wine, for sale in stores. In-store cafes were such a hit, upscale wine sales (and profits) would be huge right? This was green-lit from some sr management who... coincidentally, was a wine buff, and they put a team together to go research the wine industry (which meant... travel to wineries for research, etc). This project never got off the ground, but the team learned a lot about wine and retailing wine for about a year, then was disbanded. The company started losing a lot of ground within a few years, and was defunct shortly after.
Rather than pursuing better ways of accommodating the coming internet wave... they squandered whatever chance they may have had on ... lunacy. Another couple of contacts I had there were showing me their own skunkworks "personalized reading lists" (think barebones 'goodreads' system in 2000). Projects like that were frowned on and not supported, in favor of "wine exploration".
Any chance we get to see that book? I constantly trying to improve my company process (we are small, < 10 people) and I like to see how others are handling operation.
Am I missing something or is it a term that is coopted to romanticize something particularly horrible? I'm not a native english speaker so perhaps I am missing something, but with severe depression and suicidal attempts I had understood states of a certain learned helplessness to be what desperation is about.
Adversity and hope are what I believe small struggling companies hold on to, which seems wholly different from "desperation" and much more conducive to growth and creation.. but perhaps I'm not understanding what natives would understand.
Many people use the word “desperation” in a diluted way that doesn’t necessarily imply learned helplessness or suicidal thoughts. (I’m a native speaker)
Example: “The team’s desperation increased as their opponent continued to score more points.”
So that's a common hyperbole I guess? I've encountered the term "desperate situation" in writing (fiction) used to highlight subsequent achievements, but I assumed that every instance of "desperation" could at least be replaced with "hopelessness" - which doesn't have to be as harsh as the realities I know, but certainly go exactly opposite to the hope required for a small company to survive and thrive.
Desperation is often used as an opposite of hopelessness, but frequently close to one another. Desperation is typically resorting to careless or carefree means with the hope that a goal is achieved. It usually comes about when the typical or expected avenues of that outcome are closed, but there is still a strong desire for that outcome and a belief that it can still be achieved.
For example, an employee is shooting for a big promotion. He's hopeful that he's going to get it. But his boss tells him that he's still not doing enough and won't get the role. If he was hopeless, he would simply give up, believing that there's no chance that he's going to get it this time. But if he was desperate, he would take additional uncouth or unexpected actions, like begging and pleading, or sabotaging the coworkers who also have a chance at the promotion. If those desperate attempts failed, then it would be hopeless.
I understand the term better thanks to your contextualization, thanks. Some online definitions indeed cite "recklessness due to despair" along with despair itself being a subjective "complete loss of hope" (despair's definition). So I can see the writing as trying to highlight the idea of making a "blind" effort through something that seems entirely lost and turning that into a driving force going forward.
I’m actually surprised about your listed definitions because as a native english speaker, those definitions seem definitively wrong to me, as desperation means exactly that you haven’t quite yet given up hope even though the situation is dire. “Desperate” is like an intense kind of desire, which in my mind is the opposite of hopelessness.
I collated those definitions from a couple websites and they all closed in on the same terms, which is also what I had come to understand over the years. But it's possibly a case of definitions and usage shifting a bit, or maybe a cultural element (defined in British English vs American perhaps?). But I got the closer meaning by looking up "despair" rather than desperation, so it was one hop away :)
Maybe only somewhat relevant, but the title phrase resonated with me. Given my ADHD, desperation-induced focus was the only thing that got me through college with good grades. I wouldn't study until the night before the big exam because I was unable to focus under normal circumstances, or even pay any attention to what was being said in class, but the desperation-induced focus of the big exam in the morning finally enabled me to study, and in that circumstance, to study very well and do just fine on the test.
Aviation Psychologist David Beaty on the phenomenon of ‘Set’ (1991):
“‘Set’ is a survival characteristic we have inherited. The human brain evolved to help individuals live and survive circumstances very different from our own. It predisposes us to select our focus on that part of the picture paramount at the time – a vision often so totally focused that it ignores the rest of the environment.
Once something is identified […] it takes on a reality of its own and sticks in the mind like a burr which is difficult to dislodge. […] The mind becomes tunnelled on a particular course of action. Add to that the ingredient of fatigue and it is not difficult to see that a ‘set’ as hard as concrete can result. Furthermore, ‘set’ is infectious. There is a follow-my-leader syndrome. So it is easy to see why most aircraft accidents are caused by ‘silly’ mistakes in the approach and landing phase.
[…] ‘Set’ has been a factor in many aircraft accidents. [In a case in 1972 over Florida], the crew of a Tristar were not sure that their undercarriage was down. The accident sequence was begun by a burned out light bulb in the system which is designed to show that the undercarriage is down and locked. […] the crew examined every possible of finding the trouble. The flight engineer crawled down into the nose, while the captain and the first officer tried every combination of switches and circuit-breakers. […] the three members of crew did not notice that the autopilot had become disengaged and the aircraft was sinking […] eventually crashing into the Everglades.
Because they had become preoccupied with an unsafe landing-gear indication, they failed to monitor the critical altimeter readings. Ironically, the air traffic controller noticed on his radar that the aircraft was losing height, but instead of pointing this out simply asked diplomatically “How are things coming along there?”.
The crew, still obsessed with their landing-gear problem, assuming he referred to that, for they could thing of nothing else, replied seconds before the crash, “Everything is all right!”
– Paraphrased from The Naked Pilot by David Beaty (Ch.6)
This isn’t really a fair comparison though. More than once I’ve encouraged my team to take chances and break rules and skip processes because “nobody will die if we get this wrong”.
There is a kind of process that I think is worth it:
a group protocol on how we do things that allows you to walk into a situation and understand what’s being done and how to proceed without needlessly needing to talk to others that where involved before you.
* The documentation will be here and look like this.
* The deployment is done using code that lives here.
People need to internalize that more. The gut-check reaction from most people is that process = overhead. It may be true that it creates that from time to time, but essentially a process should help align, remove confusion, maintain flow, and open up organizational capacity to do higher-level and more impactful work.
For a while, I had a girl friend who had a remarkable propensity to get herself into serious trouble, often while I was on a different continent. We noticed that when I got apprised of these acute situations, far away, unable to do anything about it, I would often score exceptional high scores on my favourite games. The stress and desperation I couldn’t put to good use to help instead manifested itself in laser focused game performance…
I always think the Spider-Man maxim needs to be turned around:
“With great responsibility comes great power”
If you need someone to have amazing output, rather than shackling them with a process, give them responsibility and the corresponding power to make decisions and to execute.
I think it depends on the process? Process isn’t a boogeyman. If a team is consistently deploying to production wrong and customers aren’t happy, you need a process.
Yeah, I agree with you here, and not the source article. Process is scar tissue. It's there to prevent the same mistake from happening twice, but yes, sometimes it can be inflexible and make it hard to effect change. Sometimes that's a good thing.
It's all a balance right? Sometimes process helps you guide decision making and make decisions faster. Sometimes it helps keep people from making the same mistake in the past. Sometimes it keeps you from tinkering with something that's working (i.e., don't fix what isn't broken).
Process can also be wrong, it can keep you from exploring needed changes. It's a fine line to walk between preventing "fixing" a not broken system, and being tomorrow's ice shippers.
Take for example, the US government. The process to pass laws is extremely complicated and difficult. That's on purpose. It keeps the government from meddling without cause and often forces compromise. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it's better than a dictatorship or simple majority rule.
The post seems to have two separate topics - one I agree with, one I don't.
One is about keeping things simple and having focus. Could not agree with it more. On every proposal, ask, "What problem does this solve?", "Is the cure worse than the disease?", "If this is added, what else can be removed so that the overall weight stays the same?". All good points; I don't think that is controversial.
But then, the post goes into what I can only describe as a rant. Something about going to the whiteboard. About desperation. Some random tangent on bottle deposits. I don't agree with this.
A "small company" is not synonymous with a "poorly-run company". Sure, Mario Andretti's quote "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough" applies to almost every startup. There always will be some portion of the company that needs urgent attention. But valorizing constant struggles, throwing your hands up saying "Duh, startup" is poor leadership, IME.
The big tell for me is that Ravi does not explain what is a good process. There never is a "no process" world. The choice is between a stated, well-understood process OR a poorly-specified, poorly-understood, inefficient process.
A few years ago, startups used to say, "Oh, we have a flat organization - no hierarchies," and wear that as a bad of honor. Not really; there always is a hierarchy - except now it is based on who hangs out with who. I notice that most startup leaders understand this now, and the "no hierarchy" line is not trotted out these days. The "no process" bit is also like that, IMO.
> But now they are different. Most big companies aren’t focused on creating things out of nothing. Someone else made the magic money-making machine, and they assume that it will just keep working. With the one thing that actually matters taken care of, they care about luxuries like making sure as high a percentage of the company as possible feels included in the planning process. Or creating performance review frameworks with an ever-increasing number of boxes and categories. Or something else that matters even less than that. This lack of focus is a luxury and a disease.
Absolutely brilliant paragraph, couldn't have said it better. I wonder if this is some function of "idle hands do the devil's work": that is, people with not enough work to do find some moderately useless thing to do that feels like work and seems like work but is actually wasting time or even counterproductive. Perhaps a properly lean company always has a bit more work to do than it has the capacity to do it.
This echos "Desperate Ground"[1] or "Death Ground" in Sun Tzu's Art of War. I've put myself deliberately in this position many times in order to succeed. The day-to-day uses of this idea tend to be far less dramatic than the name implies. I've even applied it to process where I would phrase it as, "Create processes when you must, not when you can."
"In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency."
I recently wrote a small book for small startups called "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" and I have gotten a lot of pushback regarding my emphasis on intuition, pragmatism, and favoring direct action over process. And over and over again, people reach out to me with some variation of "So you think the people who run Google are stupid? You think the people who run Apple are stupid? You think all of these brilliant people are actually idiots?" And my defense has been: "No, I just think those companies are large, and my advice is for small startups. Small startups are different."
It should be common sense to say that small startups are different, and need to operate by other rules. But I have noticed, there are some people in the tech industry who seem to think that the way a small startup becomes a huge tech giant is by imitating that huge tech giant exactly, including all of that tech giant's "best practices." But what is "best practice" at a huge company will not work at a small startup. In fact, many of those processes would be fatal, at a small company. They'd cause you to move too slowly, and they'd also cause you to give up the few advantages that you actually have as a small company, such as the ability to trust one another (when the whole team is just 5 people, it is easier to trust one another than when you've a company of 10,000 people).