My question is whether he would actually be that way in a company. As there are substantial incentives against this.
I am not a manager, but at an IC level, why would I prevent my manager from doing something stupid that wrecks the project? Better to just go along with it and make sure I have someone to blame as it is a lot easier.
My last company was started by two non technical brothers who got funding and hired a consulting company to build an MVP, find product market fit and got a few customers (B2B).
After that, they hired a CTO to bring talent in house. The CTO wanted to be cloud native and microservice based to sell access to the services to large health care providers for their own websites and mobile apps.
I was one of his first hires. I barely knew how to spell cloud then. But as we talked during the interview, he liked my ideas and hired me and said I seem like a smart guy and could figure it out.
We were once talking and he was going out of his way to be nice and give me feedback. He was in his late 40s. I finally just stopped him and told him that I’m a big boy, we have a lot to do and I don’t need a “shit sandwhich”. If I’m doing something wrong or have a stupid idea, just give it to me straight.
After about six months, we trusted each other to be honest. I could tell him “you know in your heart of hearts that won’t work and that’s a dumb idea”. He would tell me, “why are you coming to me with this.” He said I had admin access to our AWS account, the phone number to all of our vendors, etc and to come up with a design, a POC a budget and let him know.
I was an IC.
We got a lot of things done and buy the time Covid hit in April 2020, our site traffic increased by 400% and our scaling didn’t miss a step.
The company exited at 10x revenue 8 months after I left based partially on the impression their “agility” and scalability based on my designs working with my CTO.
It’s amazing what happens when you have a manager who can check his ego at the door and listen to their reports.
But that was at a 60 person company. I don’t say shit at BigTech. Like Kosh said “once the avalanche has started, the pebbles don’t have a vote.”
The incentives against speaking up to people up the chain are very strong, and sometimes management does illogical things for logical reasons.
I worked on a POC of a vendor product that, frankly, sucked. No one wanted to buy the thing but few would speak up to say so. No one could understand where we would use it or why. UI was 20 years out of date, it used an esoteric OOP scripting language instead of SQL, it was slower than our existing system, and no one had ever heard of the thing before. Basically it repeated all the existing complaints about our current stack, worse.
CTO was IN LOVE and it was clearly not a POC but a matter of finding an excuse to buy it & tech lead to own it.
My teammate and I were two of the few tech guys DGAF enough to clearly communicated it was a bad product, to which the response was that it was getting bought and they really wanted us to run the project, lol. No thanks. We both left within a year.
So why? After I left I found out.
The CTO was rather on the outs with our major business side stakeholder, and that guy had told him his buddy had this product we should really check out. So CTO saw it as - let me score some quick points by doing what the stakeholder says, and just minimize the blast radius of wherever we integrate it.
Usually making your manager look good to their manager is a way of increasing the influence and reach of your team. Being part of a team with influence and reach typically gets you more reward and better work.
I think this depends a lot on how sensitive to incentives one is.
Obviously, there are plenty of people who are. But there are also plenty who aren't.
I think at root we have twin problems. The very common ideology that personal financial incentives are the beginning and end of things. And the way people who hold that ideology (and those values) occupy so many positions of power.
But these are not universals throughout space and time. Paradigms change. And they change in part when we decide we want something else in the world.
I am not a manager, but at an IC level, why would I prevent my manager from doing something stupid that wrecks the project? Better to just go along with it and make sure I have someone to blame as it is a lot easier.