> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios.
That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.
My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spend as much time looking to "align with stakeholders", I just go ahead and do things my decades of experience have taught me are the right paths (while also using my experience to know when I can't just push things through).
Isn't that "move fast and break things" by another name?
(I have more than once had to explain to a lawyer that their understanding was wrong, and they were imposing unnecessary extra practice)
Why would the lawyer need to talk to my manager? I'm the person getting the job done, my manager is there to support me and to resolve conflicts in case of escalations. In the meantime, I'm going to explain patiently to the lawyer that the terms they are insisting on aren't necessary (I always listen carefully to what the lawyer says).
I guess I was assuming (maybe wrongly) that you are an engineer/developer of some sort. All of that work sounds like manager work to me. Why is an IC dealing with all of that bureaucratic stuff? Doesn't they all ultimately need your manager's approval anyway?
I have a lot of experience doing this sort of work (IE, some product management, project management, customer/stakeholder relationships, vendor relationships, telling the industrial contractor where to cut a hole in the concrete for the fiber, changing out the RAM on a storage server in the data center, negotiate a multi-million dollar contract with AWS, give a presentation at re:Invent to get a discount on AWS, etc) because really, my goal is to make things happen using all my talents.
I work with my manager- I keep him up to date on stuff, but if I feel strongly about things, and document my thinking, I can generally move with a fair level of autonomy.
It's been that way throughout my career- although I would love to just sit around and work on code I think is useful, I've always had to carry out lots of extra tasks. Starting as a scientist, I had to deal with writing grants and networking at conferences more than I had time to sit around in the lab running experiments or writing code. Later, working as an IC in various companies, I always found that challenging things got done quicker if I just did them myself rather than depending on somebody else in my org to do it.
"Manager" means different things, btw. There's people managers, product managers, project managers, resource managers. Many of those roles are implemented by IC engineer/developers.