Totally agree. This reads to me as someone who is more concerned with their trajectory and appearance than actually doing the work. I believe in doing hard work well, then showing it off to earn growth. It should be deliberate, but if your end goal is the title then I will smell then lack of sincerity immediately.

The tone of the writer comes across as mildly entitled as if they, just by wanting it, are entitled to the role. No mention of other senior leaders in the company that may have been on the same trajectory at the same time, and how he was measuring up against his peers. Most of the achievements listed in this post are purely overseeing groups of people, which in itself is the bare minimum for this level of leadership. I also perceive some cultural barriers in this post.

I'm the author of the post. Yeah you got it right, I think the hiring process got me into that mindset, i.e. "This is a step back from you title-wise but you'll get back there quickly". So the hiring process made all that look too easy and in retrospect got me into the wrong state of mind.

What I should have done, at the point of being hired, is to drop all that, and focus patiently on what I needed to do. And I'm sharing it because not enough people share this side of it, and because I am working on elements that would have made it better. Thanks for reading! :)

Curious what your estimate is for what percentage of teams are actually underperforming?

And then of those underperforming teams, what percentage of those would the team members identify themselves as part of underperforming teams?

I like growth-oriented startups in that it is more of a team sport here. The promotion is pretty directly tied to:

* Doing your part to make the revenue grow. For management, going from say $1M annual revenue in seed to $3M in A means the company can support 3X the staff. Joining a startup is basically a bet that you can outperform when unleashed.

* Surf that wave. Show it makes sense to put new hires below you vs above, or give you increasingly big responsibilities, etc, bc you managed the past ones well. Startups run to their limit so can feel like pressure cookers, and they're relatively small, so your demonstrated ability should be pretty apparent to hands-on leadership.

* Compensation comes out of that. Stock becomes worth more, you get bigger refreshers, more experience, new title, etc

It’s because owners hoard the equity so workers have minimal stake in outcomes (usually the chance of the company tanking resulting in job loss is not a primary motivator or perceived risk either).

Small companies that aren’t worker-owned and without promotion ladders aren’t immune to this. They get workers who strive toward promotion via job switching.

You can debate the fairness of equity hoarding by those who invest money into the business but it doesn’t change the worker dynamics

Capitalism works because the worker feels they deserve better and will go to the open market to get it. Some workers may choose to become their own bosses. The free market makes it possible.

Hypergrowth is an extreme, but so is a communist mentality where everyone is happy where they are and does not see any incentive to improve. There is a moderate middle ground that is best for economic mobility.

The "WTF" list technique is great for this.

Every time you see, or encounter, something that makes you go "WTF?!??" you write it down.

Chances are you don't have NEARLY enough context yet to figure out why it's like that, and so barelling in to "fix" it is just going to lead to frustration and bruised ego's all around.

After a few months you'll either have crossed off things "Oh, THAT's WTF" or you have a list of things to start chipping away at, now that you have the FULL context.

From the author of the post: 100% I knew this advice but didn't follow it. Being patient early on is SO important!

I think the hard thing is as on engineer you're paid to have the "right" answer, but as a manager you're paid not to be right but to bring all the "right answers" together. That's a subtle but important shift.

I agree, it's an interesting view. I found it quite positive about the culture in that part of Splunk. The writer parachuted in, threw their weight around, bruised a bunch of people, but lost out to another manager who openly acknowledged the contributions of their people.

From the author of the post: it looks that way at first, but it's honestly about aligning people all around you. The true self promoters don't keep their eye on the ball of universal success.

I think I didn't study the actions of the people enough, a point I was trying to make in the post. If I would have I would have made better decisions.

From the author: yeah the failures I outlined were ... failures for sure! I'm not in the market for a director position at your company, but if I were I'd hope to find a place wanting people to have an honest assessment of what worked and what didn't and how they grew from it. If that's disqualifying I worry that you'll get people who are lying to you.

I'm sorry it came across as an ad, I'm full-time in a bootstrapped company working to try to solve this problem without any VC funding. It was a problem for me and for many people I know so I thought I'd share it in hopes to help people.

Also the grammar part here is interesting, I purposely write without AI because I think that's important, but I'd love your help in making it better - reach out on LinkedIn if you can. Thanks :)

Yeah, the writing and overall narrative are lacking. I got to the end of the piece and thought to myself: “wait, that’s it?”

Does it make you happy to be so rude and condescending?

Not all certainly but many enterprises use them and it feels like Splunk is printing money. The cost for log ingestion is high. But, it’s highly trusted and other Splunk killers like ELK stacks haven’t caught on everywhere.

Same here. I honestly enjoyed reading it and didn't expect an ad to slap me in the face.

Heya, not the author, but I know him. Will share this feedback.

[dead]

[dead]