This. When you’re good at doing something (making widgets, answering customer service calls, whatever), you eventually might get promoted to supervising people who make widgets or answer CS calls.’
Problem is that those are different skill sets, and too often the promoted person isn’t evil, and isn’t incompetent completely - just doesn’t have the right skill set for their new position of managing/supervising rather than making or answering.
Self-aware people tend to recognize the difference and seek out information regarding the new skill set. Sometimes, that involves fleeting obsessions with the latest management buzzwords (moving cheese, throwing fish, filling buckets) which of course leads to hilarious games of buzzword bingo.
Good managers will move beyond this phase. So-so managers will continue to incorporate some of the buzzwords but also begin to develop real skills. Crappy managers will toe a management paradigm line out of a need for security and not to fuck up.
Great managers will also buy their supervisees beer and pizza
Not really. If these folks are so senior and skilled and dominant in their field, a few phone calls would have financed a new company, non-competes notwithstanding.
You are kidding right? Many of them pre-date dot-com. Few tech companies last that long, and those that do better be re-inventing themselves very often. Think of Moore’s law. Have they kept up? Are they going to keep up moving forward? Or are there ideas in their field out there that are as new and revolutionary as these companies’ products were way back when?
Not getting this. If the employees were so great, why didn’t they see it coming too? didn’t the sales folks start noticing the quota going unmet, the longer sales cycles? Didn’t marketing notice tougher lead generation cycles? Didn’t accounting notice lower prices and longer payments outstanding? That’s a good chunk of the company and no one noticed?
I am sure when these two companies started, they put existing methods and suppliers out of businesses, and killed off plenty of competitors along the way.
Exceedingly few companies ever last a generation or more, including the most successful ones.
Well, they can get furloughed like California has - my gf has been working for free for 15% of her hours the last year. Her reward? We don’t know if she gets paid at all this month, and eventually her union is likely to make concessions on her salary and benefits.
Perhaps the workers can work for free because when business sucks, they ssimply won’t get paid.
I guess I don’t get why people think this market is still beating down the doors for the product and the next generation product. Are libraries really that free spending?
