The Greenhorn CTO

Landing rockets on barges, metaphorically speaking. Thoughts on engineering masterpieces and catastrophes alike.

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

@siteshps @george__mack There is: https://t.co/zNl18quV28

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

@johncutlefish and it's led to much, much more quality feedback and conversation from consensus-driven teams.

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

@johncutlefish This format sometimes leads to difficulty drawing out feedback from consensus-driven teams. The language implies the speaker feels the team SHOULD or MUST change behavior, which are strong terms.

I recently started using "I like, I wish, We will" instead...

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

@BradPorter_ If you wanted to take one slide out of this deck and critique it with no other context, as if all Hastings said was to not hire brilliant jerks, that's certain... a take.

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

So yeah, this is another terrible shame in a long string of shames surrounding Twitter and @elonmusk. These managers did the right thing. They cleared SPOFs in their orgs and prepared their successors. And they were fired for it.

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

The worst part of this (aside from the blatant deception) is that if those promoted employees were able to assume their former manager's role and responsibilities without trouble, it means those managers that were fired had been doing an excellent job. Why? 🧵

[Luke Bailey @imbadatlife]

Elon Musk asked managers at Twitter to nominate their best employees for promotion, then fired the managers and replaced them with their lower paid nominees https://t.co/ngOh68eEZ5

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

Any manager who cares about being promoted should be able to answer the question of who will assume their duties in that event. A manager who can't answer that is another 🚩

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

@ahl I don't know why not. It's a perfectly cromulent idea.

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

Also, the worst software engineers often have zero online presence. Another way of putting this is that online presence and engineering aptitude are not correlated, and that engineers with an online presence represent a trivially small subset of all engineers.

[Kevin Naughton Jr. @KevinNaughtonJr]

the best software engineers i know have basically zero online presence

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

@Carnage4Life The person who reported it

[Sam Newman @samnewman]

So, rather than screaming into the void regarding my thoughts on Platform Engineering, I thought I'd just scream those thoughts into a blog post instead - Don't Call It A Platform: https://t.co/oEEKARTR4Y

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

@GergelyOrosz Is this not a core part of the CTO's job (or at least the head of engineering)? It's baffling to me to think that any leader could offload responsibility for the department's culture to someone else.

[The Greenhorn CTO @dearlord]

I thought this went without saying but...

Don't manage laterally or upward the same way you manage downward! They require different approaches and communication styles!