The clue in your description is that you are a software engineer in management. I would guess that most if not all the other managers are from non-technical backgrounds. Thus they are directly or indirectly indoctrinated into MBA and/or McKinsey Management Consulting group-think. Only the insecure and their sychophants would instigate the sorts of practices that you describe.
Hate to put it bluntly, but you are attempting to swim against the tide by attempting any form of debate and examination of dissent. The management team around you have played their hand. It appears that you are vastly out-numbered.
You have two choices: go with the status quo; or the highway.
> MBA and/or McKinsey Management Consulting group-think
People with MBAs come from a pretty broad set of backgrounds, and there isn't such a thing as MBA group-think.
I'm not saying that there aren't MBAs who are McKinsey types, but they don't represent the entire population of people with MBAs, not even close.
If you see a common pattern of behaviour from MBAs in the companies you've dealt with, it's more likely that the companies hiring those people were looking candidates with those characteristics.
"there isn't such a thing as MBA group-think"... I'm not sure how something like this can be stated as a complete utter and final truth.
On the contrary, even coming from varied backgrounds, people going for MBA (and therefore MBA holders thereafter) are surely self-selecting for some characteristics. Also, "management by objective" and other nonsense that doesn't apply to creative work, that's surely resembles MBA group-think.
As always, these things are not clear-cut, but there are nuggets of truth there.
When I did my MBA, those types of people were the minority.
We had people coming in with undergrads of all types of backgrounds, including engineering.
Anecdotally, in my work experience across multiple industries, I haven't heard anyone use the term "management by objective". I have not heard that phrase since my undergrad/MBA, so we're talking well over 25 years ago. I don't think anyone that I personally know with an MBA who would use that term with a straight face.
of course, MBO would not be the term used publically, but it could very well be how management is carried out nevertheless :-)
Another way of looking at it is that not everything can be summarized in Excel spreadsheet, sometimes you have to know something of the work to be able to manage it properly.
Yeah but MBO isn't an MBA thing. It's a bunch of long-held, common-sense ideas that had been proven to work in some settings and got some branding and codification wrapped around it to sell books. If you asked someone who had a lot of work experience without an MBA to come up with some type of organizational strategy, many would come up with MBO without the naming.
It's not very different from Agile or Scrum. They've been proven to work in some settings, and when they fail in a mismatched setting, the entire methodology will get a bad rap, along with the people who promoted them.
>Only the insecure and their sychophants would instigate the sorts of practices that you describe.
As the replies to this Ask HN show many people disagree. These are logical and practical solutions to the problem of coordinating large groups of people. Public dissent amongst decision makers tends to be very toxic and lead to very unpleasant work environments. That is very different than private and upwards dissent.
Sadly that is a very common situation. Thus even more fitting to celebrate those who are still working, learning and enjoying their programming careers.
The only Power based supercomputers I can think of are all from IBM. Does any other vendor use them?
Power CPUs tend to power either iSeries (latest iteration of AS/400 - System38 etc) systems or AIX based. The large AIX systems use lots of CPUs, cores and typically vPars - but I wouldn't call them supercomputers. Disk I/O is generally FC attached SAN, i.e. performance is achieved through off-loading. A typical SAN array contains gigabytes of caching memory, CPUs on each disk drive with yet more RAM and multiple optical FC links to each node.
I have worked for companies that used both. Based on those experiences:
Use Power RISC with AIX in established IBM user organisation that wanted to run Unix software so we ported existing software to AIX.
Use existing s390 system running several core systems, to run Unix partitions to deploy software already written for Unix in C.
I have never even heard of any company not already being an IBM account migrating to either of those systems. The capital and operating costs are typically far higher than for comparable performance x86 based deployments. Technical staffing is much harder still.
There are certainly companies that have experimented with Power, including Google, but I've never heard of any large migrations either.
One other consideration is that Intel chips come with closed source and completely opaque logic embedded in the silicon, such as the Intel Management Engine.
As I understand it Power is now a fully open source architecture and you can get a system with fully transparent firmware (at least if you buy a non-IBM system). Depending on your security needs and threat model that may be an advantage, but I doubt it's a significant enough concern for most companies to justify the lower price performance ratio.
It's many years since I last saw or worked on a PDP-11. The only operational ones I know of are as embedded systems, that includes LSI-11 variants. That is, industrial and niche scientific applications.
I have worked extensively in finance and have never seen nor heard of a PDP-11 being used. A long time ago some DecSystems were in use. But those were all programmed in COBOL.
I'm struggling with your question, yet intrigued by the problem.
When you are new in an organisation, it is very common to feel awkward in making smalltalk and being remote would make it even more so. What technology are you conducting your conversations with? With Zoom you can read body language, etc. Using messaging alone provides far less clues.
I presume that you have been assigned a mentor and some tasks to perform. In which case, I would expect that your conversations pertain to the work you are doing and not shooting the breeze by the water cooler. Perhaps a good starting step would be to talk about aspects of the tasks at hand and then expand from there, asking about the decisions that led to the design / architecture / tool choices and from there the roles and personalities involved.
Yet another example of how clueless managements are. They are incapable of actually assessing value of the actual work performed. So they use proxy metrics like LoC, hours worked, in-person presence in the office.
If you want to paid very well, then churn out thousands of lines of rubbish code, be in the office for 70+ hours, attend their meetings, pay rapt attention to their PowerPoints and laugh at their jokes. Bingo!
To help yoy grok why what FB is doing makes sense, view this from the reverse situation: Let’s say you live in a low cost area (e.g. AK) and then move to the Bay Area, working for the same company.
In that case, with your COL doubling, would you expect a pay raise? Of course you would! Because your net pay would reduce significantly otherwise.
Selling the vision is both an in-house as well as marketing aspect. When you have hundreds of people working on the product design and realisation, the CEO has to figure out how to make payroll, keep investors happy, get suppliers to extend greater levels of credit, ensure that manufacturing ramps up. Successful CEOs are not micromanagers. Steve Jobs is well known for providing scathing feedback, but not for actually sitting down and sketching out designs.
Hate to put it bluntly, but you are attempting to swim against the tide by attempting any form of debate and examination of dissent. The management team around you have played their hand. It appears that you are vastly out-numbered.
You have two choices: go with the status quo; or the highway.