This is a good article about trying to get large engineering companies to do anything. Way too much of it rings true.
I'd like to mention that there's a converse. Say you're in a meeting and some idea comes up which you don't like the look of. There are different ways to sabotage it which probably also apply across multiple companies.
The most vicious I know of is to emphasise both the value and the risks of the idea if it goes slightly wrong to justify looping in a substantial number of senior people, ideally a pre-existing committee structure. Provided you can get a couple of people with no free time to engage with the idea and schedule a recurring meeting about it, you've successfully stalled the project for a number of years. That's usually enough for the proposer to run out of patience.
Also, I'm curious whether this style of engineering is what tends to kill established companies. A sort of stagnation until the competition overtakes it.
One anti-pattern at most MAANGs is too many senior people refuse to listen to ideas of others because their egos are too large. (Not unexpected when someone lives in a tiny corner of the company and is paid $500k-$1.5M TC.) They believe only their ideas are "better" and everyone else should only listen to them. There are 2 ways to approach this: either lead them to an idea and let them take credit, or work somewhere else because particularly stubborn "old dogs" don't want to learn "new tricks."
Impressive corporate-savvy from someone with not too many years in the game.
I also had my early career years at Apple. Knowing this stuff is the only way to survive. And we didn’t have Slack or Google Docs at the time, only email.
This is great but as usual, the specifics on 'how to execute' are highly culture-dependent. Some of the ways he proposes to talk to decision makers would cause them to be seen as unserious or disingenuous where I'm from.
For example, hitting senior people with 3-4 questions via Chat or, godforbid, sending them a Word Document with questions would not get you taken very seriously here.
I'd like to mention that there's a converse. Say you're in a meeting and some idea comes up which you don't like the look of. There are different ways to sabotage it which probably also apply across multiple companies.
The most vicious I know of is to emphasise both the value and the risks of the idea if it goes slightly wrong to justify looping in a substantial number of senior people, ideally a pre-existing committee structure. Provided you can get a couple of people with no free time to engage with the idea and schedule a recurring meeting about it, you've successfully stalled the project for a number of years. That's usually enough for the proposer to run out of patience.
Also, I'm curious whether this style of engineering is what tends to kill established companies. A sort of stagnation until the competition overtakes it.
I also had my early career years at Apple. Knowing this stuff is the only way to survive. And we didn’t have Slack or Google Docs at the time, only email.
Sounds like you had an unfair advantage!
For example, hitting senior people with 3-4 questions via Chat or, godforbid, sending them a Word Document with questions would not get you taken very seriously here.
Subtlety is key. Less is more.