“Fail fast” is not an excuse for being a moron, a flake, or a scumbag.

I wrote before on technology’s ethical crisis, a behavioral devolution that’s left me rather disgusted with the society and culture of venture-funded technology startups, also known as “VC-istan”. There are a lot of problems with the venture-funded technology industry, and I only covered a few of them in that post. Barely addressed was that so much of what we do is socially worthless bubble bullshit, like Zynga– which, in my mind, only proves that a company can be taken seriously even when its name sounds like 4th-grade anatomical slang. Most of us in venture-funded technology are merely bankers, except for the distinction that we buy and sell internet ads instead of securities. This world of crappy imitations and bad ideas exists because there’s a class of entrepreneurs (who are well-liked by venture capitalists) who’ve become convinced that “the idea doesn’t matter”. That’s ridiculous! It’s good to pivot, and sometimes one has to change or abandon an idea to survive, but ideas and purposes do matter. When this fast-and-loose attitude is taken toward ideas, the result is that stupid ideas get lots of funding. That’s unpleasant to look at, but it doesn’t have the moral weight of some of VC-istan’s deeper problems, which I’ve already addressed. To pore into those, I think we have to look at a two-word good idea taken too far, and in horribly wrong directions: fail fast.

As a systems engineering term, “fail-fast” is the principle that a failing component should report failure, and stop operation, immediately, rather than attempting to continue in spite of its malfunction. The diametric opposite of this is “silent failure”, which is almost always undesirable. In software engineering, it’s generally understood that an average runtime bug is 10 times as costly as one found in the compilation process, and that a “do-the-wrong-thing” silent bug can be 10 to 1000 times more costly than one that throws a visible error at runtime. In software engineering, redundant systems are usually preferable because components can fail (and they will, for causes ranging from programming errors to hardware defects to data corruption caused by cosmic rays) without bringing the whole system down and, in these, for dysfunctional components to halt fast is usually a desirable behavior.

In the systems case, it’s important to look at what “fail” and “fast” mean. Fail means to stop operation once there is a detected possibility of erroneous behavior. Fast means to report the failure as soon as possible. Whether it’s a bug in software or a defect in a manufacturing process, it’s always astronomically cheaper to fix it earlier rather than later. The idea isn’t to glorify failure. It’s an acknowledgment that failure happens, and it’s a strategy for addressing it. Fail fast doesn’t mean “make things unreliable”. It means “be prepared for unexpected wrongness, and ready to fix it immediately”.

In VC-istan, “fail fast” is an attitude taken toward business, in which failure becomes almost a badge of honor. I believe this is intended as an antidote for the far more typical and pernicious attitude toward business failure, which is to personalize and stigmatize it, as seen in “middle America” and most of Europe. I’ll agree that I prefer the fail-fast attitude over the paralyzing risk aversion of most of the world. The reason Silicon Valley is able to generate technological innovation at a rate faster than any other place is this lack of stigma against good-faith failure. On the other hand, I find the cavalier attitude toward failure to often veer into frank irresponsibility, and that’s what I want to address.

The typical VC startup founder is rich. Without inherited connections, it takes about twelve months worth of work without a salary to produce something that VCs will even look at. (With such connections, VC mentoring comes immediately and a fundable product can be built within about half that time.) Even for the rich and well-connected, it’s dicey. VC acceptance rates are typically below 1 percent, so a lot of good ideas are being rejected, even coming from well-positioned people. Raising money is always hard, but for people who aren’t wealthy, the risk is generally intolerable: twelve months without salary and a high likelihood that it will amount to zilch. Why’s this relevant? Because rich people can afford a cavalier attitude toward failure. Losing a job just means moving vacations around. If one company dies, another can be built.

In an ideal world, everyone would be rich, by which I mean that material limits wouldn’t dominate peoples’ lives and their work in the way they do now. This would be a world of such abundance as to implicitly provide the safety associated with socialism, without the drawbacks, and in which poverty would be eliminated as thoroughly as smallpox. I believe humanity will reach a state like this, but probably not until the end of my lifetime, if not some time after I’m dead. In this “post-scarcity” world, libertarian capitalism would actually be a great system (and so it’s easy to see why out-of-touch rich people like it so much). Business failure would just be the impersonal death of bad ideas, resources would quickly be allocated to the good ones, and people would rise into and fall out of leadership positions as appropriate but could gracefully decline when not needed, rather than having to fire their help, pull their kids out of college, or move halfway across the country when this happens. If everyone were rich, libertarian capitalism would be a wonderful economic system. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. We have to make do with what we have.

In the real world, failure hurts people, and most of those people aren’t 23-year-olds with $5-million trust funds. Investors (not all of whom are rich) lose large amounts of money, and employees get fired, often without notice or severance. Careers of innocent people can be damaged. This doesn’t mean that failure is morally unacceptable. Good-faith failure must be accepted, because if failure leads to broad-based social rejection, you end up with a society where no one takes real risk and no advancement occurs. This isn’t an abstract danger. It’s something that most people see every single fucking day in the typical corporate workplace: a bland, risk-intolerant environment where people are so afraid of social rejection that people torture themselves in order to seem busy and important, but no one is taking creative risks, and real work isn’t getting done. So my attitude toward those who take risk and fail in good faith is one of empathy and, sometimes, admiration. I’ve been there. It happens to almost everyone who wants to accomplish something in this world.

My issue with “fail fast”, and the more general cavalier attitude toward business failure observed in VC-istan, is that people who espouse this mantra generally step outside the bounds of good-faith failure, responsible risk-taking, and ethical behavior. When you take millions of dollars of someone else’s money, you should try really fucking hard not to fail. It’s a basic ethical responsibility not to let others depend on you unless you will do your best not to let them down. You should put your all into the fight. If you give it your best and don’t make it, you’ve learned a lot on someone else’s dime. That’s fine. The problem with “fail fast” is that it sounds to me a lot like “give up early, when shit gets hard”. People with that attitude will never achieve anything.

Usually, the worst “fail fast” ethical transgressions are against employees rather than investors. Investors have rights. Dilute their equity in an unfair way, and a lawsuit ensues. Throw the business away recklessly, and end up in court– possibly in jail. One can’t easily fire an investor either; at the least, one has to give the money back. On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors, socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees. This is absurd and disgusting because employees are the most important actual investors, by far, in a technology company. Money investors are just putting in funds (and, in the case of VC, money that belongs to other people). They deserve basic respect of their interests for this, but it shouldn’t qualify them (as it does) to make most of the important decisions. Employees, for contrast, are investing their time, careers, creative energy, and raw effort, often for pay that is a small fraction of the value they add. Morally speaking, it means they’re putting a lot more into the venture.

I’ve seen too many sociopaths using “fail fast” rhetoric to justify their irresponsible risk-taking. One example of a fail-fast acolyte is someone in his mid-20s whom I once saw manage the technical organization of an important company. I won’t get into too many details, but it’s an ongoing and catastrophic failure, and although it’s evident to me at least (because I’ve seen this shit before) that he is personally headed toward disaster, it’s not clear whether the company will follow him down the drain. (That company is in serious danger of failing an important deliverable because of decisions he made.) I hope it doesn’t. First, he took a scorched earth policy toward the existing code, which was written under tight deadline pressure. (Despite this twerp’s claims to the contrary about the “old team”, the engineers who wrote it were excellent, and the code quality problems were a direct result of the deadline pressure.) I don’t consider that decision an unusual moral failure on his part. Give a 25-year-old programmer the authority to burn a bunch of difficult legacy code and he usually will. At that age, I probably would have done so as well. That’s one very good reason not to give snot-nosed kids the reins to important companies without close supervision. I remember being 18 and thinking I knew everything. A decade later… turns out I really didn’t. Taken too far, the “fail fast” mentality appeals to impulsive young males who enjoy waving a gun around and shooting at things they can’t see and don’t understand.

My second encounter with this person’s “fail fast” sociopathy was in a discussion of hiring strategy, in which he discussed building “30/60/90 plans” for new hires, which would entail milestones that new employees would be expected to meet. As a way of setting guidelines, this is not a bad idea. Technology workplaces are a bit too dynamic for people to actually know what a person’s priorities should be three months in advance, but it’s always good to have a default plan and baseline expectations. New hires typically come on board, in a chaotic environment, not knowing what’s expected or how to “on-board”, and a bit of structure is a useful. This little sociopath wanted to take things a bit further. He thought it would be a good idea to fire people immediately if they missed the targets. New hire takes 35 days to meet the 30-day goal? Gone, after one month. No chance to move to another part of the organization, no opportunity to improve, no notice, no severance, and it’s all made “fair” by putting all new hires on a PIP from the outset. I’m pretty sure, I’ll note, that this young twerp has never been fired himself– and my money’s on him being three to 12 months away from his first experience with it, depending on how fast he can learn that primary executive skill of shifting blame, and how long he can run it. These sorts of terrible ideas emerge when people are permitted to take irresponsible risks with others’ careers. Most of the damaging HR “innovations” companies invent (which become tomorrow’s morale-damaging bureaucratic cruft) occur not because they’re good ideas for the company, but because people within these companies want to propose wacky ideas that affect other people, in the hope that some “greater fool” in upper-management will see the half-baked concept as “visionary” and promote the person who invented it, regardless of the idea’s lack of merit. That’s how Google’s douche-tsunami (douchenami?) system of stack-ranking and “calibration scores”, for just one example, was born.

I don’t like people who are cavalier about failure when they haven’t been on the other side of it, either as an investor who lost a large sum of money, or as a laid-off or unjustly-fired employee. To put it plainly and simply: “failing fast” with other peoples’ risk is not courage. I say this as someone who has taken a lot of risks and failed a few times, who has always accepted the consequences of what he has started, and who has always done everything possible to make sure that anyone taking a risk with me knows what he or she is getting into.

I’m going to advise something altogether different from “fail fast”, because the term “fast” has chronological implications that I don’t find useful. Protracted failures driven by denial are bad, sure. I agree with that aspect of “fast”, but people should try to avoid failure if they can, rather than jumping immediately to declare defeat and move on to a sexier prospect. Fail safely or, at least, smartly. Know what the risks are, disclose them to those who are taking them, and be prepared to address failures that occur. There are cases where chronologically fast failure are appropriate, and there are times when it is not. Largely, the ethics of this come down to what risks the involved parties have agreed to take. People who invest in a startup accept the risk of losing the entire investment in a good-faith business failure, but they don’t accept the risk that the founder will just give up or do something overtly unethical with the money (bad-faith failure). Employees in startups accept the risk of losing their jobs immediately, without severance, if the company goes out of business; but if they’re misled about how much runway the company has, they’ve been wronged.

The ethics of “fail fast” depend largely on the explicit and implicit contracts surrounding failure: how failure is defined, and how it is to be handled. These are conversations people don’t like having, but they’re extremely important. Failures happen. Often these contracts are left implicit. For example, a person who joins a five-person company accepts that if he doesn’t fit well with the project (because a startup of that size only has one project) his employment must end. More on that, being a founder means that one will be (and should be) fired immediately if one doesn’t work well with the rest of the team, just as being a elected official means one accepts the risk of being fired for being unpopular. On the other hand, a person who joins a more stable, large company, does so with the expectation of risk mitigation. Specifically, people join large companies with the understanding that being a poor fit for one’s initial project doesn’t mean leaving the company. The additional robustness of career is a primary incentive for people to join huge companies. Therefore, large companies that impede internal mobility, usually under pretenses of false objectivity in the performance review process, are deeply unethical and their reputations should be tarnished gleefully and often, in order to prevent others in the future from being blown up by undisclosed risks.

The “fail fast” mantra implies that failure is hard, and that it takes a certain fortitude to look failure in the eye and accept the risk. Alone, that’s not hard. Lying down is easy. Quitting on someone else’s risk and dime is not hard. Letting people down is not hard. The hard part is communicating risks as they actually are to people before they get involved, finding people willing to take those risks, working as hard as possible not to let people down, and working even harder to help everyone recover from the loss should failure occur.

Radical Transparency #1: who gets fired, how, and why.

Personal note: I wrote the bulk of this material in February 2011. I recently left a job (from which I was not fired) and admit the timing is less than perfect. There’s no connection between this essay and my personal situation, although its insights are derived from dozens of observations over the past 6 years.

I’m writing this post for a political purpose, not a personal one. Namely, I wish to provoke an epic showdown between the cognitive “1 percent” and the socioeconomic “1 percent”– a pleasant euphemism in the latter case, since it’s really 0.1% of Americans who are in access to make major decisions. I wish to force this conflict as fast as I can I believe technological trends are in our favor and we will win. It is not enough to defeat the socioeconomic “(0.)1 percent” as a class or as individuals. It is far more important that we dismantle the ugly world that they have created. If we destroy them personally but not the execrable processes they’ve set in motion, others will step up to replace each one we remove from power. We need to change the processes, which involves changing the discussion. Radical transparency is the first step toward doing this. 

I’m going to shed some light on the processes by which people are separated from companies. Involuntary termination. Layoffs. Getting fired. Shit-canned. Pink-slipped. There’s obviously a lot of nastiness surrounding this function, despite its absolute necessity to the health of an organization. I don’t intend to say that firing people is mean, or wrong, or unethical. Far from it, it’s something that all organizations will need to do from time to time. Some people are frankly toxic or unethical, and others are just not able to perform well within the organization, and must be let go.

In fact, I’d argue that the results of what happens when incompetent people are rarely fired can be seen in U.S. politics, where we face one of the most disastrously ineffective legislatures in human history because voters are so bad at firing idiots. Political officials are subjected to periodic elections (360-degree performance reviews) which are supposed to be intensely competitive. Yet the incumbent-victory rate is astonishingly high: over 95 percent in American political elections. The job-loss rate of political officials is less than 2 percent per year, despite their poor performance. In finance and technology, even people who are extremely good at their jobs have higher risk of involuntary termination than that. That contrast, I consider illustrative. For reasons like this, I will never say it is wrong to fire people, although it’s important to be decent about it. More on that later.

Two years ago, one of my friends was served with a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) issued to him from a large company. If there is a TPS Report Museum, there must be an entire wing dedicated to PIPs. I’ll say one thing about these: they should never be used, and they don’t work. The first way in which PIPs fail is that they don’t work at improving performance. A manager who genuinely wishes to improve an employee’s performance will address the matter, one-on-one, with the employee in a verbal meeting (or series of meetings) where the intention is discovering the cause (“blocker”) of low performance, and decide either (a) to resolve this problem, if it can be done, (b) to accept transient low performance if the cause is a temporary one such as a health problem, or (c) to determine that the problem is irresolvable and terminate the employee (preferably in a decent way). On the other hand, written negative communication about performance (formalized most finally in a PIP) is universally interpreted as an aggressive move and will lead to distrust of the manager, if not outright contempt toward him. As soon as a manager is “documenting” negative performance, the relationship between him and his report has failed and he should progress immediately to a decent termination. Never PIP. Fire, but do it right.

What’s a decent termination? It’s one in which the employee is allowed to resign, provided with a positive reference (both in writing, to guarantee it, and verbally when needed) and a severance package equal to between 1 and 1.5 times the average duration of a typical search for jobs of that kind (between 2 and 3 months for junior-level positions, and 6 to 9 months for executives, and with an additional multiplier to 1.5-2 granted to those who are “overexperienced”) to compensate the employee for the unexpected job search. Of course, companies have no legal obligation to any of this, but it’s the right way of doing things. In fact, because financial pressures can result in a suboptimal job search, I’d argue that severance (when the cause issue is fit or performance rather than unethical behavior) is an ethical obligation.

Speaking of this, a lot of extremely unethical things happen in American workplaces, and that is a result not of “bad people”, but the bulk of this behavior comes from morally-average people who are scared. One of the things people fear most at work is a sudden, unjust, badly-structured termination that leads to a long-term career problem. This fear motivates a lot of the bad activities that occur in workplaces that lead to unsafe products and defrauded customers. The best thing a company can do for its culture, and for its macroscopically visible good citizenship, is to establish a policy of managing terminations in a proper way– to say that, yes, we’ll fire people whose poor performance constitutes an unacceptable cost to us, but we’ll always do so in a way that ensures that good-faith low performers (i.e. decent people who are a bad fit for their role) move on to more appropriate jobs.

How does a PIP actually affect performance? First, it destroys the relationship between the manager and the employee, who now feels “sold out”. If claims in the PIP suggest that others contributed to it, it may destroy the working relationship between the employee and his colleagues, causing isolation. PIPs usually carry a biased or even inaccurate summary of the employee’s work as the motivation for the Plan. Second, PIPs often generate a lot of additional work for the employee, making it harder to perform. A PIP usually contains deadlines equivalent to a 40-hour per week work schedule. This seems reasonable, except for the fact that many work demands are unplanned. An employee who faces responsibility for an emergent production crisis during a PIP will be forced to choose between the PIP work or the emergent crisis. A PIP’d employee ends up actually ends up with four conflicting jobs. The first is the work outlined in the PIP, which is already a 40-hour obligation. The second is any emergent work that occurs during the PIP period (which is usually unspecified in the PIP, but claimed to be covered by a vague “catch-all” clause). The third is the legalistic fighting of the PIP– the employee must contest false claims about his performance or the company will represent him as having agreed with them, which damages his position if he ends up in severance negotation. The fourth is the job search process, which must be commenced right away because the PIP usually ends in termination without severance.

This brings us to the real purpose of PIPs, which is to legally justify cold-firing employees. The PIP is the severance package. Defenders of PIPs represent it as cheaper (and it’s not, because of contagious morale effects) to keep a burned-out, miserable employee in the office for a month or two than to fire him and pay a 3-month severance package. Employees who are terminated under a PIP are usually granted no severance, because their termination is “for cause”. There’s a lot of intimidation that usually goes on here. Because the PIP is confidential, employees are usually told they will be breaking the law if they show the PIP to anyone, even an attorney. (Not true.) They’re also told that they can be terminated “for cause” (read: without severance) and that it will damage their ability to get a reference if they don’t sign the PIP, damaging their ability to contest it later. This one is true (employment is at will, and severance is not a legal obligation) but a company that gives a bad reference, especially for retaliatory reasons, will not fare well in court.

I was once privy to managerial statistics at a large company. Over a 12-month window during a time of average job fluidity, 82 out of 100 of PIP’d employees left their jobs within the duration (30-60 days) of the PIP. These might be judged to be “success” cases (they left) but if this was the desired outcome, it could have been suggested in an in-person discussion without involving nasty paperwork. In another 10 cases, the employee fails the PIP and is usually fired. In 6 more cases, the PIP is ruled “inconclusive” because of factual inaccuracies, or because the PIP’d employee is able to garner support from elsewhere in the organization, and transfer to a more sympathetic manager, who kills the PIP. Only 2 actually “pass” the PIP. Also, a PIP’d employee is likely to face another PIP within six months if he stays with the same manager, while most managers don’t want to take a chance on someone who faced a PIP (even successfully) because, statistically speaking, an unblemished new hire is a better bet.

My advice to PIP’d employees is as follows. As I said, you’ve got 4 jobs now: (a) the PIP work, (b) emergent work, (c) legalistic fighting, and (d) finding another job in the event of failing the PIP. Regarding the first, don’t blow off the PIP work entirely, or at least not openly. It may seem like it’s pointless to do this work (and it is, because your future at that company has ended) but one needs to show a good-faith effort in any case. PIPs are not guarantees of employment during the specified duration; they can be “closed” early if it is judged as obvious that the employee will not meet the PIP’s deadlines. However, in the rare case that the PIP is actually fairly structured and you can complete it in time, do not use the “surplus” to move forward on the PIP work. Instead, use this time to learn new technologies (for the job search) and contribute to open-source projects (only on your own resources). Even if you pass the PIP, your days are numbered. Regarding the second, request in writing that the manager place any emergent responsibilities on the PIP calendar. Now is the time to document everything and be a pain in the ass. If he ignores these requests, you can make a case to HR to rule the PIP inconclusive, buying you time until the manager’s next opportunity to be PIP (usually a quarter or two later) you comes along. You should have a new job before that happens. On the third of your four jobs– the legalistic wrangling– document everything, but keep communication terse, objective, and professional. Don’t spend more than an hour per day on it, but if you can waste your manager’s time with HR paperwork in the hope of getting the PIP ruled inconclusive, do it. The fourth of these– the job search– is where one’s highest priority should be focused. Represent interviews (in email; again, document everything) as doctors’ appointments. This is also a great opportunity to disclose health issues, which reduces the probability of being fired without severance.

My advice for companies or managers considering the use of PIPs. Don’t. Sure, you’ve got version control and backups, but do you really want an essentially fired employee in the office for a month? It’s amazing to me that companies have security escort employees out of the building when they are officially terminated (at which point the shock has passed and emotions are likely to be resolved) but keep them in the office for months on PIPs, when they are effectively fired. PIP’d walking dead are far more damaging to morale than terminations.

Finally, my advice for employees who actually get fired is simple. Don’t be a dick. Disparaging firm-wide emails will ruin your reputation, and property damage is illegal and fucked-up and wrong, and therefore not in your interest at all. Depart cordially. On references, there are two kinds: unofficial (which can be a peer you select) and official (manager or HR). Usually official references say very little, but have your reference from that company checked by a professional service and get an attorney involved if anything negative is being said about you. Cultivate positive relationships with colleagues after your exit. Most importantly, move on quickly. When asked about the previous job, stay professional and represent the termination as one that you initiated. If your ex-employer ever contradicts you and says you were fired, then congratulations: you get a huge settlement for a negative reference.

Also, don’t let it hurt your self-esteem. There are two rites of passage in the modern corporate world. The first is getting fired. The second is learning that getting fired is not usually a reflection on the employee (more on this later, on who gets fired). Your self-esteem will benefit if you experience the second before the first.

Ok, so that’s a bit about the process. It’s important for people to know this stuff, so they know how to box if the fight comes to them. Now, I’d like to shed some light on who gets fired. Low performers, right? Well, not always. Companies initiating impersonal layoffs for financial reasons will usually drop low-performing teams and businesses, but not all those people are individually low performers. Personal firings are a different story. These don’t occur because “companies” choose to fire these people; people do. So what are some of the motivations that lead to this? First, let me say that political (non-necessary) firings usually occur in the middle-bottom and middle-top of an organization’s performance spectrum. The bottom 10% are usually so used to lifelong, serial incompetence that they’ve mastered office politics as a survival skill. The top 10% are objective, visible high-performers who tend to have political clout on account of the value they add to the organization. The middle 60 percent rarely stick out enough to get into trouble. This leaves two deciles– the 2nd and the 9th– that are most exposed to personal terminations.

Second-decile firings tend to be “trophy firings”, initiated by managers who wish to impress upon higher-ups that they “take action” on low performers. They aren’t the worst people in the organization, and whether it’s of economic benefit to retain them is not strongly resolved either way, but they’re weak enough that if they leave the organization, they won’t be missed.

Ninth-decile firings are “shot-from-the-bridge” firings, initiated against a high performer by a jealous peer before she develops the credibility and capability to become a threat (i.e. graduate into the objectively and visibly high-performing 10th decile). These people are usually fired because they’re creative, passionate, and opinionated. Now, managers don’t initiate ninth-decile firings, at least not willingly. Managers want more people to be more like their 9th- and 10th-decile reports. Rather, those firings to be initiated by “young wolves”, who are typically same-rank co-workers, but sometimes insecure middle managers, who sabotage the target’s ability to perform. The textbook young wolf is Pete Campbell in the early seasons of Mad Men, the slimy and machiavellian junior account executive who lies and threatens his way to the top. (Disclaimer: I wish the term for such people wasn’t young wolves. I like wolves. I like them better than most people.)

A direct confrontation with a manager about a 9th-decile report is not a politically wise idea, because managers know that 9th-decile employees are highly valuable. So young wolves focus on giving the target some disadvantage in project allocation. Most technical teams have a “people manager” (who is savvy to political machinations) and a technical lead (who is not usually politically savvy, but has authority to allocate projects, make technical decisions that affect the team, and delegate work). Tech leadership is a hard role because (a) it involves a lot of responsibility with minimal glory, and often no additional compensation, and (b) tech leads are responsible as individual contributors in addition to their leadership role. Thus, the tech lead is usually overburdened, and young wolves usually cozy up to him, with the intention of “helping out” on work allocation. Then they start delegating impossible, discouraging, or unsupported work to the target, the 9th-decile employee they want to shoot from the bridge before they become 10th-decile. When the target’s performance drops (transiently) to about the 7th or 8th decile, they begin to speak about how she “does good work, but isn’t as good as we thought she’d be”. As she sees leadership opportunities and the most interesting projects receding from view, her motivation declines further. By the time she’s at the 5th or 6th decile (because she’s now beginning to look for other opportunities, and prioritizing work that benefits her external career) the party line is that she’s “not giving her best”, which is, by this point, entirely true and equally irrelevant to whether it’s economically beneficial to employer to retain her. Social rejection of her is encouraged through gossip about her being “not a team player” and whispered suspicions that she’s looking for employment elsewhere. When she enters the 3rd or 4th decile, the young wolves engage her manager and– if the manager is unaware of what’s happened (a young-wolf situation)– she receives the first official warning signs, such as negative feedback delivered over email instead of in spoken form. This is an aggressive move that confirms this now-declining employee’s suspicions that her future there is over. If she’s still working there (unlikely, in a decent economy) by the time she falls into the 2nd decile, she’s now a trophy-fire.

This process of targeted, intentional demotivation, prosecuted not by managers (whose interests are aligned with the success of the whole team) but by young wolves, can occur over years or over days, but it’s a discernable pattern that I’ve seen play out dozens of times. The problem is that “flat” managerial arrangements don’t work. I don’t like the alternative (official hierarchy) much, so I wish they did work, but they almost always fail. A “flat” organization means “we’re large enough that we need hierarchy but we’re too socially inept to have hard conversations”. In most cases, I actually think that large companies (for post-industrial knowledge work) are inherently broken, because neither the hierarchical model nor the flat model results in good products. Why is “flat” so bad? It means that a manager has a ridiculous number of reports (sometimes over 50) and that it’s impossible for him to be on the lookout for young-wolf behavior, which is immensely damaging to the company because it tends to drive out the most creative individuals. Young wolves thrive in environments of managerial inattention.

How does one combat a young wolf within an organization? As with any progressive, but curable, parasitic infection, early detection is the key. A decent manager who identifies a young wolf will send it to the pound and have it put down, but effective young wolves evade managerial detection for a long time. Defining the term helps, but there’s a danger here. If “young wolf” enters the business lexicon, it will just become a term of disparagement that young wolves use for their targets. The most effective young wolves, instead of declaring their targets “not a team player”, will instead attempt to paint their targets as young wolves. So here, I don’t have the answer, but I have a thought.

I’ve been coding for five years, and I’ve made a serious mistake. At this point, I have no open source contributions. Two and a half years I put into a failed startup that should have allowed me to open-source my work (30,000 lines of Clojure code to build a custom graph-based database, and some of the best technical work of my life) but because the CEO of that failed startup is a vindictive asshole who wishes to punish me for “leaving him”, so that work is gone. For this entire five years, I was a “company man”, pumping 50 to 60 hours per week of software effort into companies with which I no longer have a relationship. I have a “great resume”, but nothing in the open-source world to show that I can actually code. I’ll be just fine, and I’m going to take some time to write some open-source work, but that’s a serious regret I have over how I’ve spent the last half-decade. Why’s open-source software so important? Radical transparency. It provides a socially beneficial mechanisms for programmers to demonstrate, objectively, high levels of skill. It provides sufficient job security to the best programmers that they can fearlessly avoid most office politics and focus on work, which generally makes the quality of that work a lot higher.

I think radical transparency should apply within large workplaces as well. Many middle managers discourage line (i.e. non-managerial) employees from taking initiatives that would make them visible to other departments, for the fear that it would make them a “flight risk”. Managers of undesirable projects are aware that external visibility for their reports will lead to transfers, and managers of average projects are often insecure that their projects might be undesirable. Moreover, many companies discourage unmetered work, such as education, career development and extra-hierarchical collaboration (i.e. helping out other teams) which further isolates line employees. The result of this is that, for many employees, the manager is literally the only person who knows what the employee is doing. This gives the manager free rein to represent his opinion of that employee (which, if the manager has 25 reports, is very probably unreliable) as objective fact. Human Resources (HR) is supposed to ameliorate conflicts that occur when this leverage is abused, but the truth about HR representatives involved in manager-employee disputes (and terminations) is that they work for the company’s lawyers (and that’s why they think PIPs are a good idea) and no one else. At any rate, this pattern of dysfunction and outsized managerial power is sometimes called “manager-as-SPOF”, where SPOF is a technical abbreviation for “single point of failure” (the weak point of a system).

Manager-as-SPOF, isolation, and a lack of transparency about who is doing what allow socially manipulative twerps (young wolves) to succeed. In this kind of environment, 9th- and 8th- and 7th-decile performers get almost no visibility and are defenseless against a political campaign against them. The solution is to make the contributions of these employees visible. It’s to make everyone’s contributions visible and to foster an environment that makes many of the worst manifestations of office politics untenable. It’s to encourage employees to share their contributions with the whole company, and to work on things that benefit all of their colleagues– not just their managers.

A future RT post will focus on this: how to construct a radically transparent workplace, and what it would look like.