<story><title>How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire</title><url>https://peterszasz.com/how-to-lead-your-team-when-the-house-is-on-fire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codeduck</author><text>This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a &amp;quot;wartime&amp;quot; footing.  It&amp;#x27;s cosplay.&lt;p&gt;Real wartime footing:&lt;p&gt;1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening.  The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling daily read-outs on project progress, and half the organisation spends the weekend frantically hallucinating project plans into Google Sheets.&lt;p&gt;2. Engineering staff react with dull-eyed disbelief on Monday; they knew this was coming, because the same thing happened a month ago, and six weeks before that.&lt;p&gt;3. Emails come from HR that there are are new, even-more-labyrinthine approval processes for expenses, and shrinking budgets for anything not directly related to whatever the &lt;i&gt;projet du jour&lt;/i&gt;, which will be fed enough to make it look like it&amp;#x27;s succeeding until the next Friday evening email kills it.&lt;p&gt;4. There is wide-spread burn-out across Engineering teams, and people are reduced to reactive, sarcastic automatons.&lt;p&gt;5. A creeping understanding seizes the better engineers that things cannot improve; they sign articles of  Armistice, pretend to comply, and start interviewing elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;6. An email arrives on Friday night...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Focus on the positive aspects of the job that can be taken for granted, like the opportunity to work on cutting-edge challenges, the company&amp;#x27;s still existing perks and benefits, the amazing team you have, the chance to work with a modern tech stack, or how your product is helping its users. Showing your team how you appreciate what&amp;#x27;s still good can help with morale.&lt;p&gt;If HN supported gifs, there&amp;#x27;d be several in this spot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toolslive</author><text>Obviously, this all follows from Putt&amp;#x27;s Law [0].&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Putt&amp;#x27;s_Law_and_the_Successful_Technocrat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Putt&amp;#x27;s_Law_and_the_Successful_...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire</title><url>https://peterszasz.com/how-to-lead-your-team-when-the-house-is-on-fire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codeduck</author><text>This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a &amp;quot;wartime&amp;quot; footing.  It&amp;#x27;s cosplay.&lt;p&gt;Real wartime footing:&lt;p&gt;1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening.  The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling daily read-outs on project progress, and half the organisation spends the weekend frantically hallucinating project plans into Google Sheets.&lt;p&gt;2. Engineering staff react with dull-eyed disbelief on Monday; they knew this was coming, because the same thing happened a month ago, and six weeks before that.&lt;p&gt;3. Emails come from HR that there are are new, even-more-labyrinthine approval processes for expenses, and shrinking budgets for anything not directly related to whatever the &lt;i&gt;projet du jour&lt;/i&gt;, which will be fed enough to make it look like it&amp;#x27;s succeeding until the next Friday evening email kills it.&lt;p&gt;4. There is wide-spread burn-out across Engineering teams, and people are reduced to reactive, sarcastic automatons.&lt;p&gt;5. A creeping understanding seizes the better engineers that things cannot improve; they sign articles of  Armistice, pretend to comply, and start interviewing elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;6. An email arrives on Friday night...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Focus on the positive aspects of the job that can be taken for granted, like the opportunity to work on cutting-edge challenges, the company&amp;#x27;s still existing perks and benefits, the amazing team you have, the chance to work with a modern tech stack, or how your product is helping its users. Showing your team how you appreciate what&amp;#x27;s still good can help with morale.&lt;p&gt;If HN supported gifs, there&amp;#x27;d be several in this spot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>engrmgr2024</author><text>What is worse, once you get promoted enough, you learn that throughout your career when these things happened, senior management often had some juicy completion bonus or other perk tied to delivery. Yet when you are doing this you are expected to just comply because the company is in trouble.</text></comment>