Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)
Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.
I think this is actually where the study is interesting. Because the “no duh!” Comments actually have merit on their face. But the argument is that these are tiny slights—not harassment, not pervasive toxicity. By definition it’s the kind of thing management doesn’t notice. So I think the argument is that employers consider those employees to be some default percentage of the workforce, and the argument is that you can move the entire performance bar up by hiring/training managers to be thoughtful and consistent.
Ok actually you sound kind of awesome. The article is about how thoughtless, petty slights demotivate employees. You are talking about the opposite of thoughtlessness: doing something that takes effort for you, going out of your way to stretch out of your default for their benefit. They see you making the effort. And on a team that size, you’re not fooling anybody—they know it’s effort. I imagine they appreciate that quite a lot.
People like dazzling conversation from their manager for like two weeks. Manager who will flex against their own instincts out of respect for my needs? I’ll line up behind that person every time, even if they’re a little awkward here and there.
I want to complain a little about the journalism (not) being done here. Because I read this article, and I read the (better, but still lacking) Bloomberg Law article it links/rewrites, and I still have no idea what's happening.
The law firm says the surgeon made false claims. (Which claims? Were they false?)
The surgeon reacted with some twitter grandstanding saying she was on the side of the women she cares for who are battling cancer. (Noble, but irrelevant. She can tell the truth for a good cause or lie for a good cause. Which did she do?)
UHC's spokesperson makes a big show of saying there are "no insurance-related circumstances that would ever require a physician to step out of surgery" and they would "never ask or expect that." Happens all the time actually, in part because if you don't work on the insurance company's schedule and answer their calls, you may not be able to talk to them for weeks, and your patient is denied in the meantime. But is that what was happening here? Apparently nobody thought to ask or include that information.
The implication of this news item is that UHC has hired a shakedown operation to chill criticism on social media. Big if true. But it seems to really matter whether the people on either side are telling the truth. Somebody should report that out. Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work, we don't need to be curious about who the hero(ine) and the villain are.
I've been the SD in circumstances like this. And I'll say this is good advice, but there's the potential for a subtle trap in it. Sounds like you're in a fairly political org. Not my favorite environment tbh, but if it's the game you're playing, don't go forth blindly.
(Note: I don't know genders of anybody here. I'm going to call OP "he" and the SD "she," because lots of they's and titles get confusing.)
The SD probably thinks this conversation is over. From her perspective: I told OP what to do (what was in his "best interest") and he did it. End of talk. I'm in an ultra-fast growing pressure cooker with 30 things on my plate to get right, and I work for people who don't hesitate to fire leaders. Now he wants to put time on my calendar to talk about it. This can go one of two ways.
Option A: OP doesn't like the way things went because he wants to spend time in the other domain. (which is what this is about.) On net, to the SD, this is just causing friction. Maybe she helps you out and puts you back in the old domain, at least after a while, and you owe her a favor. Maybe your performance is good, but not irreplaceable-good, and she gracefully handles the conversation, but she is annoyed. When your new director gets on, she tells them to look out for that one, he's high-maintenance. New director, you can decide whether or not he's worth the effort to keep happy, but please don't let him jump onto my calendar again without vetting what he's talking about. K thanks. (And yes, this is a real conversation that happens.)
i.e., it might get you what you want, but it also might backfire.
Option B: As a mid-to-senior manager in an org like that, your SD is always on the lookout for engineers who get "the way the world works."[1] You can go in framing the ask for advice differently: "I was on team A, I had to leave because of what happened on team A, now I'm on team B. Team B is fine but I don't see the headroom given the other players there. I'm happy to keep performing here, but what advice do you have for making a real difference in this circumstance, and are there upcoming challenges I should volunteer for?"
This may seem like a subtle distinction, but the framing is really important. In one of them, you come and say, "what's important to me is working on this domain, and that was taken away from me. Solve my problem for me." (To which the SD says, _damn, this guy can't wait 2 weeks for the new director to start_ ?) In the other, you send a different series of signals:
"I had a sweet gig where I loved the domain and was making progress as an expert/leader..." Ok, he's passionate. He cares.
"Nobody loves team disruption, but what happened happened and made sense. I'm not saying I necessarily want to go back." Grudges are for amateurs, this guy is future-focused. I can work with that.
"I took your advice, and thanks for taking the time to give it." He will engage hierarchy respectfully even if he doesn't love where it has landed him at the moment.
"But in the domain where I'm working now, you already have two leaders well-developed who are definitely the right people to lead it forward." He's a team player, not trying to knife anyone in the back. But he's also hungry and ambitious. Plus he's giving me a private and unsolicited (therefore probably honest) endorsement of other in-place players, which is a gift of high-value information.
"So with a lot of changes going on, new director onboarding, etc., I wanted to set a goal to make the biggest difference I can for our shared success. But you have better visibility than I do about how to actually stack tactics against that goal. What would you advise I volunteer for / do over the next 6 months? What should I tell this new director that I want?" He gets it. His goals are my goals. There's a clear reason he came to me rather than the new director, this is not a waste of my time. He's pragmatic and ambitious and technically excellent. I might not have anything shovel-ready for him this second, but I'll keep him in mind next time I need something knocked out of the park. And I think my 3 pm meeting tomorrow is about something like that.
[1] "The way the world works" in circumstances like this is more precisely, "the way to operate in this particular organization and leadership climate that will ruffle the fewest feathers while pleasing the right people."
I don’t know that there’s a single answer, but the replies here are in the neighborhood. Fees of some kind are the only revenue model, so you pick the ones that work for your use case.
Two other thoughts, one speculative/general and one where I know of what I speak:
If you make most of your income off a small group of your customers, then it’s wise the charge some nominal fee on the other customers to get them to breakeven unit economics. (That holds in most any industry, not just finance. Consider the endless think pieces on the problems caused by a high proportion of free users at zoom and Dropbox.) No, you’re not “making big profits” from them, but the point is to make sure your customers aren’t adversely selected. That can mean, “let’s still make something off the people who pay their credit card bill every month.” It can also mean, “overdrafts create manual work in our back office; let’s make sure they pay for themselves and aren’t correlated to our profit margin on the real business, which is lending.”
Area I know more about: for credit cards in particular, don’t underestimate what the annual fee does for the issuer. The psychology of it for the consumer is huge. People will cancel accounts they’re not using, sure. That helps, because forcing unused accounts closed can draw regulatory headaches. But consumers also consider the card more valuable and may be more loyal to it if it costs as much as their Netflix subscription each year. The issuer is making money on other sources—interest, interchange, travel portals, etc. The fee is, for the right type of customer, a kind of marketing device.
But it illustrates one of my deeply held beliefs pretty well: there are things that are virtuous at small scale that are disastrous at large scale, and vise versa.
In society "othering" out-groups leads to many wrongs. But it's hard to argue there's much evil in cultivating a sense of family pride. The vice turns to virtue at very small scale.
I believe in giving more help to those who need it. But does that mean I should skip Christmas presents for my kids because there are people starving in [insert poor country or war zone]? The virtue becomes vice at small scale.
A unified theory of moral behavior is actually hard to come by.
3 thoughts, ordered from most concrete and practical to most speculative.
Concretely, how do I do this? My kids go to a Waldorf school. (waldorfeducation.org) Is it expensive? Yeah. But, among many other benefits, you're automatically joining a conspiracy of parents dead set against tech-ified childhood. (A HUGE number of whom, you know, _work in technology,_ which tells you something.)
Second, and more reflective: I find that as a general matter, I spend more time thinking about how to call my kids toward things rather than away from things. Yes, social media and TV and video games will fill attention voids. But only if there are voids. The stereotype is that a parent will try to keep kids from doing 12 million things, but really you spend your best parenting effort trying to get them to love or value about 4 things. If you succeed, avoiding destructive habits and behaviors is much easier.
Third, and most speculative but most optimistic: I think we have hit peak social media for teens. It feels a lot like that point with cigarettes where everyone was still addicted to nicotine but nobody was pretending it was cool or sexy anymore. If you don't have kids yet, then society has 10-15 years to get its act together on this stuff before your kid is in the really dangerous age range for bad mental health outcomes from being drowned in tech. Could it remain this bad? Sure. But it's (literally) a generation from now in every respect: culturally, technically, politically, and socially. There is momentum for reform at many levels: legislative, private, school-level, and social. You have time for several of those reforms to fail and iterate. Someone will have figured it out by then. You may have to move—or join a cult—but I promise your kid will be worth enough to you to go find those people and live among them.
I was similar to you out of school—ended up the lone techie in a small oilfield services company.
How do you grow as an engineer? Go get a job at a company that does that. It won't be hard. Based on the problem-solving experience you're getting now, you'll impress hiring managers much more than similar-aged / similar-comped candidates, because all they have done is focused on code, and your mindframe is probably somewhat permanently bent toward larger-picture thinking. This is an asset.
It might be the wrong question, though. The question is: are you sure you want to be an engineer? You have a seat at the table in a small business and a mentor who is a strong and experienced operator in the space. Don't under-value that setup for making a career. If you measure yourself against the yardstick of being a good technologist, then yeah, this is not the best setup to grow. But if tech is a skill, not an identity, then you have other goals: building a strong career, producing value in the market and capturing some for yourself as wealth. Lean into playing that game. Ponder how irrelevant it is that some 26-year-old vegan in Silicon Valley would sneer at your code quality. Make it your goal to have an ownership stake in your company or a similar one in the space—maybe one you start or acquire with leverage from your mentor—by the time you're 35. If you get this right, you will earn dramatically more money in your career than most engineers. You will face much better odds of business success than most startup founders. And frankly, the small business operator space is starved for high-end young talent. (It's not comparatively lucrative for the first 5-10 years, and people find the frequent nepotism annoying.) There are a ton of boomers with profitable businesses and no good succession plans. The infrastructure they built—or at least their customer bases—has to go somewhere.
My story: I left the small business I started in and went to a tech company, but I did it because my first firm was terribly unhealthy. (It folded soon after.) Never lost the vision for building and owning something, though.
The headlines are "court sides with NRA!" which fits the ongoing "illegitimate court" narrative for progressives because the NRA is unpopular. (Partly owing to "ew! guns!" and partly owing to other, unrelated legal trouble growing out of NRA leaders embezzling + offering an illegal insurance product.) But... this was about whether a government official could threaten arbitrary regulatory action against a firm's customers/vendors/partners because of that firm's constitutionally-protected advocacy. (And whether that had in fact happened in this case. 9-0 it did.)
And if you're the kind of person who is set off by that and can't abide NRA having a win, I'd ask if you want your favorite progressive advocacy organization to be able to have a bank account and an insurance policy in Texas and Florida.
This was not a close call or earth-shattering case.
Different things. The snark plays to individual psychology in the moment. When someone comes at you in a way that's demeaning and clearly states that they think you shouldn't have the position you have, that's a bad way to start a conversation where you're supposed to admit error. More likely, you avoid them.
To the real brass tacks incentives: yeah, it's "someone is angry on the internet" vs, "I will have to deal with a discipline process with documentation and meetings and maybe depositions and adversarial lawyers. That's not my bag, I'm a scientist. There will be volatile young people and bad feelings communicated in person, plus gossip among my close coworkers. Also undesirable. If this becomes a repeated pattern, learners might start avoiding my lab, and deans/my superiors might start asking very awkward questions." Yeah, stacked against that, angry person on the internet is a weak incentive. Even if they're right.
And the snark does matter. Because this guy writes like a YouTube comments section, and that's not how you talk to adults or solve problems in elite institutions. So the contrast in styles draws lines of "us" vs "them." And it's natural to care more about the opinions and esteem of your in-group (who talk like you) than the out-group (who deride you).
Not my field, but my understanding of how these things work in big medical research factories: first few authors tend to be young researchers (maybe med students or even undergrads) trying to match residency or get into grad school. They do much of the work actually assembling the submission. The later names on the author list (who this article is taking to task) run labs or oversee research groups. Should they correct the record when it's pointed out? Yes. (But the snark and tenor of the post doesn't exactly convince someone they can admit an oversight in good faith.)
Should they be vigilant enough to check and notice these things? Of course. Some of the fakes are not subtle. Others, like the copy-paste of empty space in the lane to cover some undesirable result? Way harder to spot with the naked eye. I don't think there was great automated tech to detect image duplication in the 00's when these were published.
So your med student fudges data on a paper. The ethical answer is to expel them—"the world needs plenty of bartenders." But it appears big institutions these days are pretty invested in the sunk costs of prestige, dislike admitting error in admission or hiring, and prioritize go-along-get-along environments. It could be career limiting if students don't get any/enough pubs working in your lab. It'd a lot of hearings and paperwork to report him, plus I heard his uncle's a donor. If she got kicked out she'd lose her visa. And if I reported them, I'd be obliged to report everyone, and I'd be sunk in discipline hearings three times a year. So much easier to just... not look very hard.
It's bad science and bad ethics, but if you want better, reform the incentives. "Public" shaming by a niche newsletter... might be better than nothing, but doesn't qualify as an incentive.
Lived and worked in Austin tech 7 years. This article is all about startup funding, plus it quotes one unicorn whose home base / frame of reference was Houston, not another tech hub.
Austin was always a great place to build a tech career if you, for example, had a family. The talent pool is great but, in my experience, has a lower risk tolerance (read: prefers bigger and more established companies) than SF. So if you're evaluating by startup formation or funding, sure, the Bay was and remains in the lead. And as that stuff dries up, it's going to dry up faster in Austin, because the culture in Austin always had a slant toward optimization over disruption.
For the big SF/Seattle-based companies, Austin seems like a cheap second city. For a Houston-based startup, Austin seems like an expensive second location. And for a new startup trying to take risks and go big, the Bay is just set up better for it.
I don't see this as losing a luster. I see it as... very little change at all.
One of the things the article doesn’t consider, but makes me curious, is the ancillary consequences of this. For example, medicine in the US functions this way. In practice, bad outcomes are illegal and policed with big financial liability. (Yes, yes— “negligence,” not outcomes are banned, but run it through a system of insurance underwriters, the court system incentives, and lawsuit settlement practices and the distinction collapses.) What’s the result?
One of the results is a wild employment market. Doctors are highly paid, partly as compensation for the liability risk. (Including risk they legally assume from nurses and mid-levels.) Health care systems won’t gamble on anybody else. There are high barriers to entry in the profession, which pulls young talent mostly from privileged backgrounds. (Hell, it’s practically hereditary in many cases. Attend a med school graduation and see how many parents and grandparents rise to renew their Hippocratic oaths.) Disruptive innovation in medicine is vanishingly rare at this point, in part because new approaches can be vetoed at many different points by stakeholders in this elaborate risk management system.
Curious if there’s a reason why the same downstream effects wouldn’t apply to tech or security work specifically, or if anybody foresees others.
(Btw, I don’t mean to dunk on American medicine. It’s a good system with some hard trade offs. It currently chooses high cost and high quality.)
Looks like the real powers in the US are losing patience with some of the low-level legal tomfoolery of big tech. About time. Nothing against the companies, but make your money by making products people love, not by playing footsie with the court system.
I think there's a meaningful distinction between "privatized prison" and "service provided to prison by private company." The trouble with privatized prisons is that the incentives are all wrong. (Those incentives being: cut costs, cut corners, minimize oversight/hide failures, increase number of inmates.)
On the other hand, privatizing some services makes sense, depending on how you structure the deal. Same reason your tech employer buys some software—you can supply some things at better quality for cheaper price by trading for them. The catch: don't establish a monopoly where the provider can set costs and pass costs directly to inmates.
For example, a lot of jails, especially smaller jails, have a private company run their medical care. The doctor doesn't bill for every visit, they negotiate a rate with the county. It's cheaper than the county employing a doctor directly. One doctor can serve many counties. (I know one who serves 8 plus a few juvenile detention centers.) And if the doctor or nurse quits, the company has enough scale they can make sure somebody else shows up for the next shift. "Privatized?" yes. But also way better than the alternative in practice.
It appears that a significant chunk of the local online news market in these regions is only financially viable based on pay-for-coverage arrangements with moneyed interests.
So, I agree, lobbyists gonna lobby. And some of the lines in the article are pearl clutching. (GASP a utility company donated to a SuperPAC that opposed a ballot initiative? Yeah, that's normal. You might not like Citizens United, but that's just something they did, not something they're "accused" of.)
But to the extent that you have a crop of local-interest news and politics websites that present as objective but, based on the quotes in the articles, wouldn't be able to exist without opaque financial arrangements that slant coverage... yeah, it's a genuine media story. Less about the power company, and more about journalism. (Which, indeed, Folkenflik is NPR's media reporter.)
Alabama has high electric rates, an unusually profitable utility company, and this arrangement has proven durable. For me, that's a good enough "so what" for a New York based media reporter to condescend to the journalistic ethics of these Southern publications. It's not just academic; it's harming people.
You have encountered a problem too big to solve alone, so your solution involves gaining the right allies and persuading them to do the right things. So, however frustrating this is, remember first always to be kind, to your team and to your management.
To make allies of senior management, you need metrics. You need to show, concretely, how current operations put revenue at risk and make the incremental investment necessary for their roadmap items prohibitive. If you can swing a penetration test, they'll probably find plenty on a stack like this. Then you have a security justification. If not, get the best monitoring stack you can. Demonstrate reliability and performance issues. (As well as reliability and performance improvements.)
From there... I'll say the #1 tool I've used in situations like this is Fastly. VCL is way more flexible than your 10k line nginx rewrite file (I've been there, too). And the edge caching will paper over minor outages. Rollbacks are easy. Rebuild your site piece by piece and stitch it all together with a reverse proxy at the edge.
Advice: propose a "canary" portion of the site to rebuild, and make it the lowest revenue / highest complexity thing you can. Once you stabilize the cash cow, getting the buy-in to finish the job and deprecate the old code base will be tough.
I'd also advocate for adding 1 incremental engineer to your team. Make it a senior dev and interview specifically for people who have done this sort of thing before. Your team needs a hands-on mentor in the trenches with them.
Article sums it up as: there hasn't been a better WebMD because the costs of making one have been too high, but new advances promise to draw those costs down, so the author is founding.
Costs might be a factor. But revenue is a bigger one. WebMD and Healthline have flourished because advertisers have an incentive to underwrite them. Symptom checkers for health professionals do well, too—hospitals and medical malpractice insurers have an incentive to pay for provider-focused tools. A comment brings up the UK NHS site—sure, it makes sense that a national health system would have a strong incentive to help people self diagnose.
Do end users have a similarly strong incentive to maintain a subscription to a service like this month after month? Selling direct-to-consumer subscriptions at scale is hard. I wish you the best, but it's tough business.
How small the slight is.
How big the effect is.
Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)
Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.