Unmanaged

By Ignacio Chechile

In the frantic pursuit of equity money, a merger or an IPO, at some point we forgot about doing good technology and engineering. Once an activity where excellence, objectivity and a methodical approach were the norm, engineers have acquiesced to marketing departments, financiers and ambitious sales teams taking the helm, offering products that do not exist in schedules that are impossible to meet for markets that are just mirages. What is more, C-teams have embraced the practice of flooding companies with managers with dubious credentials and inflated CVs. The result? Organizations that prioritize landing a headline in specialized media over designing and developing products people need.
Every time a company goes belly up, there are a myriad of post-mortem reports and in-depth analyses written trying to explain, in total hindsight, what went wrong and what could have been done differently. Companies do not die all of a sudden in a dramatic final pirouette, but due to the progression of small, incremental vices and bad practices that end up turning great ideas into failed corporations.
The book is a curated collection of essays repurposed into very short chapters, stemming from the author’s works at the Substack Managers Everywhere. Chapters are self-contained, which means you can freely jump between them back and forth without losing context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignacio Chechile
• Release date: Aug 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005015688

Ignacio Chechile

Ignacio Chechile is an engineer and writer living in Helsinki. He has published a book titled The Fighting Startup which dives in the depths of running tech startups, another one titled NewSpace Systems Engineering (Springer, 2021) which tackles the challenges of creating complex technology in the context of early stage startups and another titled "La Ciencia Dura" (only in Spanish) which talks about the beauties and the pains of studying engineering.

Book preview

Introduction

In the frantic pursuit of equity money, a merger or an IPO, at some point we forgot about doing good technology and engineering. Once an activity where excellence, objectivity and a methodical approach were the norm, engineers have acquiesced to marketing departments, financiers and ambitious sales teams taking the helm, offering products that do not exist in schedules that are impossible to meet for markets that are just mirages. What is more, C-teams have embraced the practice of flooding companies with managers with dubious credentials and inflated CVs. The result? Organizations that prioritize landing a headline in specialized media over designing and developing products people need.

Every time a company goes belly up, there are a myriad of post-mortem reports and in-depth analyses written trying to explain, in total hindsight, what went wrong and what could have been done differently. Companies do not die all of a sudden in a dramatic final pirouette, but due to the progression of small, incremental vices and bad practices that end up turning great ideas into failed corporations. This text is about discussing such wrongdoings with a colloquial tone and augmented with a dose of real stories. Fundamentally, this work figuratively asks the next question: is it possible to develop good technology without managers? If not, how do we beat them in their own game?

The book is a curated collection of essays repurposed into very short chapters, stemming from the author’s works at Managers Everywhere. Chapters are self-contained, which means you can freely jump between them back and forth without losing context.

2022. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Free ebook. All references, figures and illustrations are credited according to the author’s best knowledge at the time of publication. For corrections or any other inquiries, please contact

[e-mail]

ISBN: 9781005015688

Chapter 1: The Future Belongs To The Managers

On The Problem Of Overpopulation Of Managers

"Managers who don't know how to measure what they want,

settle for wanting what they can measure."

— Russell Ackoff

At infinity, every organization tends to be exclusively staffed by managers. Which is a paradoxical theoretical final state: the moment everyone is a manager, no one is a manager. Sort of an organizational absolute zero, where no work is done anymore because there is no one left to lay any bricks.

In some ways, the managerial inflation is understandable: as growth ramps up, more people come in, more processes appear, more bureaucracy, more to be managed: people, papers, machines, systems, projects, products. The crowning spree goes nuts because there’s an increasing urge to encapsulate and package complexity behind single faces.

Crowning managers is like printing money: can be easily done, but the implications can be uglier than the problem it may come to solve. As managers are minted much faster than leadership can be grown or taught, the result is people with lengthy titles but low legitimacy, who are in fact incapable of taking any relevant decision, being left to float in a sea of peripherality and administrative chores.

Lurking behind the organizational growth is the equivalent growing need of more consensus, and buy-in seldom comes from pulling rank. When doubt reigns, those with the scars and the knowledge, but also with the openness and the charisma to support and guide others through the uncertainty will always be the ones sought after, regardless what the org chart has to say.

Chapter 2: The Mechanism

On The Art of Marketing Bullshit

"Build something 100 people love, not

something 1 million people kind of like."

— Brian Chesky

Someone I know—someone we could describe as a struggling actress—has always dreamed about a career in Hollywood. Although perhaps there isn’t a more competitive industry on the entire planet, this did not stop her from pursuing her dream of becoming the next Scarlett Johansson. But in order to achieve such a dream, there was a bureaucratic, not so glamorous, yet crucially important factor between her and her acting career: getting a H-1B Visa so she could settle in Los Angeles. The H-1B visa is targeted for highly achieved individuals, also applicable for foreign talented engineers, scientists, medical doctors and whatnot. When it comes to the fine arts, in order to be eligible for such a permit, you must demonstrate that you are, well, kind of an accomplished person wherever you come from, or at least show there is some sort of paper trail behind you. In other words, you must provide evidence about what you have done. What paper trail the visa processing authorities look for? Anything helps, but there is—I learned—a strong reliance on specialized media. This means, showing that different publications in the fine arts arena are talking about you and how great your work is.

But this person’s career back in her country was not what you could call precisely extensive. Was this a party-pooper at all? Of course not: because she knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, she managed to create a critical mass of nicely crafted articles in arty media portraying her as the next Julia Roberts. Long story short, she managed to get the visa, and although—not surprisingly—her gig has proven to be quite difficult, she’s finding her way, because she definitely has talent.

Now, it is not real news (pun intended) the role media plays in the hype cycle. We know the drill:

1. Something bombastically worded is published for the benefit of someone

2. Piece is picked up by a decision maker who does not bother to scratch beyond the surface and buys the words to the beat

3. Goto 1

Specialized media acts as the substrate, the vehicle on top of which all this takes place. All while holding absolutely no accountability; cashing in and staying safely aside if eventually there’s a carnage down the road because of the content published.

Space industry is a classic user of The Mechanism: a random company gets an—usually paid—piece in some popular publication announcing something along the latest fad: small launchers, Orbital Transfer Vehicles, machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, funding, or—even better—a combination of all that. Or, an already established actor announces a new factory of thousands of square meters to be built somewhere in order to manage the insurmountable peak of demand they are experiencing so they can mass produce whatever they do, thousands per year. Always adding fancy renders—and casually forgetting to clarify they are renders—hoping the textures are right enough for an untrained eye to confuse them with something real. Mostly nods to budget trigger-happy defense and space governmental entities who are surely watching. You feel like the third wheel reading all that.

In cases, opaque organizations may join forces and go out together with pieces where they announce flashy partnerships which tend to describe a long stretch between what is being announced and the actual traction of the announcers, for example: Humbug Space Systems and Hofstadter Launch Services¹ Sign Partnership for Sending 10 missions To Jupiter’s Moon Europa. Does this prevent some investors—small or big—from absolutely loving it because InNoVaTioN and start throwing money at that, although most likely nothing will ever materialize? No it does not.

All over the Internet, there is a growing ecosystem (to use a polite word) of highly dubious digital newspapers whose main objective is to place ads all over the place. In these, you can find every single day clickbait articles such as: Chinese man eaten alive by a Komodo dragon. The curious event always happens very far away, in very distant regions or rural areas of remote countries. Nowadays they do not even bother to add any source, news agency or anything. Who checks if there was actually a poor man munched by a reptile somewhere? Nobody does of course, and that’s the beauty of it. But clickbait is clickbait, they don’t try very hard. What you see is what you get.

But clickbait disguised as serious specialized journalism? That’s another story.

Some might say: don’t kill the messenger. But can we at least ask the messenger a few questions? Can we ask the messenger for some quality assurance, or to follow up? We definitely don’t have to go all the way to kill them, maybe we need to make them a tiny, tiny bit more accountable.

I bet there must be some filter of sorts behind specialized space media for the pieces they publish, which just makes me want to know about those which didn’t make it past the filter. The bullshit must be…*chef kiss*.

But Ignacio, you are so boring. Let people be. Let the marketing teams do their job, would you? Let people be iNnOvAtiVe and push the boundaries.

Alright, let me be that guy one more time. Maybe, MAYBE, this is how it all starts. Where the bullshit seed is sown. The quintessential snowflake of the snowball. Maybe this is the first gear of a long mechanism where, at the end, people are misled to spend their money buying stock or investing on purely smoke-and-mirrors hyped by fancy words spouted by respected—ahem—journalists. Some others might correctly point out that these journalists have to pay the bills. Fair enough.

I tend to believe that good, complex products and substantial engineering traction speak for themselves. You can talk about it, you can be outspoken and proud, why not. But good marketing is not clickbait. Do not kill the messenger, but at least question it.

Not long ago, I was somewhat masochistically watching a one-minute video of a salesperson from a tech company explaining the benefits of their technology. In an impressive sprint, the speaker machine-gunned 16 buzzwords—one every roughly 4 seconds: enable, proactively, leverage, engage, low-hanging fruit, win-win and many others I won’t put here so I don’t start feeling nauseous (again). The whole structure of what this person said was a massively amorphous, unnecessarily complex ball of nothingness—in short, it made, end to end, absolutely no sense. The speaker never answered the question, and I doubt it made anyone consider going and buying their technology anytime soon. It had strong Zombo vibes. As it happens, no one really cared about the pointlessness of what this person said. In an ideal world, the first comment in that video would’ve been a caustic: Excuse me, what the hell was all that nonsense?. In this world we live in, there was even some mild celebration to the babble—not surprisingly written with babble as well—which a part of me dies to believe was sarcastic.

But, ok, let’s just forget about the buzzwords today. They are not the problem—or, they are, but not the core of it¹. I have bored myself —and have probably stupefied you as well—complaining about buzzwords. The underlying problem is something else. Mainly, the lack of care for constructing concise meaning. Feels as if saying only a few precise words, for just a few seconds and TO THE ACTUAL POINT would’ve become something socially unacceptable, so we are urged to adornate our phrases with filler up to a level where the management/business/techno speak becomes the main thing and the true meaning gets buried under a pile of hyphenated rubbish.

The question is: why? To sound smart? To get out of the situation as soon as possible with the least amount of damage? It’s actually curious: the speakers/writers either have a meaning and cannot express it, or they inadvertently say something else, or they are indifferent as to whether their words mean anything or not.

Decades ago, a fictional electromechanical device called the Turboencabulator became a famous joke among engineers. Originally written by a British graduate student called John Hellins Quick (1923–1991) and published by the British Institution of Electrical Engineers in their Students' Quarterly Journal in 1944², it represented the satirical marriage of technobabble and empty marketing, with memorable results. Throughout the years, other tech companies picked it up and continued the tradition. Here’s the datasheet from GE for your reference:

And its specs:

Turboencabulator specs — I can imagine the chuckles while writing this

Because content is king, here’s a promotional video of the turboencabulator (also known as retroencabulator) from Rockwell Automation, a competitor of GE in the high-growth, data-driven, highly disruptive turboencabulator market:

Here’s a transcript of this piece of comedy gold:

Here at Rockwell Automation’s world headquarters, research has been proceeding to develop a line of automation products that establishes new standards for quality, technological leadership, and operating excellence. With customer success as our primary focus, work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current, for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such an instrument comprised of Dodge gears and bearings, Reliance Electric motors, Allen-Bradley controls, and all monitored by Rockwell Software is Rockwell Automation’s Retro Encabulator. Now, basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance. The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan. The lineup consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzel vanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar wane shaft that side-fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus o-deltoid type placed in panendermic semi boloid slots of the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential girdle spring on the ‘up’ end of the grammeters. Moreover, whenever fluorescence score motion is required, it may also be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocation dingle arm to reduce sinusoidal depleneration.

The Retro Encabulator has now reached a high level of development, and it’s being successfully used in the operation of milford trunnions. It’s available soon; wherever Rockwell Automation products are sold.

And here’s a link to the original one which has an even more hilarious ending (hear the laughs at the end as the presenter holds the price tag with a priceless poker face.)

It’s not cheap, but I’m sure the government will buy it

Reality has made the turboencabulator sound like a plausible product these days. The line between satire and serious marketing has thinned more than we should feel comfortable with.

In his short essay titled Politics and the English Language (1946)³, George Orwell argues that there is a trend to think