> Extract the kernel – everywhere I’ve ever worked, teams have struggled understanding executives. In every case, the executives could be clearer, but it’s not particularly interesting to frame these problems as something the executives need to fix. Sure, that’s true they could communicate better, but that framing makes you powerless, when you have a great deal of power to understand confusing communication. After all, even good communicators communicate poorly sometimes.
I gotta say, nothing fills me with as much excitement for a job as much as having to have a second job as a Kremlinologist, attempting to scry the motivations of the opaque execs, whose whims come down from On High, either engraved on stone tablets dropped directly into our teams, or brought down to us through three translation layers of middle-management.
> The three biggest levers are (1) “N-1 backfills”, (2) requiring a business rationale for promotions into senior-most levels, and (3) shifting hiring into cost efficient hiring regions.
I had the experience to work in a scale up like Carta couple years ago where the company stoped to hire in NYC/Berlin and as far as I know they shifted their hiring to Philippines.
Fair play, the end of the day the company had their incentive structures to support this decision.
However, after that and other events I just started to do career movements towards companies that I know that I would bring unique features in my position (eg language skills, legal settings, specific regulatory knowledge, local compliance) to be more not entrenched but in a non-constant second thoughts professional relationships in a good sense or be in epistemically different worlds where international competition is irrelevant (eg clearance filters based in nationality, government and military, market that has exotic languages, etc).
I say that because I really do not like of this “Employee as a Service” where line an AWS console you just change the region and spin up labor like some EC2 machine; where in this scenario, you are seen as some expensive spot instance in us-east-1.
Maybe I am being highly defensive, but I do not see hereafter anything I that regard getting better since we have remote work and talent everywhere.
> or be in epistemically different worlds where international competition is irrelevant (eg clearance filters based in nationality, government and military, market that has exotic languages, etc).
I like this hedging strategy, can probably also apply this to the risk of AI taking over our jobs (licensed professions won’t be going away any time soon).
If you follow the link within the article, he goes on to say:
> The most frequent issue I see is when a literal communicator insists on engaging in the details with a less literal executive. I call the remedy, “extracting the kernel.”
Most engineers I’ve worked with have been “literal communicators.” Of course, both parties can always improve. But part of being a good leader is having excellent communication skills, and that includes anticipating how your audience will receive your message. The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
This can be both true and unhelpful at the same time. “Extracting the kernel” is about putting agency back into your own hands when someone else is less-than-perfect. How do you read beyond the utterance to understand the intent? Will that lead to better outcomes?
Since you sadly cannot force leaders to improve, and sadly cannot usually also pick for yourself perfect leadership, what power do you have to make things better?
> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
How do you avoid misunderstandings as an executive when you sometimes literally should hide the information?
I heard many many executives (probably, that's why I am not an executive), a lot of them try to hide information for different reasons. Even the technical one's are trying to keep doors open for interpretation, so that anytime they can change their mind and blame team for the failure, then label them for layoffs
Good leaders don't do that? There is a difference between legitimately confidential information, and keeping your cards close to your chest to protect yourself. If you have confidential information, you can explain the reason it's confidential and everyone can move past.
I've worked with two teams where layoffs had to happen. The people weren't happy, but they were at least satisfied that the results were fair and honest. They appreciated my transparency, and worked to train up other members of the group to prepare for their own departure.
If you spend your time building trust and relationships when times are good, and weed out the toxic personalities during those times, then it's better (not easy or good at all) when times are tough. Allowing even the slightest amount of toxicity is completely unacceptable.
If your boss hides information or is intentionally vague to provide an out for themselves, they shouldn't be in a leadership role. They shouldn't be employed at the company.
Being a boss means that 99.999% of your actual job is communicating clearly and openly.
I know at least two people leaving Carta within one year of joining (recently)
and CTO within 2 years suggests something amiss (looking more at the company here than anything)
The article is frustrating since it tries to be transparent and 'what i've learned' but doesn't really give anything away to the relatively short tenure.
And I guess related to the section and post on heavily and quickly adopting LLMs: Do you have any thoughts on how to ensure that sensitive customer/shareholder data is not inadvertently mixed in to some new workflow involving third-parties while keeping it accessible for production apps and services?
Keeping confidential/sensitive data from leaking into marketing workflows seems to have been a historical and relatively recent challenge for Carta so would love to hear how you were able to transition from that to securely managing the mentioned level of LLM deployment integrating across the org.
Extracting the kernel sounds like a good idea, but it sort of depends on having a reasonable executive who'll take the time. Some executives won't tell you the kernel, may not know it themselves and the power gradient can make it hard to ask (you don't want to look foolish).
> Extract the kernel – everywhere I’ve ever worked, teams have struggled understanding executives. In every case, the executives could be clearer, but it’s not particularly interesting to frame these problems as something the executives need to fix. Sure, that’s true they could communicate better, but that framing makes you powerless, when you have a great deal of power to understand confusing communication. After all, even good communicators communicate poorly sometimes.
I gotta say, nothing fills me with as much excitement for a job as much as having to have a second job as a Kremlinologist, attempting to scry the motivations of the opaque execs, whose whims come down from On High, either engraved on stone tablets dropped directly into our teams, or brought down to us through three translation layers of middle-management.
> The three biggest levers are (1) “N-1 backfills”, (2) requiring a business rationale for promotions into senior-most levels, and (3) shifting hiring into cost efficient hiring regions.
I had the experience to work in a scale up like Carta couple years ago where the company stoped to hire in NYC/Berlin and as far as I know they shifted their hiring to Philippines.
Fair play, the end of the day the company had their incentive structures to support this decision.
However, after that and other events I just started to do career movements towards companies that I know that I would bring unique features in my position (eg language skills, legal settings, specific regulatory knowledge, local compliance) to be more not entrenched but in a non-constant second thoughts professional relationships in a good sense or be in epistemically different worlds where international competition is irrelevant (eg clearance filters based in nationality, government and military, market that has exotic languages, etc).
I say that because I really do not like of this “Employee as a Service” where line an AWS console you just change the region and spin up labor like some EC2 machine; where in this scenario, you are seen as some expensive spot instance in us-east-1.
Maybe I am being highly defensive, but I do not see hereafter anything I that regard getting better since we have remote work and talent everywhere.
> or be in epistemically different worlds where international competition is irrelevant (eg clearance filters based in nationality, government and military, market that has exotic languages, etc).
I like this hedging strategy, can probably also apply this to the risk of AI taking over our jobs (licensed professions won’t be going away any time soon).
> Extract the kernel
If you follow the link within the article, he goes on to say:
> The most frequent issue I see is when a literal communicator insists on engaging in the details with a less literal executive. I call the remedy, “extracting the kernel.”
Most engineers I’ve worked with have been “literal communicators.” Of course, both parties can always improve. But part of being a good leader is having excellent communication skills, and that includes anticipating how your audience will receive your message. The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
This can be both true and unhelpful at the same time. “Extracting the kernel” is about putting agency back into your own hands when someone else is less-than-perfect. How do you read beyond the utterance to understand the intent? Will that lead to better outcomes?
Since you sadly cannot force leaders to improve, and sadly cannot usually also pick for yourself perfect leadership, what power do you have to make things better?
> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
How do you avoid misunderstandings as an executive when you sometimes literally should hide the information?
I heard many many executives (probably, that's why I am not an executive), a lot of them try to hide information for different reasons. Even the technical one's are trying to keep doors open for interpretation, so that anytime they can change their mind and blame team for the failure, then label them for layoffs
Good leaders don't do that? There is a difference between legitimately confidential information, and keeping your cards close to your chest to protect yourself. If you have confidential information, you can explain the reason it's confidential and everyone can move past.
I've worked with two teams where layoffs had to happen. The people weren't happy, but they were at least satisfied that the results were fair and honest. They appreciated my transparency, and worked to train up other members of the group to prepare for their own departure.
If you spend your time building trust and relationships when times are good, and weed out the toxic personalities during those times, then it's better (not easy or good at all) when times are tough. Allowing even the slightest amount of toxicity is completely unacceptable.
If your boss hides information or is intentionally vague to provide an out for themselves, they shouldn't be in a leadership role. They shouldn't be employed at the company.
Being a boss means that 99.999% of your actual job is communicating clearly and openly.
I know at least two people leaving Carta within one year of joining (recently) and CTO within 2 years suggests something amiss (looking more at the company here than anything) The article is frustrating since it tries to be transparent and 'what i've learned' but doesn't really give anything away to the relatively short tenure.
Seems like Will hasn't stayed anywhere for more than 2-3 years?
Any lessons learned from the 2024 incident? Was/is it possible to put in place internal controls to prevent future compromise?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38897363
And I guess related to the section and post on heavily and quickly adopting LLMs: Do you have any thoughts on how to ensure that sensitive customer/shareholder data is not inadvertently mixed in to some new workflow involving third-parties while keeping it accessible for production apps and services?
Keeping confidential/sensitive data from leaking into marketing workflows seems to have been a historical and relatively recent challenge for Carta so would love to hear how you were able to transition from that to securely managing the mentioned level of LLM deployment integrating across the org.
Extracting the kernel sounds like a good idea, but it sort of depends on having a reasonable executive who'll take the time. Some executives won't tell you the kernel, may not know it themselves and the power gradient can make it hard to ask (you don't want to look foolish).
This guy blows
why