Oh god this is me.
Arguing with a VP that their expectations aren’t realistic, our market is saturated and cost of are increasing.
“You’re just not being creative enough, 20% annual growth isn’t even worth me being in this meeting. Come back when you have bigger numbers”
Oh okay. I just spent a quarter doing deep competitive analysis on every project on our roadmap and backlog with detailed per line analyses, but sure, your gut knows more.
Isn’t that just the most frustrating thing about working in the corporate world? People like us that look at actual data will never make it past being middle management at the highest. If you wanna make it to the top, you have to be able to confidently pull numbers from your ass.
It’s even worse with snake oil salesman and AI.
A guy built an AI model (i.e. wrote a prompt for the ChatGPT API) which generates fantastic looking offline test results for a problem. He promised the execs this will drive significant growth, so he’s on the fast track straight to the top and definitely got some nice bonuses. All his projects get big teams and resources.
I looked at the “projected” numbers, they make no sense, it’s just straight up made up numbers. It solves a problem nobody actually has, so nobody actually uses the output. The real usage numbers are abysmal.
Doesn’t matter, we’re counting on this for growth, haven’t I seen the model scores he demo’d?!
His numbers will be fed into KPI’s, so everyone looks good. No one cares if it actually works, get your golden parachute and bail.
I suggest you get your resume together asap. Shit is going to go south really quick.
I have a similar story. A few years ago, when I was young and naïve, I worked at a startup that tried to build electric busses.
The person who planned how long each prototype construction task was going to take was the CFO, who had zero technical experience, when I tried to explain my job to her, she said “Sorry, Justas, I am just a woman, I don’t understand anything.”
Later I heard that CFO in question estimated new prototype construction to take 3 months. That seemed farfetched, so I went to the garage to talk to the assembly people and they said “3 months? We’ll be lucky if we get finished in 9!” To which she replied “They don’t know anything, I am the one in charge of the planning!”
I left shortly afterwards and was the last person to receive my salary on time. They started going into debt and I recently read an article about them going into bankruptcy. So much shit happened there I could write a book about it.
Imagine you are trying to create something new, but not completely. Suppliers for most electric bus parts exist, ZTF being chief amongst them. Did the executives enter the market with a strategy to buy everything they could, assemble it, enter the market quicker, build many units, learn how busses are built and then innovate from experienced position? Nope.
A toddler learns to crawl before learning to run. A bird learns to hop before learning to fly. Our executives started to innovate before learning to build.
Why buy or build a metal frame? Too many parts, let’s build the frame out of composite materials, only a few parts to glue together and the CEO has contacts amongst the yacht builders.
The end result drove like a tank. It had zero flexibility, was way too rigid for any passenger carrying vehicle and tended to lean to one side. Together with a bunch of windows that can’t be opened and a skylight it was a greenhouse on wheels during the summer.
Composite parts getting glued required sanding and pieces of it are still embedded into poor sod’s who did that hands.
The bus also featured a front windscreen curved too heavily for most crucibles to make one.
Can’t we just buy a dashboard? No, can’t get attached to a supplier, gotta build our own thing. The designer didn’t plan for a spot for a driver to store their coat and bag. Also, it had no place to keep money and bus tickets for those passengers who didn’t buy them earlier.
Several dashboards got designed, money dried up and the people who designed and built them left. Yup, all Fantastic Four of them, leaving a poorly documented mess for people who come after them.
I was tasked with building a telemetry system and a user information system.
Built a telemetry system with Grafana and a data collection script running in bus’es computer. Me and one other guy was the whole team.
For information system, I used Vue and Python on a Raspberry pi running cog, a very minimal WebKit browser. It had a 3D bus on an angled map and said which stops come next.
So much shit happened there I could write a book about it.
Please do! Or at least a series of blog or fediverse posts.
That feeling when you’ve finally found your spirit animal and it turns out to be a middle manager who’s only slightly better looking than the previous president…
a middle manager who’s only slightly better looking than the previous president
A good deal smarter though
Godspeed. Have been in similar spot with the owner/CEO. Instantly killed my desire to continue. Found another job.
That’s so annoying.
Any way to force the ball into their court? IDK, “which one of these line items deserves another look”, that kind of thing… if you put all your creativity into trying to call their BS, you know :)
If you do tell them you’d need a completely unrealistic scenario for that project to hit a good number then one of two things will happen:
“well you need to think of changes to those projects to get there, that’s what we’re paying you for”
or “you haven’t considered that X initiative will massively boost the numbers, so we’ll easily hit our goal” with X being some project a self aggrandizing jackass confidently promised will deliver absurd results and now leadership loves them (currently that’s anyone saying to add AI to stuff that very much doesn’t need it). If this happens just wash your hands of it and document it as a key growth factor.
The goal of these meetings is often to justify projects that leadership has already agreed on, don’t want to be challenged on, and are simply looking for the numbers they can put on a slide and parade to the board or investors.
It’s a very hard sell to convince them to drop or realistically modify projects. There are execs who will listen to the numbers, but I’m finding them increasingly rare now that everyone is in greedy self preservation mode.
My worst example: a company brought me on to validate and provide recommendations for a big project that was struggling. I looked at the numbers, the margins were always going to be terrible, it needed massive economy of scale and to be successful (always always a red flag!), cost a lot to make, and the revenue numbers were forecast to be low thousands a year. I told the CEO and execs this project was doomed, drop it and focus elsewhere, but they felt it would be a huge breakout success, making up a significant portion of corporate revenues, and the numbers were irrelevant (so why did they hire me?).
They still offer that product, it still definitely makes no money.
A whole quarter? Make it 15 cents. That’s 40% right there!
You stats guys act like what you do is so hard, and I came up with that on the spot.
No, I think they mean a financial year quarter. You know how companies have stuff like quarterly earnings calls?
I love the later bit where Wormtongue says “There is no such army”, and Saruman shows him the army he must have spent an hour walking through on the way in.
To be fair to Saruman, this orc didn’t think to use the nearby forest to stoke the fires until he was told to. Not the brightest bulb.
What happened after they used the forest?
The trees slaughtered his workers, broke a damn, and destroyed the factory.
Typical executive short term thinking, yeah, Saruman hit his production targets, but he Boeinged them by doing it.
Well if the boss would quit sexting with an egurl all the time maybe he could have helped out with the whole ent thing
This is the most hilarious summary of the plot of The Two Towers I’ve ever seem.
At least this time Saruman(c-suite for sure) didn’t catch a golden parachute from the board on his way out the door to guide(Sabatoge) another kingdom(company)
Just like how all public companies focus on the quarterly numbers and nothing else. No one gives a shit about next year or even next quarter. It’s always “how much money are we making in the next 3 months, all else be damned.”
“There aren’t enough trees in the tower grounds to keep the fires going m’lord…”
“TEAR OUT THE ENTIRE FOREST!”
“Oh jeez… That’s like… A lot of extra overtime. You sure we can cover everyone’s wages?”
HAHA, yes!
And then the solution was to piss off the Ents.
God, I love the extended editions.,
