I'm not sure if anyone can shed light on this, but I'm finding it really hard to put together any rhyme or reason for the moves Elon has been making at Twitter.
Many of the decisions seem to be on a whim (despite the public telling him they're bad ideas), and when the consequences of those decisions occur, he reverts those decisions - with an almost obliviousness to the warnings previously given to him ...
I'm curious to know if this is how he's run his previous businesses - and were they successful despite of this style of decision making (or maybe because of this style of decision making?)
Sorry to hear that happened to you. I do remember losing my password for an old domain awhile ago, but I remember it being straight forward and giving me quite a few options to recover it (security questions, backup phone number to send 2FA codes, etc).
Maybe double check the "try another way" login options and maybe one of them will help you get back in.
2021 16" MacBook Pro, Apple M1 Pro silicon, 16gb / 1TB, purchased March 2021. Personal laptop, super light web dev (hobby projects):
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 27 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 6%
Data Units Read: 509,334,138 [260 TB]
Data Units Written: 394,959,651 [202 TB]
Host Read Commands: 4,719,463,111
Host Write Commands: 1,312,261,606
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 178
Power On Hours: 938
Unsafe Shutdowns: 9
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
An update if people are still watching the thread. Got the following output today (~2 days later):
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 28 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 6%
Data Units Read: 510,433,533 [261 TB]
Data Units Written: 395,139,884 [202 TB]
Host Read Commands: 4,755,060,485
Host Write Commands: 1,317,327,139
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 180
Power On Hours: 944
Unsafe Shutdowns: 9
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
So looks like my MacBook did an average of 87GB /day over the last 2 days (approx).
Which seems a lot better than the 18 month average, which was 700GB /day.
Hopefully means it's since been fixed, and I haven't destroyed my SSD too much!
I see a lot of responses to this comment, especially these lines:
> Transparency is not your job.
> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what
> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point.
To add my 2 cents I kind of agree. When I first got into management, I didn't realise how many fires they were, or priorities I needed to balance. Initially I thought "there shouldn't be this many fires" but I soon realised that that was my job, to put them out, escalate when required, etc all while making sure the ship is steady and doing it with a smile on my face.
Some examples include:
- News that a sales person has sold a huge project which will save the company, but we can't deliver or build with our current backlog / resources
- One key team member has been taking a lot of doctor's appointments recently - and suspect they might be quitting / job hunting
- There's a very obscure security issue which could be fatal if discovered, but is a huge task which will disrupt a project which is already delayed and over budget
If I ran into any of these when I first started I would have freaked out - and that would have disrupt my team as they couldn't be productive with that anxiety over their heads.
Instead I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control.
Of course if something was too big to handle I'd escalate, or if something blew up I'd take responsibility etc - but I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions and let them do what they're best at doing.
I hope that's what the original poster who you quoted meant, because I don't see all that much wrong with the examples you mention. No, there's no need to engage people in discussions about things if it doesn't really impact them, or they can't really jump in and help the situation.
However, in the absence of some legal requirement to keep quiet, if some employee got wind of one of those situations, and came to you and asked you about it, I really do hope you'd be honest and forthcoming. Because otherwise I think that's when you'd cross the line (for me at least) into being untrustworthy.
One thing to mention though: in the case of your first example, if that huge deal really is going to fall through, no question, and the company is going to fail because of that, no question, I would lose all respect for an executive who didn't pro-actively have the hard talk with employees about that situation. Yes, some people will leave. But that's life, and your employees have entrusted their livelihood with you; you owe them that level of honesty.
> I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control.
Which is fine! Because if you truly did put out those fires, or at least put in place some mitigating strategies, then you were absolutely telling the truth that it was under control.
> I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions
The difference is that some "distractions" can have a material impact on those employees' lives. An executive who hides those things and lies about them to employees is not worthy of respect. For "distractions" that truly are just distractions, sure, fine, no need to broadcast.
But I think a key question is: if a bit of news could make a reasonable employee, thinking logically about the news, decide to quit, then... you absolutely should be disclosing that news. Anything else is just a betrayal of the implicit trust an employee must have in their employer.
And yes, I know all this might seem pretty idealized, and I know there are a lot of companies and executives who won't get these things right. But that doesn't mean I want to work for those people.
Yeah for sure completely agree. Tbh I didn't think too deeply about the scenarios, they were more to put context around what I meant by "fires", and how not mentioning them (which some might consider lying) is necessary sometimes to steady the ship (though if a team member asked I'd let them know what's happening).
I do think scenario #1 is interesting to talk about though.
I.e. If I was that manager receiving that news, I wouldn't outright tell the devs and say "it could be crunch time for the next 6 months", which might cause a panic and devs will start looking for other jobs.
Instead I'd call a meeting with leadership / sales, see what was sold and if there's any flexibility on deliverables with the client. If we need more resource, is it worth finding funding to hire more staff, or maybe postpone another project to get this higher priority one done.
Once that's resolved then I can think about delivering the news. Maybe it's a non issue (e.g. a new team is spun up to handle the project and someone gets a promotion to head the team), maybe it's crunch time (in that case it's time to have a difficult conversation with the team), or maybe the client is flexible on delivery (so it's business as usual).
Again, I could see how some managers would be uncomfortable not telling their team everything (and potentially cause unnecessary panic) - but I think that's part of management, knowing what level of detail your team are happy with, knowing what you can / cannot handle, and knowing how to delivery good / bad news and sometimes having to be the bad guy.
I would add including the team once the path is clear.
What scares people is uncertainty. Not uncertainty of outcome (50% chance this will save us). It's uncertainty of what the options are, what the roadmap might be. That's the job of a good manager. Insulate the team from uncertainty and politics. Figure out the space of options, what the outcomes can be, negotiate it with leadership, and present a reasonable and clear plan to the team. That won't cause panic.
Show the team the plan, its rationale, and what needs to be done. What the upside will be. Let them take ownership of it. Let them make the lower-level decisions of how to split time, of what to prioritize, of what edges can be cut. With your feedback.
People generally don't bail when faced with a challenge. They like challenges. You just need to define the challenge clearly and set the path for overcoming it.
Worth mentioning is Stock / prices with Date or Current.
For example I want to do a comparison between certain period of time, so Market Cap are specific to those Date.
In another example I want to keep an eye on Big Tech's current market Cap, and the list would update every day. Giving me an overview of current situation.
These are great suggestions! Some of them are on the road map but lots of good additions too.
> What I am trying to say is: is there a way for me to see if there are changes I have not seen
Currently I have a red "dot" on the cloud icon in the navbar when it's lost server sync - but there are certain cases where it doesn't show. I do need to spend more time on the multi-user aspect, though it's quite a large piece of work and unfortunately not a lot of users seem to use it.
I also think a hierarchy / folder structure would be super useful. Using it regularly I have an unwieldy large number of sheets and it's difficult to find older ones / search!
Thanks great feedback and completely agree about the clunkiness around sums!
As a mitigation I did add row highlighting (if you hover over a var it'll highlight the row it was defined at), but the underlying problem of dynamic sums is still there.
I was working on a TOTAL() function (which someone also mentioned in this thread), but conceptually I also think some of the calcs are better in a tabular format, so have been toying around with designs with tables etc.
Many of the decisions seem to be on a whim (despite the public telling him they're bad ideas), and when the consequences of those decisions occur, he reverts those decisions - with an almost obliviousness to the warnings previously given to him ...
I'm curious to know if this is how he's run his previous businesses - and were they successful despite of this style of decision making (or maybe because of this style of decision making?)