> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Carta has insane turnover and is making a big revenue push right now. Concerning to see the CTO leave during that.
I’m most interested in the part he doesn’t share: “I’ve also learned quite a bit about venture capital, fund administration, cap tables, non-social network products, operating a multi-business line company, and various operating models. Figuring out how to sanitize those learnings to share the interesting tidbits without leaking internal details is a bit too painful, so I’m omitting them for now“
a lot of text with very little value. Typical executive talk.
the hard truth is that most of the time executives are really absolutely clueless and have only shallow understanding of whats going on inside the tech.
and their usual levers are mostly just distributing resources: more resources to this org, fewer resources to that org. and another level is high level program management: checking the milestones, schedules, and timelines. thats it
A master class on how to say exactly nothing.
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).
> 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. None of these are the sort of inspiring topics that excite folks, but they are all essential to the long term stability of your organization.
There it goes. The mask comes off. The sad reality of it is that your average exec views their work, indeed their life, as strictly zero sum. We should not praise this. We should not celebrate this. If anything, we should call this out.
Ah, the classic two-year exec tour - just enough time to write a book, roll out a pet program, and peace out before any long-term consequences set in.
> 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.