My Failures Onboarding at Splunk

Small companies that aren’t worker-owned and without promotion ladders aren’t immune to this. They get workers who strive toward promotion via job switching.

You can debate the fairness of equity hoarding by those who invest money into the business but it doesn’t change the worker dynamics

Hypergrowth is an extreme, but so is a communist mentality where everyone is happy where they are and does not see any incentive to improve. There is a moderate middle ground that is best for economic mobility.

* Doing your part to make the revenue grow. For management, going from say $1M annual revenue in seed to $3M in A means the company can support 3X the staff. Joining a startup is basically a bet that you can outperform when unleashed.

* Surf that wave. Show it makes sense to put new hires below you vs above, or give you increasingly big responsibilities, etc, bc you managed the past ones well. Startups run to their limit so can feel like pressure cookers, and they're relatively small, so your demonstrated ability should be pretty apparent to hands-on leadership.

* Compensation comes out of that. Stock becomes worth more, you get bigger refreshers, more experience, new title, etc

I think I didn't study the actions of the people enough, a point I was trying to make in the post. If I would have I would have made better decisions.

What I should have done, at the point of being hired, is to drop all that, and focus patiently on what I needed to do. And I'm sharing it because not enough people share this side of it, and because I am working on elements that would have made it better. Thanks for reading! :)

The tone of the writer comes across as mildly entitled as if they, just by wanting it, are entitled to the role. No mention of other senior leaders in the company that may have been on the same trajectory at the same time, and how he was measuring up against his peers. Most of the achievements listed in this post are purely overseeing groups of people, which in itself is the bare minimum for this level of leadership. I also perceive some cultural barriers in this post.

And then of those underperforming teams, what percentage of those would the team members identify themselves as part of underperforming teams?

I'm sorry it came across as an ad, I'm full-time in a bootstrapped company working to try to solve this problem without any VC funding. It was a problem for me and for many people I know so I thought I'd share it in hopes to help people.

Also the grammar part here is interesting, I purposely write without AI because I think that's important, but I'd love your help in making it better - reach out on LinkedIn if you can. Thanks :)

I think the hard thing is as on engineer you're paid to have the "right" answer, but as a manager you're paid not to be right but to bring all the "right answers" together. That's a subtle but important shift.

Every time you see, or encounter, something that makes you go "WTF?!??" you write it down.

Chances are you don't have NEARLY enough context yet to figure out why it's like that, and so barelling in to "fix" it is just going to lead to frustration and bruised ego's all around.

After a few months you'll either have crossed off things "Oh, THAT's WTF" or you have a list of things to start chipping away at, now that you have the FULL context.