For anyone thinking the not so nice version is how he really thinks, it seems instead its more of a first draft and the nice version is the one that he now agrees with.
Thanksfully engineering is soo much better, SW being the best to work in. As long as you can stay away from incompetent middle managers
I particularly like the way it talks about spreading your vision. As a showrunner it's not possible to be there for every single decision that needs to be made (on costumes, set design, etc etc etc) - so instead you need to get some trusted lieutenants fully briefed on your vision so they can make good decisions like that without you.
Isn't Apple infamous for siloing information amongst its departments such that almost nobody grasps the full extent of what is being built?
Imagine if software development had the same kind of human direction/vision. Real vision entrusted to a single person with authority to execute it. Not vision that has to be brought to life through influence from playing the company politics and building it to fit some specific KPIs. Some founders might have it, also some videogame producers/directors. For the rest, most software seems to be designed by committee.
I’d say the 5th (esp. comparison to archies) is also relevant as well as the various instances of “exec” ie the partners
[9th on the guardian mode in nerds?]
On 9C and 9D: the prussian model used to be that when taking strategic decisions, the most junior officers would make the first proposals, and then they'd go around the room and finish with the most senior officers. This has the advantage that it allows for early brainstorming, and trains the juniors to think in terms of bigger pictures than their direct responsibilities, yet doesn't lead to "vetoing" or "inversions" because everyone understands the early steps get things out on the table, the middle winnows down to the efficient frontier, and after the Old Man speaks, the decision has been made.
EDIT: eg, in "Dances With Wolves" most (all?) of the Sioux councils end with someone authoritative declaring "wašté"
* on my charitable-to-bigcorp-hires model of "founder mode", over the weekend I came up with a much more STEMmy description: the founder is probably used to early startup reports, who are high impedance low Lyapunov exponent (it takes a fair amount of effort to convince them what the right goal is, but after that you can leave them alone and they'll execute to that goal), but the bigcorp hire may well be low impedance high Lyapunov exponent (you can't leave them alone, but small nudges keep them on course). Does this make more sense than the livestock analogy?
