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.
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?!
honestly though props to him for exploiting executives, everyone should jump on the train and milk the executives dry, then jump ship and start their own businesses.
My VP just offered me a role on a different team because apparently the axe may be coming down on that whole team, I guess my numbers made the rounds after all.
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.
I’m not a business guy and I know nothing about commercial vehicles. But I have to imagine this setup is the hardest possible way to get into that market. I can appreciate wanting to build some kind of super-bus from the ground up, but unless your dream team is made up of industry veterans, that’s not likely to work.
IMO, it would be better to start with ready-made vehicles and focus on attacking the underbelly of the establishment. Like bus routes that are expensive to service via conventional means, or communities that can’t afford existing options. Or at least work with established players and solve their problems like logistics, labor, or cost optimization. Then you iterate and innovate from there, culminating at a “bus of your dreams” or whatever it was on the CEO’s bucket list.
Looking at an industry that is over 100 years old and saying “we can do this better” from almost nothing is kind of insane.
Your telemetry and route visualization system sounds nice though - that kind of thing is in my wheelhouse.
Ah, yes the industry veterans. They had none. Most of the staff were recent university graduates. Those who weren’t included a former minister, an engineer who designed various industrial buildings, like crude oil storage tanks, and electricity engineer.
Together, they designed and built a pantograph mostly by themselves, a high power charging system that worked through the roof that charged a 50 kW battery in 6 minutes.
The rest of the specialists were mostly obscure scientists, analysts, accountants and PR people.
Since I have already leaked myself, here is a picture of the “amazing superbus” prototype:
link
The high-capacity pantograph charger/gantry is inspired. Since it’s so far overhead it would appear to have some durability and safety advantages. I’m guessing that 6 minutes for 50kW is enough for charging in the field at the start/end of a route. Heck, now I’m wondering if you could get a substantial charge in the time it takes to onboard passengers at a stop.
Edit: exercising my position as an armchair engineer, this idea could still work but I think a business focus as making kits for adapting existing EVs to the gantry system, along with manufacturing the gantries themselves, would be way more viable than building entire busses from scratch.
The moving parts of the machine that come down to charge the bus were made by some Italian company, I think. And some of the electric parts that raise the power to the right amount were built by a Romanian company.
We did have capacitors arc and blow up once. Also, the charger itself arced and burned a hole in the metal where the bus parts and pantograph parts made the #-shaped contact.
Before designing electronics, the electrician in charge of the project tried to get a readymade system from ABB. They called him 9 months later to talk about it and he replied “Don’t need it anymore. We built our own.” And they were like “What do you mean, you built your own?!” 😄
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…
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.
More executives are learning the Jack Welch style of management, which is to destroy everything for short term gains, have zero talent, and contribute nothing.
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.
“Executive presence”
“Rich daddy who owns 10% of the company”
“Managing by walking around.”
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?!
honestly though props to him for exploiting executives, everyone should jump on the train and milk the executives dry, then jump ship and start their own businesses.
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.
Update on this.
My VP just offered me a role on a different team because apparently the axe may be coming down on that whole team, I guess my numbers made the rounds after all.
Did you take it? That sucks, my dude.
Yeah, it isn’t much of a choice
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.
Give us one more story please! 🍿
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.
Amazing.
I’m not a business guy and I know nothing about commercial vehicles. But I have to imagine this setup is the hardest possible way to get into that market. I can appreciate wanting to build some kind of super-bus from the ground up, but unless your dream team is made up of industry veterans, that’s not likely to work.
IMO, it would be better to start with ready-made vehicles and focus on attacking the underbelly of the establishment. Like bus routes that are expensive to service via conventional means, or communities that can’t afford existing options. Or at least work with established players and solve their problems like logistics, labor, or cost optimization. Then you iterate and innovate from there, culminating at a “bus of your dreams” or whatever it was on the CEO’s bucket list.
Looking at an industry that is over 100 years old and saying “we can do this better” from almost nothing is kind of insane.
Your telemetry and route visualization system sounds nice though - that kind of thing is in my wheelhouse.
Ah, yes the industry veterans. They had none. Most of the staff were recent university graduates. Those who weren’t included a former minister, an engineer who designed various industrial buildings, like crude oil storage tanks, and electricity engineer.
Together, they designed and built a pantograph mostly by themselves, a high power charging system that worked through the roof that charged a 50 kW battery in 6 minutes.
The rest of the specialists were mostly obscure scientists, analysts, accountants and PR people.
Since I have already leaked myself, here is a picture of the “amazing superbus” prototype: link
Well, at least it looks nice from a distance…
The high-capacity pantograph charger/gantry is inspired. Since it’s so far overhead it would appear to have some durability and safety advantages. I’m guessing that 6 minutes for 50kW is enough for charging in the field at the start/end of a route. Heck, now I’m wondering if you could get a substantial charge in the time it takes to onboard passengers at a stop.
Edit: exercising my position as an armchair engineer, this idea could still work but I think a business focus as making kits for adapting existing EVs to the gantry system, along with manufacturing the gantries themselves, would be way more viable than building entire busses from scratch.
The moving parts of the machine that come down to charge the bus were made by some Italian company, I think. And some of the electric parts that raise the power to the right amount were built by a Romanian company.
We did have capacitors arc and blow up once. Also, the charger itself arced and burned a hole in the metal where the bus parts and pantograph parts made the #-shaped contact.
Before designing electronics, the electrician in charge of the project tried to get a readymade system from ABB. They called him 9 months later to talk about it and he replied “Don’t need it anymore. We built our own.” And they were like “What do you mean, you built your own?!” 😄
LOL. With that kind of lead time, they were more or less asking for it.
I shared one in my other comment, not sure how to link it
Please do! Or at least a series of blog or fediverse posts.
Which community do you think would be appropriate?
You’ve found your spirit animal
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 good deal smarter though
True
MFW aware of existence in general
Godspeed. Have been in similar spot with the owner/CEO. Instantly killed my desire to continue. Found another job.
I think I’m due for my next 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.
More executives are learning the Jack Welch style of management, which is to destroy everything for short term gains, have zero talent, and contribute nothing.
Wowww.
Thanks for the informative response :)
They just get someone to fire you if you do that.
I’ve seen plays clever enough to dispel suspicion it’s simply a “no you’re wrong” kind of move.
You’re not wrong though heh, they’re on the lookout for yes men I’m sure.
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?
Quarter? Where!
In the couch! That’s a sign of exponential growth right there. Just find more quarters in the couch. You engineers are so stupid.
Tsk tsk tsk, infinite money glitch