Don't kick a dead whale across the beach!

It takes a lot of effort and you are not getting anywhere anytime soon...

Close your eyes and imagine for a moment that you are a very senior manager in some big tech organization. There is a near infinite amount of things that you could have your people working on.

First of all there are new products and initiatives. These line up with the business and drive sales. Surely that is the most important thing to work on. Then there are compliance issues because not all systems involved in reporting on the company's numbers are SOX-compliant (hint: They never are). And what about the GDPR and the CCPA (its Californian equivalent)? And let's not forget about the right to be forgotten!

Of course there is also tech debt. The architecture is suboptimal and the cloud provider bills have getting out of hand lately. There are also significant duplicated efforts going on; multiple teams are working on the same thing and that should definitely be streamlined.

To top it all off there is cost cutting. Maybe some lay-offs are in order? Maybe some manual operations teams can be optimized away with a few large language models? And on the hiring side of the house there seem to be too many recruiters (okay, at least that one seems easy to solve) but at the same time we they are not meeting diversity hiring targets.

So many things to work on, so little time, and so few people to work on all of it…

By the way, this is one of the reasons that companies grow continuously: There are an infinite amount of things to work on and when times are good there is is no barrier on hiring. Then before you know it you have people in your organization working on open source software for a knitting machine because they think this aligns in some way with the company mission and nobody told them to do something more useful (true example).

Let's shift the focus all the way down to a random individual contributor in that same organization. Well, not a random individual contributor, but a really good one, someone with vision, someone with passion, someone who cares. Let's call her Iris Celio.

IC, for Individual Contributor, get it? :-)

Iris has a passion for privacy.

This is an example for the purpose of this article. It could really anything, she might have a passion for replacing all the key-value stores that are currently in use by a single one to rule them all, or she might have a passion for making everyone use the same great OKR planning tool. Please keep that in mind, lest you think that kicking dead whales across the beach is only about privacy projects!

Privacy is obviously important. There is customer trust. There are legal obligations. Privacy aligns with the company culture. Everyone cares about privacy.

Or do they?

Unfortunately, privacy is hard. It's usually best to implement “privacy by design” (including privacy features into every system from the outset). Iris knows this and is therefore pushing for a mandatory privacy design review as part of every new system. She is also proposing a set of solutions to help execute on the privacy mandate: A data lineage system that can keep track of where data goes, a data dictionary system to keep track of the privacy status of customer attributes, an anonymization tool, and a PII scrubber.

Despite Iris’s good work there are many practices still in widespread use that are very privacy unsafe. For instance many developers use copies of production data to test their software without proper scrambling and too many people still have access to sensitive customer data (often for no good reason). There has already been one colleague who used their access to internal systems to stalk people they were interested in dating (true example).

Privacy is obviously important: Not only Iris says so, every says so. The company’s executives say so!

At the same time Iris is getting no traction for any of her initiatives. Her projects feel like an uphill battle in all directions.

Privacy OKRs keep getting deprioritized. Her design docs are not reviewed properly and people are not engaging with the proposed privacy design review. Her privacy office hours are mostly unattended and her attempts to get a slot at the tech council (where all the senior engineering leaders show up to review important projects) have been unsuccessful so far.

The sad truth is this: Iris is kicking a dead whale across the beach.

Kicking a dead whale across the beach means that you are trying to get something difficult done on your own without much help and (therefore) without making a lot of progress. The person doing the kicking is often committed and kicking as hard as they can but they are not getting anywhere because nobody besides them really cares.

It's not important if everyone says they care.
It's not relevant if the company officially says they care.
The only thing that is relevant is what people actually do.

Of course the company says they care about privacy; they cannot afford to say anything else. Of course senior managers say that privacy is important, they would be crazy not to.

And as a reminder: This is not about privacy, that’s just an example. Your dead whale is probably something else altogether.

But what are these senior managers doing about privacy? Are they creating and supporting actual projects? Are they throwing people towards these projects? Are they making time to ensure that these projects stay on track? Are they visibly supporting these projects (e.g. by promoting people who do important work)?

If they don't do anything like that, they actually don't care, and you are kicking a dead whale across the beach.

In career mentoring I often get this question: "Jos, I have been doing all this work on X, how do I get my manager and his manager to care about that and see that it's important work?" My answer: "I assume you have told them what you are doing? If so, then they probably don't care and you are kicking a dead whale across the beach."

Unless you are seriously devoted to the topic at hand and willing to do a lot of work in anonymity with only a small chance of recognition, do not kick a dead whale across the beach.

A friend of mine invented a beautiful solution for the problem of street addresses that works really well in areas where these addresses are non-existent, unstable, or hard to use. He open sourced the technology and then spent years drumming up support inside the company for embedding his solution in our flagship mapping product to help promote this technology.

Nobody who mattered cared.

Eventually, after an enormous amount of work, he managed to get a small team together and they integrated this solution into the mapping product. It launched and gained a little bit of traction.

There were a few reasons for the lack of widespread adoption in the outside world. Part of the reason was that there was a closed-source commercial competitor with an inferior product but better funding. Another part was because of resistance from governments who don't want poor people to have addresses because then they would have to let them vote or give them education and healthcare.

Anyway, after the launch, other people got rewarded for pulling this off and my friend was eventually told to find himself another role at the company or be let go.

Moral of the story so far: If you are not making progress on your project and are experiencing a lack of actual help, you need to consider that you might be kicking a dead whale across the beach. You probably care a lot, important people might say they care, but in the meantime nothing is happening. If that turns out to be the case then you need to make the conscious choice to either continue kicking or switch projects. If you continue kicking the dead whale that is fine by me, but do not expect success or recognition, even if you do manage to make a little bit of headway.

If you are wondering if you are kicking a dead whale then look at what sort of traction you are actually getting, not whether people say your project matters.

I once career mentored a few people in a group that were building solutions for "emerging markets". At the start of that engagement I asked them to explain to me what it was they were doing. After their enthusiastic explanation I cruelly summarized their work as: "building services for poor people without credit cards". My next statement was their career advice: "Get the hell out of here and do something that the company actually cares about."

This advice was met with considerable resistance: The company did care, everybody said so (a red flag), including the CEO. And surely poor people in developing countries with limited Internet access deserved services tailored for them that would make their lives better?

They do, they totally do, I wholeheartedly agree. But a multi-billion dollar for-profit company is maybe not the party most interested in building these services or funding their continued operation. Even if the company officially wants to be corporately socially responsible, what the company actually does is often in the hands of VPs who are either sociopaths or not billionaires yet and frustrated about that.

I asked them if their work was ever showcased on the weekly all-hands? No. Did they even have an X-team review (the CEO's name started with an X)? No. Why were they talking to me? Because they had a hard time getting traction for their work and that showed in headcount, promotions, and in other ways.

I repeated my advice. They were kicking a dead whale across a beautiful tropical beach. It was a nice beach, but they were not going anywhere.

They ignored my advice and the next thing that happened is that the entire group got dissolved. When I dropped by to give them my "I won't say I told you so, but I told you so" speech they said: “It's not that bad, this is an opportunity! The projects are not cancelled, they are just moving to other places in the organization that are focused on that subject matter. For instance our project for Internet payments using phone cards is moving to the overall payments org.” I told them that the VP of the payments org did not care about their project at all and they were sure to cancel the project. Again they disagreed.

I won’t tell you what happened next, but surely someone who is as prescient as I am should be way richer and more influential than I actually am :-)

At this point you might be convinced that the “kicking the dead whale” issue is because of evil executives, but that would be unfair. Companies have an infinite amount of things to work on but only limited resources so choices have to be made. Of course life might be better all around if we (including executives) were all more like Jan Maas (the Dutchman on Ted Lasso who is always brutally honest), but for better or for worse that is not what business life is like; for lots of reason companies and executives don’t always say what they do or do what they say.

So the advice remains: Do not kick a dead whale across the beach. It takes a shit ton of effort and you are not getting anywhere anytime soon. If you are working hard but not getting any traction and not making any headway, you might want to consider looking hard at whether there is a huge sea mammal lying in front of you that you are trying to move…