[tootie]

I saw this at a decades-old retail company. New CTO brought a Silicon Valley perspectives to the company which involved hiring a load specialist engineers into newly created departments without any explicit business justification. Literally said that once they were hired they'd come up with useful projects. He also wanted to start exporting our in-house software as standalone products even when we were still running transactions through a mainframe. CEO bought it all hook, line and sinker.

[naravara]

> Literally said that once they were hired they'd come up with useful projects.

This is a great way to have engineers burn time on projects they think are interesting rather than projects that will actually have good ROI.

[iamasoftwaredev]

How do you balance avoiding this with wanting engineers who have ideas and agency?

[karthikb]

Bring engineers in to solve problems you know need to get solved. As they learn the system, its debt, the business, etc., listen to their ideas. For ones that sound good, give them the resources to develop a POC. For the POCs that work, give them the resources to take it all the way.

Larger companies with substantial profits can hire engineers explicitly to come up with POCs one after another.