| Yes, this is how it should work. Assuming your 1x engineers are smart, competent engineers with relevant real world experience under their belts (and are not recent code school grads)... they should have a great deal of input into architecture decisions. They should never have architecture level stuff thrust upon them. Too many cooks spoil the broth indeed but nobody should be doing this stuff in isolation and dictating it unless perhaps you’re doing truly bleeding edge shit and your 10x engineer is a true, Carmackian generational talent. However. Howwwwwever.... The ILLUSION of democratic (or at least collegial) meritocracy is how our faux-10x engineer pulled the wool over folks’ eyes. He gave the appearance of soliciting feedback. We had internal RFCs and everything. But in the end though he really did just push his ideas through unmolested, because he had management's blessing to do so. Not sure how much was an intentional masquerade on his part. I think he really did think it was a meritocracy and his ideas were simply the best. It is certainly not unheard-of for folks to fail to recognize their own privilege. Whatever the case, management enabled it. He was not an awful guy in general, and I rather liked him, just not as architect-dictator. One of his favorite tactics was to spend weeks or months coming up with something in isolation. If you raised objections he’d brush them off by demanding to know your alternative. Which was horseshit - how could you have a viable alternative when he’d had weeks to come up with his idea and you’d only had 10 seconds, especially when these "ideas" are his fulltime responsibility and your responsibility is to ship 40 or 50 hours' worth of software a week. And past experiences had taught you resistance was futile anyway, so why pour your heart into a doomed battle in this latest bit of asymmetrical warfare? This tactic played well to management though. He looked like the brilliant idea guy and you looked like the negative Nancy. This is a very common bit of political and rhetorical warfare and you see it everywhere. It is, essentially, a tactic that has much in common with the dreaded "Gish gallop" - you fling stuff at your opponent faster than they could possibly refute it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop The cure for this in the software simple and difficult. Managers "simply" need to be aware of this possibility. However, they also need a certain level of technical chops IMO. If they're too far removed "from the trenches" they can't accurately judge the situation. |