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by martincmartin
1668 days ago
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you need to really buy in to the company's tech stack and development ethos. You need to be of the mindset that you're hired to help the company. The company has a certain tech stack and development ethos, so you're hired to help them with that. Just because you know there are better ways to do it, your job is still to help them do it their way. It can be possible to get them to change development ethos, but this is a big deal and uses a lot of political capital. If you can really convince most people that it's better, you'll be seen as a senior tech leader for sure. But if you're optimizing for the best performance reviews -- in other words, the incentives the company has set for you -- then it's usually better just to work within the system. "To be a leader, you need to have followers." So leadership isn't having the best product, e.g. the way Google is a leader in search. It's more like class elections in high school, it's a popularity contest. Your job is to figure out what people are complaining about or advocating for, and do those. Most likely, everybody is used to the development ethos and just thinks it's the only or obvious way to do things. So nobody is really complaining about it. |
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Mostly I agree with everything you say, especially about needing followers before you can lead, but I think this part deserves more discussion. At staff level (if not slightly before), "help the company" and "do it their [historical] way" are often not the same thing. As I said in another sub-thread, at that level you're hired to bring knowledge and skills and perspective that the org doesn't already have (or have enough of). Unlike lower levels, pulling in some direction is part of the job in this case. I think EMs at all levels understand this and often support it quite well. The problem I've seen is other high-level engineers who never knew anything but the current way and believe that it's generally the only way (except of course for the one part they personally understand and want to change). This sometimes leads to hiring people and then thwarting their efforts to do what they were hired for.
> uses a lot of political capital > ... > optimizing for the best performance reviews
That's the problem. These two should be aligned. You should reward what you want to see more of, and I think people using their best professional judgment qualifies. Relying on the continual presence of people who will sacrifice their own career/financial progress to make needed change (as I mentioned in another sub-thread) is not an effective or ethical strategy. I won't even say whether I believe I'm in that category myself, but I certainly saw other people who got tired of lying down across barbed wire so other people could run past them.