[scarface74]

I’ll take it a step further. Four jobs ago and my first where i was brought in to be “an agent of change”, I failed miserably.

The then new Director of software was brought in to move a 10 year old company to the modern era where the old guard developers and “database developers” [1] had been there since the beginning and couldn’t get out of their own way.

He subsequently hired my manager to lead the creation of a “tiger team” in a completely different city - a major city about 200 miles away from the small town where the company was founded. My manager proceeded to hire a bunch of experienced developers who were all in our 40s and had kept up with technology and best practices.

Within a year, the old guard somehow managed to get rid of the director and subsequently our manager. We never went out of our way to make nice with the old guard and we paid the price.

The lesson I learned from that is to always create relationships outside of your team and respect what came before you got there.

I carried those lessons to my next job as a dev lead with the same type of scenario, the job after that where I was brought in to lead initiatives to make the company cloud native/micro services focused as we pivoted to selling access to the services to large health care companies and my current job working in the cloud consulting department at $BigTech

[extragood]

> The lesson I learned from that is to always create relationships outside of your team and respect what came before you got there.

Very valuable lesson there. I'm "old guard" at my company now. We've grown 10x since I started, and I've observed a fair number of new employees come in and try to instigate change before adequately understanding the business, whether that's the product, tools used, or the people involved.

I think it comes from a good place - they're the newbie and want to contribute in some meaningful way early on. Really show that we made the right decision to hire them. But it can come across as arrogant or condescending if you ask people to disrupt the way they work or what they're working on before having a good understanding of what the effects will be.