[sublinear]

> I would rather implement a self-service e-commerce platform for a company’s merchandising team, rather than make it easier for engineers to service a ticket to build a /products/hat/:id endpoint every 6 weeks.

Sounds like the author is trying to justify building new stuff without being responsible for any of it.

Whatever delusions they have about the "non-linear", the big ideas are almost certainly not going to come from an engineer who doesn't have a seat at the table with the people actually running the business.

If one did they would hear all kinds of stuff that would not only wreck their self-esteem, but not have any obvious technical solutions. Engineers are not smarter than anyone else. Imagine that.

It's not so much about finding the non-linear but about finding what actually matters to the business you work for first. It's almost never going to be more software.

[btown]

> It's not so much about finding the non-linear

No matter who you are in a company, there is, with probability one, someone who has specific context on something that is non-linear... that you, from your context, think is just linear. (If you're in leadership, this is even more important to understand!)

And if you're arguing that something else is non-linear and thus more important, you're de facto arguing on whether the thing you want to deprioritize is linear.

As CTO at a relatively-early-stage startup, one of my most important jobs is to give both technical and non-technical colleagues the benefit of the doubt that they've spotted something that I didn't know was a critical non-linear opportunity, and juggle expectations so that the non-linear thing they discovered can be addressed before it becomes either a problem or a missed opportunity.

For instance, "customer X filed a ticket that they will need Y" can be easy to dismiss as a linear improvement-per-unit-work that's out of scope... but I need to keep my door open to hearing from our Customer X quarterback that Customer X is the nexus for an entire consortium of partners who all need Y and will adore us for it, in ways that might outrun the incremental improvements we'd already had planned. And, similarly, if an engineer discovers that Z is a non-linear drag of technical debt, that could be equally vital to our ability to move in an agile manner in the near future.

But I do hope each person allocates their advocacy-time (or prickliness-allocation, or communications bandwidth, depending on who you ask) towards the things they believe are the most non-linear, so we can make the right decisions as a team without getting bogged down in meetings and debates. And they know I'll try to do the same. So the mental model, "only debate the non-linear," is very useful up and down the stack.

[User23]

> Engineers are not smarter than anyone else. Imagine that

This kind of anti-intellectualism is extremely harmful. In reality engineers generally are smarter than average and that’s a good thing if you like things like safe aviation.

[Kye]

Smarter in the thing they know about, sure. Most people have some area where they're above average. Software engineers just happen to have that area intersect with a marketable and, recently, socially valued skill.

>> "if you like things like safe aviation."

Safety is less about intelligence and more about diligence. Brilliant doctors still balk at checklists even though they save lives. Most engineering disasters happen because someone skipped a safety measure.

[User23]

The useful checklist is itself a product of higher than average intelligence. It’s entirely possible to diligently follow a useless or even harmful process.

[Kye]

The useful checklist is a product of experience. Items come from death and disaster caused by not doing what the item says to do.

[cardanome]

> If one did they would hear all kinds of stuff that would not only wreck their self-esteem, but not have any obvious technical solutions. Engineers are not smarter than anyone else. Imagine that.

From personal experience sitting with higher management I can assure you that they are one of the dumbest, most ignorant people I have ever met.

I know more about business and their products than they do. Their only qualifications are high self-confidence and social connections. I wouldn't trust them to do even simple manual labor.

[vitorsr]

I find that the kind of rhetoric espoused by the author is too eagerly neglectful of negative nonlinearities. An organization needs to survive before it can consider "optimizing for the first derivative".