| A bit of clarification from some of the nuance that (reasonably) had to get cut from the episode for time: - Propose a 5-year-plan: yeah, “lol” is about right. It was never going to win any hearts or minds. It was also our least favorite plan. But it was also the only one we felt we could actually bring to our executive leadership given what they were telling us prior to that, which was basically “Even for a migration we are asking you for, do not slow down product iteration velocity at all.” How do you do that? Welllll… - I’m not really sure what you’re referring to about leading the incident with blame instead of leadership. It’s possible something got lost in translation with the amount we cut, but I actually aimed very much to do the opposite. We didn’t blame the people who lowered the memory thresholds, the people who typo’d a bad value in YAML, or anyone else. I just insisted that we actually solve the root issues instead of leaving them to fester for the next poor person who happened to be around when it inevitably blew up again. - “Speaking about problems more than solving problems”: really not sure what you mean here. I didn’t spend a ton of time bragging about what I had pulled off on the show because wow would that ever have been in poor taste, but… I did pretty well in the problems I solved there. - Lack of relationship building: yeah, I called that out on the episode! It was my weakest area. I had a really good rapport with engineers, and failed pretty miserably at building cachet with management, especially with management above me. I wouldn’t say in the end that it was just down to not knowing how to perform in the environment, though. Some of it was also a choice, in the end, not to perform in ways that I could see would be successful in the environment but which I simply did not believe in. I think a lot of the engineers I respect most are like this: can and will do the political dance for something they believe in… but not for things they don’t believe in. |