[austin-cheney]

Coddle developers.

In JavaScript land most employers set the baseline as low as they can. They would hire illiterate people so long as they see the right frameworks mentioned on a resume. They would rather hire/fire people while simultaneously complaining about the poor quality and poor productivity. The end result is supremely overpaid developers that are never capable of programming and struggle to deliver anything. Attempts to fix this generally mean passing the buck onto some senior developer without any voice in leadership or trajectory, a scapegoat.

If you want a strong team that delivers strong results do the opposite of everything I just mentioned. Management should own more than just hiring/firing people. If tech managers were directly liable for the shit their team delivers their level of involvement would be different.

At the same time expect and impose valid business considerations on product development and hold people liable for failures to deliver. This means actually measuring things and expecting software to not taking forever to do absolutely everything. It also means considering the operating expenses for having a billion dependencies in your code, the inability to refactor quickly, regression, and so on.

That said one of the worst things engineering leadership can do is promote developers to leadership positions without any degree of liability. It’s the blind leading the blind, and they are better off with some ignorant MBA that knows little about software.