Understanding the petty defensiveness and territoriality in my own behavior has been the most professional-life advancing change of my career. I can't recommend enough two particular experiences for senior engineers:
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My experience is that people in this situation either flame out or develop a deep stoic introspection and acceptance. You want the latter.
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2. Be personally responsible for the career ambitions and satisfaction of other people. This means people management.
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Nobody doesn't make grievous mistakes here. This has taught me more than anything else the value of empathy, information control, recognizing differences, amplifying strengths over correcting deficiencies, commitment, selflessness, sacrifice. A thousand lessons.
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I want more established technical leaders to have the opportunity to learn these lessons, but it's super hard because you need to trust a person so much to put them in that position. I think one things ICs generally underestimate is how badly a manager can fuck up.
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Also, having done a ton of mentorship prior, and briefly being an "Interim DRI", it just isn't the same level of pressure and responsibility. There no training wheels.
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Another valuable engineering lesson I learned by zooming out is: unwillingness to do the highest leverage work globally is the one thing that every engineer does to protect themselves to the determent of their own ambitions of impact.
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I'll be forever thankful to ThougtWorks for teaching me "full vertical stripe". That doesn't mean everyone is "full stack". It means you specialize situationally in realtime to deliver the absolute maximum impact for your effort.
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The same principle applies obviously to team-level goals. The initiative that falls out of scope for your quarter might be more important in absolute terms than literally everything another team has prio'ed. Staying in your lane is a sickness.
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So the balance is: how do we respect unique strengths, while optimizing globally? If some person wants to go heads-down on a type system for one platform only, while another platform is drowning trying to achieve basic competence, do you dictate refocusing?
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To wrap up: 1. Responsibility breeds responsible people 2. There's no substitute for being personally responsible for failure 3. Mutual trust and respect is the primary goal of collaboration, everything else is a consequence of your success of failure at this
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All of this is targeted at pretty established technologists. If you're a junior or mid, find a mentor who cares about you personally.
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End of conversation
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