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This is a mindset that I encountered a lot from managers and VPs at Google. The premise is that the best way to improve one's incremental technical contribution
by jakevoytko 9y ago
This is a mindset that I encountered a lot from managers and VPs at Google. The premise is that the best way to improve one's incremental technical contribution is to improve an entire team.
If you bust your ass for a year and improve your own technical chops, you might be able to implement stuff 10% faster. Instead, you could help a team of 30 people to produce 10% more work. This is achievable from my anecdotal experience, but citation needed. At this point, you can throw your 10% incremental improvement out the window because now your incremental engineering improvement is 10% of a 30 person team, or 3 engineers. Now imagine you organized a department of 300 engineers to develop the right mix of infrastructure, forward-looking projects, and core projects such that the organization runs and grows efficiently. Now your incremental technical contribution is so much larger than the initial 10% that it's laughable.
This doesn't have to be limited to management, which is where I think the Google VP perspective falls a little flat. You can do this kind of work through pure technical contributions. I think managers write about this kind of leverage more often, but it can come from any kind of organization. A core library or tool has a massive impact, because it's reusable past the bounds of your team. Maybe you're change isn't 10% distributed across 30 people, but you could improve 3000 people by 1%.
- IronKettle 9y agoYeah, and I think this is where it's fair for the author to use terms like "leverage", since you're effectively multiplying force. To be fair, though, I don't think having that team-first mentality (where you're focused on improving the team's productivity as opposed to your own) necessarily implies pervasive "management thinking" (for lack of a better phrase) or even soft skills. I imagine we can all think of teams where that isn't the case.
- LrnByTeach 9y agoThis Leverage concept can be applied to a family . Instead of YOU, as head of household putting more hours to solve Home chores/issues, if you teach other 3 members of your family how to solve issues/do chores , you get 3X return . An example is online shopping for Home: Instead of you spending time for all the research each time, teaching family members, you can achieve leverage . > If you bust your ass for a year and improve your own technical chops, you might be able to implement stuff 10% faster. Instead, you could help a team of 30 people to produce 10% more work. This is achievable from my anecdotal experience, but citation needed. > At this point, you can throw your 10% incremental improvement out the window because now your incremental engineering improvement is 10% of a 30 person team, or 3 engineers