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Its often very common that those with the best insights into improving a system also have the least power / knowledge of how to pull levers of power.
by ada1981 9y ago
Its often very common that those with the best insights into improving a system also have the least power / knowledge of how to pull levers of power.
- JoshuaDavid 9y agoI mean that's not particularly surprising, since someone who both had the insights into how to improve a system and also the knowledge and power to change that same system (and who cares) will generally make those improvements. So if you see a broken system, and someone who knows how to fix it, and that person is not fixing it, there must be something (organizational badness, higher priority fires elsewhere, apathy, etc.) blocking them from fixing it.
- kazinator 9y agoSo the way you see it, the people who have the power to fix things do actually fix everything they know how to fix. So then over time the situation stabilizes around people who have the power to fix, but everything that remains is beyond their insight. Anyone who has the insight is a relatively powerless newcomer.
- JoshuaDavid 9y agoYes, pretty much. Well, newcomer or someone who just learned something new.
- sbinthree 9y agoVery well put. It's like how hard/right decisions are "difficult" decisions to make. If the right decision is easy, everyone makes it without too much consideration. If the decision is hard and wrong, no one would opt for it.
- Terr_ 9y agoCurrently I'm the "surviving senior dev" for a very old crufty mission-critical legacy app, and I'm painfully aware how broken it is and the ways in which is breaks. So sometimes I have to kindly remind myself that its current state isn't indicative of some damning (yet oddly egotistical) personal failure, where I "shoulda" rewritten everything from scratch by now. On the plus side, the QA team is gradually learning to do more than manual browser tests...
- Infernal 9y agoMaybe we only hear about their frustration precisely because they don’t have the power to change things. “Leadership changed things for the better” isn’t much of a headline, it’s the expected/desired outcome.
- jcl 9y agoThis is exactly why it's so valuable to keep good notes while onboarding a new engineer... A fresh set of eyes gives you a rare opportunity to see problems that familiarity has blinded you to -- yet a new engineer is in the worst position to fix these problems.