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In my last job I moved from a team that had no "senior" level people on it to a team that was pretty much all "senior" and up level people. I was impressed at

In my last job I moved from a team that had no "senior" level people on it to a team that was pretty much all "senior" and up level people. I was impressed at the high rankings of everyone on my new team and thought that first, I was about to witness powerhouse performances and a lot getting done, and second that on such an elite and senior team I would have a good chance of moving up the org chart myself. What I found was that all the senior plus level people wanted to do was work on plans and reviews and architecture decisions and so on and so forth. We had a lot of "leadership" but very few people willing to actually put shovel to dirt so to speak. Our ultra-elite team was really unproductive. I began to think of the senior people as something like salt. A meal may be best with a lot of food and a little salt. One or two high level people to plan for and guide a lot of lower ranking people who could actually do work. The second best configuration would be all food and no salt - people doing work without the high level insights and planning. The worst configuration, I discovered, was all salt and no food - just a ton of meetings, reviews, plans, and missed deadlines. I'm connecting my experience with this blog post because it seems to me like the process of "becoming elite" causes the damage. Everyone on our software team was so busy trying to have cross team impact, show their leadership, come up with consequential architecture decisions, and the like - because all that stuff is what you need to be well regarded as a senior type person, that nobody wanted to do the more mundane tasks of actually implementing our plans. From the examples of the article it's like everyone is worried about the metrics they can control, like the academics publishing more and more papers in better journals, that they forget about actually discovering or documenting things. To use the high variance language, maybe in the ur-company, when it was just starting, you could have done something big and consequential. If it was a success you'd get rewarded and become a senior or a principal or whatever. If it failed, even if it failed through no particular fault of your own, you wouldn't, or maybe you'd get fired. Nowadays, as the company has grown, there are fewer of those big risks and more people who want to be seniors and principals, so people take the low variance route - establishing that they are influential planners who wrote and reviewed a lot of stuff and so on, forgetting about the nominal goal of the company - shipping good products.

streetcat1 5y ago
As an Ex-elite person, what you are missing is their performance goals as were given to them by their manager. As a senior person in a big org, you are judge by your leadership efforts / cross team efforts, so this is what they tried to do. I bet that if their goals were to write code, you would see them write code.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Exactly. Many senior-level people probably do want to write code, create things, and do that "shovel to dirt" work, but their company's performance review process discourages it. So, instead they have to fill their days with all that cross team impact, leadership, architecture, complexity, and process improvement stuff. Everywhere I've worked, "shovel to dirt" work is seen as what's done by the lowest rung on the totem pole. This mentality is all over industry. If you want to get promoted, you need to "create organizational transformation and synergistic thought leadership" instead.
  - chii 5y ago
    a possible way out is to tie more of senior's compensation with equity, including senior manager's. you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value. If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
    - Nbox9 5y ago
      Let’s say there are two ranks. Senior 1 and Senior 2, with Senior 2 being a higher ranking position. Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt. Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
    - Clewza313 5y ago

streetcat1 5y ago

As an Ex-elite person, what you are missing is their performance goals as were given to them by their manager. As a senior person in a big org, you are judge by your leadership efforts / cross team efforts, so this is what they tried to do. I bet that if their goals were to write code, you would see them write code.

ryandrake 5y ago
Exactly. Many senior-level people probably do want to write code, create things, and do that "shovel to dirt" work, but their company's performance review process discourages it. So, instead they have to fill their days with all that cross team impact, leadership, architecture, complexity, and process improvement stuff. Everywhere I've worked, "shovel to dirt" work is seen as what's done by the lowest rung on the totem pole. This mentality is all over industry. If you want to get promoted, you need to "create organizational transformation and synergistic thought leadership" instead.
- chii 5y ago
  a possible way out is to tie more of senior's compensation with equity, including senior manager's. you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value. If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
  - Nbox9 5y ago
    Let’s say there are two ranks. Senior 1 and Senior 2, with Senior 2 being a higher ranking position. Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt. Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
  - Clewza313 5y ago