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> I still have to tell some engineers with 10-15 years experience to stop navel gazing over the tech choices, and get the damn software out the door already. T

> I still have to tell some engineers with 10-15 years experience to stop navel gazing over the tech choices, and get the damn software out the door already. This may be an unpopular thing to say, but at most companies, you should have less senior engineers than that doing nearly all of the "get the damn software out the door already" work. The 10-15 years experience people should really be doing work with broader impact than that. And this isn't to downplay the importance of that just-get-things-done role at all! It's critically important. But it's a ratio thing; most companies should have a lot of earlier career folks implementing things and a few later career (or just very high achieving) folks setting technical direction, discovering and advocating for new projects, yada yada yada. I think the truth is that lots of places have this ratio out of whack with respect to the actual availability of impactful projects to work on. If there isn't enough work for folks at Staff level and above beyond just knocking out crud apps, you've got a mismatch.

closeparen 5y ago
We subscribe to this philosophy on paper and it works out pretty poorly. The best managers and teams are the ones that manage to subvert it. There's a pretty wide variation in efficacy at doing the mainstream work. It's good to retain and reward the people who are good at it, so that they make up a higher proportion of the ones doing it. Otherwise you're constantly throwing away good people and replacing them with new hires of lower/unknown quality, just because you don't have enough "strategic direction" type work to promote them.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Yeah... I guess it depends on the person. I personally felt like "just get the work out the door" lost its novelty / interest for me after about five years doing it and that I spent the next five years becoming increasingly unsatisfied with my work after that. It is more satisfying for me to have more scope over larger projects. But not every place has that kind of work available. But "just crank out the bread and butter work instead" is not a solution either, because like I said, I find that unsatisfying. So if there isn't "strategic direction" type work, for some people the choice isn't between "throwing away good people" vs. keeping them doing the bread and butter work; they are going to seek greener pastures for the kind of work they prefer doing either way. There are other people who really enjoy just knocking things out no matter how long they do it, and I agree with you that many organizations would benefit more from having lots of that kind of person.

closeparen 5y ago

We subscribe to this philosophy on paper and it works out pretty poorly. The best managers and teams are the ones that manage to subvert it. There's a pretty wide variation in efficacy at doing the mainstream work. It's good to retain and reward the people who are good at it, so that they make up a higher proportion of the ones doing it. Otherwise you're constantly throwing away good people and replacing them with new hires of lower/unknown quality, just because you don't have enough "strategic direction" type work to promote them.

sanderjd 5y ago
Yeah... I guess it depends on the person. I personally felt like "just get the work out the door" lost its novelty / interest for me after about five years doing it and that I spent the next five years becoming increasingly unsatisfied with my work after that. It is more satisfying for me to have more scope over larger projects. But not every place has that kind of work available. But "just crank out the bread and butter work instead" is not a solution either, because like I said, I find that unsatisfying. So if there isn't "strategic direction" type work, for some people the choice isn't between "throwing away good people" vs. keeping them doing the bread and butter work; they are going to seek greener pastures for the kind of work they prefer doing either way. There are other people who really enjoy just knocking things out no matter how long they do it, and I agree with you that many organizations would benefit more from having lots of that kind of person.