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There's smart, but then there's creative. Smart engineers might be wizards of mastering the technology, but creative engineers will re-define the problem domain

There's smart, but then there's creative. Smart engineers might be wizards of mastering the technology, but creative engineers will re-define the problem domain such that their team can deliver without being blocked by other teams, which is a frequent problem in large organizations. Solving business problems effectively is a different skillset from pure mastery of technology (though, you really do need both).

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
I understand this. I've been told a few times I can unblock myself very quickly, but at some point it becomes unreasonable. As a non-Staff IC, I probably can't unblock myself if my problem spans across multiple teams. For a manager/Staff eng, unblocking across a different org is probably infeasible. It feels like Director+ is when it becomes your responsibility to unblock things no matter what. Ex: the "Being a Leader Means Never Saying “That’s Not My Problem”" section in this article https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-into-senior-management.html https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-int...
lazide 4y ago
Large companies build up armies of folks to stop SWEs from doing this. It’s literally what auditing, compliance, etc. do. Because short term optimizations teams do to get things out almost always cause larger (global) risks, from everything from new attack surfaces to yet-another-copy-of-user-data that now can get leaked because it isn’t actually protected the way it is supposed to be. Near as I can tell from stories, Twitter was already maxing out the auditing and compliance bypassing to get things done, so yikes on the long term fallout here.