All good, i try not take things too seriously. Appreciate your bluntness and curiosity. Most of my career has been with early stage tech but I’ve also been in

All good, i try not take things too seriously. Appreciate your bluntness and curiosity. Most of my career has been with early stage tech but I’ve also been in companies of thousands. I think I’m best cast in teams of 5-20 and I’ve found I’ve done well building good culture around working within the limits of what the business needs (realistic costing, time estimates, alignment to product vision) while finding ways to intertwine the quality developers want to see in their own work with the objectives of product and the leadership team. I think to try put it in simpler terms, the best people want an environment where they can do their best work. The question i encourage people to ask themselves is if they actually know what that environment looks like? Often they have an idea of what’s worked best so far, but not what is optimal. I like having discussions around that as you can go from there to a) learn from their perspective and see if you can include part of that in the environment you’re presently operating under and b) determine if that’s a good near team goal or long term goal for the current environment and set realistic expectations with that individual as to not “bait and switch” them. I really see little point wasting someone’s time with promises of utopia when you’ve got a team that just isn’t working…that’ll end predictably. I’ve said before my best skill has been building small teams of very bright people, retaining them and out performing larger teams. It’s pretty trivial to out perform larger teams if you can retain people, but to retain them they need to like what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.