This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…
This is painfully accurate. I'm not sure how companies fall prey to these problems, but they seem to be incredibly hierarchical. What I means specifically is that the lower level employees and mid-level managers seem almost rabid to praise, cater to, and and be swept up by the useless whims of nearly anyone in the executive suite. It's sickening, and not because of the impacts on work. Why do so many grown adults act…
People want to believe the things that they do matter and are often willing to gussy up their jobs to make their contributions feel important, to make themselves feel important, to feel like the world needs them. It's the same thing that motivates mall security guards to dress up in tactical outfits. "If I spend all my time doing this thing that doesn't matter and isn't super important, then I don't matter, and I'm not super important." They convince themselves that whatever this current thing is Truly Does Matter, and then are willing to run themselves into the ground to prove the point that they contributed to the thing that matters.
I see the sort of self-aggrandizing "identifying as your job" behavior that leads to this mindset in software more than a lot of other jobs. People get into software and their personality becomes "I'm a software engineer" or "I'm a coder." They're better than the average - they're a highly-compensated expert who understands concepts like "UX" and "Architecture" and "Infrastructure" and they are going to run a Beta Test and Have To Stay Late To Deploy The New Version. They have an Important Deadline! The things they are doing Matter. I think lots of people in software had this idealized image of themselves as a core contributor to a product that's broadly loved and people care about and are unwilling to accept that they are toiling away to marginally reduce the time to first meaningful paint on yet another shopping cart page which only a few people use because the company they work for is niche, not particularly innovative, and not interesting.
I don't think a lot of people are doing this for the promotion - I think they're doing it for the validation. So they can believe that what they do actually matters. The sad reality is that 95% of software is bad and uninteresting and the people working on it are mashing together lego pieces to re-solve completely solved problems for management that doesn't get what they're doing and customers who don't like their work, and the desire to create importance where there isn't any is a self-defense mechanism more than anything.
Breaking out of this mindset was a key development in my career and I've not seen any less success but I am substantially more happy.