In praise of “normal” engineers

This is how you maintain/nurture a mature service/product.

It also works when building something new with a captive audience (banking, insurance, etc.)

Everything doesn’t need to be world-class. Sometimes long term development stability/resiliency is what matters.

There are large parts of this I really like, but it's hard to overstate just how much I disagree with the idea that "The only meaningful measure of productivity is impact to the business". The natural result of this view is a focus on quantifiable changes and short term thinking. The greatest value of experienced engineers is in avoiding landmines that will destroy a project or even a company. It's difficult to quantify things that never happen, or communicate the value in avoiding them in terms that don't sound wildly hyperbolic.

I’ve thought a lot about this my whole life. How do you build a good team? People simply don’t like each other so the natural sorting that happens is that teams hire for who they like and likes them in return (or at least in mating terms, will certainly appear as likable as can be). By definition, this can never be the most optimal team.

There may have to be a different way to think about this. How can you have things that hate each other but still run an amazing operation? The best operation I can think of is a zoo. You have your tigers over here, and your penguins over there. The operation as a whole is amazing.

A company of just tigers will destroy everything and a company of just penguins need too much caretaking.

Most armed forces are not a “team”, they are an operation. If you constantly try to fit an operation into a team framework, that’s when you’ll try to turn penguins into tigers (how do you turn someone into a 100x engineer?). Or worse, you tell a tiger to chill out and relax with the penguins (you’re asking for trouble). If you need a 100x engineer, make sure the engineer is a thousand miles away and gets paid like it and far away from the normal engineers lest they start believing the tiger cage is suitable for penguins or vice versa. It’s a big operation, no teams.

If you MUST build a team, then just be yourself. You probably are building something small dogs like, so hire a few street dogs and you won’t even need to worry about zoo-scale decisions and operations. You won’t need to go through the mistake of jamming 4 different species into the same enclosure to finally learn how things live separately but together.

Most great engineers were once good engineers. A healthy engineering organization helps its engineers on this path.

You spent all this time talking when you could have been coding.