Only Debate The Non-Linear

No matter who you are in a company, there is, with probability one, someone who has specific context on something that is non-linear... that you, from your context, think is just linear. (If you're in leadership, this is even more important to understand!)

And if you're arguing that something else is non-linear and thus more important, you're de facto arguing on whether the thing you want to deprioritize is linear.

As CTO at a relatively-early-stage startup, one of my most important jobs is to give both technical and non-technical colleagues the benefit of the doubt that they've spotted something that I didn't know was a critical non-linear opportunity, and juggle expectations so that the non-linear thing they discovered can be addressed before it becomes either a problem or a missed opportunity.

For instance, "customer X filed a ticket that they will need Y" can be easy to dismiss as a linear improvement-per-unit-work that's out of scope... but I need to keep my door open to hearing from our Customer X quarterback that Customer X is the nexus for an entire consortium of partners who all need Y and will adore us for it, in ways that might outrun the incremental improvements we'd already had planned. And, similarly, if an engineer discovers that Z is a non-linear drag of technical debt, that could be equally vital to our ability to move in an agile manner in the near future.

But I do hope each person allocates their advocacy-time (or prickliness-allocation, or communications bandwidth, depending on who you ask) towards the things they believe are the most non-linear, so we can make the right decisions as a team without getting bogged down in meetings and debates. And they know I'll try to do the same. So the mental model, "only debate the non-linear," is very useful up and down the stack.

Of course it doesn't. And that's because "the transition" he refers to is an illusion at best, and a lie we tell ourselves at worst. It's all about politics and getting on your boss' good side. Toot your own horn and you'll move up the ladder of made up titles. Congratulations. It's not more complicated than that.

Most managers don't look at code, and even when they do, they can't distinguish good work from CRUD boilerplate. Most managers don't know what it is you do, only what you say it is you do.

And the reason why we're in this situation in the first place is because our management class is filled with people who just want things to work without issue so they can collect a paycheck off of someone else's labor and provide for their families.

Managers don't care about your work, and you are being tricked into caring about your work so that managers don't have to.