Senior engineers are living in the future

If you have to produce a well-reasoned argument, and successfully convince all peers that your argument is in fact well-reasoned, and comprehensive, and handles all concerns of all involved or potentially involved, and that all opposing arguments do not meet these criteria… it will take ages to get all stakeholders in agreement, and even when you do, you get a horse designed by committee (a camel).

Projects with no owner consistently end up in the same rut — always planning but never doing. Bikeshedding.

So you need the owner. But for someone to own the project/task, he needs to be in charge of it — he needs power. For what is power if not the ability to make a decision and have others follow through on it?

In arenas without defined power relationships, but manage to produce useful work, it’s usually the case that the power relationships still exist; they’ve just been made implicit. You see this in geopolitics, in your high school group projects, in Valve, etc. Determined not by corporate hierarchy, but instead charisma, money, social networks, physical/military strength, etc. Most of which is reflected by the corporate hierarchy anyways.

Businesses just make it explicit, and consider it valuable enough to attach higher pay. You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs. But in my head, a resource-managers role is primarily to make his team more efficient — by optimizing processes, clearing blockers, umbrella’ing against shit from on high, reporting upwards, to guide the overall direction of all involved — not to dictate the every individual activities of his underlings.

Also the Linux Kernel clearly has a power hierarchy, and while that power hierarchy doesn’t dictate what you work on, it does dictate whether your work can hold any value (by getting included into mainline). The difference just ends up being in the fact that it really doesn’t cost anyone anything for you to continuously do work that’s ultimately rejected every time, whereas for a business it obviously does (in the format of your salary). Obviously you can fork if you want and make it perhaps valuable… but you can exit the hierarchy just as well in business by quitting.

I'm "yes and no" on this. The reason is that I often look at the work/process/product of others, as inspiration. There's a lot of folks that are better than I am, and it is a good idea for me to keep an eye on what they do, and how they do it.

What I don't do, is compete with others. I am not competitive, and I'm fine with that.

Unfortunately, that seems to be a bit of an aberration. I am constantly having others take a competitive stance with me, and it can add a lot of friction; when they refuse to share information, make a point of being "snooty" with me, or assume that, when I talk about my work, I'm trying to cast their work in a negative light.

That's not usually the case. I have very high standards, and I hold myself to them. If I will be incorporating the work of others, in mine, then I'll hold them to high standards.

Otherwise, I've actually found a lot of gems in things like sloppy StackOverflow examples. Their lashup code may solve my problem, and I can take their solution, and refactor it into one that meets my own bar. I don't waste any time, thinking negatively about the other person. In fact, I'm usually fairly effusive, in my thanks. The person is often coming from an academic point of view, and are not concerned about the practicalities of shipping software.

There's so damn much negativity, these days; often driven directly by competitiveness, that I feel I need to reduce my contribution to it.

"Just tell me what to do" is like the anti-senior developer philosophy, particularly if you report to someone who is non-tech.

If you're senior you should be the one setting the expectations and lay out a (working) plan to fulfill them.

Perhaps I am saying that changing the game is better for everyone than learning to play the current one well.