A career ending mistake

In the past I've often felt that success depends on people and how they work together and that it's most important to get that right. You could see it as part of the architecture of the product. In early jobs I saw how having QA as a completely separate entity lead to all sorts of blame games when something went wrong - so they should be in the team but with a different manager.

My favorite anecdote about why it matters how you arrange things socially was about Friday pizzas at one company where you got your choice if you showed up in the kitchen early and if you were late you took whatever was left.

When the kitchen was getting remodelled we had to split the deliveries per floor and get people to collect their floor's pizzas. Inevitably one person would pick up something they shouldn't have - either the wrong kind or one more than their floor was allocated and that messed up the orders for every other floor - great anger was generated with people accusing each other of skulduggery. The anger was not minor and created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. People suggested we needed more pizzas so everyone could get enough.

A few weeks later the kitchen was finished and we were back to the old scheme. We didn't order more - the old rule that if you were hungry then be early was back in place and the nastiness evaporated.

That's just a long winded way of trying to explain that some ways of arranging people work and others create a disaster. I'm interested in how to make things succeed and I realised that being good at wasn't going to ever be enough to create successes.

Often it doesn't matter what heroic programming effort you make - your management has set you up to fail.

So I wanted to, for once, be in a position where one can influence those things so I could create some "success" with the appropriate tools even if that is not just a compiler/IDE. I wanted to fix the things that were killing our success (e.g. at Nokia) that I couldn't as a pure developer.

Has that happened? Well, a little bit. I doubt it will ever be more than a little bit - but it's less frustrating to feel that I'm not stuck in the same groundhog day. :-)

Being an independent contractor/business owner is what frightens me next - will I ever have the courage to do that? Possibly when the mortgage is paid :-)

And that is the root of all evil. Everything comes down to a screeching crawl. What could be done in a week by a couple startup folks now takes months or quarters (!). So yes, I don't think "standard of engineering" applies here :-)

In addition to all that was already said, this has the disadvantage of misaligning incentives. At FAANG (or any other big co for that matter), it pays to stretch projects and blow their complexity outside of any reasonable measure, just because the folks in charge of such projects benefit materially from more people and "bigger architecture". It is engineering bureaucracy at its worst, unfortunately.

In contrast, at startups it pays to move fast and one simply cannot afford growing unnecessary "fat", gotta stay lean or die. Obviously, some folks are more comfortable with the former (FAANG/big co) approach, because at the end of the day they just want to get their paycheck and go home, it's not about this job or that job at all. It's a tradeoff, for sure.