The two worse pieces of advice in the article are breaking the rules and making your own decisions on what to work on.

Everyone including the CEO [1] has a mandate on what they are suppose to be working on. If you choose to work on something else without a mandate and the buy in of your organization, it has downstream and upstream effects you aren’t innovating, you’re being disruptive and not in a good way.

If you have an idea that you think is good, first you sell it internally and get buy in - either via a proof of concept or at least a decent write up or conversation - then you implement it.

From 2016-2018, my responsibility coming from the director was “we just got acquired by a PE firm and you are responsible for integrating these disparate systems of these companies that are being acquired. Let me know your plan and how many people you need”.

Even with a mandate that broad, I knew what rules couldn’t be broken or when I needed to ask for guidance from legal, finance, the CTO, etc.

I didn’t get to “make my own decision about what to work on”. I had broad categories of objectives and I could choose how to prioritize and took some latitude about what to “delegate to the floor”. But anyone who needs to read his advice doesn’t have the experience or professional maturity to know that. I didn’t early in my career and I have the PIPs to prove it.

The next company I also had a broad mandate. But that doesn’t mean I was going to “break the rules” and start putting workloads on Azure in an AWS shop or implement something using Postgres when we were a MySQL shop.

Fast forward to the present. I am a staff engineer working at a cloud consulting company. My responsibility is to either deliver implementation projects or your standard 40-50 page management consulting type reports.

I still have rules I know not to break even though I’m given really wide latitude about how I deliver - they still have to be done on time, on budget and meet the guidelines of the contract.

And the ends justifying the means doesn’t work at large companies. I worked at GE when it was the 6th most valuable company (where I overcame a PIP that was caused because I wasn’t politically savvy) in the US and later Amazon (AWS). With a lot of startups and small and medium companies scattered before and between.

[1] If the company has outside investors they are accountable to their boards and investors.

> The two worse pieces of advice in the article are breaking the rules and making your own decisions on what to work on.

If you read some of his other pieces that are linked. There is other dubious advice and analysis on that blog.

> Even with a mandate that broad, I knew what rules couldn’t be broken or when I needed to ask for guidance from legal, finance, the CTO, etc.

Yes I agree. There are rules that cannot be broken in the organisation. It is highly dependant on industry and the size of the business.

I think there are times when you need to break the rules to get stuff done e.g. Self approving a PRs to get something working when someone else isn't around / available on a non-prod environment. I categorise that as a "bit naughty". I am assuming that is what they mean, but the haven't made that clear if that is the case.

> I didn’t get to “make my own decision about what to work on”. I had broad categories of objectives and I could choose how to prioritize and took some latitude about what to “delegate to the floor”. But anyone who needs to read his advice doesn’t have the experience or professional maturity to know that. I didn’t early in my career and I have the PIPs to prove it.

I have got hosed by acting like a maverick. You learn quickly you can't behave like that.

> If you have an idea that you think is good, first you sell it internally and get buy in - either via a proof of concept or at least a decent write up or conversation - then you implement it.

I work in a small org. I will at least talk to my superior if I am going to implement something that hasn't been agreed or take a significant detour.