> My take away from this is that you can't change the culture

I've seen the culture changing in some special circumstances a couple times in previous companies, and honestly all of them were ugly: 1) Demographic replacement (having more people saying yes and out-vote the legacy employees)

2) Hired guns from the top to the bottom to shake the system (we called in a company those managers "007" because they used to have licence to fire).

3) Non-compliance stable as a discipline method for the "legacy employees" (very adopted in Central Europe)

4) "Train-your-replacement" as a coercion method for collaboration

5) Some modified version of the "madogiwa-zoku" but instead of looking to the window, they push people to go for the "metawork," like organizing events, being a developer advocate in conferences, assuming roles as "community managers," or being used as a "donkey token" to be used in conferences or panels of "_______________ in tech."

>And I am just raging in my office because I was trying to prevent this situation for 3 years to no avail...... My take away from this is that you can't change the culture.

This happens a lot in large company. And isn't just a singular case or a company, but any organisation or even countries. Just look at governments around the world.

You cant help those who dont want to be helped.

The biggest problem of any problem is people dont think it is a problem.

And may be controversially, you cant stop the pendulum from swinging and change its direction. The only way to fasten the cycle is to help it swing to its extreme before it swings back.

>>If top is bunch of sloppy clowns, whole company is going to be the same.

This happens so often at big companies as well. Management is always assumed to be correct, and the pay grade argument always kicks in(They are paid more because you are beneath them). And this starts to show up everywhere. You can't take any initiative without sanction from the top, and they are often clueless as to what the ask is. Most of the times its rejected just to assert authority, and not on the grounds of merit.

Top bosses are also very envious and proactively trying to kill rising talent out of fear- people better than them, will replace them. To that end no good thing ever happens, if you push too hard you will be eliminated in interest of self preservation.

So by and large no good thing is ever suggested, or tried or happens. Eventually until whole business(es) die out. This happens in every company, no matter what companies claim about hiring, retaining and promoting talent. This is just how every place works.

This, many times this. If you encounter pushback from everywhere – leave, don’t spend your life energy fighting bullshit.

Or just read all the comments and you don't need to buy their book.

> hexagonal architecture

God help me. Was on a project where this was used to justify so much extra boilerplate. Every class had an interface, and then we used dependency injection to supply the class to something expecting that interface. Actually, it was in Rust, so there were no classes, but that didn't stop us. Absolute waste of time.

> Definitely got carried away. When coming to a new org, it's always good to learn the ropes a bit before fatiguing the team with more work, processes, and burdens.

This is probably the single, most important advice for any new person joining a company in a (technical) leadership position. There are going to be missing things in any org, and bad mistakes, and people needing to learn new things. But also there are going to be tons of decisions that make "no sense" on first look that do have a reason behind, and to fix that "root cause" you probably need a 3 years plan and buy-in from C-level. So, trust the team you are going to lead.

i read that and i was like hey wait a second, that's not how you do that? shouldn't you be having conversations with your team first to find common ground to help with buy in? and also learn from them about the org.

starting with a presentation that nobody asked for is a good way to be ignored.

While I am not a software developer, it sounds like our career paths have had the same trajectory, and I'm wondering what the common factor is across industries.

I work in automation (mostly) as a lead tech and professional troubleshooter because I am familiar with a wide and varied amount of automation technologies. I've met plenty of people over the years who have much more advanced skills than myself, but never go beyond doing more than parts swapping on a workbench, which leaves me scratching my head.

Over the last few years, I have listened carefully to what people around me say about my work, and while it is good gas for the ego, I have notice that's not the likely reason I get promoted so quickly. While I can walk into a problem and know how to apply different processes to figure out what to do almost reflexively at this point, the real focus seems to be that I take ownership of the process.

Bit of a buzzphrase, "ownership of the process," but the short explanation is that a little planning, accountability, resourcefulness and communication seems to get you a lot further than just knowing what to do in any given situation. Employers like that because they now have department manager they can rely on, and team members like that because someone else is taking responsibility so they don't have to.

You're good at code, obviously, but if you zoom out on your work a bit, are you also bringing a bit of accountable authority to the table? That may be the real reason why you move up so quickly, or at least something that greases the gears so that can happen faster for you than, say, an equally skilled colleague.

I don't understand why that is a logical progression. Writing good code and leading a team needs vastly different skill-sets in my eyes.

Interesting. I've witnessed this happening in the past when someone took over all the boring configuration part of the software. It's so essential to the whole thing that you just end up with responsibilities and trust really quickly.

I don't understand the point of your comment. Why did you switch companies?

>> I don't look or act like a leader

In what way?

As the other commenters stated, it is not clear what is the point. Writing good code and being a tech leader are very different positions with very different technical skills. I was a tech lead in a few cases (different companies or different departments of a very large company) and I was not the top developer there, my job was not to be one. I worked with developers that were much better than me that were not a good fit for a tech leader.

2c. is there a context I dont understand?

I think its important to note in most companies I worked in, the issues were mostly political.

But very useful. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Big pile of horse shit, every word.

Wasted years in previous company under narcissistic manager with the same mindset. The guy had official senior lead title and was calling the shots. When ther team became too big, he assigned most senior people as “leads” without the official title. You had to perform as a team lead in an environment where your decisions do not have authoritative power, so every small task became negotiation with every member regardless of their seniority. Also no salary bump either. The “teams” quickly collapsed and they hired official team leads from there, with a real authority.

> Although hierarchical decision making may be more efficient, it's an unnatural system and anti-social

Where did you read this? “Empowerment management for empowered to empower #21”?

"Leading without authority"

That depends on the cultural / politics health of the group. The likeable right guy can end up stomped because he's a threat to the wrong dubious people. Seen this first hand in some companies.

What's wrong with it? Squads look like regular small teams. Tribes look like several teams working on the same product and having to coordinate their work. Each team has specialists, who like to hang out together and talk shop, forming different "chapters". The number of product owners and agile coaches might be excessive :-) But other than that, what's so bad about it?

Same. Strong SAFe vibes. Hopefully I'll never have to 'work' in such a environment again.

I did a reverse image search on it, and it brought up 'vietname board game' and other war-themed images. Who thought it would be a good idea to have a corporate productivity diagram where the workers look like they're prisoners, there's shooting targets plastered all over, and the "coach" looks like a warden that's flashing danger signs (all the colors, and they choose red?). And that's not even including all the poor spacing, text formatting, color scheme, etc.

Honestly, the more I look at it, the worse it gets.

It’s pretty corny.

Makes me think of Ninjas and Rockstars.

I'm a technical lead, and I often tell my teammates exactly how I want them to implement something. I am not looking over their shoulders at every line of code, but I will tell them plainly that I want an interface, a concrete implementation of the interface that is up to them, and a configuration option for substituting a different concrete type.

I don't do this because I don't trust them but because I have different requirements. What matters most to them is completing their work items according to specifications. What matters more to me is long-term maintainability of our projects for the rest of the team.

Some of them have the long-term needs in mind. Some of them just don't think that way. I try not to make them feel like their work can't be trusted or like my demands are arbitrary. I think they are more receptive to my demands when I can at least provide context for them. That seems absolutely necessary to me.

I ask myself all the time whether I'm insisting on too much control. I appreciate you asking of yourself, "Is this my ego?" It can definitely go both ways.

I think it's also that they have a vision and unfortunately this means they have to say no to landing PRs that don't make sense to the overall vision often. And nobody likes to throw away work.

> Also, I don’t think you mean “intimacy.” Do you mean “empathy?”

The words that follow support it being "intimacy". That is what intimacy is — being close enough to someone that you can be open without a feeling of being left exposed. How would empathy fit?

Totally not the same. Its used as technical phrase. In europe we have many languages, but in most of them we use the term Tech lead as phrase.

The conjoined triangles of success!

This. If the lead has no power to suspend people without pay, or to fire people, then he is not a lead. It's okay for this power to be indirect so long as it can be wielded when necessary.

I met that exact kind of leader once. In my case, they also tend to work more on their personal brand rather than the company, and keep ship-jumping every couple of years to spread their gospel.

must be an idiot that tech leads boss