HackerNews Readings: Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century

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Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century

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gregdoesitonJune 10, 2021

I have a theory on why we're seeing so much "bad management" for software engineers: most leaders at workplaces have not been engineers themselves at a company with a great engineering culture (I wrote about what I think this means [1]: it's all the high-growth small and large tech companies we know)

The CEO, and the people under the CEO know and understand traditional, top-down management. Let the people with context and decision power make the big decisions, and pass this downwards. Works with finance, works with marketing, works with IT support, and should work with engineering as well... right?

But it actually doesn't work with software engineers as well as it could. Or with designers. UX researchers. PMs... all these people would produce a magnitude more output when given proper context and autonomy.

A few leaders read about this, and try giving autonomy. These results end up even worse than the status quo, as you can't just make it a free-for-all and expect it works overnight.

And to prove this point: look at companies where the founder had worked at a high-performing company before. Before founding Twilio, Jeff Lawson spent years at Amazon (he was one of the first AWS PMs), and in his book Ask Your Developer, he writes about just how much this experience shaped him, and all the practices he adopted from Amazon.

There's this really weird divide between "forward-looking tech companies"[2] who "get it", and everyone else. Which heavily benefits this first group.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-developer-culture-tes...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717390