You aren't Google, thank goodness
What works at big tech companies doesn’t at the sort of companies I’ve worked for in my career.
Places I’ve been that try to shoehorn in - cargo cult - those ideas and processes into small companies generally create friction and slog and complicate things entirely too quickly.
Before you know it, you’re making everybody talk in GRPC and sitting in hours of scrum planning sessions while the company circles the drain.
Complexity builds over time. Don’t make things complicated intentionally - nature will take care of it for you.
Building “high-performing teams” isn’t relevant if you’re trying to build a team in general with limited funds and less time.
It’s also harder to do with the same techniques when you don’t have the support scaffolding you have at a large tech company. Many of the companies I’ve worked for are starting HR from scratch, flying by the seat of their pants. Or they’ve outsourced HR entirely to a fractional resource or something provided by the funding venture capital firms.
The problems and struggles are also different.
Nobody at Google has had to deal with a founding engineer being granted a Chief Technical Officer title, but refuses to actually manage people - that’s for the VP, Engineering. At a company of six.
Nobody at Apple is implementing an engineering process from scratch. On their own.
Microsoft engineering managers aren’t sourcing their own engineering hires - or figuring out how to vet and interview them.
The stage of these companies where they’re dealing with the sheer mess of an early startup codebase is long, long ago. They’ve built up processes and history such that many decisions are already made and written in handbooks and runbooks. Follow the well-trod path and concentrate on the “hard” stuff.
So many of the books written about engineering management are written by folks from these environments - where the groundwork is already done.
I’ve read many of these. Heck, when I first started managing humans, I breathed Rands in Repose - and still borrow many things from those long-ago writings.
But my own career has avoided big companies - if anything, I’ve gone smaller and smaller until this point where there’s just lil ol’ me.
I tend to like the work more - the creating of culture, the preparing of the ground, the sheer messiness and figure-it-out-as-we-go-along of it.
I like environments where you can try weird stuff, fail and try again. I like learning along the way.
By the time things grow, all the mistakes - or most of them - have been processed out of existence. Don’t touch that. Don’t go there. Follow this. Stack rank that.
No thanks.
Give me mess and let me learn.
====
A recent newsletter discovery that I’m digging so far is Kelly Vaughn’s "Lessons in Engineering Leadership”
Kelly’s recent piece on making engineering a safe space to make mistakes mirrors a lot of my own writing and thoughts.
She’s also a lot less rambly than I am. :)
====
Summer is a messy time. Lots of family visits and kids’ goings on.
In fact, I’m writing this today from Bloomington, Indiana - in town for a Scout camp family day for my son.
I’m taking the morning at a local coworking space so I can carve out time to get back to writing - something that’s been difficult to schedule or accomplish over the last few weeks.
The words aren’t pouring out, but at least there’s a trickle flowing this morning.
And for the summertime, that’s probably good enough.
Hope y’all are having a great summer … and reply back and let me know if there’s anything you need a hand with.
Like and appreciate ya!