Outlasting Problems
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
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Things I enjoyed in the past week
I recently got Architecture for Flow: Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies by Susanne Kaiser* in the mail! I look forward to getting some reading done on this book.
The Pragmatic Engineering has a good breakdown of the sudden changes to the H-1B program.
What Keeps Me Up at Night – Existential Questions for IC Leaders is a nice presentation and summary of questions that we all have at some point or another in our careers, especially at higher levels of the IC ladder.
When you start working at a large corporation, teams become so specialized (or maybe siloed?), and you'll start getting a barrage of requests like infosec, out-of-date dependencies, you're not scanning your source code, you're not adding an SBOM to your artifacts, etc.
In the current state of the world, organizations are constantly changing due to reorganizations, layoffs, mergers, and other similar events.
What has been a new experience during this new setup is that requests come and go, sometimes even burning out people due to what appears to be ever-changing priorities. At other times, people will adapt to consider these irrelevant requests and ignore them, and at worst, engage in malicious compliance.
If these asks are overwhelming your team, it might be good to assign someone to channel all of them through some process, or work through all the asks and figure out a strategy to comply, and allow all these partner teams to get the information they need without our team needing to intervene or do manual work.
I recently spoke with a peer, and I was calling out a team that issued an "urgent" request. I began exploring the requirements and how to comply, only to have that team disappear due to a reorganization. Essentially, the pressure ceased to exist, and to date, nobody has inquired about it.
It really feels like there are numerous inefficiencies throughout the organization. These teams often request urgent matters, only for them to disappear without sufficient documentation or information for someone else to follow up on. On our teams, a lot of effort is made to comply, only for that workstream to be cut off halfway.
Sadly, my experience was not unique; several peers called out this fact, which made me think, what does it say when you can "outlast" any request that comes from teams that might eventually be considered "auxiliary" to the central business functions?
There's a quote by Epictetus: "You become what you give your attention to." Which you can think of as the organization doubling its efforts to keep its focus on the most important things, and as such, teams are constantly reorganized as it learns more and evolves, and that feedback loop gets back as a reorganized team.
On the other hand, there's a lot of wasted time and effort because all these teams are trying to show results in some capacity, only to be laid off. Teams on the receiving end of the request are also chasing wild geese. There's an impact in terms of focus and enabling flow for teams if they're constantly shifting priorities.
Your turn!
Have you ever thought about constantly shifting priorities? Have you felt burned out by them, or just overwhelmed? Maybe you're ignoring them at this point. In any case, let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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