All of this advice here is ok as long as you work in a functional organisation. However it should be used strategically, sparingly and only when you have gained the trust of your superiors.
If you work in a dysfunctional organisation I would advise against ever using any of this advice. Any of this advice can be and in some circumstances is, used to discredit you, even if the outcome was successful. In a dysfunctional organisation you should concentrate on protecting yourself.
I’d go further and say the advice in this blog is rarely the right move. It’s written for a context where everyone else is wrong except you, dear reader, who can see the true path forward.
It also appeals to people who think in false dichotomies, where your only two options are to do strong-headed moves like this or become a passive sheep who fails because your boss is bad.
In real businesses it’s rarely that simple. Using “dangerous advice” or becoming the “scary professional” as another influencer words similar advice sounds best when you’re imagining how the interaction will go and how much you’ll be winning when it’s done, but in a real business where things get done through relationships and trust it’s very easy to find yourself moving backward and being pushed out when using advice like this.
I've read some other posts on there. I agree the advice is dubious. There is a bunch of caveats to everything and he doesn't make it clear what caveats are.
I know what those caveats are. However if you are more inexperienced you don't know what those are.
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.
No, some of that is horrible advice even at a healthy functional organization. You don't want to break rules silently, defiantly, or row in the opposite direction.
Leadership should be establishing cultural and communication norms. So if you have ideas, questions, concerns, for example - you don't need to break rules or work against the engineering org vision, culture, or process.
Mistakes and learning and being busy and lack of communication process aside... You should be expected to have a negative consequence for following some of this advice. It'd be well deserved.
Now, hopefully, you have some excellent managers who can help guide and support you...but if we have articles like this that kinda drive the behavior we don't want to see and people put more trust in random internet junk than they do their managers. That's a problem.
> No, some of that is horrible advice even at a healthy functional organization. You don't want to break rules silently, defiantly, or row in the opposite direction.
Breaking the rules Silently/Defiantly is being a diva and that is no good.
I've had to inform superiors that I disobeyed their instructions to get something done, I had a good reason for doing so (it wasn't at a whim). You should do this sparingly and only when you established that you are competent enough to make that call.
Sometimes you do need to push back hard against people. I've had to call co-workers and have an unpleasant conversation because repeatedly didn't even check something compiled. I was fed up with it and my superiors had done nothing, it was stopping me from getting my work done.
> Leadership should be establishing cultural and communication norms. So if you have ideas, questions, concerns, for example - you don't need to break rules or work against the engineering org vision, culture, or process.
I've found that even in "(more) functional organisations" cultural or communication norms are typically broken or preformative.
e.g. I worked in one org where there were things obviously broken on a website and no bugs were raised because "there wasn't a requirement for it". Now I could have raised it. I felt like they should of immediately raised it, because it was so obvious (it wasn't the first time either). I deliberately left it an entire fortnight on the site to see if any of the QA raised it. Nobody did. I then used this an example to highlight the fact that people weren't thinking. It was a various the old "teacher leaves a deliberate mistake in to see if the students are paying attention". I shouldn't have to resort to high school teacher tactics.
Sometimes you have to be very disagreeable for people to take notice.
As Kosh said, once the avalanche has started, the pebbles don’t have a vote. Unless you are high up in the organization, you can’t change a dysfunctional organization.
It’s best to just leave.
Hell as the most recent CEOs of Intel have found, even if you are high up in the org, you often can’t change a dysfunctional organization.
I don't feel the need to give dangerous advice. As an educator that has to do with the stuff people build more or less unsupervised I can assure you that dangerous is the defacto default starting point for anybody who has no idea what they are doing.
There is only a very specific class of person, who is often overcautious and perfectionist to a degree that they won't even get started. They might need some advice that eases their worries. But the dangers are real. Overcomplexity is also a danger.
Most of the "dangerous advice" I have encountered as an engineer (be it electrical or software) I have seen in the form of legacy projects without anybody there to explain them to me. There you can see where corners where cut, where they were completely out of their depth, etc.
I feel like there’s a cultural difference between people in this thread. I’ve lived and worked in 3 different countries and I can say that in one , you absolutely don’t need to tell anyone that it’s ok to break rules sometimes. They’ll do that without your advice, you can be sure of that! In others, only a small percentage of people will, specially when they are inexperienced and fear the consequences more than would be warranted in reality. Perhaps that’s the biggest culture difference I’ve noticed.
Sure, FYI I am teaching Germany. Not exactly known to be a country of rule breakers, in fact more like the opposite. But rules that you don't know are easy to break.
E.g. beginners with electrical wiring may or may not know what is up to code and what isn't and thus violate said code without knowing it.
To know when certain rules can be bent or broken usually requires a deep understanding for why the rules exist and what they are meant to prevent. Beginners do not have that knowledge and thus I'd hessitate to give any general advice to skip rules to them, unless it is extremely specific and tied to one specific situation.
Usually the more useful advice to beginners is when to ignore conventions and how everybody is doing it and when to just use the boring stuff.
The key is goodness/badness of advice is a function of the receiver. The internet doesn't give you control over who reads your stuff, so internet advice is safer and less useful than it could be.
The advice "use 'any' if it's too much work to type" is dangerous/bad advice for some developers because they don't have a well tuned definition of 'too much work', and they might not have all the tricks in the toolbox for every situation.
But legacy code or poorly typed libs can be an infinity time suck, and the most pragmatic approach might be to cut your losses, slap an 'any' on it and move on.
A great mentor gives the best (different axis than good/bad or safe/danger) advice for an individual in a specific situation.
It's a fanciful idea, but just like the real life analogue it models, it completely turns a blind eye to the fact that, ultimately, the pirates are looters and pillagers and will burn the shop down, both yours and possibly theirs.
And no I don't agree a pirate captain is needed; the notion of a "static" equilibrium is contrived and a non-sequitur in the analogy. The ship could simply sail smoothly instead (still an equilibrium) without arbitrary changes in speed or going too close to the reefs for no bloody reason.
And if the "chaos" is "strategic", then it's not bloody chaos to begin with, is it?
If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.
Every now and then, there’s a nasty accident, but most of them respect their tools, and just make a lot of money (which you’ll understand, if you’ve ever hired one).
Same goes for pretty much any vocation.
That said, manufacturers have learned that there’s a lot of money to be made, selling professional tools, to insecure fools with money.
There’s a big ego hit, in LARPing a highly-experienced engineer, when you’re not one, yourself.
> If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.
You can say that about everything that has some form of guardrails. It goes faster without them. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right decision to remove them. People tend to change their minds after they have an accident, which to me is an indication that they can't seem to properly assess the risk and the outcome beforehand.
I've repeatedly heard the anecdote (to the point that I suspect it's now data) that inexperienced users of chainsaws are terrified of them, experienced users are comfortable with them, and very experienced users are even more terrified of them.
A couple of years ago we bought a 50-year-old-house and gutted it. We had professionals do the stuff that required expertise or a lot of time / skills (electricians, plumbers, plasterers, etc), and did most other things ourselves.
At some point I'd come in to do something within my remit while the electricians were here. I'd put in earplugs to do some masonry drilling, because I've only got one set of ears and I'd like to be able to hear things when I'm 80. One of the electrician's assistants, probably in his late 20's commented on it, something like, "Got your ear condoms on, huh?" I'm at a stage in my life where I don't really care about that sort of thing, so just blew it off.
A few months later, that same guy came in to do the final wiring on something. He'd lost the end of his thumb -- had an accident with some tool or other and cut it off.
It's hard for me not to think that his attitude toward earplugs and his accident were related. Nobody deserves to be maimed for life, but we live in a universe which can be pretty unforgiving.
Opinions like yours are wildly popular on the white collar internet because they "feel good" to people who are far removed from actual danger and productivity. But if you go to a part of the internet where many are self employed such naïve and un-nuanced opinions will be laughed at and ridiculed because they completely ignore the benefit side of the equation.
We all only get so much time on this earth and on some level quality and quantity are fungible, if inefficiently and imprecisely with some element of chance.
How much is a life worth? What's a finger worth? What's a crippling accident worth? And so on and so on. Once you define these terms numbers can be crunched and it can be determined whether you are right or wrong in any given case, and I assure you, there will be cases where your attitude computes so poorly it is farcical.
Is the retired carpenter with 10 fingers really better off than the one with 7? Sure the guy with 7 wished he'd not made that foolish mistake but the lifetime productivity gains of habitually moving fast likely show in his quality of life.
More complex benefit calculations simply make the problem more complex, but they do not change the fundamental nature of the tradeoff.
Depending on what an injury is worth, the compensation structure, etc, etc, it may very well be the right decision to disable all the safeties on everything and work fast for 10yr before losing a finger and moving on to something else because the faster man can command the higher labor rate, etc, etc.
Likewise, often times it's more valuable to write crap software in a week that solves a transient need for a year rather than spending 7mo spec'ing out and developing the arc of the goddamn covenant. Yeah it might shit all over your production database but if you're smart about the details it won't be much more likely to do that than "good" software and you can be on to the next value producing task.
This is a really bad take. Professional arborists don’t “rip every guard off their saws”, there aren’t even that many guards to begin with, and the ones that exist (chain brake, hand guard, throttle lock) don’t slow anyone down. They’re there so you don’t bleed out in a tree.
The “LARPing” angle makes even less sense. What’s the software equivalent, saying that keeping engineers out of direct prod access is just an ego hit? That’s not LARPing, that’s risk management. Same way arborists keep the guards on because downtime from losing a hand costs more than any pretend efficiency.
Bad tools don’t make you a pro, and pretending guardrails are just for “fools with money” is an incredibly bad take. It’s like those YouTube get rich folks that never mention how much of the success is luck.
I guess the equivalent would be compiling rm without the '--no-preserve-root' option?
Realistically I know a professional arborist. Not only does he have all the safety equipment on his saws, all his crews have full PPE available and use it. The only piece of safety equipment I've ever seen that was dubious is the "sawstop" for table saws, primarily because it false triggers so often.
That may just be they aren't very good at risk assessment. Nasty accidents with a chainsaw are in a different league of damage for the person involved compared to, eg, accidentally deleting a database or upsetting a manager. A software engineer is all but guaranteed to walk away from deleting a DB with their limbs intact. Even if their manager gets really angry a dev is almost certainly going to survive the encounter.
This doesn't account for safety critical systems or databases containing highly personal information or those in highly regulated industries. The software engineer might walk away with their limbs but others will fall to suicide or life changing financial circumstances.
I can't help but think of the software engineers who followed exactly what their Volkswagen bosses were instructing and are now in prison.
>If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.
What are you actually talking about here? Tree surgeons may remove some of them some of the time, but all of them would either kill them, get them fired, or both.
It isn't experts who remove it. It is professionals whothink they know. I've been trained on chainsaws by USFS experts - they used the safety gear and demonstraighted that used correctly things work just as fast. In fact they were often faster than the professionals who thought they were faster - because the planning and communication steps (6 steps) often saved more time than was gained by jumping in)
safety gear doesn't cost much time to put on. Checking the safety gear also finds not safety things wrong with it.
In my experience it's the other way around. It's typically the bottom of the barrel contractors who sabotage their own (and others) safety for a quick buck.
The same way a senior engineer is more likely to use version control, backups and automated testing rather than YOLOing vibe coded applications to prod.
Agree. I am really surprised this posters opinion or the linked article is anywhere on the radar of professionals. There is a time and a place for everything. Maybe in an emergency it makes sense to get write access to a prod DB but even as a “professional” I want a second pair of eyes with me or have a backup ready to go.
In Argentina, a well known case (well known within the industry) of fatal radioactive poisoning from an experimental nuclear reactor happened because an extremely experienced and well regarded operator was used to disabling safety measures of the reactor to speed things up. After all, he understood it perfectly and knew what was and wasn't actually safe to do.
Until he made a mistake, got a dose of radiation (he may have splashed himself with water, actually), and he instantly knew he was dead. And he was, within days, if my memory serves.
Experts make the dumbest mistakes because they are sure safety doesn't apply to them, because they know better.
Having grown up in a rural environment and nearly having my own catastrophic accident while using a circular saw with all of its safety features intact and myself being in an alert and mindful state, I can only describe the scenario you've outlined as, "typical idiot-class behavior".
You see this kind of stuff amongst the petty-criminal working class who chain smoke and binge drink and steal tools off the work site and complain about never being able to get ahead. I've had numerous uncles and neighbors who have life-long debilitating injuries because they showed up to work drunk and fell of a ladder or dropped a running chainsaw on their foot. Every single one of them thought they were a bad ass who "knew what they were doing".
My own accident occurred because I was over-using the tool. I did not have the best tool for the job. The tool was generally appropriate, but I also didn't have the best work space set up for it. The work space wasn't uncomfortable, but I didn't give myself room for error. I thought I had all of the safety features in place and was "being extra careful" while I used it at an awkward angle. Then, halfway through the cut, I noticed the off-cut drooping and knew it was going to damage the piece I was cutting if it dropped too far. I reached to support the droop with my off-hand, which given my angle meant I had to cross under my arm pushing the tool. In a moment I still don't completely understand, the path I sent my hand on did not go directly towards my armpit as I knew I would need to do to keep clear of the tool and instead went under the saw directly. I ended up touching the running saw blade sticking out of the bottom of the piece I was cutting.
A half-dozen different things could have been done differently to avoid the mistake, any one of which is not all that dangerous in isolation, but combined created an incredibly narrow error envelope.
What I didn't consider is that "being extra careful" can change in an instant. One little bump in balance, one little fleeting distraction, one little change of thought as you are mid-task and don't immediately stop to re-evaluate and you blow right on out of your after envelope.
Luckily, I only cut the tips of two fingers. I was able to get them stitched up and they have healed almost completely (there is some thick scar tissue right where my fingers hit keys in my keyboard that serves as a daily reminder).
You don't see this behavior amongst the professionals in the trades who successfully build their businesses from the ground up. Professionals over design their safety envelope. And they still occasionally get hurt. Just not as catastrophicly so.
> What I didn't consider is that "being extra careful" can change in an instant. One little bump in balance, one little fleeting distraction, one little change of thought as you are mid-task and don't immediately stop to re-evaluate and you blow right on out of your after envelope.
This is a great summary.
Your best-laid plans (with power tools, motor vehicles, gravity, etc) can be completely invalidated with a single twitch (possibly not even your own). If you're operating at the margins of safety, there is no room for that.
And it takes experience to know where you are on the safety spectrum! But even that is sometimes inadequate.
For example, I love my radial arm saw. It's my favorite tool for cross-cutting wood. It's an old Craftsman, from the 1970s or so. I bought it from a furniture manufacturer who used it as an infrequently-used backup tool for ad hoc manual fixups, since new (they had big industrial machines for ordinary manufacturing operations). It was very close to new spec when I bought it, but I've tuned it back to perfect. All of the safety guards (the minimal ones that existed in the 1970s) except the dust hood were removed before I bought it.
Anyway, I love it. But they don't really sell RAS's at the consumer level any more, because people hurt themselves with them too frequently. Table saws are also quite dangerous, apparently. Circular saws are supposed to be the safest option, even more so than miter saws.
So I have a lot of experience with all of these tools, and with my RAS specifically. I think I know where I am on the safety spectrum, which I believe to be acceptably safe. But the statistics say otherwise, and one of us must be wrong. I don't think it's me, and my ten fingers attest to that belief.
Right? Or maybe wrong! I think about this every single time I use the RAS, which is probably a good thing. I guess we'll see.
The old saying "they've forgotten more about X than you'll ever know" is very true. A professional quite often has forgotten what it was like to be a beginnner, making them both very knowledgeable about a topic but also very likely to give dangerous advice to a beginner.
Although I've never worked as an arborist, I supervise the installation of high voltage equipment for a living. I work with all kinds of contractors. Our equipment weighs tens of tonnes.
If I would see somebody removing the guardrails from their tools, I would send them off site immediately. There will be no nasty accidents.
Although, loggers have specialized vehicles (harvesters and whatnot) that look more like construction vehicles with giant saws and grabbers on the front.
I think there’s something interesting in the pick of arborist (somebody specialized in coming in and dealing with troublesome trees) vs some kind of logger (specialized in the at-scale harvesting of trees). I bet there’s more room for modified consumer gear in the previous case, because the whole job is to figure out weird situations (like taking down or cleaning up a too-big tree in somebody’s back yard with poor access and lots of things you don’t want to hit) that might preclude the use of the ideal equipment.
But, it isn’t obvious to me which is more like software engineering. Ideally, the software company is a cultivated environment optimized for productivity, more like a logging forest. Part of the engineer’s job is to help cultivate the nice orderly rows of correct-sized trees so that they can just rip through them at scale, right? Maybe the arborist is more like some high-end consultant that you hire when things go wrong.
I wouldn't call myself an expert arborist, but I cut the firewood that provides all my heat in the winter. The safety features (mainly the goofy guard they put on the end of the bar) are good if you're a homeowner cutting some shrubs a couple times a year, but you have to take that off to drop a tree or cut pieces wider than your bar, so they aren't practical for serious work.
Fortunately, a chainsaw isn't a very dangerous tool, since it stops as soon as you release the trigger. The danger in dropping trees is from the tree itself: having one fall the wrong way or crack loose at the base before you expect it. I don't drop anything large when I'm working by myself, for that reason. I've been mildly injured by some surprisingly small trees, when something happened to bounce where I wasn't expecting.
If you’re regularly cutting pieces of wood wider than your bar, for god’s sake invest in a bigger saw. It will serve you better in many ways, safety included.
> There’s a big ego hit, in LARPing a highly-experienced engineer, when you’re not one, yourself.
There's a big ego hit in punching up, down, and sideways, and it's far too popular among engineers these days.
I wish that engineers overall were more humble with each other, but it's not going to change quickly. And regrettably it is the human condition. Humility is also unprofitable.
And if they cut their hands off as an independent worker, the only person who gets hurt will be themselves.
But I bet if they start a business and have employees they will have rules against removing safeties and fire anyone who gets caught because now they have to worry about insurance premiums, lawsuits, and their business going under.
I disagree with the original poster about arborists, but I don’t think racing is a better example. Racing is a sport with rules (limitations) specifically designed to promote some type of fair competition. It is a game designed around wanting to drive cars really fast, it looks nothing like “getting a task done as fast/easily as possible.”
If the goal was just to get from point A to point B as fast as possible without and constraints, I guess they would launch the guy out of a cannon or something.
If the goal was to do something useful, like move a lot of people/stuff from one point to another, we’d end up looking at solutions that look nothing like a race car; public transit, stuff like that.
Race cars have special rules - safety equipment in general does not count against some track limits so winners are looking for ways to hide something that makes them go faster in safety equipment. Every gram matters but there are things that matter more than grams.
The further away one gets from the technical side the more one is operating with imperfect information. Even if you're technical yourself you can't oversee everything so you look for rules that you can impose to try to guide things without having to micromanage.
If every function could be reduced to rules, however, life would be a lot simpler than it is. Rule makers need to understand why people have to do X or Y before banning or forcing some behaviour and I think this is where rules go wrong - the people that make them aren't the ones necessarily having to live by them.
I've been a manager and I know of no way to deal with this other than to make time for development myself and see where the problems are. I think one shouldn't really be making rules for things one isn't doing oneself - if you are then you're going too low level.
Sure there is a way, hire good people, fire bad people , give them wide guardrails and hold them accountable for results.
Hire people based on their proven ability to deal with ambiguity and gets things done. Like Joel Spolsky said, the only hiring criteria is if they are smart and get things done.
This is good advice for workers trying to thrive in dysfunctional organizations, but these are the kinds of people who cause the company to become dysfunctional in the first place, by only doing work that causes them to get ahead, instead of what is right for the company. And I'm not referring just to line workers here, but management too. Incentives are there to point people in the right general direction, not to give license to abandon your ethics and sense of craftsmanship. An alternative to pursuing incentives to the point of abandoning your principles might be to go to a better company, or even starting your own.
That is about right. The backlog is what makes money in general.
You want the top 5% not working on the backlog because that means if something urgent comes up you don't feel bad about asking them to switch tasks. If a junior needs help they are not interupting anything imbortant to ask. and it means you are making the 5-10% your leads and thus growing them into future top 5%.
that the top 5% often discover things that make money you didn't expect is a bonus.
Even the top engineers don’t have total freedom to choose what they work on. The work has to contribute to the business. I’ve seen valued engineers go off on tangents that don’t produce anything useful, which after time gets noticed and they are no longer considered one of the top engineers at the company. Worst case, the company needs to do layoffs and they look at what everyone has been contributing. They realize the engineer off working on their own thing could be removed without impacting operations at all, and that they have become detached from core business operations. So they are laid off and, honestly, nothing changes.
Everyone has to work on things that are in the company’s backlog of needs. The more status you have, the earlier you can be involved in shaping that backlog. But the backlog always comes down to what the business needs.
>However, lots of managers wish they could give you advice like this. They certainly appreciate it when you follow it. I’ve never been a manager, but it must be incredibly frustrating to manage strong engineers who would be much more effective if they approached work a little more tactically (and a little less according to the written job description).
Yuk, yeah, no - We don't appreciate it when you just do your own thing. We appreciate it when you're able to cut through red tape and get it done. That thing, that we discussed, during our 1:1's, when I told you what we wanted to do and you said "I have a sharp tool that will cut through that BS". Sometimes we want to cut through the tape, sometimes we're laying it. It's all to make sure you continue to get a paycheck. You're welcome.
Take down production though and we're going to have one of those things managers call a "difficult conversation".
Readit News
If you work in a dysfunctional organisation I would advise against ever using any of this advice. Any of this advice can be and in some circumstances is, used to discredit you, even if the outcome was successful. In a dysfunctional organisation you should concentrate on protecting yourself.
It also appeals to people who think in false dichotomies, where your only two options are to do strong-headed moves like this or become a passive sheep who fails because your boss is bad.
In real businesses it’s rarely that simple. Using “dangerous advice” or becoming the “scary professional” as another influencer words similar advice sounds best when you’re imagining how the interaction will go and how much you’ll be winning when it’s done, but in a real business where things get done through relationships and trust it’s very easy to find yourself moving backward and being pushed out when using advice like this.
I know what those caveats are. However if you are more inexperienced you don't know what those are.
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.
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.
Leadership should be establishing cultural and communication norms. So if you have ideas, questions, concerns, for example - you don't need to break rules or work against the engineering org vision, culture, or process.
Mistakes and learning and being busy and lack of communication process aside... You should be expected to have a negative consequence for following some of this advice. It'd be well deserved.
Now, hopefully, you have some excellent managers who can help guide and support you...but if we have articles like this that kinda drive the behavior we don't want to see and people put more trust in random internet junk than they do their managers. That's a problem.
Breaking the rules Silently/Defiantly is being a diva and that is no good.
I've had to inform superiors that I disobeyed their instructions to get something done, I had a good reason for doing so (it wasn't at a whim). You should do this sparingly and only when you established that you are competent enough to make that call.
Sometimes you do need to push back hard against people. I've had to call co-workers and have an unpleasant conversation because repeatedly didn't even check something compiled. I was fed up with it and my superiors had done nothing, it was stopping me from getting my work done.
> Leadership should be establishing cultural and communication norms. So if you have ideas, questions, concerns, for example - you don't need to break rules or work against the engineering org vision, culture, or process.
I've found that even in "(more) functional organisations" cultural or communication norms are typically broken or preformative.
e.g. I worked in one org where there were things obviously broken on a website and no bugs were raised because "there wasn't a requirement for it". Now I could have raised it. I felt like they should of immediately raised it, because it was so obvious (it wasn't the first time either). I deliberately left it an entire fortnight on the site to see if any of the QA raised it. Nobody did. I then used this an example to highlight the fact that people weren't thinking. It was a various the old "teacher leaves a deliberate mistake in to see if the students are paying attention". I shouldn't have to resort to high school teacher tactics.
Sometimes you have to be very disagreeable for people to take notice.
Plus every developer believes they're a special and insightful little petal so all the caveats will get ignored.
> Plus every developer believes they're a special and insightful little petal so all the caveats will get ignored.
I don't believe that is true. I think there is a vocal minority of developers that would apply to.
It’s best to just leave.
Hell as the most recent CEOs of Intel have found, even if you are high up in the org, you often can’t change a dysfunctional organization.
There is only a very specific class of person, who is often overcautious and perfectionist to a degree that they won't even get started. They might need some advice that eases their worries. But the dangers are real. Overcomplexity is also a danger.
Most of the "dangerous advice" I have encountered as an engineer (be it electrical or software) I have seen in the form of legacy projects without anybody there to explain them to me. There you can see where corners where cut, where they were completely out of their depth, etc.
E.g. beginners with electrical wiring may or may not know what is up to code and what isn't and thus violate said code without knowing it.
To know when certain rules can be bent or broken usually requires a deep understanding for why the rules exist and what they are meant to prevent. Beginners do not have that knowledge and thus I'd hessitate to give any general advice to skip rules to them, unless it is extremely specific and tied to one specific situation.
Usually the more useful advice to beginners is when to ignore conventions and how everybody is doing it and when to just use the boring stuff.
The advice "use 'any' if it's too much work to type" is dangerous/bad advice for some developers because they don't have a well tuned definition of 'too much work', and they might not have all the tricks in the toolbox for every situation.
But legacy code or poorly typed libs can be an infinity time suck, and the most pragmatic approach might be to cut your losses, slap an 'any' on it and move on.
A great mentor gives the best (different axis than good/bad or safe/danger) advice for an individual in a specific situation.
I really like Dimitri Glazkov's "Sailors and Pirates" framing of this:
https://glazkov.com/2023/04/02/sailors-and-pirates/
And no I don't agree a pirate captain is needed; the notion of a "static" equilibrium is contrived and a non-sequitur in the analogy. The ship could simply sail smoothly instead (still an equilibrium) without arbitrary changes in speed or going too close to the reefs for no bloody reason.
And if the "chaos" is "strategic", then it's not bloody chaos to begin with, is it?
If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.
Every now and then, there’s a nasty accident, but most of them respect their tools, and just make a lot of money (which you’ll understand, if you’ve ever hired one).
Same goes for pretty much any vocation.
That said, manufacturers have learned that there’s a lot of money to be made, selling professional tools, to insecure fools with money.
There’s a big ego hit, in LARPing a highly-experienced engineer, when you’re not one, yourself.
You can say that about everything that has some form of guardrails. It goes faster without them. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right decision to remove them. People tend to change their minds after they have an accident, which to me is an indication that they can't seem to properly assess the risk and the outcome beforehand.
(More likely both: we are as a species absolutely terrible about assessing low-probability risks.)
At some point I'd come in to do something within my remit while the electricians were here. I'd put in earplugs to do some masonry drilling, because I've only got one set of ears and I'd like to be able to hear things when I'm 80. One of the electrician's assistants, probably in his late 20's commented on it, something like, "Got your ear condoms on, huh?" I'm at a stage in my life where I don't really care about that sort of thing, so just blew it off.
A few months later, that same guy came in to do the final wiring on something. He'd lost the end of his thumb -- had an accident with some tool or other and cut it off.
It's hard for me not to think that his attitude toward earplugs and his accident were related. Nobody deserves to be maimed for life, but we live in a universe which can be pretty unforgiving.
We all only get so much time on this earth and on some level quality and quantity are fungible, if inefficiently and imprecisely with some element of chance.
How much is a life worth? What's a finger worth? What's a crippling accident worth? And so on and so on. Once you define these terms numbers can be crunched and it can be determined whether you are right or wrong in any given case, and I assure you, there will be cases where your attitude computes so poorly it is farcical.
Is the retired carpenter with 10 fingers really better off than the one with 7? Sure the guy with 7 wished he'd not made that foolish mistake but the lifetime productivity gains of habitually moving fast likely show in his quality of life.
More complex benefit calculations simply make the problem more complex, but they do not change the fundamental nature of the tradeoff.
Depending on what an injury is worth, the compensation structure, etc, etc, it may very well be the right decision to disable all the safeties on everything and work fast for 10yr before losing a finger and moving on to something else because the faster man can command the higher labor rate, etc, etc.
Likewise, often times it's more valuable to write crap software in a week that solves a transient need for a year rather than spending 7mo spec'ing out and developing the arc of the goddamn covenant. Yeah it might shit all over your production database but if you're smart about the details it won't be much more likely to do that than "good" software and you can be on to the next value producing task.
The “LARPing” angle makes even less sense. What’s the software equivalent, saying that keeping engineers out of direct prod access is just an ego hit? That’s not LARPing, that’s risk management. Same way arborists keep the guards on because downtime from losing a hand costs more than any pretend efficiency.
Bad tools don’t make you a pro, and pretending guardrails are just for “fools with money” is an incredibly bad take. It’s like those YouTube get rich folks that never mention how much of the success is luck.
Realistically I know a professional arborist. Not only does he have all the safety equipment on his saws, all his crews have full PPE available and use it. The only piece of safety equipment I've ever seen that was dubious is the "sawstop" for table saws, primarily because it false triggers so often.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45027284
That may just be they aren't very good at risk assessment. Nasty accidents with a chainsaw are in a different league of damage for the person involved compared to, eg, accidentally deleting a database or upsetting a manager. A software engineer is all but guaranteed to walk away from deleting a DB with their limbs intact. Even if their manager gets really angry a dev is almost certainly going to survive the encounter.
I used to write a lot of hardware-interfacing software.
The cool thing about writing things like device drivers, is that you can have some really kinetic bugs.
I can't help but think of the software engineers who followed exactly what their Volkswagen bosses were instructing and are now in prison.
What are you actually talking about here? Tree surgeons may remove some of them some of the time, but all of them would either kill them, get them fired, or both.
Here is an old quote to put into perspective:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/06/06/old-bold/
safety gear doesn't cost much time to put on. Checking the safety gear also finds not safety things wrong with it.
I've never seen an expert arborist remove any safety feature from a chainsaw and they'd be off site in a heartbeat if they did.
You're imagining a scenario to support your opinion, no basis in fact.
Deleted Comment
It's not nice to be not nice...
The same way a senior engineer is more likely to use version control, backups and automated testing rather than YOLOing vibe coded applications to prod.
Until he made a mistake, got a dose of radiation (he may have splashed himself with water, actually), and he instantly knew he was dead. And he was, within days, if my memory serves.
Experts make the dumbest mistakes because they are sure safety doesn't apply to them, because they know better.
You see this kind of stuff amongst the petty-criminal working class who chain smoke and binge drink and steal tools off the work site and complain about never being able to get ahead. I've had numerous uncles and neighbors who have life-long debilitating injuries because they showed up to work drunk and fell of a ladder or dropped a running chainsaw on their foot. Every single one of them thought they were a bad ass who "knew what they were doing".
My own accident occurred because I was over-using the tool. I did not have the best tool for the job. The tool was generally appropriate, but I also didn't have the best work space set up for it. The work space wasn't uncomfortable, but I didn't give myself room for error. I thought I had all of the safety features in place and was "being extra careful" while I used it at an awkward angle. Then, halfway through the cut, I noticed the off-cut drooping and knew it was going to damage the piece I was cutting if it dropped too far. I reached to support the droop with my off-hand, which given my angle meant I had to cross under my arm pushing the tool. In a moment I still don't completely understand, the path I sent my hand on did not go directly towards my armpit as I knew I would need to do to keep clear of the tool and instead went under the saw directly. I ended up touching the running saw blade sticking out of the bottom of the piece I was cutting.
A half-dozen different things could have been done differently to avoid the mistake, any one of which is not all that dangerous in isolation, but combined created an incredibly narrow error envelope.
What I didn't consider is that "being extra careful" can change in an instant. One little bump in balance, one little fleeting distraction, one little change of thought as you are mid-task and don't immediately stop to re-evaluate and you blow right on out of your after envelope.
Luckily, I only cut the tips of two fingers. I was able to get them stitched up and they have healed almost completely (there is some thick scar tissue right where my fingers hit keys in my keyboard that serves as a daily reminder).
You don't see this behavior amongst the professionals in the trades who successfully build their businesses from the ground up. Professionals over design their safety envelope. And they still occasionally get hurt. Just not as catastrophicly so.
This is a great summary.
Your best-laid plans (with power tools, motor vehicles, gravity, etc) can be completely invalidated with a single twitch (possibly not even your own). If you're operating at the margins of safety, there is no room for that.
And it takes experience to know where you are on the safety spectrum! But even that is sometimes inadequate.
For example, I love my radial arm saw. It's my favorite tool for cross-cutting wood. It's an old Craftsman, from the 1970s or so. I bought it from a furniture manufacturer who used it as an infrequently-used backup tool for ad hoc manual fixups, since new (they had big industrial machines for ordinary manufacturing operations). It was very close to new spec when I bought it, but I've tuned it back to perfect. All of the safety guards (the minimal ones that existed in the 1970s) except the dust hood were removed before I bought it.
Anyway, I love it. But they don't really sell RAS's at the consumer level any more, because people hurt themselves with them too frequently. Table saws are also quite dangerous, apparently. Circular saws are supposed to be the safest option, even more so than miter saws.
So I have a lot of experience with all of these tools, and with my RAS specifically. I think I know where I am on the safety spectrum, which I believe to be acceptably safe. But the statistics say otherwise, and one of us must be wrong. I don't think it's me, and my ten fingers attest to that belief.
Right? Or maybe wrong! I think about this every single time I use the RAS, which is probably a good thing. I guess we'll see.
I must confess that I have done exactly that.
If I would see somebody removing the guardrails from their tools, I would send them off site immediately. There will be no nasty accidents.
I think there’s something interesting in the pick of arborist (somebody specialized in coming in and dealing with troublesome trees) vs some kind of logger (specialized in the at-scale harvesting of trees). I bet there’s more room for modified consumer gear in the previous case, because the whole job is to figure out weird situations (like taking down or cleaning up a too-big tree in somebody’s back yard with poor access and lots of things you don’t want to hit) that might preclude the use of the ideal equipment.
But, it isn’t obvious to me which is more like software engineering. Ideally, the software company is a cultivated environment optimized for productivity, more like a logging forest. Part of the engineer’s job is to help cultivate the nice orderly rows of correct-sized trees so that they can just rip through them at scale, right? Maybe the arborist is more like some high-end consultant that you hire when things go wrong.
Fortunately, a chainsaw isn't a very dangerous tool, since it stops as soon as you release the trigger. The danger in dropping trees is from the tree itself: having one fall the wrong way or crack loose at the base before you expect it. I don't drop anything large when I'm working by myself, for that reason. I've been mildly injured by some surprisingly small trees, when something happened to bounce where I wasn't expecting.
There's a big ego hit in punching up, down, and sideways, and it's far too popular among engineers these days.
I wish that engineers overall were more humble with each other, but it's not going to change quickly. And regrettably it is the human condition. Humility is also unprofitable.
I didn't mean it to be taken as so, but I guess that I should have anticipated it.
I'm pretty sure that line is the real reason for the animosity.
My sincere apologies. I'll leave it there, as a lesson to others.
But I bet if they start a business and have employees they will have rules against removing safeties and fire anyone who gets caught because now they have to worry about insurance premiums, lawsuits, and their business going under.
If the goal was just to get from point A to point B as fast as possible without and constraints, I guess they would launch the guy out of a cannon or something.
If the goal was to do something useful, like move a lot of people/stuff from one point to another, we’d end up looking at solutions that look nothing like a race car; public transit, stuff like that.
If every function could be reduced to rules, however, life would be a lot simpler than it is. Rule makers need to understand why people have to do X or Y before banning or forcing some behaviour and I think this is where rules go wrong - the people that make them aren't the ones necessarily having to live by them.
I've been a manager and I know of no way to deal with this other than to make time for development myself and see where the problems are. I think one shouldn't really be making rules for things one isn't doing oneself - if you are then you're going too low level.
Hire people based on their proven ability to deal with ambiguity and gets things done. Like Joel Spolsky said, the only hiring criteria is if they are smart and get things done.
You want the top 5% not working on the backlog because that means if something urgent comes up you don't feel bad about asking them to switch tasks. If a junior needs help they are not interupting anything imbortant to ask. and it means you are making the 5-10% your leads and thus growing them into future top 5%.
that the top 5% often discover things that make money you didn't expect is a bonus.
Everyone has to work on things that are in the company’s backlog of needs. The more status you have, the earlier you can be involved in shaping that backlog. But the backlog always comes down to what the business needs.
Yuk, yeah, no - We don't appreciate it when you just do your own thing. We appreciate it when you're able to cut through red tape and get it done. That thing, that we discussed, during our 1:1's, when I told you what we wanted to do and you said "I have a sharp tool that will cut through that BS". Sometimes we want to cut through the tape, sometimes we're laying it. It's all to make sure you continue to get a paycheck. You're welcome.
Take down production though and we're going to have one of those things managers call a "difficult conversation".