If Erling Haaland Were a Software Engineer, He'd Never Get Promoted
Recently I caught up with a colleague who was one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with. They were also the hardest person to promote. The CTO’s pushback to my request came in one sentence: “They were never in the war room.” The CTO wasn’t wrong about the facts. They were never in the war room, because their systems never warranted one. Everything they shipped was resilient against the failure modes we had, documented well enough that other teams and users could answer their own questions, and boring in the way that well executed systems are boring. On top of that, culturally, they made the people around them better, quietly, without ever boasting about it. ...