[note] team of hereos
I was walking at Tempelhofer Feld, the old West Berlin airport, when I saw a manifesto on the community board. The title was “Space travel is a lie.”
No name, no signature. Not even a group name. Just a strong belief being manifested.
I like manifestos. In our field, probably the best known is the Agile Manifesto. Another example is the Communist Manifesto which has shaped political ideas for generations.
What I admire about manifestos is that someone puts their beliefs out in the open. You can disagree, argue, or build something around them together.
In engineering, so much of what we believe good engineering looks like stays inside experienced people’s heads. We learn to trust their judgment, but we don’t always get to understand how they arrived at it. Over time, we keep going back to the same people.
For senior engineers who spend years in a single company, becoming the hero is a common pitfall.
I don’t want to be the hero. I want more engineers to have the chance to become the people their teams need and depend on.
The usual story goes like this:
- A team starts to depend on one engineer without ever deciding to. A strong senior engineer.
- The person who knows the system best gets asked to make the hard calls. They become a silo of business cases, exceptions, and edge cases.
- Each call gives them more experience, so it makes sense to ask them again for the sake of having the issues resolved quickly.
- Meanwhile, everyone else gets fewer chances to develop the judgment that made that person so valuable in the first place.
Now they have a hero. Nobody complains until they realize they have a superhero, and the rest of them are human.
That’s where I think Staff Engineers can change things.
When someone brings me a hard decision, I can clarify my considerations, investigate other perspectives they may have overlooked, and come to a consensus on the final decision they can make.
Sometimes I’ll need to make the call myself. I can still explain my reasoning afterward and make sure someone else gets a chance to lead the next time.
There’s a difference between handing someone a task and giving them authority. If I ask an engineer to take ownership of a decision, they require the context to evaluate the options, the support to take action, and the opportunity to learn from the results. They may choose differently than I would. If their choice is solid, I should be willing to back it.
That’s what I mean by a team of heroes. The people closest to the work should have a real say in how it’s done. As a Staff Engineer, I want to use the authority I’ve earned to help more people exercise theirs.