Gregory's Server@danluu I suspect social some amount of social Darwinism is at play here, along with the expectation for engineers to "prove they are a team player". While my sample size is small, when ever I bring up organizational dysfunction, the response I get is something along the lines of "strong performers should be able to overcome institutional barriers and still get work done". Furthermore one proves one's loyalty to the company by showing a willingness to waste effort on the companies behalf.
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@artt IMO, in terms of effectiveness, it's a major red (or a least yellow) flag for someone to give the "strong performers should be able to..." line since only someone who's ineffective and doesn't get a lot done (or actually owns the company, a la Zuck or Musk) could imagine that there are people who are persuasive enough to not run into these barriers when pushing high-impact projects. Anyone who has enough of a mental model of how orgs work to be effective couldn't have that fantasy. |
@artt Yeah, I've heard the "strong performers should be able to..." line a lot, but IMO it pretty obviously falls flat since all of the highest performers (measured by either my judgment or the company's) have the complaint, e.g., I'm told I was the 2nd highest paid person at my band at LastJob and I believe I know all of the top N and we all had the exact same complaint.
At larger companies, I didn't know all of the top N, but all of the highest performing people I knew had the same complaint.