Why do leaders think engineering is slow? Because 40% of engineering time goes to maintaining legacy products, and they're nostalgic for the days when a few hero engineers could ship anything. Scaling to 200 people requires systems and distributed teams, not individual 10x engineers.
Chapters
When is that thing coming online? Why aren't we actually like inventing some new thing? Have you read this whole thing about a 10x engineer? Do we have 10x engineers? Why aren't you hiring 10x engineers? You ever get these questions? What we're gonna do today is actually we're gonna walk through what they really mean when they're asking you those things. And once you know what they actually mean, what are we gonna do about it? How are we actually gonna get ahead of it and how do we actually address it? At the root of this, there's a couple things going on. One, they want more stuff out the door. They've got something that they need to have delivered and they're frustrated they can't get that out. But they're probably also romancing the past, right? Where they were a smaller team and there was some individual that would just hero everything every night on those things. So what do you do about it? Well, this means there's a constant undertone of like, things aren't going fast enough. And so one of the things you can do, you know, is actually address and explain on a regular basis why things are going the way they're doing, right? And so why are things going slow? Well, it could be that you're actually carrying a bunch more maintenance than you used to be, right? Like, this isn't 4 years ago. We're not going to romance being 10 people in a room anymore because we now have 100 people and we're carrying 3 legacy products. But you're probably not helping yourself by not explaining what everybody's doing. Broadly speaking, that we're actually, you know, spending 40% of our time on maintenance on these old legacy products. And that's probably why you're being perceived as slow. The right answer might actually be to cut some of those old product lines. CEO and the other business folks, they probably think those things are free, right? Which we all know they're not. We're not helping ourselves by explaining that. So part of this is an example of actually, you need to address on a regular basis why you're going the speed that you're going. And in doing so, that actually helps. Now the other part around their belief around one person is the hero that will save all. Look, there probably are amazing people on your team, right? There probably are people that are actually disproportionate in actually what they can actually do. However, we all gotta grow up too, right? At a certain point, if you ask 100 people, 200 people, we're building a system now. And yes, the system can try to depend on those people that are really kind of delivering, but it needs to be a system. And this means that, you know, you really gotta actually have multiple teams that are successful and multiple people on those teams that are successful. And so part of this is to also explain to this person around like, hey, what's our organization principle, why it needs to be this way, how we're gonna scale going forward, so they too come to the conclusion that it can't be about one person that saves an entire 200-person organization, right? I mean, look, they just greenlighted a budget for these 200 people, of course. So somewhere in their head, they're thinking that too. So you're really addressing two things, which is explaining to them why we're actually going slow, but also explaining like, Hey, how we need to grow up to actually have a 200-person organization or a much larger one. And that means actually spreading work out across people, enabling future leaders, finding other people that are actually really productive across the team, right? And stop living in the past in that way.
