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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a PE role, and I have to tell myself every day not to go do the POC because that's not how I can maximize my impact. If someone else can do that work, I'm going to try and lean on them.

Strategy is hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. I am unable to make progress on strategy when I'm deep in tactical work.

I do jump in when needed, but every time I get my hands dirty I fall behind on strategy.

Your PE may indeed be useless, but it's also possible they are pretty good at their job. Good strategy is boring and seems obvious when presented because it creates clarity across a diverse company.

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at my work, I'm a principal and my boss is a partner. he spends a lot of his time doing organizational stuff and coming up with plans to solve problems, but he also still writes PoCs. he'll take the downtime he has between meetings, solve the really hard parts of the problem and hand it to the team for incubation. I do the same thing now - I pitched an idea which requires a fair bit of pure research, and I'm going to get a rough prototype going that vets the idea, then build out my team to make it better and turn it into a robust product.

the trick is to keep the PoCs lean enough that it's easy for your reports to flesh out and change the architecture as they need, but developed enough that it's working code, so people can run it and start working from a grounded product.

This is a fine line for me as a PE. It is good to help the team grow. However, I like to do the PoC sometimes so that I can keep my skills sharp and my opinions grounded in reality.

If I just sit in my ivory tower dishing out advice, the advice will eventually become useless.

I’ve been at this place before even if I don’t have the title formally.

What I have learned to do is to actually do my own flavour of the PoC concurrently with the team. That way I have more material to discuss and am able to give deeper insights like “have you considered X or what happens when Y?”.

It helps getting to know the problem better while letting the responsible get to own the product.

+1. And if there are several ways to design or implement something, it is 1000x better to do the one proposed by the people who will do the work. They’ll understand it better, have more context, and be much more motivated.

Unfortunately this has the side effect of making the principal look like an overpaid rubber stamp and cheerleader to the best less-senior ICs who usually have their shit together. :)

> I have to tell myself every day not to go do the POC

What is a "POC"?

Side Rant : It's really helpful if an acronym is at least expanded in the first use. I don't find the acronym in the article or the parent comment. I am not sure why and how this is a norm but it's frustrating as someone who wants to understand a conversation.

Proof of Concept

Piece of Crap?

Sorry about that. POC was introduced in the parent comment, but as you said without expansion.

If anyone has a hard time empathizing with unexplained acronyms, read a bit of https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/. I think the jargon is okay for the nature of that community (taking advantage of credit card sign up bonuses) but following discussion there can be really confusing until acclimated.

Example sentence: "CSR CL can be lowered. Need $5k CL to PC it to most cards, $10k to PC a(nother) card to CSR. Recon might only be able to drop it to $5k, you might have to SM to go lower than that."

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