In my last job I moved from a team that had no "senior" level people on it to a team that was pretty much all "senior" and up level people. I was impressed at the high rankings of everyone on my new team and thought that first, I was about to witness powerhouse performances and a lot getting done, and second that on such an elite and senior team I would have a good chance of moving up the org chart myself.

What I found was that all the senior plus level people wanted to do was work on plans and reviews and architecture decisions and so on and so forth. We had a lot of "leadership" but very few people willing to actually put shovel to dirt so to speak. Our ultra-elite team was really unproductive.

I began to think of the senior people as something like salt. A meal may be best with a lot of food and a little salt. One or two high level people to plan for and guide a lot of lower ranking people who could actually do work. The second best configuration would be all food and no salt - people doing work without the high level insights and planning. The worst configuration, I discovered, was all salt and no food - just a ton of meetings, reviews, plans, and missed deadlines.

I'm connecting my experience with this blog post because it seems to me like the process of "becoming elite" causes the damage. Everyone on our software team was so busy trying to have cross team impact, show their leadership, come up with consequential architecture decisions, and the like - because all that stuff is what you need to be well regarded as a senior type person, that nobody wanted to do the more mundane tasks of actually implementing our plans. From the examples of the article it's like everyone is worried about the metrics they can control, like the academics publishing more and more papers in better journals, that they forget about actually discovering or documenting things.

To use the high variance language, maybe in the ur-company, when it was just starting, you could have done something big and consequential. If it was a success you'd get rewarded and become a senior or a principal or whatever. If it failed, even if it failed through no particular fault of your own, you wouldn't, or maybe you'd get fired. Nowadays, as the company has grown, there are fewer of those big risks and more people who want to be seniors and principals, so people take the low variance route - establishing that they are influential planners who wrote and reviewed a lot of stuff and so on, forgetting about the nominal goal of the company - shipping good products.