I dislike the blame bit because success in creative jobs are to a large extent about doing things nobody else thought of. (And by definition, of course, if you fail to do something nobody else thought of, nobody would blame you for it either.)
That's a great point. It's definitely not a perfect lens. And I do think that the power of a "Staff Engineer" title or similar is giving really talented, creative engineers the organizational capital to go do wack shit, because hey -- sometimes that wack shit is GMail or JavaScript!
But at the end of the day, we're all getting paid to be here; I think having a clear understanding from the start of "what could I do wrong enough that my job is at stake?" is very, very valuable.
Later in the article, Amy also talks about how the "blame" can come from below, too:
> If the ICs that report to my manager end up feeling like “I told you so” or “We knew this was a bad idea” and that wasn’t surfaced for a discussion, that’s on me.
And I think that's a really healthy way to approach leadership. It is -- and should be! -- a very serious responsibility to be making decisions that affect lots of other people's jobs.
That might well be. I have a vague, uncomfortable feeling that there's a deeper understanding here that simply eludes me. I feel like maybe five years from now with some more experience I'll be able to read this exchange and facepalm at my naivete!
So if you come up with an idea nobody else had thought of, and you convince the company to spend millions or more on it in engineer-time-dollars, and it ends up being a total waste: yeah, you might have some questions to answer. There's a difference between doing something nobody else thought of and doing the right thing nobody else thought of, and the more you're responsible for in a company, the more that falls on you if you either keep getting it wrong or get it wrong once in a sufficiently-spectacular fashion. (There are nuances here of course depending on how you sold it to people, just how much everyone was aware of the risk of failure, etc... but it's important to remember freedom to experiment and take risks is different than freedom to do whatever you want.)
(There are certainly places where cushy titles can be sinecures, but whether or not that's the case is going to vary greatly depending on the company and their positioning and needs.)