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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

There is a massive difference in maturity crossing from individual contributor to manager between the military and corporate world. Never in the corporate world have I seen a junior manager tell their boss ”no” and pushback as I have in the military.

In the corporate world it’s all about hiring/firing versus the military where it’s all about developing people and liability at all levels. The key consequence of that is that in the corporate world people are eager to play it safe and follow trends versus the military where its generally considered a safe environment for learning more tolerant of controlled failure. Tolerance of controlled failure is how I learned to become a developer while working at Travelocity a billion years ago and I have not seen that since (in the corporate world).

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Another possibly related difference is the training managers get. There are military careers where you know on day one which leadership responsibilities you will take several years down the line. That’s a stark contrast to starting out as an engineer and then transitioning as described in the blog post.

This. The state of leadership training in our industry is abysmal. Most managers I've met get little to no training when they transition to leadership roles. It's slightly better in larger companies, but as you say - a stark contract with military

There’s the little issue that most formation are cargo cult crap. They’re teaching you some kind of method or canvas, but not much more - and cost a lot.

Good formations exists, somewhere. But they’re well hidden.

FWIW IC training is also bad. You can have a career just winging it (having done so myself) and any standards of competency are left to individual teams/companies or simply who you chose to imitate

I agree, but ICs winging it have less potential negative impact compared to managers winging it.

I disagree, however I never served in the military. There are companies which provide a safe environment for mistakes to be learning opportunities, its the culture that defines that. Rarely will an actual mistake lead to someone being fired where I work, usually if it does its because of attitude and someone believing they can do no wrong.

If you bring down the production system with a change that is a learning opportunity and your team should be supportive (i.e. help you recover it) when these things occur. Thats why its important to be constantly deploying code and knowing how to roll back, etc.

I’ve worked at a company that did releases months apart and everything was supposed to be perfect, it never was. In that culture it was all about posturing, covering up mistakes and blame-game which is utterly frustrating to work in.

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