> To me that's the most interesting quote of the podcast and that's the impression I had gotten before reading this quote. Sounds like they received valuable feedback along the way and ignored it on purpose.
We don't really have enough context to make a judgement here IMO. I've been in places large enough to have fairly complex politics where people would manouver themselves into better jobs as much as they could, including performing a hostile takeover of another department. They might not have had the best ideas or the best plans, but they did have the right connections, go to lunch with the right people and say the right words.
I've seen bad decisions made because more persuasive and better connected people were attempting to climb the ladder and managed to talk management into it.
"You’re too idealistic. You don’t care enough about the bottom line. You should change your values." could just be something someone says when they're trying to smear someone in the way, especially if that's how they've sold themselves and their ideas to upper management.
Personally I've seen and done a number of large scale changes/upgrades (mostly Ruby/Rails/Postgres things) in orgs smaller than Facebook but still with hundreds of engineers and large codebases, both stop the world, and where the work was streamed seamlessly into regular feature etc. work and the methodology outlined by Chris seems incredibly sensible and aligns with what I have found to be the most successful way of doing these things.
As the host says, we ony have one side of the story here, but at least a lot of the things Chris is saying seem to make sense.
> My career lesson is that being right isn't the hard part of being a senior staff engineer. Being right isn't enough. It's building alignment across the entire org towards the right solution. That's the hard valuable problem that I'm paid to solve.
I agree, leadership positions require trust and respect to be effective. You still have to be right for that to be useful of course. Progress in the wrong direction isn't really progress.