Sometimes your job is to stay the hell out of the way

I’ve had the pleasure of managing a wolf.

Respectfully, if that’s your mindset then I think the problem lies with you and not with the manager.

> good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it

The absolute best way to get a shitload of people to speak for it is to get a shitload of people to use it. The best way to get them to use it is to make it _so good_ they use it naturally. Using the test framework from the article as an example - a period of time passed between the meeting and the work actually being recognised. The manager clearly gave the right feedback to keep working on it rather than “I’m not sure - your other thing is quite important too”. The sign of a good wolf is someone who can tell the difference between “this isn’t a good idea” and “there’s a process to be followed to find out if there’s a good idea”. Ignoring the first one is suicide, but ignoring the second one is what makes you succeed.

The wolf and Rands are next level.

> Good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it.

Good work does speak for itself. The work speaks directly to other like minded engineers who "get it" and spread the word.

Nobody in authority needs to do any selling or mandating for the kind of work and the kind of person Rands is talking about here.

It's not the biggest pile of crap, I'd say it's... let's see... currently the 27th biggest, but that's subject to change since I have several meetings coming up this week.

I read those stereotypes as people phantasizing about being wild and free and a fierce (coding) biest, without actually knowing the wild. But it does have the effect on me to not being able to take it serious. If they don't even know basic facts about the animal they want to use as their metaphor, I expect way more to be wrong.

Not all wolves work in packs.

Hint: think of the widespread expression used in terrorism debates: "Lone wolf". It's a self radicalized/motivated individual acting independently and alone.

lone wolf. maybe he missed the significance of lone in that phase when he heard it first and thought it could be dropped. That is my working assumption, it happens.

Whether or not the natural world has such wolves, its a fictional archetype.

It is a particularly common theme in Japanese fiction, where the deviation from the social hierarchy requires a stong force of individual will. Interesting it is also common in Japanese technology breakthrough documentaries.

Ogami Itto - Lone wolf and cub is the first thing that comes to mind when the author says wolf.

I think we can simply replace "wolf" with "alpha" and the analogy makes much more sense.

I mean that in the worst possible way.

There will always be this back-and-forth discussion of planning vs not-planning. The agile idea in itself is quite simple: Inspect and Adapt. My firm belief is that everything else needs to be build around that.

> Being able to improve something without planning it.

There are very few professions we’d consider this acceptable. Implicit in this statement is the assumption that your time-value is only known by you (or free).

You certainly wouldn’t let your contractor improve things on your dime, unplanned, and unexplained. You might even fire them if you discovered they spent the day “refactoring” conduit instead of installing the pot lights you asked them for.

This article has to be satire…

It helped me to think of it more as does-my-house-say-dead-engineer-storage-Wolf than awoo-Wolf.

I think this quote snipe without the context doesn't really do the article justice. The post is interesting both intellectually and in that it's already clearly controversial. This quote standing by itself is mostly just confusing and imo takes away from the discussion.

Google AI overview returned: “A ‘lone wolf’ is a wolf that has left its pack to find a new territory or mate, a natural dispersal behaviour crucial for genetic diversity.”

Interesting enough people do jump around to build their skills.

Shark or sheep?

The point is the wolf does not need managment. He has built up a model in his head of the problem and solution space better that a team of 1x specialists. T expose it to "managment" , "oversight" and "accountability" is to destroy it, especially for the article that shows an innnovative solution to an organizational pain point. They may be poorly managed, but they may be well managed, either way the managment style likey does not match the particular problem and/or solution the wolf is adressing. One of the key premises of The Innnovators Dillema is that well managed companies are well managed in sweet spots of operation and struggle outside of that sweet spot.

Now, the wolf may benefit from hands off managment, but they will need leadership support. The author seems to have proposed a style of leadership centered around hands off managment and letting the wolf sink or swim. I would hope thismstyle of leadershio includes him holding a life support by the sidelines. (leadership != management)

> Good work very much doesn't speak for itself

Some people are obviously very intelligent and for people with enough technical abilities this can be spotted (e.g. because they churn out a large volume of high-quality code with almost zero defects). I have definitely seen this.

But I have also seen a colleague getting promoted that took thrice the scheduled time to deliver on a low-impact project, planning 2-3 long meetings a week, with about 8 people, discussing details for hours and hours (of course without writing anything down). When he went on leave for a few weeks, leaving a significant backlog of work and noting to our manager that "it's trivial to release", I actually managed to release it. At the end-of-year review he was praised for "deliviring such a complicated project", while the higher impact project I worked on and delivered in 1/3rd of the scheduled time was seen as a "simple project" because it got delivered without any hiccups.

Often it's also just a matter of "this guy states facts with confidence so it seems he knows what he's talking about" (even when he gets the facts wrong). At some point I just stopped correcting him because if we disagreed people would just assume I was wrong. In other words, being good at talking helps your career a lot.

Yep. Even the details provided suggest that (i) the "wolf" explicitly asked for a level of support from upper management that wasn't offered and (ii) when others eventually became aware of the testing framework, they were able to improve it. Neither of the two details provided vindicate the author's self-congratulation on spotting the wolf and choosing to keep it quiet.

There are definitely times when the best thing for upper management to do is stay the hell out the way, but this doesn't sound like it was obviously one of them.

100% agree. You don’t have to let an engineer go rogue to get stuff built that isn’t a new feature.

I don’t manage managers, but do manage a team of 15. I try to be clear that part of my job is giving them time to improve their jobs. When one has a complaint or suggestion, I ask them to put it on paper so I can get it into our backlog. I will gladly prioritize something that will have a positive impact across multiple engineers.

Test and build are things that fall through the cracks and working on them can get outright hostility from management and other team members in some places, indifference in others.

At one place I worked nobody could give me a reliable build procedure, I settled in on one that was 40 min and worked reliably. I complained at every team meeting about the slow build and nobody cared. I put in a ticket for the slow build and was asked “how does this help the end user?” and my answer was “if my build was faster the end user would have had the product six months ago”

Where I am now I have a “maintenance droid” that automates a mildly polyglot build and when it runs into trouble it applies various levels of cleaning and every few months I run into some problem where it gets different results from my supervisor and/or the CI system and these days it always turns out to be right.

> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.

Yes, and this is unfortunately the best move in many situations given how hard it is to fire people. The ideal thing to do is fire the incompetent manager who is a tax on their team rather than a multiplier. That unburdens the highly competent engineers on their team to do good work.

However, that might not be possible or even a good idea. A failed hire might reflect badly on the upper manager, or prevent them from hiring a replacement. It might require a lengthy performance improvement plan, which means you have a burdened team for that whole duration. It's often easier to de-claw the bad manager, and take back on their responsibilities yourself. Not ideal, but the best of a bad situation.

> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.

The second red flag in all of this is that an engineer doing good work on their own is labeled "rogue". Management's job is to make people productive, if they can't realize that the best configuration for their team involves some individuals working largely separate from the managers own mediocre day-to-day ceremonies/projects, then they aren't doing their job. People that don't need to be managed are the best kind of people, if you can't spot them and leverage them, get out of management.

> good work speaks for itself

I disagree. Ideas don’t speak, and work doesn’t speak. People do. Being a 10x engineer isn’t just about having great ideas, it’s about having great impact.

Sometimes I hear ICs say with some pride that “I’m not interested in playing office politics”. I promise you they will lose out to the engineers who are able to self advocate, and coalition-build.

Man I'm glad someone said this. Incredibly cringe and unnecessary using the whole wolf analogy for, essentially, "someone who's good at their job". Gives off vibes of the whole "alpha/high value male" thing going on in social media.

I have to admit reading heroic stories like these is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's ridiculous, but strangely inspiring in a completely unrealistic way.

It's like a linkedin article that has escaped from its cage.

This. And the reason this is relevant today is because an excellent build and test system multiplies the effectiveness of coding agents which multiply again the effectiveness of next level engineers.

There aren’t many other things I can think of that have such a huge positive impact on the productivity of an engineering team.

You need to tell your countrymen that rugged individualism belongs to the omnivorous foxes, not lonewolves

Hard agree. Nothing more offputting than being labeled and categorized like the corporate overlords are playing AeO II and I’m a "resource" to be acquired, harvested, used and/or discarded.

> i have been seen wolves accomplishing amazing feats and being sidelined for not being team players by mediocre leadership because the leadership did not get recognition.

That's the norm across all industries.

Early in my career I would build something I thought was useful, deploy it, meet with people within the company to get people to start using it. A lot of effort for something that would have a positive impact. My manager would schedule a meeting with me, and with a look of panic open with, “why didn’t you tell me about this or why did you do this?”. I understand now that before you start something, you need to decide who you are going to give credit to, and that person needs to be made aware that they will get credit for the project. Ideally your boss’s boss’s boss. Corporate caché only exist insofar as leadership allows it to exist, you gotta play the game. Pawns don’t get to take the glory for themselves.

I thought the message is “you might really want to find and encourage and promote and support your best programming talent though overt action, but such overt action might in fact have the inverse unintended outcome, often best to ensure you know such people are in the team and ensure traditional management does not get in their way or piss them off with traditional corporate thinking, which has zero idea what great programming talent looks like or is motivated by.”

That’s what I read.

The message is that process is there to extract value from people with average skills and motivation. When you find someone very skilled and self motivated doing the right thing, don't let process hamper their way.

> Process exists because it makes your org more efficient

That is one hell of an assumption.

> Process exists because it makes your org more efficient

Nah. Process mostly exists because management doesn't have visibility into what engineering is doing, so they have to poke vertical holes through the org to know what everyone is up to.

Process is often pitched as improving coordination between teams, but that's more of a fringe benefit than the actual reason for process.

You are confusing concepts.

What the original article described is an engineer who could not stand by and let a painful problem with an obvious solution not be solved. the key point of the so called wolf is the obviousness of the solution. it was. ot obvious to anyone else, and to anyone else it would have been a major investment. the 10x does not come from frantic coding, it comes from a comprehensive and unique understanding that translates to code quickly due to motivation and understanding.

Process does not make an org more efficient. it makes it more consistent. if the baseline efficiency is low, the consistency of an improved set of work practices will ofcourse improve efficiency.

What a process often does is overfitting. Overfitting to the most common buiness need, sometimes overfitting to the noisiest patholgies seen.

The problem with process overfitting is that it excludes efficient solutions for problems that don't fit the previous set of business needs, or are not at risk of the previous set of pathologies. sometimes the process has a good pressure valve for this, pull the andon cord. do some kaizen, fire up the CMM level 5 KPAs. but sometimes just applying bespoke judgment is better.

I have been the wolf he describes. I also have been the manager he describes who lets the wolf have space and stand up for themselves. i have also been the manager who creates process and worflows and alignment and blah blah to dampen the noise of individual agency.

tech debt is an orthogonal concern.

Most wolves I know of are impossible to work with and a barrier to company scaling. Which eventually leads to à net lots of growth opportunity.

Worse I’ve experienced as dev around wolves is the typical tendency of being marginalised only to be later proven true about things. To me this is super toxic so duck them wolves really, they be lone very often.

He posts his articles to his socials,⁽¹⁾ along with the occasional quip like “Your life is going to be full of people sounding like they know what they’re talking about.” and “Your three-day response time to critical communications tells me exactly what I need to know.” and “You're either getting stuff done or talking about getting stuff done.”

⁽¹⁾ https://www.threads.com/@rands

I don’t know, man. Rands was kind of the original slop

Well the writer has had a number of books published which appear to have been successful. So he has found a market and delivered completed work.

Gassing them up so they'll manage that many bodies (outsourced, of course)

So basically just cats then?

He got attention?

Building a reputation of being wise?

Some people genuinely want to help others, without any immediately visible reward.

I won’t say it’s necessarily altruistic, as of course there could be a drive from inner machinations that we’d never be privy to.

(Sometimes the exposure of an article can be considered a reward, for those looking for ego inflation)

Even myself, I generally don’t leave comments unless I feel they’re going to be helpful or insightful to someone else. But I am also biased, as I do have a very strong affinity towards sharing information, so I greatly appreciate the effort artisans and those more knowledgeable than I go through to share such knowledge.

I had a boss like this. He didn’t stand me up in front of everyone to show stuff off, but each year when it came time for raises and bonuses, he always took care of me. But those raises were never conditional or tied to whatever project I was working on.

I got the recognition in my paycheck, which was the only place I wanted it. I prefer to work quietly behind the scenes. It wasn’t about any one project, but consistently delivering whatever it was I was delivering, without much input or interference.

He’s building credibility as an engineering management consultant.

I find it fascinating that people find it fascinating that people just want to do right by others. I get that this is in the context of a workplace, and there is always some level of competition between people, but personally, I never gave that more weight than being happy and feeling good about how I treat others.

Just in from 2014, when the original article referenced in the first line of this one was written, opening 'You've heard of the 10x engineer, I'm here to tell you about the Wolf'?