> Instead, they are usually focused on making sure the team is building what their boss thinks should be built.
This rings so true. I vowed to never again work with companies with non technical leadership for this reason. My career so far has mostly been building features nobody wanted for people who are trying to impress management and/or VCs.
> The less technical the dev manager is, the more likely they are to be ignorant of technical debt, that is until customer escalations become politically untenable. This life cycle is why the engineering VP job has about a one year lifespan at many companies who run Idea Silos.
I've never heard of this concept of idea silos before. It makes so much sense. At my last company it was even worse. I had 4 managers over 2 years, yet the more senior management gave the VP of engineering free reign to make whatever changes he wanted (yes, they were all men), so the system was a cobbled-together mess of half baked features as a result of each manager coming in trying to make sweeping changes to show off their "scrum" skills.
> Engineers are problem solvers, and if the primary problem becomes delivering Something™ that will pass QA by the Date™, they will, with enough pressure, solve that exact problem.
Ahhh I can't even handle how accurate this is. You should have seen the spreadsheets and meetings we had about sizing and building roadmaps. The entire engineering department's job became keeping managers at bay by producing roadmap items on schedule. There were meetings upon meetings about "metrics", which were just numbers we made up but put into a fancy spreadsheet, because doing calculations on made up numbers makes them appear more legitimate than raw made up numbers.
The majority of the effort of our department was wasted on features nobody wanted. They sounded impressive and apparently were cool enough to keep investors satisfied. This company also went to great lengths to re-brand itself as an "AI" company, whatever that means, even though none of the people in charge had the slightest idea what AI was really capable of or how it would benefit the business.
The worst part is that it took so long for me to realize I was wasting my time. After the third major feature I delivered to be used by absolutely nobody I realized we were out of sync with reality. I thought I had made this great discovery and was almost excited to bring it up because I thought it would be a great opportunity to change to do better by our customers. Instead I was met with a response that essentially amounted to "shut up, know your place, and give me code", which is when I realized I was really just a cog in this machine designed to get engineering VPs bullet points for their CVs, and left.