In March I published a piece called How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership? It demonstrates (I hope) why production line metrics sho

What layoffs teach us about technical leadership

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2024-11-01 08:30:03

In March I published a piece called How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership? It demonstrates (I hope) why production line metrics shouldn’t be copied and pasted onto knowledge work. Then, in a cunning move I ripped from email marketers, I reach the titular question at the very end of the piece and promise to come back to it.1 For several months, I don’t.

That’s not to say I’m not working on it. I’ve ridden trains and sat in airports with High Output Management and The Manager’s Path and The Staff Engineer’s Path and Kill It With Fire. I’ve revisited Managing Humans and The Phoenix Project and The Hard Thing About Hard Things.2 I’ve sat down over coffee, over ice cream, over soda, with practitioners from all over the place. I’ve drenched myself in the spilled tea of insider layoff stories—these days in tech, everybody’s got one.3

This last part has clarified my thinking enormously. Practitioners deposit their most valuable lessons-learnt in their books, but those books often elide a dirty secret; the solutions are theoretical. Authors have witnessed the destruction wrought by what not to do for 30 years, and they fill their written opus with hypotheses about what to do, and it sounds convincing. But these authors often haven’t tested the hypotheses for real—and when you do it on their behalf, you might discover externalities that the book failed to mention. Layoffs, by contrast, actually happened. Those decisions, fraught and heartbreaking, realistically capture how executives make value judgments about staff.4