TL;DR: that “golden age” you’d had 10 years ago might be what’s holding you back now

Every few months I meet at some social circle with people who had been considered extremely successful in one of the organizations where I used to work a few years back. Those are often very pleasant conversations to have.

Most people are doing just fine and have grown remarkably as professionals and as human beings. However, there’s a considerable minority of people who don’t appear to be growing - it’s as if those specific - previously dynamic - individuals had frozen in time! Two frequent behaviors of this category of people is:

  1. They see value only in people of a very specific kind – which was a certain kind of hero “tech bros” which they had around them when they shined
  2. Culture for them is only about those things that mattered when they first rose to success.

The focus on only a specific kind of people made me feel sore, partly because I did not feel they genuinely saw or valued my kind of people back then or now, for whatever that’s worth; the cultural inflexibility made me feel somewhat concerned for their various endeavors, because what was a decent set of values back then is no longer such today. I’ll try to expand on that idea in the next paragraph.

Here are some important lessons that I learnt up in the last 10 or so years, and I consider crucial for building and scaling up a technical organization in 2022:

  • People with a seemingly “weak” or “mismatching” background can develop into crucial stakeholders – especially when they can practice humility needed to take one for the team and agency to come up with good decisions that make up for missing experience,
  • The “vitamins” required for the success of the organization as a whole often come from a skillset that none of the “bros” seem to understand or value – the most obvious example is marketing, which a lot of technical types ignore into oblivion;
  • Assertive and paternalist styles of leadership cause employees in competitive fields to leave in favor of employers which allow said employees to find their own voice.
  • Given a long-term challenge, people tend to lose track unless they are part of a principled, carefully crafted, honest and sustainable system, which is what managers should focus on.
  • Key people who are oblivious to culture tend to stick with like-minded peers; what starts out as tolerably bad taste over time scales into toxicity.

I’d like to conclude with an idea I heard from one of the people in the “just fine” group – changing oneself is hard but practical, whereas expecting the world to change is simply not practical. This is especially true if the expectation from the world is for it to go back in time - things never return to what they used to be. Accordingly, I wanted to wish that if you want to be a hero – may you become one, but not the hero the world wanted yesterday, but rather, the hero that the world needs today.