Theses:

1. People are responsible for their own choices and have agency, and the responsibility part is particularly applicable to people who want the right to call themselves “engineers”.

2. People are social animals who respond deeply to the norms in their environment,¹ and who respond very strongly to their direct authority figures.²

3. When something in an engineering organization is deeply broken, it is usually because (2) is undermining (1) in profound ways.

One of the most formative experiences of my career, almost a decade now, was — after years of being profoundly beaten down by previous bosses — having an EM more or less yell at me (we were friends and it was in a good way), “Stop complaining to me and go change it! You’re an engineer, not a code monkey! That’s why we give you that title! You are actually empowered to go fix things!”³

So many of the folks in the industry at large, perhaps especially in VC-funded or public co. land, have never had that desperately-needed pep talk/lecture. And too many EMs think their PMs are their bosses, so they pass that onto their engineers.

And so: my job is to avoid getting upset when I see other engineers having done something less than desirable, not least when I can see that their intent is actually good, and to go fix as many of the underlying problems with (2) that I can so that they have a shot at doing what they should in (1) — and also to tell as many engineers as I can that (1) is in fact their responsibility regardless of what dynamics are in play under (2).