> All of these activities did occur because good work speaks for itself ...
Good work very much doesn't speak for itself, typically software problems represent management problems more than a lack of people trying to do good work. This is such a wild claim vs what I've seen that it makes me quite suspicious of this article and the one before it. It is a nice story that there is a high-productivity engineer who just does great work and everything steams to a happy end out because they are just that hyper-competent. But that is a myth, and probably more a tell that the narrator is misreading something about the situation.
This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue. I'd believe that the engineer is actually doing good work, but then that suggests there are problems in the management culture here. Either the blog writer doesn't know how to manage managers, or the middle manager has a competence problem. From that assumption I'm not totally surprised that there are problems in the resulting software that one unusually capable engineer can expose with a few weeks of rogue work.
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)
> Wolves don’t care if they are seen or not. Wolves are entirely focused on the self-selected essential project in front of them
The wolves analogy is simply wrong. Wolves work in packs.
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 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.
He's a furry, you insensitive clod!
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 wolves are not happy animals, though. They are less successful in hunts, they can’t take down large prey at all. They don’t generally produce offspring. They’re an unfortunate effect of the social structure of wolves, where young males who cannot find a place in the pack are expelled.
There are plenty of lone wolf developers, but you won’t find them in large teams. Or if you do, they’re dysfunctional. On their own, a lone wolf engineer is not generally able to complete large, important pieces of work. Some do! But they are exceptions.
Whether or not the natural world has such wolves, its a well formed fictional archetype.
You assume "lone wolf" types are "one trick ponies" who can't learn. You also assume the only interesting problem space for these people is technical/code.
The lone wolf has a big limitations in transitioning to scale:
1. managers do what the article suggested, and stay out their way. The lone wolf never gets the experience of being managed, so it is difficult to transition to manage others.
2. they don't get why others don't "get it". e,g the solution is clear , the code can be done in a day, the comprehensive system model in their head should be shared by everyone.... it takes time to understand that the average engineer works slow and steady on a small scale understanding.
I will suggest there is a lone wolf type manager too. This is not a productivity skill, but an adaptivity and mobility skill.
I don't know that I care much for the mythologization of effective developers as "Wolves" and "10x-ers" which are this decade's equivalent of Ninja / Rockstar / Guru, but a similar less tech-centric version of that is just the concept of the "Maverick" within any organization and the parallels aren't too far regardless of the industry you're talking about. Outsized impact in undersold roles with a lot of heavy swinging soft power earned through merit.
It's strange to intentionally try to place or manufacture mavericks within your org for (at least) two reasons:
1. They're emergent phenomena. It's probably more valuable on average to examine WHY someone skipping all of your processes is effective than it is to make the conditions right for someone to become that maverick. Theoretically anyone CAN be that person, but unless something is actively going wrong it probably won't happen.
2. Process exists because it makes your org more efficient. When you start building your teams around the idea of someone explicitly being the maverick(s), ask yourself: "Who exactly is going to reconcile all of this against the framework that the entire rest of the company runs on? Is the rest of that person's team relegated to damage control and cleanup crew, and is that actually more effective than having an equivalent number of mid-level performers all pulling in the same direction?"
In the world of tech, the alleged 10x-er often manifests itself as: Tech Debt, but at High Volume™!
> 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.
> Process exists because it makes your org more efficient
That is one hell of an assumption.
> Wolves are the result of the work, not asking the question. Wolves don’t ask to be wolves; they are.
Whether or not you find this blurb interesting will probably determine whether or not this link is worth clicking to you.
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.
It helped me to think of it more as does-my-house-say-dead-engineer-storage-Wolf than awoo-Wolf.
This article has to be satire…
I lived through some of the events described therein. It's not satire.
That’s cool it just reads like an onion piece.
I know Michael Lopp. It’s not satire.
"A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinions of the sheep!"
On National Geographic channel, I have seen cannibalism in lions and spotted hyneas.
“Jugglers and singers require a pay raise. You’re a Lannister”
I have experienced some companies trying to tame wolves with agile type systems with poor results. I have seen wolves getting sick in cages, 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.
> 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.
The argument seems to be: don't promote/support good ideas or projects because if they're good they'll likely succeed without you, and then the initiator will be slightly more confident.
Which is phrased as "not my job" for some reason.
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.
I wish the article actually said that in plain words instead of trying to foist it into that peculiar "wolf" analogy (or whatever it's trying to do). I found the article kind of confusing. Thanks for spelling it out.
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.
Same. New ideas are like starting a fire. Piling too much on top or blowing too hard will stop it. You (together, however distributed across roles) do have to assess if you can handle one more fire, if it comes on top, replaces an old one etc. Getting to this decision in your specific setup is the tough and important part.
10x people can be like one-shot LLMs, your request is for sure wildly underspecified and what you get is 90% determined by the "smoothing term" applied by not you. This is why the right amount and frequency of interation is needed.
I remember when we used interns as an analogy to explain LLMs, now we've come full circle and are using LLMs as an analogy to explain people.
This is how I took it, and what I lived through. Both the supportive boss that let me do my thing without getting in the way, and those who tried to manage everything and make me shut down.
But did OP actually suggest their job is to “ensure traditional management does not get in their way”? I’m almost certain their point was not to interfere even at that level, which is why they didn’t hype it up the chain and let it land on its own.
Part of not hyping it up the chain is also that a lot of these projects are experiments. They may work, they may not, and some pivots may be required along the way. As soon as something is hyped to leadership, now there are feature lists, timelines, and expectations. All room for creativity and experimentation are gone.
I’ve gotten in the habit of not telling anyone about side efforts I’m working on until they’re done, and even then, I usually only tell the people who it might be of use to. I’ve been burned too many times by people trying to “help” or placing a lot of extra expectations and pressure on something. I don’t know if something will work until it works.
sure is nice to be paid for staying out of the way.
i think i am an expertise on not getting into other people's business. can someone pay me?
This just in: Wolves is the new hype word for the mythical 10x employee.
A feel good article where you can choose to self insert as the wolf or the wise manager who knew to be “hands off”.
To someone actually running a company this looks like absolute corporate nonsense. Don’t categorize people like this, it’s demeaning and weird. Why can’t we just treat people like adults.
Instead of “Oh yea he’s a total 10xer wolf,” try “Yea Mark, has some good ideas for a test framework we should consider”.
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.
"omegas don t care what other people think, they simply do their thing", thats hoow you people sound, very dumb.
So basically just cats then?
I generally don’t take these articles too seriously but a question has been popping up in my mind.
What the hell is the incentive of the guy posting this to encourage and help The Wolf??? He’s just doing it out of good will? What does he get out of doing the right thing? No recognition. No bonus. Nothing. Yet he still does it.
I find this fascinating.
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.
In this case you are helping your boss’s bottom line. The poster here gets nothing.
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.
He’s building credibility as an engineering management consultant.
He got attention?
Building a reputation of being wise?
What an untalented writer. His prose is clunky and every paragraph drips with sanctimony and reaching generalizations.
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.
So it's okay he's a bad writer? Sales above all?
Nice to see Rands back.
Refreshing writing in a world of AI slop.
People wonder how to find great developers - what even IS a great developer in the world of AI, do they still exist or did AI level them all out with the playing field?
They’re still around - they can talk with you in great depth about software and how it works ……. same as ever.
> All of these activities did occur because good work speaks for itself ...
Good work very much doesn't speak for itself, typically software problems represent management problems more than a lack of people trying to do good work. This is such a wild claim vs what I've seen that it makes me quite suspicious of this article and the one before it. It is a nice story that there is a high-productivity engineer who just does great work and everything steams to a happy end out because they are just that hyper-competent. But that is a myth, and probably more a tell that the narrator is misreading something about the situation.
This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue. I'd believe that the engineer is actually doing good work, but then that suggests there are problems in the management culture here. Either the blog writer doesn't know how to manage managers, or the middle manager has a competence problem. From that assumption I'm not totally surprised that there are problems in the resulting software that one unusually capable engineer can expose with a few weeks of rogue work.
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)
> Wolves don’t care if they are seen or not. Wolves are entirely focused on the self-selected essential project in front of them
The wolves analogy is simply wrong. Wolves work in packs.
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 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.
He's a furry, you insensitive clod!
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 wolves are not happy animals, though. They are less successful in hunts, they can’t take down large prey at all. They don’t generally produce offspring. They’re an unfortunate effect of the social structure of wolves, where young males who cannot find a place in the pack are expelled.
There are plenty of lone wolf developers, but you won’t find them in large teams. Or if you do, they’re dysfunctional. On their own, a lone wolf engineer is not generally able to complete large, important pieces of work. Some do! But they are exceptions.
Whether or not the natural world has such wolves, its a well formed fictional archetype.
You assume "lone wolf" types are "one trick ponies" who can't learn. You also assume the only interesting problem space for these people is technical/code.
The lone wolf has a big limitations in transitioning to scale: 1. managers do what the article suggested, and stay out their way. The lone wolf never gets the experience of being managed, so it is difficult to transition to manage others. 2. they don't get why others don't "get it". e,g the solution is clear , the code can be done in a day, the comprehensive system model in their head should be shared by everyone.... it takes time to understand that the average engineer works slow and steady on a small scale understanding.
I will suggest there is a lone wolf type manager too. This is not a productivity skill, but an adaptivity and mobility skill.
I don't know that I care much for the mythologization of effective developers as "Wolves" and "10x-ers" which are this decade's equivalent of Ninja / Rockstar / Guru, but a similar less tech-centric version of that is just the concept of the "Maverick" within any organization and the parallels aren't too far regardless of the industry you're talking about. Outsized impact in undersold roles with a lot of heavy swinging soft power earned through merit.
It's strange to intentionally try to place or manufacture mavericks within your org for (at least) two reasons:
1. They're emergent phenomena. It's probably more valuable on average to examine WHY someone skipping all of your processes is effective than it is to make the conditions right for someone to become that maverick. Theoretically anyone CAN be that person, but unless something is actively going wrong it probably won't happen.
2. Process exists because it makes your org more efficient. When you start building your teams around the idea of someone explicitly being the maverick(s), ask yourself: "Who exactly is going to reconcile all of this against the framework that the entire rest of the company runs on? Is the rest of that person's team relegated to damage control and cleanup crew, and is that actually more effective than having an equivalent number of mid-level performers all pulling in the same direction?"
In the world of tech, the alleged 10x-er often manifests itself as: Tech Debt, but at High Volume™!
> 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.
> Process exists because it makes your org more efficient
That is one hell of an assumption.
> Wolves are the result of the work, not asking the question. Wolves don’t ask to be wolves; they are.
Whether or not you find this blurb interesting will probably determine whether or not this link is worth clicking to you.
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.
It helped me to think of it more as does-my-house-say-dead-engineer-storage-Wolf than awoo-Wolf.
This article has to be satire…
I lived through some of the events described therein. It's not satire.
That’s cool it just reads like an onion piece.
I know Michael Lopp. It’s not satire.
"A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinions of the sheep!"
On National Geographic channel, I have seen cannibalism in lions and spotted hyneas.
“Jugglers and singers require a pay raise. You’re a Lannister”
I have experienced some companies trying to tame wolves with agile type systems with poor results. I have seen wolves getting sick in cages, 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.
> 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.
The argument seems to be: don't promote/support good ideas or projects because if they're good they'll likely succeed without you, and then the initiator will be slightly more confident.
Which is phrased as "not my job" for some reason.
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.
I wish the article actually said that in plain words instead of trying to foist it into that peculiar "wolf" analogy (or whatever it's trying to do). I found the article kind of confusing. Thanks for spelling it out.
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.
Same. New ideas are like starting a fire. Piling too much on top or blowing too hard will stop it. You (together, however distributed across roles) do have to assess if you can handle one more fire, if it comes on top, replaces an old one etc. Getting to this decision in your specific setup is the tough and important part.
10x people can be like one-shot LLMs, your request is for sure wildly underspecified and what you get is 90% determined by the "smoothing term" applied by not you. This is why the right amount and frequency of interation is needed.
I remember when we used interns as an analogy to explain LLMs, now we've come full circle and are using LLMs as an analogy to explain people.
This is how I took it, and what I lived through. Both the supportive boss that let me do my thing without getting in the way, and those who tried to manage everything and make me shut down.
But did OP actually suggest their job is to “ensure traditional management does not get in their way”? I’m almost certain their point was not to interfere even at that level, which is why they didn’t hype it up the chain and let it land on its own.
Part of not hyping it up the chain is also that a lot of these projects are experiments. They may work, they may not, and some pivots may be required along the way. As soon as something is hyped to leadership, now there are feature lists, timelines, and expectations. All room for creativity and experimentation are gone.
I’ve gotten in the habit of not telling anyone about side efforts I’m working on until they’re done, and even then, I usually only tell the people who it might be of use to. I’ve been burned too many times by people trying to “help” or placing a lot of extra expectations and pressure on something. I don’t know if something will work until it works.
sure is nice to be paid for staying out of the way.
i think i am an expertise on not getting into other people's business. can someone pay me?
This just in: Wolves is the new hype word for the mythical 10x employee.
A feel good article where you can choose to self insert as the wolf or the wise manager who knew to be “hands off”.
To someone actually running a company this looks like absolute corporate nonsense. Don’t categorize people like this, it’s demeaning and weird. Why can’t we just treat people like adults.
Instead of “Oh yea he’s a total 10xer wolf,” try “Yea Mark, has some good ideas for a test framework we should consider”.
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.
"omegas don t care what other people think, they simply do their thing", thats hoow you people sound, very dumb.
So basically just cats then?
I generally don’t take these articles too seriously but a question has been popping up in my mind.
What the hell is the incentive of the guy posting this to encourage and help The Wolf??? He’s just doing it out of good will? What does he get out of doing the right thing? No recognition. No bonus. Nothing. Yet he still does it.
I find this fascinating.
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.
In this case you are helping your boss’s bottom line. The poster here gets nothing.
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.
He’s building credibility as an engineering management consultant.
He got attention?
Building a reputation of being wise?
What an untalented writer. His prose is clunky and every paragraph drips with sanctimony and reaching generalizations.
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.
So it's okay he's a bad writer? Sales above all?
Nice to see Rands back.
Refreshing writing in a world of AI slop.
People wonder how to find great developers - what even IS a great developer in the world of AI, do they still exist or did AI level them all out with the playing field?
They’re still around - they can talk with you in great depth about software and how it works ……. same as ever.