The Evolution Of Badly Led Companies
Or, “natural selection in the grand game of software engineering”.
I fully believe that the grand game of software engineering is something of a microcosm of the real world¹ in general and today we’re going to visit a facet of this comparison based upon natural selection or, in this instance, survival of the most talented.
The similarity between the grand game and the outside world is based primarily on the fact that it has a wide range of people in it who generally get in each other’s way, it spends an awful lot of time adhering to inefficient and obstructive protocols and processes and arguing with people in notional positions of authority who try to enforce them², but most of all because it evolves in the manner of natural selection in a number of interesting and fun ways.
As I’ve alluded to many times in the past us progressive software engineers are driven by the need to do meaningful, challenging, and fun work but also get paid at least market rates for doing so.
To that end if we leave aside remuneration for the moment then the primary reasons for leaving a company tend to be related to meaningless, unchallenging, and tedious or outright boring work. This is something that I lay squarely at the feet of the people running the company right from the CTO³ at the top of the food chain right on down to…
