”Organizational interest comes in waves. When it’s reliability time, VPs are desperate to be doing something. They want to come up with plausible-sounding reliability projects that they can fund, because they need to go to their bosses and point at what they’re doing for reliability, but they don’t have the skillset to do it on their own.”
So if you want to get something technical done in a tech company, you ought to wait for the appropriate wave. It’s a good idea to prepare multiple technical programs of work, all along different lines. Strong engineers will do some of this kind of thing as an automatic process, simply by noticing things in the normal line of work.
The piece is very typical programmer cynicism about non-technical people in organizations: “management.” But, it is mostly accurate. Many programmers feel this way when they start looking outside of the dev team.
Related, see my series on surviving and thriving in a BigCo.
From “How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer."