Reluctant Leadership - The hardest part of tech is people
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This article could do with a good edit to cut out the middle section, which appears to be a list of mostly meaningless platitudes. Although I can't argue with great managers "organise ... a free team lunch" - managers of the world take note; deficiencies on the free lunch front could be what is holding you back from greatness.
The basic idea of greatness being small optimisations in a large number of areas is worth repeating a few times though. The majority of greatness comes from avoiding making any well known basic mistakes and a strategy of working through all the details and checking for small problems can do a lot to enable that. Big dramatic gestures generally do not.
By davedx 2025-06-166:14 Yeah I recall reading this works in industrial contexts too (lots of small optimisations accumulating into significant gains).
Ugh. Please lets stop adopting military concepts into the field of business leadership. Given that most humans and engineers in particular perform best when in position of having high autonomy, which is exactly the opposite of military environment, why do we keep borrowing from there? Is it because all the expired military "experts" who are trained to fit in and not think for themselves, lost all the wars in the past two decades and need a new job? Why do we allow people who are severely under-educated even compared to a junior-LLM-assisted rookie to tell us what we need to do? No, please don't be a "force multiplier", just look around and do what makes sense in your specific environment. You are way smarter than that.
By MoreQARespect 2025-06-166:37 >Given that most humans and engineers in particular perform best when in position of having high autonomy
High autonomy militaries outperform low autonomy militaries too.
I think most people feel like they’re performing well when given a high level of autonomy, which is not the same as performing well.
Well, no. This was proven scientifically a long-time ago, so no, what you think does not disprove what was already proved by scientific experimentation of workplace psychologists back in the 70s...
Could you reference some of those works? I do not disagree that high performers need a high degree of autonomy, but I do not believe that anyone can be turned into a high performer by just adding more autonomy to their work life.
People who aren't high performers, as a general rule, can't be transformed into them by any system (although there are some fascinating explorations of what a low performer can achieve with the right capital investments). A good strategy is one that either achieves the best possible results with a large number of average performers or turns medium-high performers into high performers and really enables the high performers to shine.
By hansmayer 2025-06-176:22 Really? So you are saying things are set in stone?
By hansmayer 2025-06-166:51 Not off the top of my head right now, but pick up any classic book on managing software teams and you will find heaps of such scientific references, for example "Peopleware" comes to mind.
By ofwellkgi 2025-06-166:46 It shouldn't come as a suprise to anyone that happy people make way better workers than angry and sad ones. Autonomy makes people happy, and on top of that experts usually know what they're doing, some even like their field and actually enjoy taking on challenges.
I think organizations of any type or size have a habit of discounting the power of spite aswell. You can do way worse than lose productivity, revolutions happen because people are unhappy.
By asplake 2025-06-1610:45 > You don’t obsess over one thing. You move lots of little things forward. No grand initiatives. No reorg. Just constant, low-key, under-the-radar nudging in the right direction.
It's not terrible advice, but it scales less well than the writer thinks. To really scale, you:
1. Engage with the right challenges (large or small)
2. Invite others into the process, celebrate their successes etc
3. Coach others to start from #1
Perhaps its organisational scope isn't much bigger than the team, but to my mind, the article doesn't go far enough beyond #2.
Do it, and you're the best kind of leader, one that makes other leaders. That's what scales.
