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Bus-Factor: A new metric to describe how well kowledge is distributed among the team members by calculating how many of your team members can be run over by a bus without killing your project!5
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The emphasis on "team" to the exclusion of the individual (thanks in no small part to Scrum) is destroying the software developer career. It's a pendulum. There are always team/company goals AND personal goals. However, these days, the rhetoric is ALL about the team: everybody on a team has the same title, get rid of people who don't conform to some "collaborative", "open space", "colocated" ideal, etc. OKRs are entirely about giving everybody the exact same goals. I remember sitting down with managers throughout my career to talk about where I want to be in a year. What skills I wanted to explore. There were no guarantees, but the generally accepted idea was that nurturing the employee helped retain the employee. Now, there is only the idea that every developer should have the same "T-shaped" skillset, that all team members are the same, that all teams are interchangeable, that all developers are nameless cogs. It is demoralizing. If I were to give any advice to those looking to enter the industry as a developer right now, it would be "Don't". Because you will be told that being a "hero" is a bad thing. In what other industry does management tell its producers that they don't want people to go "above and beyond", and that if they do, they won't get credit for it because the credit always belongs to everybody.7
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There is a difference between HR and CHRO, senior marketing expert and CMO, senior developer and CTO.
There is a work ethic stance of always staying in your scope and saying "that's not my job" to any extra stuff someone asks you to do. This is acceptable and perfectly normal. Any team member has a contract, and you owe your company nothing beyond that.
That stance is however only acceptable from regular workers, not a chief board members. For any acronym position that starts with a capital letter C, that stance is not acceptable anymore. That's the difference.
Board members should have a share. Board members should have the right to dictate how a company is, at least proportional to their share or more.
Only those who display T-shaped skills, ownership and interest in the whole business model, not just their scope, are eligible to graduate up to a chief position. If you're not a chief officer, but you want to get there, this is what you do. Analyze the business as a whole and come up with measurable and provable ways of making it better, because this can't be formalized, and thus can't be a part of your contract. This is the surest way to the top.
I am of course speaking of the companies where the main priority is the business and its ethics and not the founder's ego. The latter can't be saved.4 -
I choose mine (full-stack) because I worked on countless projects on my own and always had the curiosity that span the whole picture although I'm leaning towards a T-shape specialist.
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To those who have worked in mad RAD solo environments, with next to no testing...
...and those who have worked full Agile, with high code coverage, code review amongst hoards of T-shaped developers...
...how much difference does it make to wellbeing and upskilling in the two?
Bonus points if you have done both and can compare in an n=1 way.2
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