I’d like to talk about a troubling pattern I have seen in the software industry for nearly twenty years. I have tracked this pattern often, but for some reason the concept never materialized clearly and ‘jumped the chasm’ from my industry experience and into real life — until recently. Lately, I see the pattern everywhere, all the time; and it scares me.
The pattern is that of leadership delegating responsibility for a complex system (i.e. a ‘Black Box’ of some sort) to “experts” — but leadership has insufficient (or no) experience required to audit performance or select the right “experts” at the start. These “experts” tend to serve the facade of competence and expertise, as opposed to shepherding the perfection of the actual thing.
In software, this pattern leads to monolithic risk profiles, debt, and disaster.
When I imply inexperience, I don’t mean inexperience with leadership or inspiration as an art form, but inexperience with the complex task for which they are inherently responsible. We have many leaders with insufficient experience in the actual doing — and who are on a path that seems to move away from real knowledge or excellence by way of delegation.
To put this in more crude terms, leadership want all the loyalty, trust, productivity, praise, respect, investment, payouts, and power that come from shepherding a complex system, but…
- they don’t want to see how the sausage is made
- they say “that’s way over my head, but I trust the team is doing this properly”
- say or imply things like “trust the experts”
In effect, we have blind (yet spirited) orators and ‘strategists’ piloting giant ships through the straights of risk—with only the destination in mind.
How do we get there? Who cares.
What happens if something goes wrong? NMB: Not My Business (also… not your business either)
Who, then, is behind the wheel? “The Experts.”
But who delegated to “The Experts”? The non-expert ‘expert’, duh!
Inexperience Is Risk
So we have non-technical leaders leading, but refusing real responsibility for our complex systems. Why should we care?
I am generally focused on software, but we are surrounded every day by complex systems. These complex systems are found in places like financial markets, governmental health and monetary policy frameworks, international trade and military systems. Software is the archetypal dynamic project — but it is a close cousin of all other organic dynamic projects.
Our leaders’ ability to manage our dynamic software projects have quality of life consequences in the software industry (i.e. potential burnout, stress, anxiety, bankruptcy, future opportunity cost).
Our leaders’ ability to manage our larger dynamic social projects have life and death consequences (poverty, famine, acts of war, loss of liberty and personal autonomy, social and cultural rot).
Non-technical leaders lack the ability to:
- audit personnel (i.e. inability to hire excellent people, and to fire bogus people)
- audit the complex system, i.e. audit the Black Box
- calculate risk over time
- constrain batch size
- determine total cost of ownership
- prioritize empirical and scientific truth over narrative, ideology, and fantasy
Projects run by “experts” who are deployed by non-technical leadership are often a wish and a prayer, an article of faith. We see leadership so confident and stoic—yet how is their current project any different than a crooked-eyed horse bet?
The statuesque management consultant flanked by a cadre of “experts” is great for optics, but experience shows us that we need to demand more from leaders and rethink how we approach dynamic projects. We need to be more honest about our leaders (a class that sometimes includes self).
The ‘Thinking’ Class
Just think it, and it shall be done.
In dynamic software projects we often see a large chasm between the ‘thinkers’ and the ‘doers.’ The thinkers talk about vague strategies and hard deadlines, and the doers grind it out praying the foundational assumptions which originated from upon high are correct.
The greater the distance from leadership to actual task competence and real-world experience, the greater the risk of disaster.
Experience as a delegator is not the same as real-world experience. Absent actually being a producer on the line, at no time in my career have I seen longer periods of delegating make a leader more technically competent and efficient over time.
In the case of the software industry, leadership is usually represented by the following three profiles. These profiles also seem to be shared by many other industries.
- Single task owners at all levels
- Non-technical founders at startups
- Large corporate leaders
Single Task Owners
The lazy, non-technical random task owner is one of the worst examples of software industry rot I’ve seen. Some of these people are the ultimate delegators—they can find ways to delegate even the most essential task for which they should be responsible.
This is the person that just seems to refuse to learn anything, unless it’s the hard way. This person will reply to an email thread with 9 people asking “but what’s a CDN?” instead of just Googling it. This person will completely ignore your explanatory email where you desperately wish they would take an extra moment to absorb additional details or knowledge about a task that is essential to their daily job. The non-technical random task owner WILL NOT spend any time learning on their own—and they will absolutely not take my class Web Fundamentals 101 even if I offer it to them for free.
These people suck and should be banished from polite teams.
Non-Technical Founders
With the non-technical founder…where do we even start?
A founder need not know everything, but they must approach mastery/excellence/supreme competence in something explicitly related to producing a core product component. If not, at a minimum, what a boring company it will be!
Being enthusiastic, spirited, confident, networked, and driven — while a fantastic combination — are not enough.
Fundraising—while miraculous, difficult, and essential—is not a technical skill related to producing a core product.
This is not to say that there are no non-technical founders who are successful. They certainly exist. However, the vast majority of projects run by non-technical founders in highly competitive markets will melt smokings holes in the ground when faced with adversity generated from market conditions, sales, technical constraints, or demand generation.
“Pump and dump” is only a good strategy for jerks in life. It is not a sustainable strategy directed at a culture of community excellence and trade mastery.
We are not entitled to success, it must be earned. The quote “it takes 10 years to become an overnight success” seems to be true, in every way. 10 years or 10,000 hours to mastery. It seems to be some hard rule of the nature of things.
Large Corporate Leaders
Large corporate leaders are non-technical team executives and directors at large corporations. These are people with titles like Director, Head, VP, President, and so on.
I have some compassion for large corporate leaders. As the famous quote goes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” I’m not sure what the equivalent is for the corporate world, but corporates generally attract the folks who can operate effectively (and spiritually) in a slow, annoying, and uninspiring bureaucracy. To each their own, good for them, blessings and best wishes and all that.
Despite my compassion for the large corporate leader, there is a massive red light flashing on the console—the “dummy” light has illuminated in our car’s instrument cluster. We are being swept into high seas with no route, no life preservers, no radio, no beacon, no dingy—and the captains of our ships are not actual captains, but they did conveniently “stay at a Holiday Inn Express” last night…
Our large corporations are becoming eerily intertwined with the government, in a historically worrying sense. This interweaving is compounding local, state, and global risk, in a historically worrying sense.
**My apologies for swearing below. I’m really trying to work on it and get better. I’m sorry that, at the time of publication, I do not know of a truer way to express myself on this one.**
In the USA, we have supreme dipshits in two political parties made up of uniquely self-serving dipshits, sponsored and funded to elected office by their dipshit peers—most of whom have zero technical experience apart from taking distributions from a family trust fund. These elected self-serving dipshits delegate to self-serving corporations, filled with master delegators.
We see historically wacky and unethically negligent behavior in software, health care, pharmaceuticals, public policy, military strategy, telecommunications, media, and more.
The USA is not unique, this is a global pattern which is creating risk profiles of historic size, impact, moral, and human consequence. This updated culture of non-technical delegators is spinning up global webs of risk so scary it’s hard to talk about.
There was once a time where watching the master craftsperson—his gnarled fingers and his wise brow, her precise technique a thing of ten thousand attempts and divine patience—showed us how to believe that the pursuit of mastery was somehow divine, in a personal and cultural sense. We need to cultivate this narrative again, asap. Our remote office depends on it, our real office depends on it, but more importantly, the world depends on it.
Enough of this nonsense. If you hear one more irresponsible dipshit tell you to defer to their self-delegated “experts,” tell them to kick rocks.