Pragmatism

On today's episode of random thoughts, practicality wins the crown.

I have noticed a trend in many different size companies of chasing ideal theoretical maxima without really staying realistic. Unfortunately, decisions coming from these "visions" can vary dramatically based on the size of the company. I was guilty of this in some earlier startup experience. I think part of it was driven by the fact that I drank the cool-aid. I was knee-deep learning patterns and best practices and I convinced the team to follow them religiously.

I promise I had good intentions! At the time we were lacking code reviews (small team moving super fast and all). My goal was to minimize tech debt by aligning on state management in our React-based app. I documented in a README how the team should have gone about managing state and, with surprisingly no push back, everyone agreed. I like to believe that others just didn't have the energy to criticize the plan constructively so they went along with it, trusting my intuition.

What I did well was encouraging people to discuss drawbacks as soon as they found any, and to reach out if something just didn't make a lot of sense. Things went pretty smoothly until our most speedy developer called me up for some questions. Initially the back and forth was quite productive, I was able to cover some areas that he was unfamiliar with. Things went along fine until he second-guessed a specific pattern (I really wish I remember what it was). After some back and forth, I kind of ran out of satisfying answers. I caved and pat myself on the back for staying open-minded. Even though, at the time, I spent countless hours in React-land, my dream for the perfect state management didn't come fully to fruition. I just didn't encounter enough pain points to realize that some of the guidelines were, in the end, not very pragmatic. The team was suffering from it so we quickly adjusted.

This approach scales terribly. As teams grow bigger and communication channels are not as direct, enforcing ideal "visions" of what the future should look like might be too far from reality. I find it helpful to embrace the imperfections. Not everything will go according to plans, being resilient plays an important part here. Additionally, the bigger the company, the more communication should happen with representatives of teams that would be affected.

Thoughts

I'm not going to pretend I have a definitive answer to this. I don't find it necessarily bad to start from a vision of a perfectly crafted future as long as it eventually adapts to practical problem-solving. I have seen time and time again grandiose plans leading to nothing. I have seen frustration because of the excessive detachment from reality by authors of these plans.

If you witness something along those lines or if you're an author, you have to talk to people on the field in order to yield the best outcome for that initiative. The larger the company the higher the risk that those changes might be very hard to reverse. Be also open to talk more closely with few select teams and, if the plan is quite large, don't hesitate to run a pilot program to understand which gaps are there. Great leaders are open to big changes as long as they are focused on positive outcomes rather than enforcing a standardization for the sake of it.