Item — HN Reader

His logic for staying "out of the way" is:

"The work was going to be successful without me; he’s a Wolf."

This is the biggest pile of crap I have ever heard. Projects and ideas being thought up by "wolves" that are incredible so often die because of lack of support from management. If I talked to a senior leader about an idea and they thought it was jaw droppingly good, and their only resulting action was to tell my boss, "oh yeah, that thing x is working is interesting", during a prescheduled meeting, I would never have faith in that person again.

Good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it. The most capable "1000x" engineer in the world can never achieve anything if someone better at talking has the mic.

edit: spelling

3 comments

The wolf and Rands are next level.

> Good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it.

Good work does speak for itself. The work speaks directly to other like minded engineers who "get it" and spread the word.

Nobody in authority needs to do any selling or mandating for the kind of work and the kind of person Rands is talking about here.

Have you never seen a good project or idea, that every engineer who saw it thought was awesome, die because it wasn't sold well to authority?

Authority may not have to sell or mandate for that person to get their work done but supporting good ideas and effective people is what authority should be doing.

No I haven’t. I’ve also deliberately avoided the types of places where that happens throughout my entire career.

Those types of ideas and projects have no need for the approval of authority. They are their own authority.

If a person in authority ends such a project or idea then the engineering culture at that organization is so completely broken the best path is to leave.

Understood, I think we are coming from different environments.

Edit: I wish I had access to ones more like yours.

It's not the biggest pile of crap, I'd say it's... let's see... currently the 27th biggest, but that's subject to change since I have several meetings coming up this week.

I’ve had the pleasure of managing a wolf.

Respectfully, if that’s your mindset then I think the problem lies with you and not with the manager.

> good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it

The absolute best way to get a shitload of people to speak for it is to get a shitload of people to use it. The best way to get them to use it is to make it _so good_ they use it naturally. Using the test framework from the article as an example - a period of time passed between the meeting and the work actually being recognised. The manager clearly gave the right feedback to keep working on it rather than “I’m not sure - your other thing is quite important too”. The sign of a good wolf is someone who can tell the difference between “this isn’t a good idea” and “there’s a process to be followed to find out if there’s a good idea”. Ignoring the first one is suicide, but ignoring the second one is what makes you succeed.

The best wolves I know define their own process to find out if the idea is good and ignore all externally imposed processes that get in their way.