My director said something offhand on a call recently that stuck with me: promotions codify what's already been happening. By the time someone gets promoted, they've already been doing the work of that next level, and the title is just catching up.
I was reading a post on Hacker News - a list of rules for being a new manager. Good rules. But some of them really are rules for new managers. I've been watching Gotham Chess's "slow-run" series, and it gets at this.
I was on a team that put junior developers into the on-call rotation earlier than we should have. The reasoning made sense on paper - they needed to learn the system, and the senior engineers were stretched thin.
A feature request came through on my team while I was pulled into another project. The ask was simple - expand notifications so everyone on a team got them, not just people who had directly interacted with the item.
A friend of mine told me a story recently that's been stuck in my head. His company made an acquisition, and along with it they inherited the acquired company's infrastructure. Most of it was fine. But one system stood out: a desktop NAS with a couple of drives striped in RAID 0, running the acquired company's financial system.
I watched a video recently about the hidden costs of microservices, and it put words to something I've been thinking about for a while. The video walks through the usual pitch - break the monolith apart, give each function its own service, deploy independently.
The last post in this series ended with a line I wanted to come back to: managers - especially first-line managers in more hierarchical orgs - are not always empowered to change the systems they're operating in. They're functions of those systems too.