I work in a company where we say that everyone is an expert (and to a very large extent this is really true). We create teams of experts, including more business savvy people. Everyone respects each others expertise and makes sure they can apply it as best as possible. We don’t infringe upon each other’s expertise. We might ask another expert about the why or the how, but we should not assume we know better. Obviously this happens sometimes, but then we remind each other that we’re all experts and that an engineer wouldn’t like to be told by marketing how to do their job either.
I think this fits nicely with ‘stay in your lane’ and actually makes it easy to remind people to do so. It’s in the core values of the company that people excel in their lane and cooperate with people in other lanes.
Engineers like to say that business people should get out of the way and let the engineers to their job, but ask yourself how many engineers choose to supervise other human beings. Somebody has to do the hard job of dealing with employee psychology all day long. It’s a messy, “up to your armpits in other people’s lives all day long” kind of job.
You need people who are actually GOOD at that, with all the emotional intelligence it implies, if you want a workplace that doesn’t completely suck.
I work in a company where we say that everyone is an expert (and to a very large extent this is really true). We create teams of experts, including more business savvy people. Everyone respects each others expertise and makes sure they can apply it as best as possible. We don’t infringe upon each other’s expertise. We might ask another expert about the why or the how, but we should not assume we know better. Obviously this happens sometimes, but then we remind each other that we’re all experts and that an engineer wouldn’t like to be told by marketing how to do their job either.
I think this fits nicely with ‘stay in your lane’ and actually makes it easy to remind people to do so. It’s in the core values of the company that people excel in their lane and cooperate with people in other lanes.
Engineers like to say that business people should get out of the way and let the engineers to their job, but ask yourself how many engineers choose to supervise other human beings. Somebody has to do the hard job of dealing with employee psychology all day long. It’s a messy, “up to your armpits in other people’s lives all day long” kind of job.
You need people who are actually GOOD at that, with all the emotional intelligence it implies, if you want a workplace that doesn’t completely suck.