I don’t know if Engineers & Ecosystems would be a particularly fun roleplaying game, but I have been having some fun noodling on the idea of comparing different “types” of engineers and their ecological effect on the organizations they’re in.
This thinking came up because recently a pretty beloved and load bearing engineer where I currently work put in his 2 week notice. Everyone had great things to say about the guy (we’ll call him Guy for now) – he was absolutely the go-to for a number of really essential systems, he really knew his shit, etc., so his departure was of course going to hit hard.
It’s not a hot take to say load bearing engineers create a single point of failure and represent a substantial risk to continuity – bus (or lottery) factor is a pretty common term and these kinds of engineers make that skyrocket. It’s also an obvious path to take that, when you identify someone who is load bearing it’s smart to have them pair with other people in order to spread knowledge and build up more subject matter experts as a result. Let’s add in another thing everyone knows – it’s good to build up processes and practices that prevent load bearing engineers in the first place and emphasize getting subject matter expertise spread throughout an engineering org.
This post isn’t about that kind of stuff – I’ll probably write something at some point to get at how to ACTUALLY do those things in a way that has worked for me in a number of different jobs – this article is about what happens after one of those people leaves.
So, Guy left, and there was wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, “glad to see you moving onto something new but wow we’re screwed” kind of talk. Meetings were had to see how we could get projects he was expected to consult on back on track, estimated dates were pushed back, tasks were cut for time. Ominous rumblings were heard about major potential disruptions in the future when certain work only Guy knew how to do were needed by. There could have been panic – it would be easy to panic.
And yet, when I had one-to-ones a couple of weeks after he left with engineers in my organization, when he was brought up, all of the conversations went fairly similarly: “Guy was great, he really was able to quickly fix a lot of problems, but…”
After the “but…” came: “I got tagged to work on something that was previously only a Guy problem, so I grabbed one of the other engineers and we worked together to start figuring out how to solve it.” And: “People stopped just asking Guy questions in a DM and started asking questions in the channel because nobody knew who to go to – so we all learned.” And: “I just feel like there’s a lot of opportunities for me opening up here.”
Guy wasn’t an asshole, he wasn’t a hero dev, he was just Guy, who had a lot of knowledge and would solve problems he knew how to solve so his teammates could keep working without churning. Guy kept the lights on and did a lot of stuff no one else wanted to – he just didn’t get to bring other people along with him so they could know how to do that too.
For whatever reason, the way my brain works, all these conversations made me think about what I’ve read on invasive species and how they strangle an ecosystem, driving out or even causing the extinction of some species, but when the invader is removed, slots in the ecosystem that had been taken over by the invader were suddenly getting filled by newcomers, leading to a more vibrant and robust balance.
Ok, I’m not saying people are invasive species, and I’m not saying invasive species are bad – I’m just saying that people, like invasive species can totally throw off the ecosystem of their organization. Yeah, we know about bad fits and how one really bad hire can trash a whole team – but I wonder if there’s more to thinking about team dynamics specifically with the ecology lens, and exploring that for building healthier teams and companies.
An example of applying this “ecological” lens to engineering would be to look at what happened when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. The upshot is the wolves got the coyote population in check, fewer coyotes meant less overhunting of other species which in turn began to flourish, and the ecosystem started growing and becoming healthier and more robust. Who or what are the coyotes in your organization? Who or what can function as the wolves? Who or what is being overhunted by your coyotes? If you learn these things, can you make predictions – if we introduce a certain kind of wolf to take out a certain kind of coyote, what rebounds do we expect to see – and how do we know if we introduced the wrong wolf?
I can pretty easily identify an invasive species when I use the ecological lens – but identifying the species you can add into an ecosystem seems a lot more challenging. Ask an Australian about how that works out if you get it wrong.
I don’t actually know if that way of thinking is useful – I’m going to be working up a small experiment in my org with this in mind and see if it leads somewhere useful, and I’ll write about it once I figure out the details and once I get my results.
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