I have run into many people that work for companies, where vendor relationships are based on That Guy With the Really Good Coke at Burning Man, or, in more staid organizations, That Guy With the Prada Pimp Suit at the Country Club.
Many times, the higher-level managers are working on a culture, where they are The Big Decision-Makers, With A True Knowledge of The Big Picture, and everyone else is an interchangeable peon.
This is usually reinforced by their peers, and the culture is embedded like a tick. Pretty much impossible to dislodge, without damaging the entire company.
>I have run into many people that work for companies, where vendor relationships are based on That Guy With the Really Good Coke at Burning Man
This is the cynical view, but you're right.
But why does this surprise developers? The more optimistic view is: people want to work with people they like. I want to work with people I like.
There's a trope in the tech world of the ornery IT guy that everyone tolerates because he's smart. Well, a lot of times these people aren't as smart as they think they are, and will be the first to be replaced when it's possible. Life is too short to work with these kinds of people.
I believe in teams. I was a manager, for many years, and having a strong, healthy team was of paramount importance.
My team was pretty damn good. Almost everyone in it had decades of software development experience, but it was also difficult to manage. I had to deal with every member, individually, and had to sometimes be Bad Cop, but it worked.
When I interviewed candidates, I don't think I ever made a technical mistake, but I did hire people that broke the team, and they didn't last.
Teams are how we do big stuff. Individuals can be extremely productive, but there's an upper limit to how much they can do. If you can get a good team working, there's really no limit.
Being self-centered, dishonest, not taking responsibility, blaming others, etc.
Each person had to be very reliable, and that included admitting challenges, and asking for help, as long as it wasn't asking all the time.
Selfishness, where they would not compromise for the team, was a dealbreaker.
I gave each of my engineers a great deal of agency, and expected them to deliver, as opposed to having to ride them. They were grown-ups, and I needed them to act as if they were.
Personal Integrity and Honesty was a big deal for me, as was a sense of accountability.
Most managers "cop out," and only hire people that "fit the culture."
The problem is that homogeneity breeds mediocrity. If you want good, innovative stuff, you need to hire and manage people that don't "fit the mold." That's a challenge.
Everyone seems to get caught up on technical merit, but a good tech can generally be trained to do anything. During my tenure (almost 27 years, 25, as a manager), we went through many iterations of technology, programming languages, etc.
When we want a good, heterogeneous team, we need to hire for team cohesiveness, as well as technical merit. Almost no one we hired was able to just do the job, out of the starting gate. The tech was too specialized. We needed people that could be trained, and that would stay around (When they rolled up my team, the person with the least tenure had a decade).
Which points a larger problem: The vast majority of people are incapable of wisely handling the complexities of modern life.
>Pretty much impossible to dislodge, without damaging the entire company.
You are correct, the only way a good company can be built (if it can be built) is ground up.
In practice this does not happen. A sort of boiling frog phenomenon. The creep sets in because the founders hired or promoted people who have better soft skills (and sometime low on principles and hard skill) over people with hard skills. Sieving and assessing multitudes of prospective candidates for a job is a very time consuming, exhausting work, and people are often willing to settle for less, especially if the organization is really successful and the founders feel the need to expand rapidly.
I have run into many people that work for companies, where vendor relationships are based on That Guy With the Really Good Coke at Burning Man, or, in more staid organizations, That Guy With the Prada Pimp Suit at the Country Club.
Many times, the higher-level managers are working on a culture, where they are The Big Decision-Makers, With A True Knowledge of The Big Picture, and everyone else is an interchangeable peon.
This is usually reinforced by their peers, and the culture is embedded like a tick. Pretty much impossible to dislodge, without damaging the entire company.