Seventeen

The best leaders are those the people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised.
If you don't trust the people,
they will become untrustworthy.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When she has accomplished her task,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"

Being a senior software engineer is hard. You’re expected to contribute and have impact, but at the same time, much of what you’re expected to do sounds an awful lot like doing nothing. I don’t mean to say I do nothing, but how do you quantify indirect impact through other people except by assigning your words to their actions?

Pattern matching.

Repetition.

It’s about making a story that can pointed to as stationary in time, repeatedly throughout time.

It’s about having a mark.

It’s about making that mark repeatedly.

And then teaching other people to make that mark.

Eventually it’s about teaching other people to teach other people to make that mark.

That’s where this book comes in.

I’ll be perfectly transparent: I don’t always know how to have impact; when I feel this way, I write for clarity. Tonight I recognize that writing is the best way to have impact. I usually write for me.

Not tonight.

I had an epiphany tonight that’s too good to not share: The best way I can have impact at work is not to enforce my ideas, but to take the awesome team I work with and encourage them to grow in ways that are amenable to long term health.

It’s about identifying their marks.

It’s about teaching them to make their mark.

It’s about teaching them to do it repeatedly.

I’m a bit lucky here. When you’re blessed with good co-workers there’s not much heavy lifting to do. Instead, I’m left feeling imposter syndrome in the best of ways. I have a Ph.D. in distributed systems from an Ivy League university and fresh undergrads regularly blow me away with the insightfulness of seemingly innocuous or basic questions. The level at which people think these days is truly outstanding.

Either that or Chroma is a special place to work.

So why start on chapter 17 of the Tao Te Ching?

Leadership.

Meta-leadership

A fixed point of leadership.

It’s about teaching others to identify marks.

it’s about teaching others to grow a mark.

In short, it starts a dialogue about leadership. Senior leaders need to heed the warnings here. Too often, people trying to be senior try to lead through force, dictate, mandate. Instead, they should lead through supporting others, by being approachable, by embodying the values they want to instill in others.

Monkey see, monkey do.

It’s about putting out into the world that which you want to receive.

The universe has a way of bringing together like-minded people if only because they’re the only people who can understand each other. Embodying the actions, thoughts, and ideas one wants to cultivate is the most sure fire way to reinforce those learnings in others. It’s not the most direct way to get what one wants on a short time scale. There’s a training period in which one has to admit room for loss and growth.

To accelerate this process, the best senior engineers are ones that know how to make others grow.

It’s about teaching a process.

It’s about forking that process.