If you look around the corporate landscape today, you’ll notice a disturbing trend: management is actively trying to strangle the productivity out of their teams.
Don't let the recent push for AI by management to "increase productivity" fool you. They don't care about effectiveness, they care about following the trends.
I’ve gone into contract after contract and seen the exact same disease. You have organizations over-managing their people, refusing to do the non-intuitive (or even the blatantly obvious) things required to improve team efficiency. You are surrounded by people who worship safety and HR as primary, a mindset that is fundamentally misaligned with reality and real value creation. (Hint to the managers, team morale, which is something within your sphere of influence, has more impacts than just about anything else).
This post is about what to do when your environment doesn't want to do the right thing. It’s about how to make yourself (and your team mates) intensely productive even when the broader organization is begging to be average.
The 2020 Serverless Rebellion
Let me tell you a story.
At the very beginning of 2020, I was hired onto a new project. The customer had hired us to "do stuff," but they had absolutely no idea what they were doing. They didn't really have a software team; it was a mixed engineering group, and there were exactly two software developers—me and one other guy.
When I got there, it was the classic bureaucratic nightmare. No telework. No proper development desktops. We basically had nothing. At the time, all the different teams were developing and deploying natively on EC2s or running containers in some massive, shared platform the customer tightly controlled.
I took one look at our team size and knew the truth: we didn’t have enough people to manage VMs or endlessly running processes and actually build the software at the same time. Nobody ever does.
So, I made a decision. We were going to embrace serverless and stateless technologies. Specifically "we" meant, I'm doing it, and I'll explain my actions LATER.
We needed a system that could run without us having to babysit it. Eventually, we added in a few stateful data models where necessary, but even they were temporary (Dynamo TTL, so we didn't have to manage long-term databases and all the administrative bloat that comes with them.)
Six years later, that architectural decision proved to be a complete enabler.
But here is the most important part of the story: I never asked for permission to do it and nobody ever asked me to make decisions and innovate.
I simply did it.
I only told people we were doing it after the fact. For years, I kept running into a customer who wanted to tightly control what we were working on, yet they were operating at a high level without understanding the ground-level complexities of building an effective, efficient development environment and enable us to give them what they wanted. Most modern "leaders" are just corporate functionaries and as a result don’t know what it takes to actually do the work.
When you're afraid, you're not effective.
The Playbook: How to Subvert the Bullshit
If you are a doer, you are going to find yourself in environments plagued with efficiency issues driven entirely by "people stuff." If that is your reality, you have to play people games. You have to build a bag of tricks.
Entrepreneurs understand this fundamental truth: whatever the rules are, they are for other people. It’s not that rules are inherently bad, but environments that "require asking permission first" are environments that growth ultimately stops, decline happens, and even more decline will occur.
Here is exactly how you push through the bureaucracy and get things done:
1. Build the Smokescreen
I eventually created a cultural standard amongst our development team to do things behind the scenes. We got our management to unknowingly play blocker for us at first, and then eventually explicitly.
We would actively extend out how long certain tasks would take. We didn't do this so we could slack off and do no work; we did it because we needed the unmanaged time to do the real work that needed to be done without asking permission. If you are trying to do the right thing, you likely have to bypass alot of stupid fuckers. As long as you aren't doing anything illegal such as stealing money and time, do it. I promise you, in the long term, you and everybody around you will benefit.
2. Win the Team, Ignore the Functionaries
You have to pick your battles. Yes, in the big picture, you might want to change how the entire organization does business, but I have to warn you: it may not be worth the collateral damage. What is worth it is having a massive impact on your immediate team. You win your team over by doing things better, doing them faster, and creating innovative solutions. You don't even have to point it out. When you take charge and do awesome things, the environment naturally changes to being more effective. One day, people will just get it. Then, and only then, should you start to "move up." Now you have experience, true confidence, and a track record of success that you can speak about.
This is just a lesson in life. Stop trying to change "the world". Change your actual world. Your lived experience, moment to moment. When you start doing it, one day you look around and see the world like Neo saw the matrix (at the end). You see that people you thought were stronger than you, aren't. They're actually afraid, and will go with the person who is most confident about the direction.
Neo, just, saw it. He couldn't be explained it. He couldn't be told it, he did, and then he just... saw it. That's how it works.
Just take action, think later.
3. Weaponize Trust
You gain trust by taking extreme ownership. Most people refuse to take ownership because they are terrified of liabilities. We were not built to endlessly obsess over liabilities; that is secondary to actually executing the mission. Tell management overtly: "There are inefficiencies in how we are doing things. I need you to provide defense and keep "them" out of our details so I can fix this, because right now, it is costing us." When you build trust, you don't have to explain exactly what you are doing in the shadows. You just deliver the results.
Once you've gained trust, you can use it. Influence wasn't meant to be pooled together and do nothing. But you can't do anything without influence. Gain it, then cash it in.
The Anti-Leadership Myth: "I Can't Care More Than They Do"
I was talking to a friend on that same 2020 contract, and he said something that floored me. He said, "I can't care about their thing more than they do."
That is the most anti-leadership/effectiveness thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
I understand the logic. For a project to be ultimately successful, the participants have to care, and there are hard limits when senior management just doesn't give a damn. But the idea that your personal level of care should be artificially capped at one notch below the client's is a loser's mentality. This mentality will stick with you every where you go, and will infect everything you do or really that you won't do.
When somebody comes in, takes ownership, and cares about the thing more than anyone else in the room, the universe bends to them. Things start to go that person's way. The success of a project depends highly on how much the participants care. Be the one who cares the most. Not just about the success of the project, but the people involved. Yes, I know I'm saying this to developers, and people would rather sit in a closet and play with computers in the dark (I know I would), but this comes from observed reality and lived experience.
Life's a lot better when you are an active player in your life rather than a recipient of whatever comes your way.
Stress-Test Your Beliefs with Action
When you get that inkling of what the right thing to do is, that is your opportunity to stick your neck out.
Will you get hurt in the process? Yes. But it’s worth it. Lukewarm beliefs are epistemically useless; if you never act on your beliefs, you never find out if they are true or bullshit.
Sticking your neck out builds the muscle and the capability to act despite anything getting in your way.
In pains me to see people using excuses. I'll save a deep dive into this for another post, but for me personally it's like watching a person who thinks WWE is real, whos in their 30s. It's ugly and very clear they hadn't quite figured it out yet.
The system, and all the managers who are afraid for their corporate lives, will try to impose their fear on you. But you are a doer. You do not have time for their fear. You have too much to build in yourself to let these guardians of the establishment get in yours (and everyone elses) way.
I'm going to be frank, I don't give a shit about the people whose job is to be a barrier. Let them smoke their hopium in the clouds. Everywhere you look, this kind of bureaucracy is taking the entire system down. Refuse to be a part of it.
(This isn't a call to "quit" or "fight the system", but rather, reject systemic mediocrity, by embracing being really good at what you do.)
Seek, Knock, and Own Your Experience
Recently, I was brought onto a contract where the person running it had absolutely no idea what they were doing. The last time they touched technology was twenty years ago, doing little scripts in a completely different environment. I had to step in and kindly, but firmly, show them exactly what we should be doing and why. I am the person cracking their outdated concept of reality, and I can do that because I own my experience.
It takes time to build this weight. In my first five to seven years as a developer, I did a ton of R&D, but I didn't have real gravity until years seven through ten. When I left, started a company, and came back to the software space, I came back as a regular software engineer—but I absolutely owned that team. It wasn't just my technical skills; it was my ability to own the problem set and attack it with a fervor that other people didn't even come close to possessing. As a result, the teams productivity increased, and felt a little bit more sense of "urgency" to get things done. (No it didn't change their entire perspective and everything was sunshine and rainbows, but the bar was raised).
The scriptures tell us: "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you."
This is not a passive suggestion. This is a clear description about how the world ACTUALLY works. It’s a statement about seeking, acting, and executing—not waiting, complaining, and being concerned.
Your own life will not wait. Whatever enterprise you are engaged in, you need to apply your absolute fullest to it, even if the organization doesn't deserve it. You need to step up for yourself. Real innovation happens when no one is asking for it. If you wait for the official corporate "R&D" department to greenlight your ideas, you will die waiting.
Stop asking permission. Bypass the roadblocks. Build the muscle. Knock on the door, and if they won't open it, take it off the hinges.
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