Image Courtesy: Choicesdomatter.org
People usually are trained for hierarchy and do not tread beyond theirs, when it comes to decisions. The reasoning here is to ascertain safety in daily work. A similar extension applies to the IT industry as well.
There exists a well-defined structure in most software companies that allows people to expand vertically in their careers. It's generally addressed as climbing up the corporate ladder and flows as follows:
Now I think this is a perfectly valid structure as it allows for clear delegation of roles and responsibilities. It also ensures individuals have ample scope to display the apt team-building and leadership skills at each level as required before moving on to the next one.
But as is the case for a lot of concepts, there exists a counter-point to this one as well. Here, critics often say that a formal structure is a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy, complicates work and encourage flat hierarchies instead. These are wherein one can work anywhere in the above chain but without the "title". Additionally they say leadership is not in the title but more so in actions.
I politely disagree with the counter-point. My oft used example: would we people consider, listen eagerly and be influenced by the opinions of executive leaders like Mark Zuckerburg, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Susan Wojcicki, Padmasree Warrior, Mira Murati if they all were anything else?
Most likely a big No.
On the other hand, we would hardly be aware of the entry-level employees in each of the above leaders's companies let alone know and be influenced by their opinion.
However, my post is not to berate anyone but outline how titles matter. They're vital to let people know who are the decision makers in a formal organisational structure but more importantly why they are so. While with great power comes great responsibility but it gives an individual tremendous influence as well.
This leads me to the interesting question as headlined:
Top comments (4)
They do matter but depends on the scale of the company.
In a early stage startup, everyone does everything to keep moving faster (hustle culture)
Once the startup scales, the maturity of the organisation will grow and it requires formal structure to avoid egos in slowing down the decision making process.
In scaleups, everyone will start to work more towards their role and align the responsibilities based on their role.
That's an interesting viewpoint, Paramanantham.
I concur with you but believe the individual role responsibilities with the designated titles should be streamlined in an early stage itself. Restructuring it when the startup scales to a bigger team can lead to a lot of friction as members used to the hustle culture might find the whole activity very restrictive and oppose it.
What are the practical ways you've experienced to make this formalisation smoother?
Scaling of teams will always bring challenges but usually early stage engineers who stay longer will start to lead either as manager (engineering manager, site reliability lead) or as individual contributors(staff, principal engineers) if the company is growing.
So they will eventually end up hustling within their area or scope or projects assigned to them.
Problems start to arise if product/company growth didn’t scale as fast as the codebase complexity. Then it will be a mess that you will need specialist to clean things up and minimise tech debts but eventually you can’t hire more or promote within since you need to continue building due to budget constraints.
Every teams face different scaling challenges, I just stated one such example here.
There are companies which scaled too fast due to sudden peak in growth and eventually failed to build proper engineering culture to make it work too. They also struggle because of too many individual superstars who can’t act as a team.
Very valid points indeed. This is why formalising structures across engineering like naming conventions, Architecture Decision Records, Pull Request Formats, other applicable workflow standards are better when set and adhered early on.
A stitch in time always save nine and it's more true regarding the reduction of tech debt. Otherwise recurrences of Murphy's Law will be seen in action every now and then.