You are right and the biggest asset here are executives and management that can:
1. Think
2. Know what is going on.
3. Effectively get the best from their people.
You want the whole org to engineer the right solution
Any metric that gets abused needs to be found and replaced. Companies should use metrics and be very respectful, curious and also suspicious of them. Even revenue!
I know companies that leave revenue on the table for strategy.
Finally quality is about probabilities. That test you wrote that takes 12s to run and flakes 0.1% adding 10 hours of build time a year ... what is the probability of it detecting a bug and what would the cost of that bug be. You need every engineer to think of that stuff. It is hard stuff to get right or even good.
I worked at places where a religion almost builds. People are hired to maintain those slow expensive unreliable tests! You want to improve that you now have politics!
How do you build 1 and 2? It seems so simple: talk relentlessly about what you’re trying to do as a company, and then figure out how to assign your people most effectively to do that. I’ve seen a number of leaders figure out the messaging and then flat out fail on execution. Once they’ve worked out the vision, they fail to give middle management enough latitude to accomplish it, and the lack of trust flows downhill.
1. Think
2. Know what is going on.
3. Effectively get the best from their people.
You want the whole org to engineer the right solution
Any metric that gets abused needs to be found and replaced. Companies should use metrics and be very respectful, curious and also suspicious of them. Even revenue!
I know companies that leave revenue on the table for strategy.
Finally quality is about probabilities. That test you wrote that takes 12s to run and flakes 0.1% adding 10 hours of build time a year ... what is the probability of it detecting a bug and what would the cost of that bug be. You need every engineer to think of that stuff. It is hard stuff to get right or even good.
I worked at places where a religion almost builds. People are hired to maintain those slow expensive unreliable tests! You want to improve that you now have politics!