It can be a bit of a double edged sword, especially in startups.
I've been on the leadership side of this where you suddenly realize it's vitally important to your growth that you can give away the things you're doing day to day - unblocking people when they get stuck has a higher ROI than doing it yourself even if you'd do it better/faster because it scales more.
But I saw this very differently at an early stage company where our being successful led to people being hired to do all the interesting areas I had been growing into - if someone has Legos anxiety it may very well be because they've realized that this growth is not going to work well for them.
The ability for people to give away their Legos is one of the most important ways I guage an organization's health. If I'm in an established organization and I see a VP or director prescribing technical solutions to engineering problems, it's usually an indicator that:
- the leader cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work. This signals a lack of maturity.
- there is some other serious organizational problem preventing delegation from happening (weak engineering IC hires, lack of clear processes and ownership patterns, etc)
I don't think "engineering work" and "leadership work" should be a dichotomy, especially if you're trying to follow a promote-from-within mentality.
Sure, after N years, you might be career-tracked from development into management, but you probably also know where all the bodies are buried. If you're not doing code reviews, trying to mentor new developers, or just butting in and saying "We tried that in 2006 and it has huge non-obvious compliance/performance/maintainability costs!", it lets all that knowledge go to waste.
Was Henry Ford a bad CEO? I have more faith in a CEO that's involved to a degree and understands the engineering side as opposed to some out of touch MBA.
> If I'm in an established organization and I see a VP or director prescribing technical solutions to engineering problems
That 'established' part is key because early stage companies require wearing so many hats. And knowing when and to whom to let something go it's crucial IME.
There are some bounds on this, I’ve seen plenty of situations where VPs may not be prescribing technical solutions because they are so far out of touch they can’t even understand the solution options in play.
This is a fantastic article and I have shared it with many, many engineers in the past. It's one of those totally counterintuitive things about career growth. It's all about accumulating scope as one grows into a senior-level role. Then everything flips, and one's seniority tends to grow proportional to the amount of scope one gives away (therefore enabling others to work on larger-scope initiatives). Applies to managers as well as individual contributors.
This article was shared with me in an organization that was scaling incredibly quickly; it was extremely helpful. The mantra, "give away your legos" has echoed for me since.
The first time I was in management, I failed because I couldn’t give away my LEGOs. I wanted to continue to micro-manage and still do the stuff I had done as an IC and wasn’t ready to trust the team to do things in my place. My fear was that things wouldn’t be done as well (which may have been true, although that doesn’t mean that wouldn’t have changed over time) and I wasn’t able to let go and focus on the stuff I needed to focus on as a leader. I failed.
I learned from that experience and the next time I was in management (and continuing today), I was so much better at letting things go, trusting my team to get stuff done, and focusing on the next challenge. That doesn’t mean you aren’t sometimes wistful or nervous, but I know for me, I had to learn to trust people to get things done and be OK even when things weren’t done exactly as I would do them.
As a group grows, what is the general size, time, or other markers of maturity where this transition to “LEGO disavowal” begins to pay off?
I’m on a small team in ag automation that is growing/maturing slowly, and I'm curious when this needs to happen in earnest. Frankly, we’ve struggled with the little turnover we’ve had.
Such an insightful article. The definition of politics being at the inflection point of when people switch from indexing on the interest of the organization to individual and team interest was very helpful.
One thing I might add about scaling teams and growth in general is a bit more meta, which she talks about in a few ways, whereas I would estimate a sense of security is valued at upwards of 30% of your comp.
Some people weight it differently, but when you re-examine wealth as the ability to reasonably plan into the future, it's not just a linear effect of marginal dollars. Working in a high growth environment means giving up the real wealth that is a sense of security.
Your "legos," in the article, are the levers you have that you percieve as securing your ability to plan to still be working there in 6, 12, or 18 months. The growth mentality is that there is no stability and you just learn to manage and extract value from dynamic situations, but that mentality and talent are not always present. To work in startups, you need to source your sense of stability and your ability to plan from somewhere outside the office. This can be a constructive attitude, or it can be frugality, or just maintaining your openness to opportunity elsewhere, but what seems to cause that inflection point during growth isn't so much the speed of growth, but whether you can provide your teams with the ability to maintain that security to plan for themselves as individuals. It's similar to offering her colleague something with a multiple on importance to what she was working on to get her to delegate her current queue. That let her plan, and secured her perception of her future.
That "new job" is picking up new legos. Looking at what problems there are to solve. Which legos would fit the best.
In that article, point about "Fire people. Just do it!" means, that if there is some part of business that does not generate enough profit or other success, those people need to be "fired" or they should find another job in same or other company, so that job would generate enough profit. If those people are not "fired", then company will get less profit or go bankcrupt.
That "new job" depends, what customers actually need the most. Customers could say "faster horse" but can not imagine "auto" or other most efficient, easiest to use solution.
Sometimes with those legos, it's about picking only most important in use legos, making them work together, and then making many groups of legos working together, and groups of groups, while each lego has a failsafe way to recover from possible error scenarios.
Sometimes it's looking at what some most advanced competitors are doing, and imagining what way it could be hugely improved and simplified. Even better, going in completely different direction with more advanced solution, and leading the way.
Point with legos is, to not be too emotional about changing legos, job contents, etc. If there is a way to solve something completely, automate oneself away from job, and move to bigger different role with more advanced legos, just do it. With more advanced legos, it's possible to solve bigger problems.
Therein lies the rub. I've never had a manager either suggest or provide a new opportunity to me while they were encouraging me to hand off my work to someone else.
The Lego's worth keeping either impossible to give away or working with the recipient of the Lego is going to be far more rewarding than the Lego itself.
In Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and British/Australian/NZ English, LEGO is an uncountable noun like "rice" or "sand". The Danish LEGO company used to advocate this usage by printing the following on their sets:
"Dear Parents and Children
LEGO® is a brand name that is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely appreciate your help in keeping it special by referring to our bricks as "LEGO Bricks or Toys" and not just "LEGOS". By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand that stands for quality the world over." [1]
So the singular form is clearly the manufacturer's intention, but "Legos" is widely used in North America and is just one of those words that grates if you haven't grown up with it. For whatever reason I have the same reaction when the Poms say "kit" instead of "equipment".
When you have completely given away everything you are responsible for, then you are now free to pick up all of your boss's responsibilities. So i guess the sign is, your boss gets promoted, you get promoted into their job and so on.
It is an interesting article, but the hardest thing to me is accepting the premise: why do we want "scaling startups" in the first place?
As a consumer, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a company that can make my life better or deliver better services because of its size.
As an engineer, I'd rather work in an organization that can be more efficient and profitable by being super-focused in the core business and commodifying/outsourcing/open sourcing everything else. I get depressed thinking about all the brainpower that we waste by having these huge corporations competing for market share in areas that would benefit immediately from collaboration/interoperability/open standards. Google and its 20 different messaging solutions come to mind, but I also don't forget that Skype was sold by 7 billion dollars and then wasted away. And history likely repeating itself with Discord.
As an entrepreneur, I'd rather have a Basecamp-style company with < 50 people and constantly profitable over an unicorn where I'd have little to no control and would be dependent on VC money.
Every day I am getting more and more convinced that the problems of Capitalism could be mitigated by not allowing corporations over a certain size. Over 150 headcount? Instead of fighting to get the company culture in place, just break it apart.
> As a consumer, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a company that can make my life better or deliver better services because of its size.
Please let me know if I'm mis-understanding this sentence, but there are quite a few companies that confer benefits to consumers as a result of their size. Think of Walmart, Amazon, any ride-sharing company, any airline, any carmaker, etc. Those are all examples of business models whose value proposition is predicated on the scale of their operations.
Granted, not every industry or company depends on scale, but plenty of them do. Business is a big tent, and different industries have different requirements for entry. It's exceedingly unlikely that the COVID mRNA vaccine could have been invented by a company with the scale or capitalization of a Basecamp.
Again, let me know if I'm misunderstanding the point you made.
The concept of a scaling startup is used to juice the internal brainwash so that everyone feels they are 1) part of a successful company and 2) destined for career growth.
There are many companies that label themselves as startups despite not actually being startups I would also expect that many of those companies also consider themselves to be 'scaling startups' as well.
[+] [-] 1235711|4 years ago|reply
I've been on the leadership side of this where you suddenly realize it's vitally important to your growth that you can give away the things you're doing day to day - unblocking people when they get stuck has a higher ROI than doing it yourself even if you'd do it better/faster because it scales more.
But I saw this very differently at an early stage company where our being successful led to people being hired to do all the interesting areas I had been growing into - if someone has Legos anxiety it may very well be because they've realized that this growth is not going to work well for them.
[+] [-] wanderer2323|4 years ago|reply
Tomorrow he would like to quickly "fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more" [0].
Double-edged sword indeed. To be fair to the OP, they seem to be writing from the position inside the FAANG, and there it's a much safer proposition.
[0] https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s...
[+] [-] ferdowsi|4 years ago|reply
- the leader cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work. This signals a lack of maturity.
- there is some other serious organizational problem preventing delegation from happening (weak engineering IC hires, lack of clear processes and ownership patterns, etc)
[+] [-] hakfoo|4 years ago|reply
Sure, after N years, you might be career-tracked from development into management, but you probably also know where all the bodies are buried. If you're not doing code reviews, trying to mentor new developers, or just butting in and saying "We tried that in 2006 and it has huge non-obvious compliance/performance/maintainability costs!", it lets all that knowledge go to waste.
[+] [-] jimmaswell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulryanrogers|4 years ago|reply
That 'established' part is key because early stage companies require wearing so many hats. And knowing when and to whom to let something go it's crucial IME.
[+] [-] fieldcny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otabdeveloper4|4 years ago|reply
But the reality today is that most companies simply cannot afford to hire strong engineers across the board for economic supply-and-demand reasons.
You have to work within the bounds of possibility, and yes, that sometimes means that people have to wear multiple hats.
[+] [-] romanhn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ISL|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|4 years ago|reply
I learned from that experience and the next time I was in management (and continuing today), I was so much better at letting things go, trusting my team to get stuff done, and focusing on the next challenge. That doesn’t mean you aren’t sometimes wistful or nervous, but I know for me, I had to learn to trust people to get things done and be OK even when things weren’t done exactly as I would do them.
[+] [-] travisgriggs|4 years ago|reply
I’m on a small team in ag automation that is growing/maturing slowly, and I'm curious when this needs to happen in earnest. Frankly, we’ve struggled with the little turnover we’ve had.
[+] [-] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
One thing I might add about scaling teams and growth in general is a bit more meta, which she talks about in a few ways, whereas I would estimate a sense of security is valued at upwards of 30% of your comp.
Some people weight it differently, but when you re-examine wealth as the ability to reasonably plan into the future, it's not just a linear effect of marginal dollars. Working in a high growth environment means giving up the real wealth that is a sense of security.
Your "legos," in the article, are the levers you have that you percieve as securing your ability to plan to still be working there in 6, 12, or 18 months. The growth mentality is that there is no stability and you just learn to manage and extract value from dynamic situations, but that mentality and talent are not always present. To work in startups, you need to source your sense of stability and your ability to plan from somewhere outside the office. This can be a constructive attitude, or it can be frugality, or just maintaining your openness to opportunity elsewhere, but what seems to cause that inflection point during growth isn't so much the speed of growth, but whether you can provide your teams with the ability to maintain that security to plan for themselves as individuals. It's similar to offering her colleague something with a multiple on importance to what she was working on to get her to delegate her current queue. That let her plan, and secured her perception of her future.
[+] [-] ChrisRR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notjustanymike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xet7|4 years ago|reply
Or alternatively:
1. Give one Lego away to someone.
2. That someone messes up something immediately.
3. Take that one Lego back.
4. Repeat 1-3 many times. Thinking, how to help somebody to not just mess up everything? And, is it possible to delegate or grow?
[+] [-] flemhans|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xet7|4 years ago|reply
In that article, point about "Fire people. Just do it!" means, that if there is some part of business that does not generate enough profit or other success, those people need to be "fired" or they should find another job in same or other company, so that job would generate enough profit. If those people are not "fired", then company will get less profit or go bankcrupt.
That "new job" depends, what customers actually need the most. Customers could say "faster horse" but can not imagine "auto" or other most efficient, easiest to use solution.
Sometimes with those legos, it's about picking only most important in use legos, making them work together, and then making many groups of legos working together, and groups of groups, while each lego has a failsafe way to recover from possible error scenarios.
Sometimes it's looking at what some most advanced competitors are doing, and imagining what way it could be hugely improved and simplified. Even better, going in completely different direction with more advanced solution, and leading the way.
Point with legos is, to not be too emotional about changing legos, job contents, etc. If there is a way to solve something completely, automate oneself away from job, and move to bigger different role with more advanced legos, just do it. With more advanced legos, it's possible to solve bigger problems.
[+] [-] itronitron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingMachiavelli|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast76|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjmc|4 years ago|reply
"Dear Parents and Children
LEGO® is a brand name that is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely appreciate your help in keeping it special by referring to our bricks as "LEGO Bricks or Toys" and not just "LEGOS". By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand that stands for quality the world over." [1]
So the singular form is clearly the manufacturer's intention, but "Legos" is widely used in North America and is just one of those words that grates if you haven't grown up with it. For whatever reason I have the same reaction when the Poms say "kit" instead of "equipment".
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10839/what-is-th...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Uehreka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigsausagepizza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tchanglington|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] data_ders|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmchuster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muglug|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rglullis|4 years ago|reply
As a consumer, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a company that can make my life better or deliver better services because of its size.
As an engineer, I'd rather work in an organization that can be more efficient and profitable by being super-focused in the core business and commodifying/outsourcing/open sourcing everything else. I get depressed thinking about all the brainpower that we waste by having these huge corporations competing for market share in areas that would benefit immediately from collaboration/interoperability/open standards. Google and its 20 different messaging solutions come to mind, but I also don't forget that Skype was sold by 7 billion dollars and then wasted away. And history likely repeating itself with Discord.
As an entrepreneur, I'd rather have a Basecamp-style company with < 50 people and constantly profitable over an unicorn where I'd have little to no control and would be dependent on VC money.
Every day I am getting more and more convinced that the problems of Capitalism could be mitigated by not allowing corporations over a certain size. Over 150 headcount? Instead of fighting to get the company culture in place, just break it apart.
[+] [-] toomanyrichies|4 years ago|reply
Please let me know if I'm mis-understanding this sentence, but there are quite a few companies that confer benefits to consumers as a result of their size. Think of Walmart, Amazon, any ride-sharing company, any airline, any carmaker, etc. Those are all examples of business models whose value proposition is predicated on the scale of their operations.
Granted, not every industry or company depends on scale, but plenty of them do. Business is a big tent, and different industries have different requirements for entry. It's exceedingly unlikely that the COVID mRNA vaccine could have been invented by a company with the scale or capitalization of a Basecamp.
Again, let me know if I'm misunderstanding the point you made.
[+] [-] itronitron|4 years ago|reply
There are many companies that label themselves as startups despite not actually being startups I would also expect that many of those companies also consider themselves to be 'scaling startups' as well.
[+] [-] hanoz|4 years ago|reply
There really aren't. There's just the one Lego.
So many Lego bricks.
[+] [-] bigyikes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labster|4 years ago|reply