[rebeccaskinner]

I’ve been lucky enough to work on a number of teams in my career that are full of brilliant high performing people who are also kind, empathetic, and focused working together to deliver something to customers. These days I’m lucky enough to lead a team like that.

Counter to the article, in my experience these are the hardest teams to manage well because organizations typically aren’t set up to deal with them. Larger companies tend to lean into standardization and making things accessible to average engineers in ways that make high performing teams less effective and often demotivated.

I think this is an overly cynical approach that assumes that you can’t invest and grow people into exceptional engineers. In my experience you can if you are willing to invest in it, and the long term benefit of having more high performing engineers who aren’t being restricted from doing good work outweighs the cost of training and growing people.