<story><title>How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire</title><url>https://peterszasz.com/how-to-lead-your-team-when-the-house-is-on-fire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dakiol</author><text>It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive.&lt;p&gt;It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care about is to keep receiving the big pay checks until the ship sinks. Obviously you cannot just mandate “normal mode”, otherwise it wouldn’t look as if everyone is doing their best to keep the company afloat.&lt;p&gt;I hope in 10 years or so, we’ll see “wartime software engineering” with the same eyes we see today Agile and Scrum masters: snake oil.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>screye</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s easy to validate the veracity of &amp;#x27;War mode&amp;#x27;. If survival hinges on a critical deliverable, then the promised reward must be in line with the stakes.&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t have an employer offering a 20% bonus for keeping them alive. It&amp;#x27;s an insultingly low payoff or the crisis was a lie.&lt;p&gt;There is definitely such a thing as wartime software engineering. But such moments offer a clear path to millions of dollars or generational glory. Otherwise, you&amp;#x27;re being fed koolaid.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire</title><url>https://peterszasz.com/how-to-lead-your-team-when-the-house-is-on-fire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dakiol</author><text>It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive.&lt;p&gt;It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care about is to keep receiving the big pay checks until the ship sinks. Obviously you cannot just mandate “normal mode”, otherwise it wouldn’t look as if everyone is doing their best to keep the company afloat.&lt;p&gt;I hope in 10 years or so, we’ll see “wartime software engineering” with the same eyes we see today Agile and Scrum masters: snake oil.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>imetatroll</author><text>Where do you work that you get to avoid agile, scrum, and war mode?  I&amp;#x27;m jealous.  Then again I&amp;#x27;ve always just been stuck working for startups my entire career.  I have a family and desperately need something more stable.</text></comment>