Good soldiers follow orders

Listen to the Costco CEO talk sometimes. He constantly talks about ignoring the board when they tell him to make decisions for short term shareholder gain but long term brand/production damage.

Won’t increase the price of the hotdog or rotisserie chickens (incredible loss leaders), refuses to remove the tuition assistant programs and additional employee benefits, refused to change PTO and holiday pay.

We will see the coming days of brand deterioration. As a SWE it’s already a nightmare looking at company code where companies haven’t prioritized long term value.

My manager and I (I am a tech lead) are currently working on a huge project which will have massive benefits to our company and allow us to respond to management change requests and client needs so much faster. But we can’t tell anyone about it because the second we say we are working on it they will say “don’t focus on that, do these other 10 features because you clearly have time”. When if they give us 3 months to finish this, I could have the 10 features done in a week. Doing them now would take me 6 months…

I’m getting director buy in on some other work as well and seeing him stand up to execs is incredible “we aren’t doing that. Fire me if you want, but that’s a bad move and going to result in a crappy product and half our devs leaving”. Gives me goosebumps, but should be common place. Managers, bosses, CEOs, they are supposed to stand up to the wishy washy desires of the boards and the shareholders for the benefit of the long term success of the company. Not give in to crappy ideas because it looks good on their quarterly bonus.