Influence Without Authority
Photo by Sammy Williams on Unsplash Back in 2015 I built a new payments processing backend with a small team of engineers. The new system worked very well but by 2020 it became clear to me that it needs a major overhaul to keep up with the demands of a growing business moving billions of dollars every year. At the time I was working for a company that practiced promotion-oriented culture which rewards people for shipping new services and creating new features, not for fixing old systems or making them run better. This meant that it was much more beneficial for everyone with authority over the future of this system to focus on other things. Building new features, making new integrations, or creating new ancillary systems to cover up issues with the payments processor were all better for engineers’ and product managers’ careers than actually rebuilding the aging system. It didn’t matter how much I argued or tried to convince the powers that be that rebuilding the system will unlock a lot of potential and improve most of the metrics we all cared about in the long term. There always seemed to be more pressing short term needs that took precedence. ...