Tech Leadership

Been interviewing with various tech leadership options, and I'm noticing some patterns:

  1. Explicit rejection of people skills as a quality worth considering in the hiring process
  2. Hard requirement of sophisticated backend development experience, regardless of the amount of time actually spent doing backend development (could be 0%, doesn’t seem to matter)
  3. Front end lead positions almost exclusively consist of "please help us clean up the mess our full stack / backend devs left us".
  4. A profound, systemic failure in considering the end user in almost any aspect of the development process.
  5. UI/UX Design, even for design system positions, is not mentioned.
  6. HTML/CSS/JS skill is no longer a contributing factor to the hiring process. It's exclusively expertise with a framework (React) plus its tools (Typescript).

If I wanted to hire for someone as anti-social as possible without openly discriminating against social people, I would probably use an approach like this. At the end of the day, software exists to be used by people. Why are engineers so hostile to this basic tenet? I cannot understand engineers treating people actually using the software they built as a side effect rather than the goal.

This is anecdotal experience, obviously. If you’re wondering why your software sucks and why tech C-level people sound out of touch with reality, this is part of the problem. These are the people we’re pushing upward. What is the point of any kind of work if it’s not to work with people, with the end of improving the lives of society? I dunno, I miss making software that helps people. I miss hearing from a customer that I made their life easier, that I made them happier. I miss working with people that also wanted that. I don’t even know why the anti-social engineers continue to do this work. Obsessed with code, beautiful, elegant code, but it’s always rushed, never planned, always falling apart at the seams. It sucks to look at, it sucks to work with, I don’t get the appeal other than getting to talk to a computer all day instead of people (even though you literally can’t do your job that well if you avoid that but hey whatever).

Nothing against anti-social engineers really, there’s plenty of people that prefer to just sit at a spot quietly day after day and do the work, I respect that. But leadership is social, by nature. As a leader, your architecture is brought to life by your coworkers. You can get the work done by giving them orders and treating them like extensions of yourself, but it doesn’t really compare to bringing out the best of what each of them have to offer, to collaborate and feed off each other, ultimately creating something that never would have happened on your own. There’s a lot of beauty and satisfaction in that. If you don’t want to be a people person, can you at least hire a people person to run the team? What are we doing here?