Comment by ratorx
12 hours ago
Team lead manages the overall direction of the team (and is possibly the expert on some portions), but for an individual subsystem a senior engineer might be the expert.
For work coming from outside the team, it’s sort of upto your management chain and team lead to prioritise. But for internally driven work (tech debt reduction, reliability/efficiency improvements etc) often the senior engineer has a better idea of the priorities for their area of expertise.
Prioritisation between the two is often a bit more collaborative and as a senior engineer you have to justify why thing X is super critical (not just propose that thing X needs to be done).
I view the goal of managers + lead as more balancing the various things the team could be doing (especially externally) and the goal of a senior engineer is to be an input to the process for a specific system they know most about.
I agree, but I think that input is limited to unopinionated information about the technical impact or user-facing impact of each task.
I don't think it can be said that senior engineers persuade their leaders to take one position or the other, because you can't really argue against a political or financial decision using technical or altruistic arguments, especially when you have no access to the political or financial context in which these decisions are made. In those conversations, "we need to do this for the good of the business" is an unbeatable move.
I guess this is also a matter of organisational policy and how much power individual teams/organisational units have.
I would imagine mature organisations without serious short/medium term existential risk due to product features may build some push back mechanisms to defend against the inherent cost of maintaining existing business (ie prioritising tech debt to avoid outages etc).
In general, it is a probably a mix of the two - even if there is a mandate from up high, things are typically arranged so that it can only occupy X% of a team’s capacity in normal operation etc, with at least some amount “protected” for things the team thinks are important. Of course, this is not the case everywhere and a specific demand might require “all hands on deck”, but to me that seems like a short-sighted decision without an extremely good reason.
In my 30 years in industry -- "we need to do this for the good of the business" has come up maybe a dozen times, tops. Things are generally much more open to debate with different perspectives, including things like feasibility. Every blue moon you'll get "GDPR is here... this MUST be done". But for 99% of the work there's a reasonable argument for a range of work to get prioritized.
When working as a senior engineer, I've never been given enough business context to confidently say, for example, "this stakeholder isn't important enough to justify such a tight deadline". Doesn't that leave the business side of things as a mysterious black box? You can't do much more than report "meeting that deadline would create ruinous amounts of technical debt", and then pray that your leader has kept some alternatives open.