Leaders Have Vision

I recently met with a mentor to discuss career development. We chatted for a while, but one of the themes of our conversation stood out to me: Leaders have vision.

Leaders can see down the road past the current feature or story they're working on. Leaders can see the forest for the trees. While some leaders have the opportunity and/or ability to dive deep into the details of the task at hand, they're also able to take a step back and see the bigger picture. They understand that the lines of code that they're writing or helping to write connect with something bigger and are building the future of the software.

Being able to connect the current task to the bigger picture doesn't come naturally to some, but it is a skill that can be developed. I often ask myself, "how does this fit in with the other tasks I know about?" Or, "how are these things related?" Or even, "how does this help our company carry out its vision or meet its goals?" Or a number of similar questions. These types of questions help me connect with the bigger goals and vision for the company. I used to ask these types of questions more frequently. Now I've developed the habit of thinking this way and I don't need to explicitly ask them as often as I used to.

As I say this, I'm reminded of a downfall of taking this too far. Some individuals might be tempted to connect their current task with every possible goal the company has. That's a mistake we often call "speculative generality." You probably know that you need to integrate with feature X, but maybe you'll also integrate with features Y, Z, P, and G later on. So, why not just write the code to integrate it now? Doing so often leads to overly-complex features, dead code, and a number of other code smells not to mention the wasted time and effort put in to implementing these items.

So, a leader not only has vision, but they know what to worry about and what not to. They know what "good enough" looks like and aren't afraid to stop when they've met it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Common Technical Lead Pitfall

"That item is nearly done. I just need to run it past the team lead to make sure it's good to go." Have you ever heard a phrase like that? What about something like this? "So, I had that finished and then I ran it by the team lead and he made some great suggestions to make this more reusable. Unfortunately I'll basically have to rewrite the entire thing, but it should make it easier in the future." Do you see anything wrong with either of these scenarios? What about this one? "The team lead is out of town, so that item will have to wait until she gets back so she can look it over." Situations like these come up every so often in development. There are some simple solutions to each of these. With the last one, the team lead should have designated someone to act in her stead while she was out. In the second one, the poor junior developer should have worked closer with the team lead from the start. The first one, though, isn't really an
Keep reading

Maze Generation in JavaScript

Image
This article will outline the algorithm for random maze generation with backtracking and show code examples of the steps of the process. This algorithm is obviously useful for random maze generation, but the concepts can also be applied to other areas where random input or path generation is needed. The basics of this algorithm are as follows Initialize an object to track nodes that are visited Generate the nodes in the maze. Generally you'll want to track the node's edges. You may also want to give the node an ID of some sort. If you want to cut down on recursive calls, you'll also want to track its possible edges (aka all its neighbors). You'll also want to store this as an object instead of an array as it speeds up lookup times. Choose a starting point in the maze Mark the node as visited while there are potential neighbors to visit Randomly select a possible edge to visit Add that node to the edges for the current node Add the current node as an edge on the selected
Keep reading

Leadership Experiment Update 2

This week was a bit of a slower week. A number of people that usually participate in the channel were out of town. Even still, we had some decent thoughts on these two articles: Every Day We Must Sweep and  From Engineer to Manager: keeping your technical skills . I'd like to share one observation I made: Be Vulnerable Often times as leaders we think we need to appear invincible. For some reason we think in order to lead, we can't show weaknesses. While that may be a good mindset to have towards an opposing force in war, it doesn't work well towards those you lead. If you want those you lead to follow you, you need to be vulnerable at times. You need to show them your weaknesses and how you overcame them or how you're overcoming them. This doesn't mean you need to be publicizing your weaknesses, but it could mean recognizing them when they come up naturally or sharing stories about them while mentoring and coaching those you lead. Why Be Vulnerable?
Keep reading