Making Architectural Decisions Without Being the Smartest Person in the Room
For the first several years of my career, I was used to being the person with the answer. Not always the best answer — I got things wrong plenty — but when a technical question came up, my instinct was to engage with it directly. To think through it, form a view, and advocate for that view. That’s what good engineers do. When I moved into management and eventually into leading teams of teams, I had to confront something I hadn’t fully anticipated: there were rooms I was walking into where I was genuinely not the most technically knowledgeable person. Not by a little — by a lot. My engineers had spent the last three years doing the work I used to do, which means they’d gone deeper on the specifics than I had. And yet, in those rooms, people were still looking to me for something. I just had to figure out what that something was. ...