The missed lesson here is that that company seemed to be a mismanaged nightmare.
Lots of orgs are, and they can be a fine place to cut your teeth and learn some things and build a positive reputation with colleagues, but ideally you learn to recognize when a shitshow is a shitshow so you don’t normalize it.
Hopefully Max learned that failing systems are sometimes better than flailing teams, but that failing systems shouldn’t be the norm in the first place. Other people (founders? execs? managers?) had done very poor work there and what he did was find a productive way to deal with it.
For most of the article I assumed that the “it” that they were letting fail was the project itself, in order to force organisational change, not the incumbent software system.
Lots of orgs are, and they can be a fine place to cut your teeth and learn some things and build a positive reputation with colleagues, but ideally you learn to recognize when a shitshow is a shitshow so you don’t normalize it.
Hopefully Max learned that failing systems are sometimes better than flailing teams, but that failing systems shouldn’t be the norm in the first place. Other people (founders? execs? managers?) had done very poor work there and what he did was find a productive way to deal with it.