Sometimes Your Job is to Stay the Hell Out of the Way

I wrote a piece a long time ago about The Wolf. It’s my personal take on the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren’t a myth. They exist. I’ve seen them. Many of them.

The article was popular. With hindsight, I determined two populations cared about the piece and one who did not. One was the “I want to be a wolf” crowd, and the next was the “How do I create a culture that encourages Wolves?”

“How do I become a Wolf?” Wolves don’t know they are wolves. They don’t care about the label or the unique conditions that surround them. Wolves are the result of the work, not asking the question. Wolves don’t ask to be wolves; they are.

“How do I create a culture that attracts or encourages Wolves?” I have slightly helpful advice here. First, I’ve seen Wolves in every type of company. Tiny, medium, and huge. Enterprise, consumer, ad-tech, and pure services. Every single one had Wolves in their engineering-friendly companies. That’s your job — building a culture conducive to engineering.1 After that. Nothing. Don’t talk about 10x engineers at your All Hands. Build a safe, healthy, distraction-light, and drama-free environment where builders focus on building. That’s where engineers do their best work.

And the third important population. Wolves, the population, did not read this piece. Yes, I shared the piece with the Wolf I was thinking of, and he nodded and said, “Yup,” and returned to the project in front of him. Wolves don’t care if they are seen or not. Wolves are entirely focused on the self-selected essential project in front of them because they decided it was worth their time and important to the company.

A Wolf Factory

I have tried and completely failed to build a Wolf-like role within two different companies. I used different approaches and different framing in each attempt, but each was a failure. Existing Wolves were, at best, distracted from their work and, at worst, left the company because they felt like I’d forced them into management. Disaster. Another time, I created an entirely new title, which was my definition of the responsibilities of a Wolf. Learning from my prior attempt, I left the Wolves out of the process except for a gentle heads-up regarding my intent.

The result of the second attempt was a handful of fake Wolves stumbling around attempting to do Wolf-like things. They’d carefully read my role description. They worked hard. And they pissed off just about everyone around them because while they were respected, they were now acting with unearned privilege.

At my next company, four months into the gig, a random meeting with Richard showed up on my calendar. He was an engineer on one of my teams. I’d never spoken with him outside of a group setting. No title for the meeting. No heads up. Just a meeting.

Richard showed up right on time. Nervous. Random, disposable chit chat before he got to the point:

“Yeah, so. I’ve been really worried about the quality of the code base, so I haven’t done any of my work for the past two weeks because I’ve been building a testing framework to pressure test the worst part of the code base. Can I show it to you?”

He did. Punchline: never seen anything like it. Jaw to the floor. Not going to tell you why. It’s his secret to tell.

Picking my jaw off the floor, I calmly asked, “This appears amazing. How can I help?”

“My manager is getting mad because I’m working on this versus a feature. I think this is much more important.”

“I see. Let me see what I can do.”

I did very little to support Richard. At my next 1:1 with his manager, late in the meeting, I made an off-the-cuff comment about Richard’s testing framework, “Looks promising.”

I did not:

Suggest to his manager that this work was more important than his feature work.

Come up with ideas on how to help load balance the engineers so Richard has time to work on his side project.

Get others interested in his effort.

All of these activities did occur because good work speaks for itself and Wolves are entirely motivated by good work. Richard eventually (reluctantly) demonstrated his project to others, and they all had the same jaw-dropping reaction. They stepped in to help on the spot and made it even better. Someone else chose to help with some of the feature work, so that just got done, albeit a little late. All of this signal eventually got to his manager, who was now paying full attention to the effort.

Could I have accelerated this effort? Yes, but when it comes to Wolves, my job is to stay the hell out of the way.2

The Hell?

One of my managers discovered — months later — that Richard had pitched me on his project and also that I’d briefly mentioned my impression to his manager. They were confused. They’d watch this rogue project appear out of nowhere, gather steam, and eventually become the cornerstone of our testing strategy.

Confused, “Why didn’t you do more for an obviously helpful effort?”

I responded, “I was not required to help make this effort successful. I was aware Richard was a Wolf long before he walked into my office. I’ve seen many. My job was not to help nurture this effort; my job was stay the hell out of the way. The work was going to be successful without me; he’s a Wolf. More so, the organization, seeing how this engineer works, is actually more important than the success of this essential project. Richard’s ability to help will be amplified in the future by others recognizing this ability.”

Still confused, “But what about the process? We do things a certain way for a reason.”

Pause.

“Process is how we get things done at scale, but we’re also innovating. We’re bringing new work into the world. At key moments, process has an unfortunate side effect of crushing innovation unintentionally. My job here is to identify the work and explain why management staying out of the way is the correct strategy.”

“And you didn’t ask, but the reason I swear slightly when I say this is because managers need to hear this. The job is a privilege, but many managers confuse the privilege with the desire to know, act, and help with everything. They believe that is their job, but very often, their job is to know when to do absolutely nothing.”

This is hard. ↩

There are a great many engineers who fancy themselves Wolves, but they believe this means it’s ok for them to be jerks. Brilliant jerks is what we call them. Yes, they are productive at their work, but they are toxic to a team and a culture. So, don’t worry about Wolves, worry about those engineers. ↩