Can't support this enough. Management bullshit. Appoint an engineer who has developed some empathy and START TRUSTING HIM. If you're not an engineer you will very like fuck this up. Getting someone to give you the right words for recruitment doesn't translate into understanding what drives an engineer.

I am an engineer, but I realise that what matters to me will be different to what matters to many others. The point about empathy is an interesting one though - might try and highlight the empathy we have in the company, thanks.

Good point.

We would like to think we hire good people, give them the tools they want, and then empower them to make changes. If you're complaining that the build takes 5 minutes, the general response would be "then make it faster". Is this a good approach? How do you think we can get that across effectively?

I agree that bullshit slows people down. What would show you that a company has less bullshit than others?

It sounds simple, but note that I said "50 minutes", not 5, which is a big difference. Specifically, in a 1.5 week sprint cycle involving about 40 maven modules with complex inter-dependencies, a 380-step procedure to deploy into production and that is fragile enough that simply getting it to work at 95% reliability in 50 minutes was a huge advancement over the state when I showed up.

(The previous developers "looked" productive because they could work on things a module at a time, but they went in a circle for two years because they were incapable of delivering a fully integrate working system)

In this particular case the company was using an "agile" process except this what not bought into by many of the key people, including the superstar developer, lead manager, product manager, etc. It did mean however, that if I wanted to speed up the build, I would have conversations about "How does this benefit the customer?" which would degenerate into "does the customer want to get this product at all?" It would mean not doing anything else for a sprint cycle, for one thing.

Now that particular case required an organization to gain some size and lumber along for a long time to build up a huge code base, but bullshit happens in small organizations too.

Yeah, that situation sounds pretty bad. Thankfully I think we're a long way from that, and I'm sure that will come across in our hiring process.