I never take any leadership-adjacent blog post seriously since I found out that by far the most toxic manager I’ve ever worked with in my career has apparently risen to a CTO position at a respectable startup and has since published numerous blog posts and a book on management. His resume looks amazing though.

Is this CTO in the room with us right now?

1) bad people can give useful advice. generally life is richer when you can separate art from artist.

2) 1 person bad does not make all people bad

Terrible people can be good at things, so their advice may be useful, but it still doesn't mean taking leadership advice from a terrible leader is a good idea. Maybe if he was blogging about how to fail upwards. It's more about separating the con from artist.

1) pee pee

2) poo poo

Thanks for the laugh friend. I was thinking the same thing.

i understand the criticism but i also wonder at how to improve the status quo. Lethain is regarded as an authority because he has such a wide experience and writes so much and so thoughtfully. The truth is we just barely and rarely get such insight from people at his level so we just take whatever we can get.

the people who are in-deep for decades 1) have no time or motivation to write/build a brand^, 2) have political reasons you can't write anything insightful esp while your own house is messy (and it never isn't).

so how to change this?

my approach is to run a conference where practitioners do short ted-talk-like-but-technical talks about their work and learnings while still on the job. but ofc they all have their own motivations to speak.

^ though i will be the first to say that you CAN be primarily self-motivated to write-to-think-out-loud and this is a thing, do not let jaded HN people tell you different

While I perhaps wouldn't have put it the same way, I agree.

This may go against "SV standards", but I've found that the execs that I most admire at any particular company put in at minimum 4 years - that's the time it takes not just to get a project or two off the ground, but to really instill structural and cultural objectives at any company, and as you put it , to really deal with the consequences of their decisions and refine as necessary. While everyone have some "misfires" in their career, I'm extremely wary of advice from someone that has literally never hit the 4 year mark despite nearly 2 decades of experience.

Agreed, 10 × 2 years of experience is not the same as 20 by a long shot.