An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

The two reasons that applying policy consistently is particularly challenging are: Accepting reduced opportunity space. Good constraints make trade-offs that deliberately narrow your opportunity space. Some of the opportunities that you’ll encounter within that space will be exceptionally good, and it’s hard to stay true when faced with concrete consequences. Locally suboptimal. Satisfying global constraints inevitably leads to local inefficiency, sometimes forcing some teams to deal with deeply challenging circumstances in order to support a broader goal that they may experience little benefit from. It’s hard to ask folks to accept such circumstances, harder to be someone in one of those local inefficiencies, and hardest yet to stick to the decisions at real personal cost to the folks you’re impacting.