Another excellent article by Chelsea Troy on how common ways to evaluate technical leadership contributions (and knowledge work in general) fail. The section on Positivity really resonated:
the pursuit of creation lives in contrast to some of the most useful products of the knowledge worker: the absence of a security breach. The curtailment of a replicate effort. The removal of a feature that used to exist, but whose value didn’t justify its maintenance requirements.
[…]
Fewer useful things exist in tech than we would have if engineers didn’t spend so much time raking the detritus of shelfware, vanity features, and experiments that got to production and failed. Why do we rake it? Because no one ever removes it. Product managers focus on what to add, oblivious (or utterly unsympathetic) to the heaving of their engineering team under the exertion of maintaining the existing Rube Goldberg machine. Instead, companies live in denial until venture capitalists force them to face the music, at which point they cut whole failed product lines that have limped along for years. The cut often involves laying off disquieting numbers of intrepid employees whose time and talent the company has wasted.
I feel both seen and attacked.