Maybe you're a manager looking at your functional, motivated engineering team and thinking: "This is way too peaceful. Where's the chaos? Where are the 4 AM Slack messages about MongoDB sharding? Where are the rage-quit commits?"
Well, congratulations - you've just stumbled upon the ultimate guide to destroying engineer morale faster than a production database without backups. Grab your favorite DevOps buzzwords, that Medium article about blockchain you've been reading but not getting, put on your Scrum Master hat, and fire up those micromanagement instincts, because I'm about to show you the time-honored case study of:
How to turn a high-performing engineering team into a LinkedIn job search speedrun.
First up - and this is crucial - you've got to completely ignore the fact that your engineers actually know what they're doing. Your engineers may have multiple degrees and years of experience, but clearly they need you to explain how DNS works. Trust me, they'll love it when you ping them at 3 AM asking if they've considered using MongoDB instead of PostgreSQL because you heard it's "web scale." And don't forget to question every single technical decision they make - be that Stack Overflow comment section brought to life. Bonus points if you suggest rewriting the entire codebase in Rust just because you skimmed a junior devs Medium article about it. Make sure to regularly ask why they're not using blockchain for that internal CRUD app.
Now, you want to make simple tasks feel like filing taxes. Require a 50-page design doc for changing a button color. Implement a 12-step approval process for updating npm packages. Make engineers get sign-off from Jeff Bezos' dog before deploying to production. Bonus points if you make them use JIRA, Confluence, AND Azure DevOps simultaneously. Cause, it’s always funny watching someone try to solve a Rubik's cube while juggling chainsaws.
But, why ship code when you can endlessly refactor? Never ship anything. Ever. Keep pivoting the project direction faster than JavaScript frameworks pop up. Wait for that mythical "perfect" codebase (that doesn't exist). And whenever someone posts something trendy on Hacker News, that's your cue to rewrite everything from scratch. Make sure to measure success in lines of code written, and not features shipped.
Want to really crush their spirits? Here's a classic move: keep dangling that tech lead promotion in front of them like it's a carrot on a stick - but make sure that stick is longer than the universe is old. Promise them equity that dilutes faster than a homeopathic remedy, and keep the "we're about to IPO" story going for at least half a decade. Oh, and my personal favorite: advertise amazing work-life balance during interviews, then hit them with those sweet, sweet 80-hour weeks.
You'll know your plan is working, when engineers start "working" from home with commit messages like "final_final_v3_REAL_last_one.js" and Slack statuses permanently set to "Looking for connection" (but somehow they're always active on LinkedIn). If someone starts a Substack about leaving tech to become a goat farmer, you're definitely on the right track. Keep pushing until their GitHub activity graph looks like a flatline EKG!
If your engineers still have hope in their eyes, actually shipping code and feeling good about it, or showing up to standups without looking like they're attending their own funeral, you're doing something wrong. Time to schedule an emergency four-hour meeting about Agile best practices. That usually does the trick.
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