8 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
I grew up professionally in places where you followed the rules. Standards existed and audits enforced them. I was being audited at 23 years old. Workarounds didn’t survive that environment so I never learned to build them. The idea that you could simply choose not to follow an organizational directive was genuinely foreign to me.
I was working from home, which sounds like freedom until it isn’t.
There were ten of us, TCP engineers, paid by the job. The faster you worked the more you made. That was the deal. Except the deal had a ceiling nobody had agreed to.
The quality control person was also the project manager. One person, two roles, and a system built entirely around his need to control the flow of work. You turned in a job, he quality checked it, and only then did he call you with a new one. No call, no work. No work, no pay. Miss the call and you went to the back of the line. That was not a written rule. It was just understood. He was that type of person.
So I sat. In my house, the phone never too far away. Waiting for it to ring. I couldn’t leave to grab lunch or go for a walk because missing that call had consequences. Once on the phone, we would go over the job together, and if there were corrections you were expected to make them immediately and turn them back in. Then you sat while the corrections worked their way through the queue for his review a second time. Only then, once your corrections were verified, were you given another job. That was the process. That was the whole job.
This process made no sense to me. I didn’t complain, just a shake of the head every single day. Here we go again.
His fear was that engineers would sit on corrections. They’d get a new job, work on it, and let the job needing corrections gather dust when it needed to be returned ASAP. I understood his fear. In a turn and burn operation, a stalled correction might mean a missed deadline. He wasn’t wrong about the risk. He was wrong about the solution.
I told him directly. I’m not that person. Give me a job while I’m waiting and I will jump back on corrections the moment they come in. I will not make you regret trusting me. He didn’t want to hear it. He was the gatekeeper and that gate was closed.
When three or four jobs came in at once, he checked them one by one. Three or four of us sat and waited, staring at our screens, while he worked through the queue. That was our time. Our paychecks. Our sanity. Held by one person’s unwillingness to trust the people he was supposed to be leading. We also worked off spreadsheets, not in the company database like the rest of the organization. He didn’t take the allotted time to understand the system put in place. Through lack of effort, the system somehow became untrustworthy to him. So we had a workaround on top of a workaround and called it a process.
As I sat waiting, I brainstormed the changes I would make to streamline the process. We each needed our own bucket of jobs to work from. Engineers should have access to work all times, no downtime, no waiting, no QC meetings held over their heads like a reward for good behavior. The answer was not complicated. The person with the authority to implement changes wasn’t interested in changing. End of story.
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When the group became too big for one person to manage, they came to me. I had management experience. Did I want to lead this group?
Honestly, when I joined this company as an engineer, I was done with management. Piecemeal work meant long hours but the accountability was mine alone. No one else’s problems landing on my desk. I understood what the tradeoff entailed. The PM role meant standard hours, benefits, a ceiling I believed I could push through. It also meant a $25K pay cut. I said yes anyway. The grass isn’t always greener. I knew that going in.
The transition was not clean. Nobody handed me the full picture. I was trained by him on his workaround, two spreadsheets talking to each other, neither of them the database the company had built and expected us to use. I didn’t even know the database existed at first. He had been in control since the beginning and he wasn’t letting go easily. I was technically the PM, but he made sure I understood that he considered himself still in charge. This notion added stress to our working relationship.
About a month in, leadership was trying to secure more work for our department and noticed the backlog of jobs sitting unassigned. As they dug deeper they noticed none of our work was in the database. The CEO made it clear: get into the database, do it the way the organization expects, clear the backlog immediately.
That conversation was a wake up call. Not because I had been deliberately resisting. Because the transition had been messy and I allowed the old guard to influence the way we had been operating. I couldn’t defend what we were doing because I already knew it was wrong. I had known it since I was one of ten engineers sitting alone in my house waiting for a phone to ring.
The CEO didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. He just cleared the path for me to lead the department.
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We moved everything into the database. I trained the team on how to use the system, how to access their bucket, and how to proactively forecast their workload to ensure due dates are met. The QC manager was trained too. The expectation was simple: update the database when the job is done, not at the end of the week. Real time. No exceptions.
I worked on a new puzzle every morning. Prioritizing and sliding jobs in and out of the team’s buckets, moving things from here to there, always keeping the company’s priorities at the forefront. I estimated how long each job would take, matched it to the right person based on skill and current load, and built each bucket deliberately so there was no downtime. When something came out of a bucket I knew exactly how big the hole was and found the right job to slide in. Six or seven jobs sitting in a bucket, prioritized by due date, each sized and sequenced. Nobody was waiting by the phone anymore.
We ran morning calls to check due dates, flag anything that needed to move, and made sure nobody was drowning. We worked as a team. That had not been possible before because the whole operation had been built around one person. Everyone started with an A. I trusted them to do what I would have done if someone had trusted me.
The backlog melted quickly, it was as simple as offering overtime for the next three weekends. Three weekends. Something that had been slowly building for months dissolved in three weekends because the right system was finally in place.
There was a quiet moment in there, by myself, watching it happen. No audience. No announcement. Just the clean feeling of something I had known for a long time finally getting the chance to prove itself. That is its own kind of reward, the kind that doesn’t need anyone else in the room to celebrate.
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Following the organization’s direction was never a question for me. Choosing not to was foreign. I didn’t understand how someone got there. What this situation gave me was the first clear look at the human cost left behind when they do.
He built something that made sense when we were small. It worked when there were three engineers and a handful of jobs. But the department grew and the system didn’t grow with it. He held onto control past the point where it served anyone because he was losing his grip on something he created from scratch. The organization moved forward and he stood still, and the team and company paid for it.
Change inside an organization is going to happen whether you agree with it or not. The direction gets set above you. The question is never really whether to get on board. The question is when. Get there early and you have a grace period, room to learn, room to make mistakes, room to figure it out before the pressure is full. Wait until you’re forced and the grace period is gone. Now you’re playing catch-up in a live system with no runway while everyone downstream absorbs the consequences of your resistance as you try to find your footing.
I had tried to tell him that from the bottom. He didn’t want to hear it. So I sat with the rest of them and waited. When they handed me his seat I already knew exactly what I was going to do. I had known for a long time.
If you are fighting change right now, that is your choice. But do you actually know what that choice is costing the people standing in the wake of it? Because from where they’re sitting, it looks a lot like ten engineers waiting by a phone.