Operating well – what I learned at Stripe
&lt;Rant&gt;<p>Is there any place in the world for a developer passionate about creating value for users and less so for fighting leadership-made fires (velocity! faster! quicker!)? I don&#x27;t care to debate endlessly about velocity and processes. I just want decently thought of processes, to adapt to them and produce value.<p>As an IC I don&#x27;t want to be involved in every step of the strategy, to keep a track of all my colleagues and how they work, to keep track of the tasks in the context of the epics and the milestones, and be blamed for when a strategy I was not part of doesn&#x27;t work. I don&#x27;t want to answer &quot;how could you do this faster?&quot; for myself because it&#x27;s a horrible question to have to answer almost every week when you feel like you&#x27;re burning out running. I don&#x27;t want to answer &quot;what is the priority of the task you are working on relative to our investor&#x27;s desires?&quot; without actually knowing who the investors are. I don&#x27;t want to have feel impostor syndrome every start of the week and be in a team that gets ground down at the end of every week for the shit job we&#x27;re all allegedly doing and where solutions are expected to come from us.<p>I just wanna get to work, have a clear roadmap that was developed by CxOs, leadership, consultants, investors, people with actual domain knowledge, deeply thinking about what needs to be done and in what order (in order to produce value for our customers). Then I want to create a technical road-map with my fellow engineers and engineering leaders that takes into account business requirements, technical know-how inside the team, planning and start working on that, in sprints, under the watchful supervision of ... supervisors that don&#x27;t need me to answer questions that they should have had the answers to about a half a year ago.<p>I&#x27;m feeling my mind closing down to this kind of stuff. I don&#x27;t know how much longer I can do this. I am now in a position where on Monday I get a pile of unthought of requirements, by Wednesday everything changes. Thursday evening a fire starts burning and if fix is not done by Friday morning, we are already behind and disappointing our bosses and investors. Doing the fix and dropping the current task, for urgency, will of course get the velocity &#x2F; scope discussion. And the seemingly simple fix for the entire team is apparently that we should just increase velocity, but we&#x27;re just too retarded to do that.<p>A number of years ago, I left the corporate world, as horrible as that was, there were some people that had answers. Since joining the startup world, perhaps due to bad luck, I&#x27;ve never had a proper answer. I always get a &quot;I&#x27;ll get back to you on this&quot; and they never get back. If I push for it, it usually gets deprioritized even though it was considered top priority. If I push even more I have to start investigating it. Talk to stakeholders that are not aligned on answers, and it never seems to be about users. It&#x27;s always growth and velocity.<p>&lt;&#x2F;Rant&gt;