The balance between experienced and inexperienced professionals is crucial for a tech team to function optimally, with an inspiring and stimulating work environment where employees feel productive and have room to be creative. It’s a virtuous cycle that increases the team’s overall efficiency and allows innovation.
Experienced and talented professionals on the technical track of the Y-career path make a huge difference to the company, as they can take a broader view of setting up platforms that will provide the company with strength and agility in the long term. It is possible to surround such a person with collaborators who will complement their abilities and help them to have an even greater impact on the company’s activities.
Senior professionals on the management side of the Y-career path, on the other hand, can lead large teams with a clear direction, providing stability to their direct reports and helping to consolidate the organizational culture. Both on the technical and on the management side, key leaders are also multipliers of the platform mindset for the rest of the team.
Leaders with corporate experience and a strategic vision built up over many years are better placed to allow room for creativity while still giving technical guidance. Problems of team misalignment in technology are incredibly complicated because they can lead to duplicated codes, systems more complex than strictly necessary, and potentially significant technical debts. People in technical and managerial leadership roles need to be alert to these deviations.
Both on the technical and on the management side, key leaders are also multipliers of the platform mindset for the rest of the team.
Even considering the fact that a company’s resources are always limited, and that the technology team tends to “eat up” a large part of the budget of companies in all industries, it is worthwhile to invest in top talent. It’s an investment that usually pays off because, when a highly efficient senior manager is hired, this person will reduce management overhead across the board, attract other equally efficient people to the company, and so on.
The organization must be seen as a pyramid, with a narrow top. The pyramid format should be preserved, with levels of seniority distributed throughout the different layers, so that the company doesn’t fall into the trap of having a huge team in which no one knows where they’re going.
When a company realizes that a team has too many junior professionals, it can create a “seniority” plan. The way to do that is to determine a point on the career path to serve as a threshold between someone considered junior and senior, and from then on, control the proportion of new hires. If the company previously brought in 15 junior employees for every senior hired, this could be changed to 3 juniors for every senior until the desired pyramid format is achieved.
Even though this process is slow and gradual, it must also be intentional, planned out from the moment of definition of the annual budget and the opening of each headcount.
Marcus Fontoura
Marcus Fontoura is a technical fellow and CTO for Azure Core at Microsoft, and author of A Platform Mindset. He works on efforts related to large-scale distributed systems, data centers, and engineering productivity. Fontoura has had several roles as an architect and research scientist in big tech companies, such as Yahoo! and Google, and was most recently the CTO at Stone, a leading Brazilian fintech.
