I was sitting on the floor playing with my son after coming home from work when my wife said: “it’s great to have you back". I was puzzled, what did she mean by that? Back from work? I hadn’t been away or anything so it had to be that, right? After putting our son to sleep I asked her what she meant. She said it was nice to see me present and participating when returning from work.

This has probably always been the case to some degree, but I think it gets even more apparent with the Internet and the rise of social media. What exactly? The culture where everyone is a parrot, merely repeating what some idol said in a post / interview / talk without really thinking things through and asking questions. Who said that? # I was asked this in a meeting when I presented an idea of how to structure web applications in a way which gave focus on the end user’s and not the technology.

The last five years I have had the privilege of having jobs with awesome titles like “Front end architect” and I was even at one point a CTO. Being in such positions enables you to have the impact to see ideas materialize. You also have impact on how others do their job. About two years ago I became the leader of the front-end core team at Finn.no after having been the front-end architect (the company decided to remove the architect role).

This is not about aerospace or getting people on Mars (that stuff is easy). It is about how to create an environment where people help each other out. If you maximize utilization. Set absolute deadlines. You set up your team to be self centered, stressed out and in a mode of self preservation. If you are in an organization were teams are expected to collaborate and share extensively, you shouldn’t do any of the things above.

You read something or listen to somebody say something in a talk. Sometimes you think: “hey, this is really great and makes a lot of sense”. You go back to your job and apply what you learned. The missing piece here is this: you can’t just take the thought and methods somebody else came up with in a different context and apply them directly think you will achieve the same results.