Discord

• Heavy investment in Rust.
• Shout out to lutin for being an excellent engineer and an all-around wonderful human.

There is too much misery at this company; I don't know where to start. Poor work-life balance is an obvious one. Constant churn on vision, roadmap, and projects is another. The fact that leaders really need to work on their communication skills is a third, though this has seen significant improvement over the past year.

Discord's company and engineering culture is very unique. Some people love it, but it's definitely not for everyone. There is not a strong desire to adapt it to be more welcoming to people who don't fit the mold.

Engineering leadership is a bit... odd. Top-level leadership has extremely strong technical foundations and domain knowledge but isn't so strong or experienced in leadership skills like communication and ensuring that significant company decisions greatly impacting employees and users are well received or fair. Director-level leadership has limited technical knowledge or vision but communicates well and has a lot of big-company "leadership training".

The bigger problem is they don't seem to be on the same page regarding vision, roadmap, or prioritization. I sometimes wonder if their roles should be switched, or if our VP should spend less time debugging incidents and invest more in the engineering culture, overall vision for the org, making the org structure align with what we're trying to deliver. We should hire a director with directly relevant domain experience who is capable of keeping an ear to the ground.

There is constant churn on how to represent and organize your status reporting (Asana milestones, different categories of Notion spreadsheets, OKRs, planning, monthly check-ins, etc.), but most of this just seems like a symptom of broader disagreement on where the organization or company is going. I've worked with a lot of good people at this company, and each one is unhappy for a different reason. People seem genuinely happier on the other side of leaving.

As an employee, I want to be able to believe that the actions of the company and leadership are done in good faith, having considered our users and our employees.

I think the mark of strong leadership is the ability to step up and take responsibility for mistakes made, and not pretend to be perfect while the mistakes were all made by other people.

A mission of "creating belonging" starts with how you treat the people around you, the culture of the organizations and teams you lead.

I think the leadership chain needs to be able to get on the same page with each other and present a unified vision on where the company is going that directors, managers, and ICs can all get behind.

Fighting these battles with on-callers in help tickets and weekly sprint planning is probably a symptom of broader management and leadership misalignment, and likely not the best use of time.