Investing in People (in progress...)

Investing in people is more valuable than investing in systems or processes. A lesson learned that I try to apply more consciously.

When I use the term "invest", I mean in the context of investing one's time, effort, and energy to a particalular undertaking in the expectation of returned values in the broadest sense.

The journey started when I was feeling overwhelmed. I felt I spent too much time trying to control the quality of every single output stream of my team. Until I decided it's enough and there should be a better way to do this.

There were several ideas popped up in my mind, mostly automating the process. But, there's a limit to automation a tool can do. Such as linters. higher semantic such as architecture compliancy, dependency graph to ensure non-spaghetti code, etc. cannot be automated. Rather, it's an art of trade-off that requires human time to judge and decide.

One particular solution keeps surfacing in my mind from various sources when I tried to find the answer. When I asked my question on Reddit. When I watched a YouTube video from Timothy Ronald (controversial, I know).

That is "delegation". I've been hearing this "delegation" term in all leadership books, articles, and videos. It never clicked with me. But this was finally the first time it clicked and unlocked the solution to my problem.

It may have struck me that I was trying too much to be in control. Everybody has 24 hours in their day, technically 8 hours for a corporate job. It was never a scalable strategy in the first place.

TODO: refine this section

If we make an analogy of a stream, where water flows from upstream to downstream, reviewing code is located pretty far downstream.

I invested time and effort in refining and maturing our processes. Building various checkpoints along the lines, such as low-level design review and specification review. Finally, the code review.