Modern View on Architecting Teams

What matters in building high performing engineering teams

Sometimes going down the Internet rabbit hole is not a waste of time. Sometimes it is a marvelous revelation as I discovered reading through a blog post this week.

The author made a compelling case that college degrees do not matter in hiring. What matters more is passion and what you can do. It’s a policy being embraced more and more by enterprises like Google. Apple, and Penguin for knowledge worker roles.

Tucked away in the middle of the post though was a mention of a Mary Kom. Not knowing who this person was, I spent the next hour learning about the life of this accomplished boxer. Magnificent Mary is not only the most decorated Indian female boxer, but one of the all-time greats and still competing at the highest levels for a spot in the 2020 Tokyo games.

From rural farm girl to a world champion athlete, it was not an obvious career path. The more typical career would be a farmer or teacher or something more “fitting” for a woman. She took the different path to pursue what she showed promise in and loved to do.

I was co-founder of a startup over a decade ago providing a solution to map skills to the goals of an organization. The idea was that by quantitatively measuring the skills of employees and rolling that up across an organization, leaders could see how an organization aligned to the work to be done.

Though the startup eventually folded, the data from initial customers was enlightening. It was clear that things like pedigree, schooling…