Leadership: systems thinking over ego
Senior engineers are being urged to trade ego for systems thinking — 'Seniority is the death of the ego,' one post put it — and to shift toward coaching and peer roundtables for architecture and hiring decisions argued. The same thread recommended building feedback loops that reward stability and ownership over novelty-driven churn shared.
The thread was posted by Yordan Ivanov, Head of Data Engineering and author of the Substack "Data Gibberish" (which he runs for data leaders) x.com. It was reshared on X by Bob Bouthillier, a Lean/Agile medtech engineering executive with more than 30 years of industry experience. x.com The posts specifically argue swapping top-down architecture and hiring edicts for coaching-led decisions and confidential peer roundtables for technical review; Ivanov’s newsletter explicitly teaches turning day‑to‑day work into decisions, approvals, and measurable outcomes. x.com Both contributors pushed building feedback loops that reward stability and ownership rather than novelty-driven churn, a point that aligns with recent PNAS research showing novelty can persistently drive exploration even when suboptimal. x.com
