Be a Cathedral Builder

From Andy’spost:

you want your developers to be Cathedral Builders not Stone Cutters

Well one should not only strive to hire Cathedral Builders for his team, but also to be one himself.

So how you turn yourself into a Cathedral Builder?

It’s simple. Just be one.

So don’t whine on problems with the code/methodologies/technologies/etc. Instead you should come up with proposals and solutions for these problems.

You don’t have to be radical (we need a web server running Erlang), and you shouldn’t be negative (our methodology is crap. we need to act differently). Small incremental steps, and elegant solutions that integrate well with the current assets of the team, are likely to be accepted and valued by your team leader and managers.