This is goddamn terrible advice. You’re rolling a dice to see if the great work ends up making it.
Have we not learned the lesson of bell labs? 90% of the time the great work doesn’t make it by itself. It takes leadership to carve a path for it to emerge and actually flourish.
I swear, there are like two influential things on the internet that have completely wrecked the practice of engineering management:
The Spotify org chart blog post and Rands.