The Problem With Instant Gratification
We live in a world optimized for immediate feedback. Ship code, see it deploy. Post content, watch the likes. But the most impactful work in engineering leadership has a delay measured in months, not minutes.
This disconnect creates real anxiety — for you, your team, and your leadership.
Three Real Examples
Monitoring Alerts (Feb → April)
In February, we implemented custom New Relic alerts. For two months, nothing happened. The dashboards were there, the alerts were configured, but everything was... quiet.
Then in April, the system caught a critical outage before it impacted thousands of transactions. The groundwork we laid in February only proved its value when the crisis hit.
Quality Metrics (Jan → August)
We introduced post-mortems, improved code reviews, and automated testing in January. For months, bug tickets stayed roughly the same. Leadership questioned whether it was working. The team wondered if it mattered.
By August, bug tickets had dropped 50%. Six months of invisible progress, made visible all at once.
Developer Growth
One engineer gradually internalized proper logging practices. Not through a single training session, but through months of exposure — code reviews, pairing, gentle nudges. One day, he realized that properly structured logs had reduced his debugging time from hours to minutes.
No single moment made it click. The accumulation did.
Why The Delay Is Dangerous
The gap between effort and visible results creates three problems:
- Leadership questions your decisions. "We invested in observability three months ago — where are the results?"
- Teams lose motivation. "We've been writing tests for weeks and nothing changed."
- You doubt yourself. "Maybe this was the wrong call."
The temptation is to abandon initiatives before they've had time to work.
What Helps
Clear purpose. One-sentence clarity about why each change matters. Not a manifesto — a sentence.
Track small wins. Unbroken deployments. Bugs caught before production. An insightful question in a code review. These are signals that the system is working, even if the big metrics haven't moved yet.
Patience. Accept that results require time. Not passive waiting — active patience. Keep nurturing, keep reinforcing, keep believing in the process.
The Lesson
Culture change doesn't work at TikTok speed. It works at farming speed: you plant, nurture, wait, and hope it rains at the right time.
The results come. They just rarely arrive on anxiety's schedule.
This is part of a series about lessons from my first year as Head of Technology.