> On a few occasions, someone may suggest that I check out a project that could use my help, but nobody tells me what to do.
> I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company.
These appear to be the main points, so there is a kind of pressure to work on things that benefit the company.
My question is, how does overall strategy get set then? There are probably 1,000 things you could do to benefit the company, but only a small number of them have a huge effect, some of them require coordination to really help, and some of them might be diametrically opposed to each other.
Who makes these decisions, when there are multiple viable ways of going forward, but someone just has to put their foot down and decide which one?
We have the advantage of using GitHub to build GitHub (http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...), so we all know what needs worked on. There is certainly some vision casting from a few core people, but everyone takes responsibility for figuring out what needs done and coordinating how to do it.
> Who makes these decisions, when there are multiple viable ways of going forward, but someone just has to put their foot down and decide which one?
We all do, but whoever submits the first pull request usually sets the tone of the conversation. Occasionally, a pull request will get abandoned, but usually it is the starting point and we build from there.
There are often intense conversations about how something should work. I've learned to just try one way and see if you like it. Not everyone will, but you can form some consensus.
> I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company.
These appear to be the main points, so there is a kind of pressure to work on things that benefit the company.
My question is, how does overall strategy get set then? There are probably 1,000 things you could do to benefit the company, but only a small number of them have a huge effect, some of them require coordination to really help, and some of them might be diametrically opposed to each other.
Who makes these decisions, when there are multiple viable ways of going forward, but someone just has to put their foot down and decide which one?