Oof, this hits close to home. during my tenure as a principal engineer at a certain startup, well known and loved in these parts. Anyway I was new to engineering leadership and this big initiative came down from above to migrate to k8s. team was excited to be done with the myriad adhoc scripts and duct tape infra. But it turned out the team was very junior, and I was green as a leader and manager. every day brought a quagmire of smaller, seemingly inconsequential tasks. i'd be midway through configuring a helm chart and someone would drop by, asking for a pairing session or help with something or another or my input on something unrelated or to sign off on some administrative document.

To make matters much worse, one week, an elm / functional programming purist in the team started making a lot of noise. they believed in sticking strictly to the core principles of elm and basically avoiding 3p dependencies like the plague. while they were generally respectful and i respected their dedication, it became another thing to juggle. trying to mediate between that guy and those more pragmatic about our deadlines was taxing.

I realized that amidst all this, my primary role of mentoring others and solving higher level engineering challenges was getting overshadowed by these micro-decisions and tasks. it was like being in the middle of a sea, trying to stay afloat, while holding onto a bundle of papers. EFT, as described here, is a term that captures this perfectly. it's so essential to be aware of it, especially in the tech world where the lines often blur between roles and responsibilities, and especially in engineering leadership. Love having a word for this now that I'm in a position to mentor people who are new to engineering leadership