> <i>Effective teams need trust. That’s not to say that frameworks for decision making or metrics tracking are not useful, they are critical — but replacing trust with process is called bureaucracy.</i><p>A thousand times this. Highly effective teams have super high levels of trust and mutual accountability.<p>The moment you lose trust, you now have to replace trust with some other type of mechanism. This leads to process/bureaucracy.<p>Trivial example for those that don’t “get it”: think about why do we need code reviews? If we knew people would write perfect code every time, they would never be needed. However, we hold them because we know that even in our own “best code” we may miss something/forget some detail.<p>However, think about your own process, at least for me, depending on a feature/the engineer, my code review might be cursory rather than super line by line. The difference? How much I trust that engineers ability in that specific type of code.<p>But that was a digression, my main point is that hight trust means high speed, low trust causes slow speeds. The more you can build up trust and eliminate/prevent process, the better your organization will be.<p>For anyone that wants more details on this, I highly recommend the book “The speed of trust” by Stephen Covey.
<i>they have innate understanding that being observed working is more valuable than the results of their work.</i><p>I've seen coders who knew this by heart forget this less than 5 years after entering management and become champions of forcing everybody into the office for 8:30 stand-ups and time tracking systems that enforce minute by minute "project accountability".<p>I don't know exactly how this happens, all I know is its like a damn force of nature. The only thing I've ever seen kill morale and tank projects faster is random periodic layoffs.
The best one I received: "It is easy to like likable people. It is much harder to like people who have flaws. It does not mean you should not do it."<p>I saw a lot of tech people with the same bias as me: instead of dealing with people who think a bit different or act a bit different, we prefer to isolate and stay in our own world. Dealing with different people is hard but can be really rewarding. The lazy approach of sticking with your own crowd is comfortable but not necessarily the best approach.<p>And I double down on her "thinking is work too". I think internet makes us very addicted to have a constant flow of information pouring into our brain. We dont want it to stop. Disconnecting and staying with your thoughts is something that used to happen naturally, now it takes some efforts to do it. Yet we absolutely need it
Excellent writing, I really enjoyed the content of the post and the way it’s written.<p>This phrase particularly stood out to me:<p>> We are stronger by considering the opposite first.<p>That’s something I’m not very good at, but work hard to do. In many situations I have a tendency to assume I’m right, and that as soon as my interlocutor understands my argument, they will see I’m right. “I’m a rational person and I believe X, so if you don’t believe X you must be irrational.” So I spend lots of time clarifying my argument, and it gets nowhere.<p>By genuinely spending a larger proportion of my time thinking about others’ points of view, I arrive at better solutions.
> When I find myself itching to interrupt someone with my thoughts about a topic I try to ask myself “what am I being asked to be an expert in here?” Often I realize that in my enthusiasm to show my casual knowledge I’m about to correct someone that who has devoted a considerable amount of time and effort into developing their expertise in the topic. I never regret keeping my mouth shut and letting them speak.<p>This definitely resonated with me.
>When I was in a traditional office environment I used to tell my people: If it’s 2pm and you’ve finished your work for the day and you have no meetings, just go home<p>I've often had this thought - what is the ultimate cost of giving someone a random friday off, not counted against any sort of vacation policy? "Hey, you've been working really hard and the team is better off for the work you've done, take a three or four day weekend". Would that really harm the bottom line? I mean, in a metrics driven environment, if we hit our metrics, then why not spend some time gearing up for the next thing by recharging?
> But trust also degrades naturally over time. Italian researchers Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rino Falcone have a model of trust in which it’s observability not success that is the key factor. Under their theory an entity that is silently successful can end up seen as less trustworthy than an entity that visibly fails.<p>I would believe it.<p>From what I know, trust is a fickle, and irrational attribute. It places disproportionate value on first hand sensory input, and it isn't nearly a commutative as would seem reasonable.
> Places where no one is sure who owns what, or who is responsible for what are unlikely to have proper monitoring and much more likely to be two or three upgrades behind. The seams are where things get lost, sometimes for years. So if your mandate is security or availability the seams are your best bet of finding a big pay off.<p>So true. Sometimes there's a person behind the scenes keeping it all working with bailing wire and elbow grease, but that person is also a huge point of failure.
Of all the advice articles I’ve read, most of them are contrite, seemingly obvious and not actionable.<p>This one was pretty good. Not going to argue it’s all gold, but she did a great job of putting some thought into it.
My collection is at <a href="http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup</a> .. though not exclusively non-engineers, I find it genuinely useful to recalibrate if stuck for fresh perspective.
> If it’s 2pm and you’ve finished your work for the day and you have no meetings, just go home.<p>It never makes sense to me when people say this. As a Software Engineer, there's always work that can be done. How many people actually have a list of "work for the day"?
Really enjoyed that!<p>Minor nitpick though:<p>> Another thing he used to say a lot was “when you punch someone you need to pull your arm back, before you launch it forward. If you don’t your hit will be weak.”<p>This is not true.
“To go left, turn right.”<p>I encountered this idea in a different context, and I too thought it was insightful/funny:<p>(On some divided highways) “Left turn from right lane”<p>The jughandle would make as good a symbol for a philosophical movement as the yin-yang.
"I never regret keeping my mouth shut and letting them speak."
love it. even though i like to annoy people with my dumb comments, this is sound advice for sure. :)
> “People like us make our money in the seams of things”
Who said it: a Senior Official at the National Security Agency (NSA)<p>I find this sentiment to be terrifying when it comes from the government, let alone the NSA.<p>Government employees should be worried about nothing except than the efficient and legal discharge of their legal obligations/goals. I hope the wider context of the conversation makes this more innocent than it initially sounds.
I liked this article and it was nice to think through some of these things in these contexts.<p>That said, if I was speaking at a big government meeting (where the sign on the door often indicates a classification that is above what you can say on Medium) and found myself quoted in a blog post later I would be pissed.<p>In future, I would recommend the author take all the names of the organizations out or get permission from the person. The quote would have been just as powerful without the agency name drops in a security context.
Her #1: "Security and reliability are more likely to go wrong in the seams between components".<p>Cannot confirm for security. Too naive thinking. Security mostly goes wrong in the very core, not at the seams.<p>One of her next is also a big red flag<p>> A big part of what I do as an engineering manager is stopping truly brilliant people from executing on plans that begin with the words “I can just do this myself in a weekend.”<p>It completely denies the impossibility of doing great work in a team. Someone has do it somewhen. She'll loose the brilliant guy who offered to do it properly, and she'll come up with the typical business solution. Unscalable and unmaintainable.<p>I stopped reading then. Way too self-congratulating engineer bashing.