So while suck it up buttercup isn't particularly nice, it's more catchy than "Focus on your goals, and what you can do to achieve them."
Love you all. For more, read on!
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When you focus on what other people are doing, you're spending your energy on something you can't change. When you focus on what you can do, you're spending your mental energy on finding paths to success, opportunities, or choices you can make.
Two - Maintain an internal locus of control. Identify what you can do, not what others should do.
Instead of: "My boss should recognize I do better work!" try "What can I do so that my work is recognized?"
One - Focus on what you want, not what happened.
Instead of: "It's unfair my co-worker is paid more!" try "How can I increase my pay?"
It feels obvious, but I don't know how many times I've heard rant sessions from people who weren't taking the simplest steps to achieve their goals.
The world isn't fair. We've heard that often enough.
But beyond the "suck it up buttercup" sentiment, is there something valuable to be gained here? I think there are two things to think about.
When you try to verify what others believe are facts, you're slowing them down. You get pushback and dragging feet. What you also find is that things are not at all what they seem to be.
For some great anecdotes from Amazon on this topic, read on!
https://buff.ly/4f0pjeP
However, everyone is so busy. The easiest thing is to just trust and skip the verification step. I believe those metrics are telling us the right story, so we should do X. I'll just execute on our processes to achieve Y. I'll assume these few things, so I can make progress on Z project.
One of Amazon's frequently quoted mottos is to trust yet verify. You assume the best intentions from people. You assume that they're competent. Yet, you still verify because everyone makes mistakes.
You never want a great excuse for a failure.
The Amazon Bar Raiser process is how one of the world's most prolific hiring pipelines scales.
Unlike Amazon's perf system, most employees love BRs. It creates high-quality hires, improves the experience for candidates, and trains new interviewers.
For more on the process:
5. Significant disagreements rarely revolve around code.
Managers are there to make a group of individuals a team. If anything, being deep in the technical details would make you less capable of being an impartial leader.
I love this topic. For more, read on!
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4. The manager needs to be the interface between engineers and the business.
Managers need to create the highest business value with their team. They translate product and engineering requirements to find the optimal value. Hard to be an arbiter if you're working on implementation details.
3. What you build is more important than how you build it.
It's hard for managers to focus on both execution and the why. Those managers overly focused on detailed engineering are the ones without the time to ask critical questions.
2. Managers must grow their team members.
If the manager is leading implementation, what do the senior engineers on the team lead? How do they grow?
1. How you build something is rarely how you fail.
How do projects fail? They misunderstand customer needs, or they fall drastically behind schedule. This isn't due to coding speed, it's due to leadership issues.
As a junior manager said to me at Facebook, "How could you earn the respect of your team if you weren't the best coder on the team?" That alone should be a warning sign.
Why shouldn't managers code?
When I interviewed at Facebook / Meta years ago, I had to take a coding test as a part of the hiring process. Thankfully my rusty coding skills didn't prevent me from getting an offer.
But the idea persists in places that engineering managers should code.
Amazon expects their engineering managers to run projects, mentor employees, design systems, architect platforms, manage operations, communicate with customers, and evolve products. But they don't expect them to code. However, that's not true of many companies.
Instead, unravel the complexity and find root fixes which solve the root causes of the issue.
For more, read on!
https://buff.ly/4f2vRcZ
If customers aren't notified about a security event, the issue is not with a single person who worked on the event, it's with your reporting processes.
Every time a process or system relies on a single human not making a mistake, you've designed a fragile system.
If a junior engineer can take down your product, the issue is not with your junior engineer. The issue is with your system being fragile.
If a bug is released in your code, and it causes customers to be double charged, the issue is with your QA process, not with the engineer who wrote the code.
"Bob screwed that up" doesn't have a real fix because even if you fire Bob, his replacement Joe is likely to do the same thing.
Almost always, if the main culprit listed for an operational event is a person, you've found an excuse / explanation, not a true root fix.
However, that single simple explanation is almost always a fiction story. It's not the full coverage of what happened. It's a convenient explanation which avoids the complex (but valuable) steps of identifying everywhere that things could have gone better.
2. Simple is easier. It is mentally exhausting to understand a big, complex project. Where did things go south? But you're saying that it failed because we didn't do user testing? Ok, that makes sense! Big mistake! We'll do user testing next time. Let's move on.
1. Blame is avoided with singular explanations. Even if your company is understanding of mistakes, no one enjoys the feeling of admitting a mistake. If you point at a single simple explanation, chances are that most people are then blameless. Our ego appreciates it when we dodge responsibility.
When bad things happen, we love to look for an explanation.
"The launch didn't meet expectations because of X."
"The outage happened because of Y."
"We made that bad hire, because of Z."
Having a single simple explanation is satisfying to the explainer and listener for a couple of big reasons.
Only then, after friendly warnings, serious warnings, and extremely clear warnings, should you proceed with PIPs/Coaching. Because only then have you actually given them a chance to improve their performance.
"I have warned you repeatedly that pushing code to production without peer sign-off is unacceptable. If this continues to happen, it will lead to you not working at this company anymore. I like you, and would like you to be successful, but I need to ensure that you understand what's at stake."
When serious feedback hasn't made an impact, you need to be extremely clear of where this is going, since many people don't have experience with this process. I find it helpful to make it clear that you're not the enemy.
When the pattern becomes more serious, you need to ensure they understand the feedback is serious. And you need to own it, with "I", not "We".
"That's the third time you've missed a deadline without letting us know. I am losing trust in your ability to deliver. This is a problem."
"I noticed you were late for standup for the second time. I just wanted you to know that it impacts our team's ability to get through standup quickly, and it can be frustrating to us all. Got it?"
