My latest in Quartz…
There’s a saying in software that all bugs are eventually user interface bugs, because someone has to see them to report them. In organizations, it often seems like all problems are eventually communication problems, because communication is the way we interface with each other—and the way most problems surface.
There are a lot of reasons why communication within a company can break down. Here are some of the most common.
My latest in Quartz…
Functional teams have four layers of communication:
– A mission (also known as a vision)
– Strategy (made up of proximate objectives)
– Tactics and process
– ExecutionThis list might seem like it includes categories of action—it does. But it’s not just doing these things, but also communicating them that ties teams together. Communicating the items on this list plays a major role in scaling teams and leaders. With these things in place and communicated, it’s much easier to add people to a team, and then entire teams to an organization.
Now you’re a manager, communication (always important) has become even more import, and your words carry more weight.
How do you communicate… one on one?
… to the team?
… about the team?
In a relationship with a power dynamic, the burden of a good relationship is on the person with the most power. I first made this observation with respect to interviewing but it applies here too. If conversations with someone are painful, it’s on you to make them less painful. Showing up regularly helps, as does taking an interest in them as people. Ultimately, different people will have different ways in which they want to communicate with you, and you can learn their styles and preferences and make an effort to accommodate that. Different people also have different baggage that they bring to work. If someone isn’t used to their manager seeing them as a human being, that will take a while for them to get used to. If someone has had bad experiences in the workplace they might take a while to open up.
Be consistent, and be kind. Work on doing good 1:1s. Take time getting to know people, and use what you learn. But don’t delude yourself that it’s kind to delay telling someone something they will find out eventually – for example, don’t delay talking to someone about their performance if there are problems. These conversations don’t get easier.
How often do you talk to the team as a whole? What kind of things to you talk about? How do you communicate a the direction of the team and keep things on track despite all those tempting diversions?
Get comfortable repeating yourself. Decide what you will do, and make hard choices about you won’t do. Talk about why you are choosing to do what you are doing. This is team direction communication.
The other aspect of this is communicating the kind of things you spend your time on. Figure out what you’re comfortable with. I do a version of this, each week I post some notes about what I’ve been working on to the team blog. Bigger things get their own post, but consistently I show up and share how I’m spending my time. With a smaller team I used to share my priorities in the daily standup.
How you communicate to the team depends on the size and how people are receptive to information – some teams like to write, and others like to talk. But it’s easy to not share what you’re doing, in part because people don’t ask and it can feel like there’s not much interesting to say about the activities of management. But people having some kind of insight into the kind of things you worry about and spend your time on is really helpful.
How do you talk about the team to your peers? To your boss? How do you highlight what is going well, and how do you get the alignment and help you need from other leaders in the organisation?
If you manage a team that has been underperforming (and particularly if your joining the team was supposed to address that) how do you communicate that things are getting better – given that they won’t change overnight?
This depends very much on the organization, but again I think consistency is key – and patience. People are focused on their own priorities, and can take a while to notice improvement elsewhere.
This is part 3 of a series aimed at new engineering managers. Part 1 was about figuring out your schedule. Part 2 was about social support. For help and support, you can also ask for an invitation to the New-ish Eng Manager Slack.
When I started thinking about what would be next for me after my year of funemployment, remote work weighted pretty highly on my list. People who know me might think that it’s because of my geographical indecision, and yes, that was a consideration, but the biggest factor for me was not actually that.
I didn’t want to cry in the bathroom ever again.
I didn’t want to get to work early, start panicking and sobbing at my desk, and rush home before anyone else got in.
I didn’t want to walk out of the office at the end of the day and cry most of the walk home.
Remote work seemed like a great compromise on returning to tech. When I cried at work (which would surely happen, I hadn’t known anything else). I could sob on my sofa (or, if things were really bad, in bed), and then wash my face with facewash, and not worry about my mascara running because I wouldn’t be wearing any. Clearly this would be a vastly improved situation.
I have read a lot of think pieces (by men) about why Remote Work Is The Answer, but I’ve had a lot of conversations with women about the convenience of crying at home, and the physical and emotional distance from micro-(and macro-!)aggressions.
If you’re wondering why remote work is so often wanted by women, my unscientific survey says it’s nothing to do with kids and everything to do with not having to cry in the bathroom, not having to sit next to the guy who just stole your idea in that meeting, not having to eat lunch with that guy who always stares at your breasts.
That being said, remote work is not a panacea, and on reflection I was probably optimising for the wrong things in preferring it. Luckily other things I weighted (a manager who I could trust, and the culture of the engineering team) saved me from myself.
We throw around the words “remote work” like it all means the same, and it doesn’t. Sometimes we work remotely on similar timezones, a few companies (generally ones that can tolerate a higher degree of inefficiency) work genuinely across timezones.
For me, I spend ~50% of my time in Medellin where a lot of our engineering team is, and cowork ~2 days a week. I try and make it to NYC (where my boss is) regularly, where I get dressed and go into the office like a Real Human. I have appalling remote work habits in many ways – I work from the sofa (or the bed, if I’m in a hotel) in my PJs. West-Coast or Europe, I work roughly EST hours. Sometimes I crawl out of bed into my first meeting (I try not to do this, but make no mistake – it happens). In general, as a manager, I try to accomodate my team, rather ask them to stay late because (for example) I decided I needed to be Anglo in Seattle for a couple of weeks. These are all choices that I made, because they seem like the right thing to do, and the starting point for system I can iterate on, and weren’t forced upon me.
Some questions I have after every piece I read about how “remote work” is the One True Way and how we will invariably work in the future.
But not everyone is suited to remote work. What will they do in your utopian future?
Yep, I personally love working remotely, but I’m an ambivert (and in practice, I cowork ~30% of the time). Some people like a boundary between work and home, some people (extroverts?) are just much happier in an office. To advocate the One True Way Of Remote Work is no different of advocating The One True Way Of Co-Location.
What about junior developers?
How do junior devs fit into this world view? Junior devs need mentoring and supervision, and it’s much easier to notice they are stuck when you’re physically with them. Do you only hire junior devs who have the experience to pro-actively seek help? Or do you not hire junior devs at all?
Are you remote across timezones?
This is completely different than a global-remote team, and isn’t quite the constraint-free environment it’s presented as.
As a leader, do you accomodate your team or do you expect them to accomodate you?
Do they know when you will be around? Is it on their timezone? If you’re timezones apart who gets up early, or stays late? I’m pretty skeptical of the engineering leader who frames remote work as pure upside, because I suspect they are pushing time problems onto their team. When I was in Japan for a week, I would get up to have necessary meetings or catch up with people on Slack at 5am, because I don’t want my team to have to work past 6pm,or for us not to communicate, because I decided to go speak at a conference.
How much do you travel?
I don’t feel like I travel that much, but increasingly people make comments such that it’s clear that my life seems unbearable to them. Which is fine, because they don’t have to live it. The amount of travel I do is only feasible because I have no responsibilities.
When it comes to having a remote team, how often do people have to travel to be there in person? Do you have them come to you, or do you go to them? If you ask people to travel, what if they have life commitments or health issues that make that hard? How much notice do you give them? Do you allocate any of these massive $ savings of remote work to subsidising child, or elder-care (burdens that disproportionately fall on women) whilst people are away from home? What if the employee is a single parent? Do you ever arrange your team get togethers in places where employees face discrimination on the basis of their gender, sexual orientation, or race?
How do you deal with communication when things get hard?
OK, you turn on video for the Hard Conversations. But if you’ve never met someone in person, or you spent a week together surrounded by another 20-100 people and grabbed a 30 minute coffee 1:1, how good is your relationship with them, really? How are you going to handle it being tested? What are you going to do when you have to give them bad news? Or tough feedback? Yeah we’re all adults working in our PJs in bed (no? just me?) but that doesn’t actually mean that nothing is ever going to go wrong.
This is something that I wish people would write about more, because I feel like I’ve been making it up as I go along. I worked, and continue to work, really hard to get to know everyone on my team as a human being. I do bi-weekly 1 hour 1:1s, when I’m together with anyone IRL I make a point of us doing something (breakfast! dinner!) 1:1. I try to speak to everyone who reports to me via DM at least every other day (tech leads, every day). If there’s something that I think can cause an emotional reaction, I make sure we talk about it at least on VoIP. And I have hard conversations with the video on (unless it’s unplanned and I didn’t brush my hair that day – I’m kidding… mostly).
A final note on communication: Co-located teams often cite the need for good communication as a reason to co-locate, and I agree that communication is really important. But one observation I have from 4 months of remote work, with people, many of whom are communicating in their second language, is that sure, communication is easier when we are co-located, but it’s not as much easier as we think it is. On a remote team, where everyone acknowledges communication is hard, we work to be good at it (see the communication guidelines we open sourced). Co-located teams who assume that being in the same space is enough, no matter how busy and focused they are, can take it for granted and easily miss important signals, cues, and information.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what working in bad environments had done to me, but that one manifestation of this was thinking about convenience of crying rather than you know… not having a job that would make me cry, is not something I realised until months later. What I should have looked for – didn’t know I could – was lucky to find anyway (finger’s crossed, it’s been 4 months) – is a job that wouldn’t make me cry.
My job is stressful. Emotionally draining. Exhausting. But it doesn’t make me cry. I think because my work environment and my colleagues have never made me feel completely devalued and powerless – in fact, the opposite.
I love working remotely. After my realisation about crying, I can conceive of working in an office again, but yeah – it’d be great not to have to. There’s a lot of economic benefit, and also social benefit. One of the things I love about where I work, is that we have a huge LATAM dev team and we’re providing the kind of opportunity that isn’t that available locally – yet. I have spent years writing about and trying to advocate for change in tech, that an entire industry shouldn’t be dominated and defined by one small geographic area full of myriad social inequity, and this is probably the top thing I’ve done that I feel meaningfully contributes to it.
There’s a lot of upside. But it’s not pure upside, and it’s not magic. Some things are harder, some things have hidden costs, and everything we do well we work really hard at. I’m really tired of reading Think Pieces that don’t acknowledge that.
Internships are often billed as a “3 month job interview”, but from the other side they are a 3 month stint in being a people manager, and the first opportunity people have to have a real impact on someone else’s career. This can be in a good way – the internship that makes the intern feel confident in their decision to be an engineer! The one where they built the Awesome Thing that helped them get that full time job.
Or, a negative impact. The Internship that was so bad that the intern left wracked with doubt about their capabilities. The poorly defined project that wasn’t actually possible, conclusively proved too late to do anything else meaningful. The manager who said that thing, that they won’t talk about but can’t forget either.
The job of a good manager (of an Intern, but maybe this applies more widely) is to set them up to succeed, and to define a space within which they can be effective. An internship should not be a test to overcome a poor manager and a badly-defined project. It should be a test to execute on a well-defined project with a supportive manager.
A good intern project is self contained whilst exposing the intern to multiple people. It will have significant impact, but isn’t on the critical path.
It can be hard to balance these things. Finding something nicely self-contained may mean you need to work harder to get your intern exposed to other people. Sometimes that means the project is more experimental, which means there is a risk it won’t actually ship.
I like to split off an initial project, that I estimate will take ~2 weeks. This gives the intern a chance to get to grips with the code base, and achieve something early that is significant enough that they can look back on that if they later feel discouraged. It’s also a time for me to gauge their competence, and make sure the main project is going to be the right one for them.
It’s also an opportunity to set the ground rules of how I want us to operate. One enormous CL (changelist) for a 2 week project is going to be a pain to review, one enormous CL for a semester-long project is just not going to happen. At this point I’ll meddle more so that I can back off later – train them to break down things into small pieces (students are used to submitting entire assignments and waiting weeks for feedback, so this can be an adjustment), and to ask for guidance as we go.
The intern is not there to fix little bugs for you, they are there to build something that demonstrates their employability. If they are so amazing that they can pick up bugs for you as well, and you can tell the story “operating like a full time engineer”, great. But they shouldn’t be doing things like that to the detriment of their project.
As with anyone, really, the best relationship with your Intern will be one where they feel they can come to you, and where they value your opinion. Where you can trust them. Where you are convinced of their capabilities, and they know you are, and that you are on their side and there to make things easier for them.
Because of the poor quality of management in the tech industry, a lot of people don’t have a good model of what a good manager looks like, and management anti-patterns beget other anti-patterns. The hands off manager begets the micromanager, for example.
Personally, I hate having scheduled meetings with people I sit next to (the emptier my calendar is, the happier I am). But I’ve realised that a meeting blocked out in my calendar is a visible sign of a commitment to make 30 minutes for them, every week.
However the weekly meeting is, in my opinion, the least important part of your communication. Eat lunch together, listen to their updates in the standup, give thoughtful and fair code reviews, ask their opinion on things. And when they do something good, tell them. When they do something really good, tell other people as well. Always give them credit for what they do.
Find ways to proactively discover if they are having issues. I like things broken down so that I’ll expect to see a CL every day so if I day goes by and I don’t see something from them, I’ll make a point to ask them how it’s going. If their standup update sounds like they are going in a different direction that I would have expected, I’ll ask some questions to figure out if I should be worried and intervene.
I read back through this and it sounds like it could be invasive and micro-managey. But micromanagement is when you are forced to account for your activities in a way that makes you resentful. Conversation often features people talking about what they are working on and how it’s going. Aim for conversational.
When I was an intern, I worried I was the diversity hire. Years have passed, and I’ve worked in other countries and it appears… I am not alone. Male interns can create or just exacerbate this problem by making comments to that effect. It’s helpful to be aware of this, and look for opportunities to quash that fear. If they are a diversity hire, for example part of a program that offers internships to underrepresented groups, all the more reason to affirm their potential and capability.
There are guys who think it’s great to hire more women because they think this will improve their chances of getting a girlfriend, who gleefully exclaim “intern season” in the manner in which they might exclaim “girls gone wild”. Be mindful of any men in the office who do anything that could conceivably make a female intern feel uncomfortable. I’ll ask female interns (that I know! Not just randomly) “Is everyone being nice to you? Is anyone being… too… nice… to you?” because you can’t expect them to complain. Firstly, because they are on a 3 month job interview. Secondly, because girls are trained to be grateful for male attention, and to internalise it if it makes them feel uncomfortable. And to female interns everywhere: the guy who works full time at a company you are interning at and wants to date you, is not the kind of guy you want to date.
I know, I know, Dave’s a jerk to everyone and he always tears apart everyone’s first code review. But, don’t be a bystander. Be it casual undermining, or the intellectual pissing contest, don’t put up with it. Insist that other people be kind to your intern. Yes, the comment might be fair, but it would be phrased better if the writer thought first “this is a smart person who has thought about this problem”, and not “yet another idiot I am forced to work near”.
If you can’t cope with the first two conversations, reach out to a woman in the office (or outside!) and ask them to mentor your intern. If you can’t cope with the third, have your manager do it.
If you can’t cope with those alternatives, do your potential intern’s career a favour – have someone else mentor them instead.
With the rise of political correctness, it’s become so much harder to undermine women. One can no longer tell her to get back in the kitchen, or express appreciation for her physical attributions through unsolicited touching. These things have – bizarrely – become frowned upon. Why does no-one have a sense of humour any more?
This list of 14 strategies (try one every day for two weeks should you be so inclined!) will take the most reasonable, well balanced woman and have her questioning her own abilities. And, if she ever complains, just point out the pure intentions and the very niceness of the act.
Thanks to Nat, Kelly and Dennie for their suggestions.
Obviously, this is satire. These strategies should not actually be used.
I’ve been thinking, and worrying, and talking with other women about the how hard it can be to walk the line between being a bitch, and being a pushover, for a long time.
It took me a long time to realise, that this line isn’t just a line we walk because it is there, isn’t just our problem. It is a line that other people draw for us. And it’s difficult because they draw it in different places, and in different widths.
Take a statement like, “No, I think that is a bad idea.”
The woman making it is a pushover when… they get ignored.
The woman making it is a bitch when… the person whose idea it is views it as an attack.
The woman making it is a human when… it is viewed as the start of a dialog, because a smart, reasonable person wouldn’t object without good reason.
For the most part, men have wider lines drawn for them. The presumed competence means they are less likely to be pushed around. There is no concept of being a bitch, they are allowed to be less “emotionally aware”, which broadens the line on the other side.
Then take those situations where you’re expected to drink the coolaid. Is a man more likely to just be seen as having a healthy skepticism? Being “incurably honest”?
But a woman… it’s so easy for her to be a bitch. We have to take care of the lines we draw for each other, and the lines that other people have drawn, that we try to walk between. Figure out where they are, and choose those people that make the lines as wide as possible. Walking a tighrope is hard. An invisible one, impossible.
One of the takeaways I took from The Male Factor is that I should feel OK with 20% of men thinking I’m a bitch, because 20% of them are prone to find women to be attacking them in some way. So I tell myself that too much below 20% and I’m pandering to them. More than that, and I might actually be kind of a jerk. This has been a liberating attitude to take. I know, trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity [Colin Powell], but having a metric is comforting.
I found this book by Sherry Turkle – Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Amazon) fascinating, and think it’s worth a read for anyone who creates digital experiences, or just worries about their consumption of them.
Things That Stood Out For Me
How people interact with robots, what does “it’s alive enough” mean? Do we want to interact with robots because it is simpler, a robot can give us the illusion of the support and affection we crave, without the demands that other humans place on us?
Having robot carers for the young and old, the benefit is that they can always be there, but what about the downside? “Shouldn’t there be people for that?”.
Avoiding phone calls, because it seems intrusive, and yet feeling left out of one another’s lives. The way we stay in touch has changed. I’ve noticed that people find it weird that I call them – that to me, is something I do when I’m in the same timezone as someone. My “close” friends, I want to hang out with or have a “realtime” conversation with every week – and that means the phone.
Using online experiences like second life to explore areas of ourselves (example of artist programmer), and to escape – being immersed in a video game, and playing for such long hours, that miss out on life, fail at work etc.
Confessional communities – sometimes people confess rather than make amends, and the “secrets” may not actually be true. People may say that the negative comments aren’t important, but they still effect them. Good discussion about Post Secret, which I personally love to read every week. When I went to the Post Secret show, every seat had a postcard to write a secret on… I bought a card, wrote the pertinent part of my secret, and gave it to the person my secret was about instead. In the end, I felt – why send it a stranger to be maybe posted on a website? That does nothing. Maybe the option I chose did nothing either, but it at least felt less futile.
Anxiety – students experience of 9/11 was of disconnection, as teachers ushered them to the basement (reminiscent of the cold war era), and lack of connectivity (lack of phone) can make them anxious. They don’t really understand the terms and conditions of the sites they use, and have little expectation of privacy – one even talked about going to find a pay phone for conversations he wanted to keep private, and bemoaned them being hard to find. The level of maintenance that goes into profiles is stressful, and the way that online bleeds into offline can be anxiety-inducing.
Idea that online apologies are worthless; they are too easy.
The way people feel about people using cellphones rather than being fully present with them – especially kids around their parents. They are there, yet not.
Things It Made Me Think About
When I started reading this book, I was feeling the disappointment of human relationships that don’t live up to expectations. Breakups. Friends who let you down. People who are less than honest. Robot friends, I wasn’t sure about – (most of) my friends are so amazing, I don’t need an alternative or a backup. But the idea of a robot boyfriend? That appealed. It wouldn’t cancel on me at the last minute, be threatened by my job, make snarky remarks about how much money I must earn, resent business trips. It could do practical things like wait in for the plumber, reach high shelves (maybe?), carry my suitcase up the stairs when the elevator breaks (again), stoke my hair when I come home in tears because I’ve had a crappy day. And, let’s be brutally honest, the other physical aspects that I miss.
The book challenged me in these ways – to reconsider that the other appeal of that, is because it would allow me to have a selfish “romantic” relationship, one where I wouldn’t need to face the fear of being let down, or the difficult negotiations around priorities and time – it would be on my terms.
It made me consider that my ways of keeping in touch – blogging, status updates… the way people might perceive a lack of personalisation there, that they deserve. I could make more effort to be personal. One of my close friends wrote me a letter the other day as part of a project she’s doing. When she told me she was going to write me one I wondered why – we speak every day – but then I found it on my desk, and read it, and it was lovely. Really lovely. That piece of paper is a special thing that I’ll keep.
By the end of the book, I felt like I appreciated my human relationships more. I still see the appeal of a robot – something that wouldn’t let you down – but the special things about humans is when they don’t let you down, they could have. The complexity, the difficulty, and the unpredictability of human relationships is part of what makes them special. A robot replacement might be safer, but we would be the poorer for it.
Slides and commentary for the talk I gave at Ignite Waterloo, June 15th. Missing two slides – title slide and end slide (with my twitter handle and website on it). Ignite is a tough format – 5 minutes, 15 seconds a slide, the slides auto-advance. The *’s are where I expect the slide to change (I’m going to follow this up with a post on preparing, when I think they will be useful).
I was talking to one of our facilities people recently, about someone behaving a little… strangely. And she said, “they’re an engineer”. To which I replied: “I’m an engineer!”. She responded, “Oh,*but you shouldn’t be”.
Actually, I really love my job and so I’m pretty sure that it’s exactly what I should be doing. But, I have noticed something, where if an software engineer seems, y’know, normal, and well-dressed* and functions socially then people are surprised, or even skeptical of their profession.
Back when I was a student in Edinburgh, I went to a ceilidh. And I met a guy. And he asked me out on a date. Sure*.
And then ascertained from my roommate that I was single (apparently me agreeing wasn’t enough, but as it turned out him asking me out didn’t imply he was single, so fair enough). And then, he starts getting to know me. So he asks what I’m studying* – extremely normal, student, conversation – right?
So by 3rd year I’ve finally accepted that I am not meant to be a chemist – mostly due to the sheer volume of equipment I was smashing. And so I say, CompSci.* And he says, “I don’t believe you”.
And then – you can tell we were both drunk at this point right? I mean, it was in Scotland – argue about this. And I’m all, if I was going to lie about it I’d pick something better. Like, “I’m in an elite program* that feeds into MI5. We take core courses in math and languages, and then weapons and advanced driving. I’m specializing in sword-fighting and snowmobiles.”
In the end, it probably would have been easier to convince him I was training to be a female James Bond than a CompSci student*. He just kept saying, “I don’t believe you. You’re too normal”. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out. And now I live in Canada.
And honestly, I wasn’t that offended. Not so long before that I’d been dating another CompSci who had used to tell women he met in bars* he was studying “social anthropology”.
I told this story in introduction for another talk I gave last summer, and afterwards my friend came up to me and said, “Cate, how did you KNOW?” – *she’d been telling people she was an English lit major.
Some engineers, even ones who have girlfriends, have taken offence, and they say “I don’t have to lie to get dates”. In this town, I can believe it.*
But here’s the thing – engineers, we have an image problem. And maybe this is why in the US more parents encourage their daughters to be actresses than software engineers, a fact that horrifies and terrifies me.
But we also have a communication problem. We don’t *communicate the value we bring and what we do well. And we don’t listen well enough to what users want.
I was trying to explain to someone what I do. I was like, “you know, if you have an iPhone? And you get your GMail in safari? That’s what I work on.”*
And she said, “Oh, you work for the internet”.
Which is not really that accurate, but would be a pretty awesome job title, right? “Hi, I’m Cate. I work for the internet”. I guess Vint Cerf can really say that.*
Meanwhile, my mom calls me because she can’t get Facebook to work, or her Windows machine to connect to a network, or some kind of question that I know nothing about, because I don’t use Windows and barely use Facebook. Last time I was there she complained is that my sister’s trainee-accountant boyfriend *gives better tech-support than I do. Which caused me to exclaim, “this is like asking a brain surgeon why your cat is shedding hair!”
What’s the point of all this? I think if we could communicate better, then engineers would have to lie less to get dates,* but also humans would get better products.
Clearly, I don’t have the communication figured out. But I do know that we need to listen better, and ask more questions.
Engineers need to realize that humans don’t care about the things that we do. They mostly care *about getting what they want to do done, not how, or in what language, or requiring how much RAM.
Humans, writing code is not the same as using software. I literally spend all day every day using only Chrome, XCode, and an emulator. If you have a problem in an application running on Windows,* it’s extremely unlikely I know what that is. The big difference, I think, between engineers and humans when a computer is “not working” is that the engineer isn’t afraid.
(slide which only contains the words “DON’T PANIC”)
But the human shouldn’t be either, and if they are – that’s something that* engineers need to fix.
And finally, please tell your daughter to think about being an engineer. It’s awesome, and I think we need a more representative selection of humanity building our software, changing the world, and connecting, enabling and supporting humans*, to do whatever it is, they want to do.