For a long time — especially in software engineering — there was an unspoken promise: if you were smart enough, fast enough, or technical enough, the rest would work itself out.
That promise no longer holds.
I had the chance to talk with Amy Yee on her podcast Wired for Change about what’s changed in tech, and what engineering leadership demands now. We covered a lot of ground — identity, AI, leadership, values, career paths — but it all comes back to one thing: we have to let go of what we thought was normal, and understand reality as it is.
When Did Things Change?
For me, it was when the mass layoffs started. Before that, doing a layoff was a sign of failure. Somehow it rapidly became a normal thing to do – at volume and in an inhumane way.
The underlying shift is that org size went from a status symbol to liability. The base assumption used to be a large enough group of developers would generate value. Post-ZIRP, all kinds of debt got more expensive. Organizational debt included.
On a human level, a social contract was broken. You saw people who had worked at an organisation for a decade or more just have their access cut one day. Now I think there’s a split between people who think they can out-work or outmanoeuvre being dispensable, and people who know that a job is just a job and their career – and life – is something outside of that, that they need to pay attention to.
The Identity Problem
I don’t think demand has evaporated, but it has changed. I think most obviously, in hiring, it’s a buyer’s market and that means longer, more arduous processes and less good candidate experience. Within organisations, fewer perks and promotions.
External validation was always a shaky foundation. Picking a CS degree at 18 was often arbitrary, and building an identity on it was never healthy. What matters now is clarity about how you bring value.
The job was never to write code – the job was to solve problems and move metrics. What problems or metrics are you responsible for? Do you know what impact you’re having on them? Can other people – like your manager, their manager – tell the impact you’re having?
The 80/20 Shift
Scaling yourself is about building systems and instilling judgment – how you continue to deliver things of value as more is available to you. It was always the case that at a certain level code was not the limiting factor. But with AI that’s happening earlier in someone’s career.
If it used to be the case that a good developer was say, 80% throughput, and 20% team multiplier, that calculation has now changed. Let’s say in 2026 it’s 60:40 – the result is that figuring out how to be a multiplier is more important than ever.
Engineers often used to put off that shift until staff level, but now they need to adjust their mindset earlier. It’s less about the code or language – more about systems design. Being good at systems design, being able to critique, give feedback, and set standards are even bigger levers than before. These were multiplier skills that used to be 20% for strong ICs – not everyone. Now 20% is the minimum, 40% is expected – a bigger part of the role and greater drivers of impact.
AI as a Multiplier
I think about AI as a multiplier, and that’s part of the dissonance around it. Competent, self-aware people use it to get more done. Less competent people use it to generate noise — it’s easier than ever to produce something superficially polished but lacking depth. That creates work for the people reviewing it, and undermines credibility.
Worth naming: we’re all competent and incompetent depending on the task. I have a workflow that makes me produce better written content. I use it for frontend development because I know enough to get adequate results. But when I tried to use it for a professional development policy — something I have no expertise in — I could tell the output was bad but couldn’t fix it. At least I knew, and didn’t waste anyone else’s time.
What You Can Control
Developers have less control than we had before, but all the more reason to use the power we do have well. Nowhere is that more true than over our own choices and attitude in the face of change.
We need to expect to earn our keep. In the ZIRP era I think a lot of software devs lived in some world where they expected to make a lot of money in a way that was divorced from the realities of the business. Now you need to know what value you drive to the business and stay focused on that.
Embrace the idea that your career is bigger than your current job. A bad job is hard, but it’s survivable. You can come back from it. Start with the things you can control – it’s more than you think.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Amy and I talked for over an hour — self-management, feedback, privacy and values, what leadership looks like without authority or abundance. You can watch the full episode here or listen on [Spotify | Apple podcasts]
If this resonates with you, you might be interested in:
DRI Your Career – the courses Jean and I are building to support ICs and managers navigating the post-ZIRP era
This isn’t a doom-and-gloom conversation. It’s a reframing — about judgment, agency, and what it means to lead when the old assumptions no longer hold.
A few weeks ago everyone was arguing about “founder mode”, but before it came the idea of “Peace time CEO/War time CEO”.
The removal of the unnecessary violence in the metaphor is an improvement, but the content of peacetime/wartime is actually better. It’s more specific, and more about operating with focus and efficiency. Founder mode is more about individualistic exceptionalism.
It is an eternal mystery to me why some people still rate El*n M*sk. Thinking about this, I wonder if it’s that he willingly put himself on extra hard mode by taking a barely viable business and saddling it with a mountain of debt. It’s the leadership equivalent of padlocking yourself blindfolded in a tank of water. Now the world is divided into people who think his confidence means he knows what he’s doing and people who think he’s delusional.
In tech we have spent such a long period in zero interest rate driven growth that what it means to be an effective leader has been more about supporting growth than navigating difficulty. Perhaps it is in part because it’s hard to share the more difficult things. The day I had to lay off half my team remains one of the worst days of my career, but it’s not a story I will ever share publicly in a way other people could really learn from it.
Most people are heavily biased by their own experience, are inclined to credit skill rather than luck, brilliance rather than being in a position to be in the right place at the right time. It’s easy to tell a story about how you did the right things when the numbers were going up, and it’s hard to know what worked and what didn’t when the numbers are going down. You make difficult decisions, and you hope for the best, and you learn what you can. The more you move up the org chart, the fewer people who will have context on the decisions you make – and the more people who will be angry with you, regardless of what you do.
In good times, leaders were defined too much by their ability to sell a vision, which generated the valuation and helped them build a team. I think this whole founder mode idea is about an equally shallow definition of what it means to be a good leader in a bad time, all the shallower because it doesn’t admit that it is a bad time.
In hard times, I think leaders need to:
Have rigour to decision making – constrained resources mean decisions are harder to reverse and more costly to get wrong.
Be willing to make hard decisions and stand behind them – it’s inevitable that you have to make (more) hard decisions in a tough market.
Be intensely focused on delivering value – in hard times leadership is measured less by vision and more what is actually accomplished.
Build systems of accountability – and use them, when layoffs are more likely, it’s all the more critical that the team you have is structured to be successful.
Understand constraints (of resourcing, time, or money) and how to operate within them – this feeds into decision making, and also the need to say no.
Find cheaper and more sustainable ways to motivate and align people – when you can’t promote people or pay them more, what else can you offer them?
Reflecting on this list, I dispute that the skills required for hard times are not needed in good times. Perhaps other skills carry more weight, perhaps it’s easy to get away without them. Perhaps they are the things we cut corners on when we’re busy. I know I could be better at all of these things, and I can think of many times when I haven’t done them more than sufficiently.
Whilst I’m all for pushback on shallow VC think pieces, I think we have to be honest about how the market has shifted, and how we as leaders can be effective within it. For me, that starts with being realistic about the current reality, my own place within it, how expectations have shifted, the skills needed to be effective – and how to reconcile them with my personal value system.
My partner and I had a hellish move recently. We were lucky in that our landlords are nice, reasonable people, and unlucky in that they were quite disorganized and hadn’t done everything they needed to, like ordering furniture and thoroughly cleaning up after the last tenant.
So as this played out, living in a hotel, in a new (to me) country, trying to juggle his new job, my existing job, and the absolute chaos of everything, our differences started to play out.
My partner, a software engineer, said “they should do these things.” I, an engineering director, started to develop a risk mitigation strategy.
My colleague John and I recorded a little podcast together, and you can listen to it here. We talked about listen-first leadership, being judged on performance vs potential, and how I think of a senior engineer as “making the whole team better”. There’s also a transcript available for those of you (like me!) who hate AV.
Early on in my career, I worked on something that shipped without tests. And I learned something important:
That’s a bad idea.
To frame it positively, I learned that any tests were better than no tests. And so I went away and read things, talked to people, and experimented. And over time I’ve learned a lot and mastered a certain level of competence. I’ve also become the kind of person who writes extensive unit tests on my experimental side projects.
But it’s not uncommon for people in tech to claim they learned their leadership skills, or management skills, from learning what not to do from some terrible leaders and – especially – managers.
There are a number of things wrong with this. Firstly, these create self-perpetuating cycles. We’ve all heard (and often told!) stories of terrible micro-managers, I heard about one who had his team track their time in 30 minute increments (just the thought of this makes me stressed). The result is that many of us fear being the micro-manager, and so we tend to be too hands-off.
The thing is, if you could get past your loathing of the micro-manager and actually listen to what they think they are doing, you might hear a story about how they had a hands-off manager, and didn’t get the support they wanted, so now they are trying… not to be that guy.
So we’re all trying to… not be that guy (I use “guy” deliberately, because the vast majority of the time it is a guy). Cool. I totally believe that guy was a terrible manager, or terrible lead. But that doesn’t mean that we know what the hell we are doing.
So we read things (but mostly ignore all the wider research outside the tech industry), we talk to people (do we know that they know what they are doing? Did they make it up from some other place of things not to do?) and experiment.
Only now our experiments are not with source code. But with people’s careers. In an industry where people’s careers make up an unhealthy level of defining who they are.
I’ve learned a lot of what not to do. But recently I learned something about what to do. Specifically, if you lead through a hard thing, especially something that fails, the best measure of success you have is the relationship you have with the people you led. If you get through it and they still respect and like you, you’ve done something right.
And it made me realise how little we learn when we learn what not to do. And how many unknown unknowns it leaves us with, that will one day come back to bite us.
The other thing I’ve observed recently, is that the way someone treats a new grad, or an intern, says a lot about them. It’s like that tip of seeing how your date treats the waiter.
Yes, some interns and new grads are arrogant and obnoxious. But in general these are the most enthusiastic and positive people you meet. You are amongst their first experience of what people are like in the working world. They are so keen to like the people they work with, and they are the people who we conduct the most brutal experiments of poor management and poor leadership on.
And so, they learn what not to do. They learn not to be that guy, only now that guy is you. And the cycle continues.
These quotes set the stage for a really helpful presentation about how we see our jobs, and how we advance using a framework of Do Better, Look Better, Connect Better.
As a kid, Azzarello was into arts, and her mother said to her: “You will go to college. You will get an education. You will support yourself. Don’t expect anyone else to support you.” As a result of this, Azzarello decided to do Electrical Engineering instead of art, where she was one of three women, also achieving a minor in CS. Electrical Engineering wasn’t natural to her, but coding was ideal.
Azzarello’s first job was at Bell Labs, which should have been a dream job, but wasn’t. She wasn’t using enough of her strengths, and was interested in products and business. So she took a job as a Sales Engineer at a Silicon Valley company. She’s held every level of position at a company, didn’t drop into being a CEO – had entry level jobs. And Engineering and tech education was a big part of her success, it taught her about problem solving, and that there is always somewhere to start.
Did Product Marketing at a couple of Silicon Valley startup companies. Azzarello was technically in Marketing, but spent half her time with Engineers. At HP, she had the choice between Marketing Manager and Software Development Manager. She picked Software Development Manager, because she knew she wanted to be a General Manager some day.
The product was a mess. Quality and morale were both low, they were on a two year cycle and running late. After a year, all the problems were fixed, in part because they had moved to a 6-month development cycle. But after all that, Azzarello did not get a raise. When asking why, given that, the answer was “I tried, but nobody knows you”.
This was a huge slap in the face about how the world works. Work is not enough. To have more impact, it’s not just about recognition and raises, you need to be known, respected, and recognised. As a result, you get more opportunities, more money, and more interesting projects. The results have to be seen.
Worst job, was Sales and Marketing for HPs desktop systems, but it gave her more experience to help become a GM. You can’t get a job without experience, but you can get experience without the job. Moved to HP Openview Software business, ran a global org with 5k people. Then became CEO of a startup. Then Chief Marketing Officer at Siebal, but after that was bought by Oracle she was paid off and has been running the Azzarello group for 6 years.
Do Better
Work, or the environment, beats the “I can change the world” out of you”. The key is to focus on your natural strengths, which we often take for granted. When working in our areas of greatest strength, it feels ideal, and we don’t think that it can be impressive. When others are amazed, and it doesn’t feel like a big deal to you… that’s a strength.
We are impressed when others do the things that we think are hard.
Invert that – focus on the strengths. The ROI on strengths is higher than the ROI on stuff we’re not good at. So spending time on things we are naturally good at, has big returns! Hated every minute of working on weaknesses, and never got any better at any of it. Once she stopped worrying about weaknesses, and invested in strengths, business improved and her career soared.
No one person can be good at everything, but a team can.
Tune your job over time to suit your strengths. Know what works for you – you can change your job, without changing your job.
EXERCISE: Think about a time when you were at your best. What was special (extra good!) because you did it?
The energy in the room is tremendous when talking about strengths – I know I feel a boost focusing on a positive experience.
Celebrate natural strengths – figure out what you’re naturally good at. Don’t try to earn your primary living doing something you’re not good at. It’s painful.
Developing a strategy to use strengths and values at work.
Too Busy
To think, to reorganize… “to busy to scale”.
No-one other than you has any motivation to make you less busy. Most successful people didn’t happen to be less busy on the way – they figured out how to get things done in spite of being busy.
If you are overwhelmed by your job, you aren’t ready for promotion. People wish for work that is more important and has more meaning, no-one wants more meaningless crap.
Are you a workhorse? If you are, the reward is – more work. It feels like you’re doing the right thing, but you have to catch and wiggle out of this way of working. It doesn’t get you ahead, it just gets you more work.
There was an inventory crisis at HP. A guy spent time on crisis, but he wasn’t a workhorse, he was strategic and so delivered better results without burning up all of his time personally.
Give yourself time to think – get known for rising above work, solving problems in a more strategic way. You need a system or process for dealing with it in a different way. Move yourself out of workhorse mode. No-one will do it for you.
When you have time tot hunk, consider what the business really values. Think about how to do your job better.
Ruthless Priorities
Too many things on todo list, all of them seem important. Decide, what are the things that you will not put at risk? Ask how bad is it if this fails?
It’s not about saying no, it’s about allowing yourself to finish your ruthless priorities first. Get famous for finishing important things, not for being busy. Talk about what you are doing, not about what you are not doing.
Being a leader is about getting the most important things done when it is hard.
Defend Your Time
Your job is not to do everything and die trying. Not all requests are created equal. Advise your boss, and negotiate. Your boss delegates thinking and judgement, not just the work.
Look Better
This is about credibility. Being invisible doesn’t work – you can’t opt out of communicating. If it’s not a natural strength, develop it as a skill.
If you are not communicating, you are communicating. But, it’s OK to be just OK at it. Azzarello trained herself to be a more convivial listener.
Be visible, but not annoying. You can’t be credible if you are invisible. You are never annoying if you are genuinely adding value, or if you are communicating about important outcomes achieved.
Be more relevant, you need to translate:
Business first.
Don’t educate
No jargon.
Talk their language.
Create “the hook”.
If you have to educate someone about what/why – you are not relevant. What’s relevant is what they wake up in the morning worrying about.
Magic Communication Tool
Business initiative / realities (“hooks”). The only way to know their hooks is to ask. Really understand who your stakeholders are.
Personal Brand
Your brand is how you are perceived by others. Example: Disney has the brand as the happiest place on earth. They have turned waiting in line into an art form, and you never see a security force (but they are there).
Your brand is not what you say, but what everyone else says. Your brand is what people see from you most consistently.
PERFORMING OR PRESENTING
Performing means owning the outcome.
Not just content.
You are being assessed.
Not about having a “big personality”.
Humility is OK… invisible is not.
Don’t be afraid of being judged – seek it out.
Patty told us an embarrassing story of going to a client and having someone say: “why did you bring her? She doesn’t know anything.” She didn’t die. “Fearless” people are afraid, but do it anyway. Just because you are scared, doesn’t mean you are not qualified. Be scared, and do it anyway.
Body language is not just what you show to others, it changes you. Influences your brain chemistry. When you smile, sends stimulus to your brain. It makes you feel more powerful and less afraid. A pen between your teeth achieves the same thing.
Power poses. Wonder women – don’t hunch in on yourself! Wear a sweater (theory is that women sit like this because we are cold).
Be very focused on outcomes and excellence, and just stand your ground. You are stronger when you are yourself – don’t try and turn into someone else.
“The last thing you need is another one of you.”
Connect Better
Get help! Never struggle along. Get mentors, and build your extra team.
The most successful people are those who get the most help.
Types of Mentors
Smart people.
Can’t have too many.
Engage several per year informally.
Personal Career Advocates.
Add one every 1-3 years (informal and formal).
Business Advisors.
Be on the lookout for help at getting better at your business.
Create your personal advisory board.
You can attempt your career by yourself, without mentors, but why would you?
If you have mentors, good for you, get another. If not, get one.
“Mystery mentors”: they are your mentor, but they never know it.
Figure out what job you want, then figure out how to get that experience.
You current job will never give you all the experience you need to get the next one.
Networking Paradox.
Need a network that can help you.
Networking is about giving, not taking.
Give before you need anything.
On balance, always take less than you are giving.
Authentic Networking
Keeping in touch with people you already know.
Meeting new people.
Meet new people based on things that actually interest/inspire you.
Give positive feedback.
Reach out based on something specific.
Offer to be of service.
Recommendations:
30 minutes networking a month.
Send 10 emails a month.
Connect properly with 2 special people.
Summary
Do your job and change your job.
Do Better – impact.
Refuse to burn time on low value work.
THRIVE: redefine your job to add more value; raise the bar.
Look Better – Credibility
Be visible, but not annoying.
Be a translator: be relevant, show your value.
Connect Better – Support
Build a broad network.
All in all, I enjoyed it, and I got things out of it – more so than when I read the book, I think. I was a bit wary at first, because I hate the advice of women with other interest, take less technical roles, but I don’t think it went that way at all, and this advice is relevant whether you’re in a technical role or more of a management one.
This Thursday, it will be two months since I arrived in Sydney. I came to work on a specific project, and that project came with a pretty ambitious deadline. I don’t know if anyone, including the person who thought this deadline up, really believed we would make it. But we did, just about. We as a team, did. And that moment, where you can say, “yeah, did that” – pretty awesome. But there are moments that happen before that, where people start to look at what you’re doing, and say, “hey, you just might do that”, and those are pretty cool, too.
I ran this project. Which means if we didn’t make that deadline, it would be on me. Making it, well, good leaders give away credit and take blame. But I do get to feel satisfied. But the biggest thing I get to feel satisfied about, is that in the last two months, I have consistently worked around 40 hours a week. I have gone out, a lot, and found friends and things to do in Sydney. Got (kinda) settled in my apartment, even taken a day’s vacation. Worked out 4-5 times a week, and averaged 4.5k fuel points a day. My life is a little loopy, but it’s definitely diverse.
Extensive reading around personal development, and watching other people run things, and running my own, much smaller, things meant I had some ideas about Planning, Leadership, and keeping sane under pressure. So this is my three most important things in each area, most of which I tested by breaking at some point.
Software Development Planning In General
Eliminate your Known Unknowns
This is the most important thing. You have a feature set and a deadline, some things you know how to do, and some things you don’t.
The thing you don’t know how to do is the most important thing you need to do today. This unknown falls somewhere on the scale between being very easy, and being hard / time consuming / requiring someone else to change their thing / flat out impossible. The sooner you know what it is, the sooner you can adjust your estimates, or your features, to be more realistic.
Think Medium Term
I don’t hack. I worry, actually, that I literally can’t hack. I can’t fight with something, and be happy with a one line fix labelled “DO NOT TOUCH THIS”. I always need to understand why, and to rationalize why things interact, or work the way they do.
Hacking is short term thinking. I’m in a hurry, do this quickly, come back later. It borrows time from future-you, to save time today. But you don’t know when future-you is going to pay the bill. You might find it’s tomorrow (before you ship) – that’s the worst case. And hacks multiply, the more you have, the more expensive each one will be to fix, so here’s the next worst case, you ship something full of hacks, and now you can’t do anything interesting until you unravel them all.
The thing about long term thinking, is that the world is going to be different a year, hell, a month from now than it is today. Long term is an investment in the future, but you have no idea what the future is going to look like. Isn’t that one of the awesome things about working in tech? Everything changes, all the time.
Medium term is the balance, and I find when I think medium term I know what issues will result from that decision, and I know roughly when they will occur. Choosing X over Y will mean that we have to adjust some things, in a relatively minor way, if we do Z, but I’m confident Z won’t be on any of the next few iterations I’m OK with that, but document it somewhere.
Medium term is doing things that will get harder over time sooner rather than later. In this case, Y is a pain, but needs to happen for Z. If we do it now, it’s very easy, and has and intermittent slightly higher overhead for a while. If we wait, it becomes a huge problem that takes someone a long and miserable time to unravel.
Ruthlessly Prioritize
Feature creep is the biggest problem with tight deadlines, and the temptation is always to slip things in because “things are looking so good”.
But why are things looking so good? Because you eliminated so much of this stuff. Because you were ruthless in the first place.
UX wants the widget to slide in and out, but when they realize it is as much work some feature, maybe they will reconsider.
I think it’s pretty easy to eliminate the large things, if you are ruthless about it, you’re clear about how long things take, and your PM and UX people are realistic. The thing to watch here is the small things. I find these are the things that I could fix in an hour or less, and it’s tempting to just agree to them, because it wouldn’t take much more time to write the code than have the conversation – and coding is more fun than having meetings! But I think you get 4-6 hours of good coding a day. So 4 “little things” and you’ve just allocated most of your day away, and were these things the most important things you could be doing?
Maybe not.
Leadership
Give Away The Stuff You Know
It is super tempting to look at the list of things to do, identify the things that you know and could do quickly, and just get cracking on them. You’ll feel an awesome sense of accomplishment, you’ll make super fast progress, and then there will be barely anything left, so that won’t take long at all.
This is complete nonsense. Especially if you have new people who you don’t know. If you give them something you know, you can evaluate how they do it, provide guidance, easily conceptualize it in the bigger picture. If there’s an issue with it down the road, you’ll be able to fix it.
And, importantly, you can instead work on one of your Known Unknowns. And when you’ve figured that out, you give that away too, so you are continually at the boundary of what you know and what you need to do, figuring out how it all fits together. You have the big picture in your head, and enough detail on everything to dive into it at need. Maybe you don’t know anything the best, but you can rationalize about everything, and that is really, really useful.
One of the biggest mistakes I made, that came closest to causing us to miss the deadline, was that I gave away something I only 50% knew how to do. I missed something crucial, and it became an emergency as a result.
This isn’t about being a control freak, it is about you knowing enough about everything, even if there is nothing you know everything about.
Learn Your Superpowers
I learned one of my most important lessons about leadership from someone I worked with, not at the time, a year after the fact.
We worked at a camp, and she was the director. A year later she tells me, “I always used to show you the numbers of how many kids we had in each class, because you would just remember them”. And so she could ask me at any time and I would just know. I could also lay out the classrooms in my head at need.
This, to me, was completely normal, so it didn’t occur to me that not everyone would remember a list of numbers after seeing them. But my friend knew it wasn’t, so she used it to make her life easier, and I never even noticed her doing it.
I think people can be really bad at knowing what they are good at. They don’t always value or notice things that are so natural to them that they don’t realize they are doing them. The more you notice about it, the more you can give people the things that they are fantastic at. The person who has a really good eye for UI flow, and usability, they get that slightly un-specc’d feature. The person who is really stubborn and diligent gets that tedious problem that is going to take patience and bloody-mindedness, rather than a flash of brilliance to fix.
Create a Space
This is about balancing the desire and need to shield your team from the outer world – politics, negotiations, long term planning, and the need to situate what you’re doing in some wider coverage.
Too little shielding, and too many people are worrying about things they have no control over. Too much, and your decisions can seem arbitrary and unfounded.
Some things are “PM problems”. I can’t do anything about them, but I need to know the status of them. I stay out of them and try not to worry about them. I probably want to share that there is a PM problem, when it is clear that it is going to hold something up.
Eng problems I’ll share as they come up. Like, I know it seems like I’ve gone mad on test coverage, but this is coming from these directions and this is why it’s important. I know it’s frustrating that we are doing X, but there is this medium-term plan of doing Y, and investing in X now pays dividends then.
Personally
Don’t Miss What You’ll Resent
I took a day off to go skiing. I knew if I missed it, I would be sad and resentful that I didn’t ski during the winter here. So I went, and it really energized me. Those things if you miss out on, you’ll really miss, you don’t want to lose out on those. Your work is part of your life, it’s not something that should happen at the expense of it. And your life is not something you should put on hold for something that is not 100% under your control.
Don’t Borrow From Tomorrow
My theory of working late is that in the best case I borrow time from tomorrow, and in the worst, I do that and I break things, which I then also need to fix.
So when I feel like I’m done, I go home. I go home well before I start breaking things. One of the things I find as a result, is that I am consistently productive 5 days a week. There’s less of a range. In grad school, I had insanely productive days, and some which were just a write-off. There was so much variance, that it was really hard to know how much I could get done in a given week. Now I have a pretty good idea, and I have evenings and weekend to myself, both of which greatly improve my happiness.
It’s Not Just Hours, It’s Energy
Last Thursday night, my friend and I are in a cab headed out to a comedy show. We were running late, because we’d both been completely absorbed in what we were doing and hadn’t really considered how we were getting there, or even where we were going, and there was terrible traffic.
And we got there, and had a great time, but waiting in the traffic jam, I admit that I think Thursday nights should be reserved for the gym and mall food (the mall food here is delicious, and the mall is only open late on Thursdays).
My friend says “Yes! By Thursday, I have made so many decisions, that if I don’t recharge I have no decisions left for Friday”.
Even the “worst” weeks I had probably didn’t exceed 45 hours. The most stressful day I had, I finished working before 5. But that didn’t mean I had any emotional energy left when I left the office for the day. I was exhausted.
And it’s hard to go out with someone new, when there’s really only one thing on my mind and I just feel like I have no conversation. I have to make more time to do things that recharge me – reading novels, hanging out at the gym watching How I Met Your Mother. The morning after the most stressful day, I went in late because I felt compelled to spend 2.5 hours in the gym before I could face the next onslaught. The biggest challenge I’ve had, is feeling like because I leave the office by 6 I have the time and energy for daily early morning workouts and going out almost every night, and I just don’t. I’d sooner work out in the evening, because it decompresses and de-obsesses me before bed. I want 9 hours sleep when I’m stressed. And that’s OK.
As part of the course I’m taking, we watched 12 Angry Men. I don’t watch many movies in general, and I’ve barely seen any black-and-white ones so it was weird. The whole movie was set in one room, and they showed the heat by having the men sweat copiously (like, wet faces, one guys shirt with big sweat patches, yuk).
But I got more into it and quite enjoyed it, although depressing to think that as recent as that it was the norm to have a jury made up entirely of white men. It’s an interesting film, and it makes some good points about influence. Some that spring to mind are:
Peer pressure; people may be more open if they are anonymous.
Don’t get angry; anger didn’t carry any points.
You don’t have to be definite for it to be worth having a dialogue.
Ask questions.
Listen to why people think what they think, then address that point.
And maybe these are obvious, but the last time you disagreed with someone I bet you forgot at least some – I know I did.
There’s a pyramid of things – Inattention to Results, Avoidance of Accountability, Lack of Commitment, Fear of Conflict, Lack of Trust (I can’t find any images licensed for re-use, but Google Image Search is your friend here).
Trust is the base of the pyramid. When I read Overcoming the Five Dysfynctions, there was this focus on vulnerability that I didn’t quite get. However, trust being at the base – this makes complete sense to me. Lack of trust destroys everything.
When you don’t trust someone, it’s obvious. If you have to rely on them, you’re bracing yourself for their failures. But I think often people just avoid interacting with people they don’t trust, I know I do. You’re more critical, more alert to mistakes.
And when someone doesn’t trust you, it’s so difficult to interact with them. You second guess yourself. You’re resistent even to comments that you later, on reflection, find reasonable. In short, feeling untrusted is a productivity killer.
Some people find the code review process we have crazy. But, I think it all comes down to trust. I’m going to send you a code review, and trust that you’ll be reasonable, and timely, and helpful. When you receive my code review, you’re going to trust that I know what I’m doing, and that I’ve thought things through. That trust means that you’ll look for improvements, not things to nitpick for the hell of it.
Trust means that if you make a suggestion that I’ve considered and rejected, you are not casting a slight on my decision making process. Trust means that if you suggest an option I haven’t considered, this doesn’t not imply that I’m an idiot.
Trust means that we both have different information and knowledge, and we’re going to take the opportunity to share and learn.
Without that trust, yeah, code reviews would be crazy. But if it’s there, it’s the best learning process I’ve encountered.
Fascinating to consider how that one process has an insight into your entire team dynamic.
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