Category: Ethics

You Can’t Force Psychological Safety

March 12th, 2023

In recent years, a lot more emphasis has been placed on making spaces (particularly workplaces) into settings that have psychological safety. I consider this a fantastic trend (though a lot of people tend to disagree with me) because people who feel psychologically safe not only have a better quality of life, the results of their work tend to be better.

What sane, healthy business or leader doesn’t want to have happy employees who do great work?

The problem is that a lot of people have absolutely no idea how to foster this kind of environment (or, worse yet, say they want to foster it and then do everything they can to destroy that safety). Many of them seem to think that it’s as simple as saying “you’re safe. You can talk to me about anything.”

It doesn’t work like that.

The truth of the matter is that you can’t make someone else feel psychologically safe. You don’t have that power – only they do. There is no magic wand that you can wave and say “you’re psychologically safe!” (Especially since that’s usually followed by an unspoken “Now go do what I say”).

Real psychological safety happens when the other person feels that they have it. End of story.

So, if you can’t make someone else feel safe, how the heck do you get to a place where your team actually has psychological safety?

The answer is that it’s much like nurturing any other kind of relationship – you do things that help foster it and try to avoid things that harm it.

Things That Help Foster Psychological Safety

Treat people like people – I know I say this a lot, but the people around you are people. Not resources. Not human capital. They’re people, damnit. Treat them like it. You’re never going to have psychological safety in a group of people that you don’t treat like people.

Follow up on your commitments – Show the people around you that you do what you say you will. Every. Single. Day. People who consistently see that you do what you say are going to be more likely to open up.

Own your mistakes – Don’t bury mistakes that you make. Admit to them with your whole chest. Especially when they cause some harm (even small harm) to the people around you.

Apologize and make things right – After you’ve admitted to the mistake, apologize for it and see what can be done to make things right. Did you ever have moments as a kid when adults essentially told you to deal with it when they did something that hurt you? Did you like that? Did it make you feel safe? Yeah, well, it doesn’t make your peers or people who report to you feel safe either.

Realize that we all have bad days, even you. (Sometimes especially you) – Have some grace with people, including yourself. Sometimes we have an off day and things don’t come out right. As long as it’s not a pattern of behavior, that’s okay. Own it, apologize, and do better. The people around you will see you doing it and be more likely to model that behavior themselves.

Reassure people – when they make mistakes (and they will), make it a point to help put things into perspective and reassure them that it’s okay to make a mistake. Then work with them to figure out how to make things right if something has to be made whole.

One of the ways I help calm people down when things go sideways is literally to say “If that’s the worst thing that happens today, we’ll be alright.” My team hears this fairly often. The thing is that you have to mean it and then you have to help them fix it.

Celebrate the wins – Don’t just focus on when things go wrong. Call out the things that go right, and do it frequently. Even if something seems like a small win, it’s still a win. Celebrating victory helps bring people together and reinforces social bonds. Those bonds help foster psychological safety.

Share the credit – You should be doing this anyway, but sharing the credit for those wins makes people feel like they’re not going to be used by you (because you’ve literally demonstrated that you aren’t just using them). It also helps a lot of people feel like part of a cohesive group, and that can help foster a sense of psychological safety.

Realize that, while you may be the one “in charge” on paper (or in the org chart), at the end of the day, you aren’t in charge of a damned thing. You’re responsible for the people in your care – I guarantee that every person who works with you can get a job somewhere else. If they want to be somewhere else, they aren’t going to have safety here. Even if the project isn’t great, you can help your team feel safe and even look forward to working together despite the challenges.

Things That Destroy Psychological Safety

The short answer is that the things that destroy psychological safety are pretty much the opposite of everything on the above list – berate people for mistakes, go out of your way to find flaws when they don’t really matter, be “The Boss”, and don’t admit when you make mistakes.

People will see those things and they will instinctively know that they can’t trust you. If they don’t trust you, they aren’t going to feel safe. Period.

This is sometimes a lot harder than it sounds. Remember that you’re a person too and sometimes you don’t feel secure in your own position due to pressures that you are facing, causing you to revert to closed off behavior. Those are the times that leadership can feel lonely, but realize that you aren’t actually alone.

The people that work with you (and especially the people that report to you) want to see you succeed and to feel secure because they themselves want to succeed and feel secure. If you put effort into it, unless you’re in a situation where no reasonable person could ever feel safe, they should at least start to feel like they’re safe in the space that you’ve created as a group.

Again, remember that power is with them, not with you. You can’t force it, but you can help it grow.

Also keep in mind that, while psychological safety can be hard to build, it’s incredibly easy to destroy. It’s something you will have to work to encourage every day, but it’s worth it – both for you and for those around you.
Assuming Good Intent is a Bad Idea

February 22nd, 2023

Telling people to “assume good intent” when they interact with others is one of those things that sounds great because it acts as a social lubricant, but is actually a really bad idea and can cause a great deal of harm.

It Actively Hides Bad Actors

Part of how it causes harm is because it lets bad actors hide their actions behind the thinnest veneer of appearing to mean well.

Go ask any member of an underrepresented group (BIPOC, LGBTQA+, etc) just how many of the problems they face on a regular basis are purposely perpetrated by people who put on a show of being a “good person” and, if they actually answer you honestly, you’d be horrified at the answer.

Most of the problems that members of those groups face aren’t because of some Hitler or David Duke style figure (though they certainly cause a hell of a lot of damage) because those are a lot easier to spot and rally people against.

It’s the day to day issues caused by a bigoted manager, like passing someone over for a raise/promotion or not hiring them because they “aren’t a good cultural fit” that impacts people on a longer timeframe, causing them to earn less in their lifetime.

It’s the politician that votes for legislation that “preserves life,” which is actually used to take away bodily autonomy from people. It’s the (often same) politician that votes for legislation that prevents trans people from getting gender affirming healthcare for whatever bullshit reason that they can come up with to play to their base that takes away peoples’ rights in order to shove some zealot-level religious ideology on everyone else that hurts so many people.

To take it even further, it’s honestly also the people who vote for those politicians because they like those policies (or, possibly worse, because they like the “fiscal stance” that those politicians take and don’t consider the bigotry and harm to be a deal breaker).

Most people would, I hope, agree that Hitler was bad and would fight against that shit happening again (even though current events suggest otherwise…). Most people, however, would insist all day long that their racist uncle wasn’t really a bad person, but was instead “a product of another time” while trying to do mental gymnastics to minimize the damage caused by that racism.

It Upholds The Status Quo

When you don’t challenge people because you’re sure that they “mean well” when they do things that unfairly advance their causes at the expense of others (especially at the expense of those who aren’t like them), you get a situation in which nothing really changes.

The people in power continue to be in power, and they continue to work to advance people just like them. We, as a society, let them get away with it because “they mean well” and “well, they’re in charge for a reason”.

Both of these viewpoints are bad and lead to the world not becoming any better. The path we’re on is because of that mindset. Think about that for a minute.

“Good Intent” Doesn’t Matter When It Causes Harm

I’m going to come right out and say it – by and large, your intent doesn’t matter. Your actions and their consequences matter.

Talking about your intentions and how you “meant well” is something you do in order to help absolve yourself of the responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It’s something you do to help you sleep at night when you do something that actively causes harm.

The people you hurt don’t care if your “heart was in the right place.” They’re still suffering because of what you did and no matter of “hopes and prayers” or “good intentions” is going to change that. The only thing that does change that is action to undo the harm that you’ve caused. Even then, that doesn’t change the fact that you caused harm; just that you’ve done something to minimize the damage from having done it in the first place.

By the same token, you tell others to “assume good intent” not because it undoes harm but because, on some level, you see yourself in the shoes of the person who has done harm and want to somehow convince yourself that it’s okay when you’re the one who screws up or that, for some reason, that makes the harm okay instead of being something that has to be fixed.

Instead of telling people to assume good intent, start looking at the impact of the actions of yourself and others. Judge by that.

The only thing that telling people to assume good intent does is perpetuate harm in order to gain the illusion of a civilized society.
There’s More To Life Than Work

January 2nd, 2023

There’s frequently a worship of “hustle culture” in this, and many other, industries. You get told that if you work really really hard and do insanely long hours that people will somehow recognize you and you’ll magically get ahead.

It’s a lie and I think a lot of people are starting to realize it. The fact that every business journal has articles on “quiet quitting” and people refusing to work extra hours is a sign that this is both the case and that the people at the top are terrified of this trend because they’re working so hard to change it.

Working insane hours for someone else will almost never let you get ahead. In fact, it’s more likely to wear you down and encourage others to exploit you because you obviously don’t value yourself or your time. (Remember that we encourage the behavior that we allow.)

Sure, it may work on extremely rare occasions if you’re working for someone else. It’s more likely to work if you’re working for yourself rather than someone else, but even then, the odds are against you for a number of reasons.

In my career, I’ve literally seen people work themselves into the hospital or even into an early grave. I’ve honestly lost track of how many of my friends and coworkers have had heart attacks, cancer, and other health issues that were, at the very least, exacerbated by (if not caused outright by) the stress of working ridiculous numbers of hours and being “always on”.

I remember a coworker of mine being in the hospital after a heart attack and his boss visiting him, demanding to know why he wasn’t using the time to study programming instead of resting like his doctor ordered him to. I wish this was a joke or an exaggeration.

If you add in the people who have suffered extreme burnout or had their doctors literally tell them that their job was killing them and they needed to find someplace else to be, the number is even higher.

For my own part, my doctor was overjoyed when I left my position with a Fortune 50 mega-bank because of what it was doing to my health. She had reason to be happy that I quit. It’s left me with health issues that I will have to deal with for the rest of my life. Thankfully we caught them early, so they’re manageable with lifestyle changes, but the damage is still there.

As a result, I’ve gone out of my way to set healthier boundaries for myself. I’ve also worked hard to help set healthy boundaries and expectations for the other members of my team.

This is often more difficult than you’d think.

Most of my current team is in India. They’re a great bunch of people and I enjoy working with every last one of them. There is, however, a downside (as there is with working with any group of people).

Their work day ends at about 11am my time. This in itself isn’t a problem, though it does occasionally make it difficult for them to get access to some of our coworkers in the US. The problem is that they are a truly driven bunch of people (which is great and part of the reason that I love the lot of them – they honestly help inspire me to keep improving as well) and I have to make sure that they don’t overwork themselves (which is bad).

True story. I literally have each of them pinned on my Teams chat list so I can make sure that their status isn’t “online” well past their normal hours. I occasionally have to remind them to log off and go have a life if they’re working too late.

I’ve also had to check in with my onshore colleagues when they send messages well outside of hours to make sure that they’re doing alright, that they don’t feel overwhelmed with work, and that they aren’t doing too much outside of normal hours.

When leading a team (or multiple teams), it’s literally part of my job to make sure that my people have what they need. This includes having enough time off to recharge, be people, and live their lives.

If anyone tells you that it isn’t your job to be concerned for the wellbeing of the people who report to you, you have my permission to tell them to pound sand (using whatever level of politeness you feel is appropriate at the time). People like that shouldn’t be in leadership positions.

Work is not, and should not be, the only thing in your life. We are whole people who spend part of our waking hours working in order to be able to live our lives. And I think that we’re finally starting to realize that again as a society.

It’s long past time that this expectation of overwork stop, and the only ones able to stop it are us. Value yourself and those around you – especially the people that report to you. You help set the tone for what is expected and acceptable.
Own Up To Your Mistakes

November 29th, 2022

As a culture, we have a real problem admitting when we’re wrong. This seems to be especially true in the workplace when people in positions of authority are concerned.

There are too many people who seem to think that admitting that they made a mistake or apologizing for a misstep makes you look weak and undermines your authority. They’ve been conditioned to see answering to others as something that diminishes their own power – especially when the other person/group is someone who is supposed to be “under” them.

After all, you don’t answer to people under you. You were put in charge for a reason, right? You earned the position fair and square and part of that reason is because you’re better at what you do than they are, yes?

Bullshit. (And we’re not even getting into the reasons why you might be “in charge” that have nothing to do with your being better at the job than someone else)

I’ve even been in situations when people above me have tried to tell me that I didn’t owe an apology to people on my team for a misunderstanding of something that I said which caused them concern. I wish I was kidding.

Admitting when you’ve made a mistake doesn’t make you look weak – especially as a leader. It makes you look like someone who can admit when they did something wrong, take responsibility for it, and do things better going forward.

Do you know what we call someone like that? An actual leader.

Doing right by the people who work under you and making up for it when you fail in that endeavor is part of how you foster trust and psychological safety within a group. It doesn’t cost you anything at all and only causes you to gain in the long term.

Will some people take that as a sign of weakness and try to exploit it? Sure, but there are assholes in this world and you can deal with them as they arise. On the whole, your people will only have more respect for you when you make things right by them.

As a general rule, any problems caused by admitting your mistakes are more likely to come from above you because of toxic leadership practices that your higher ups have bought into. They’re the same people who think that you saying you don’t know the answer to a question but can look into it is a sign that you don’t know what you’re doing.

If we want things to get better, we have to model the changes that we want to see in the workplace, and indeed in the wider world. Admitting you were wrong about something can be nerve wracking, but if you don’t, how can you expect others to do so?
Managers, Give Your Team Credit

November 22nd, 2022

There are a lot of differences between good managers and bad managers. One of them is that bad managers often try to take credit for the work that their team does as though they were the ones that did it.

I once had a manager who would even try to downplay the contributions of the team doing the work when speaking at monthly meetings and literally try to act like he was the one doing all of the work. It was doubly ironic because he didn’t really do any of the work at all.

Even worse was that his boss and his boss’ boss rewarded and encouraged that behavior. He got raises and bonuses while the team that he managed essentially got nothing at all.

I hope it goes without saying, but don’t do that shit.

I can hear people saying “but I’m the manager. I should be taking credit for the work!”

No, you should be taking credit for leading a team that can do the work and helping move the boulders out of their way. YOU did not do the work – your team did. You enabled them to accomplish great things. There’s a big difference.

How do you do that? Believe it or not, it’s actually more straightforward than you’d believe.

The first step is literally to reframe how you report status and achievements. Instead of saying “I did Thing X”, you say “We did Thing X” or “My Team did Thing X” or “Our Team did Thing X”.

After that, point out concrete things that your team members did in order to achieve the thing you’re talking about.

If people father up the food chain try to give you all of the credit, go out of your way to put some of the spotlight on your people. No, I’m not kidding. A director or VP trying to give all of the credit to a single person (especially the manager, who is usually hands off) is a sign that they are a bad manager (bad managers happen at literally all levels).

That, however, doesn’t mean you have to play that game yourself. My general response when that sort of thing happens is to say “I have a good team” and then outline a few things that the members of my team did to make sure that they also get credit (ideally you’d do a thing per team member, but on large teams this can be difficult when dealing with VP+ level executives because of time constraints).

This doesn’t make you look weak. On the contrary, to competent high ups, it makes you look amazing. It makes you look like someone who can pull together a group of people that really gets stuff done, and a good executive knows just how hard that is to do consistently because they’ve had to do it too.

It’s even better if you can pull together a group to do that while, at the same time, helping the members of the team grow in skill – both technical skills and leadership skills.

Your job as a manager isn’t to do the work. It’s to help make sure that the people doing the work are able to get things done and to encourage them to grow along the way. Part of that job includes not taking credit for having done the work yourself.

There’s a word for a manager who looks like they’re doing all of the work of a team – ineffective.

There’s also a word for a manager who takes all of the credit for the work their team does – abusive.

As a leader, you don’t want to be either of those things.

And my former manager who took credit for everything and left his team out in the cold? Almost the entire team left within the span of a few months.

So there are actually two words for a manager who takes all of the credit. The second one is alone.
Not Everything Has to Succeed – Death Marches are Bad and Wrong

October 16th, 2022

Over the course of my career, I’ve seen more than a few bosses who insist that “failure is not an option.” Some of them have been on projects I was involved in. Others have been in charge of projects that I’ve had a view on because they were worked on by friends and colleagues.

These bosses act like the thing they are “in charge” of is the most important thing in the world – more important than your health, work-life balance, and pretty much anything that doesn’t cost them directly.

Funnily enough, those same bosses are usually the ones that raise mortal hell if you try to contact them outside of hours. In fact, they’re generally the first people to remove themselves from the on-call rotation when they get control of the tool that manages it.

I had the displeasure of working on one project with an incredibly unrealistic timeline that was short staffed and depended on an outside third party. When I asked the manager what our backup plan was if the deadline couldn’t be met, he had the audacity to say that he doesn’t make backup plans because, if there’s a backup plan, people won’t try to make the deadline (which can’t be met in the first bloody place).

Instead, he ran everyone into the ground, burned out most of the team, lost most of the team to attrition, and still didn’t meet the deadline. Everyone paid the price for this except him. He was praised as a “strong leader” because he abused everyone around him (which is the exact behavior that the managers above him exhibited).

My experience on that project reinforced a very important lesson that I had forgotten for various reasons – Not every project has to succeed. In fact, it’s sometimes a much much better outcome to simply stand back and let them fail. Don’t try to heroically save a project which is going to cost the health and free time of the people who work on it.

Death marches deserve to fail. They NEED to fail, and they preferably need to fail in such a way that the abusers are the ones left holding the bag. If they don’t fail, it incentivizes the behavior of abusive management practices because it shows that they “obviously” work.

(As an aside, I have a friend who once called out my use of the term “death march” until I pointed out the number of people that I know who have literally suffered heart attacks related to overwork. In one case, the CTO came to the hospital and demanded to know why the person wasn’t studying something programming related instead of resting like his doctor ordered. I wish I was exaggerating.)

If you start to see the signs that a project you’re on is going in this direction or that this behavior is expected of the members of a team, remember that you have options. You don’t have to agree to working yourself into an early grave.

I’d also like to point out that, if you see one death march project, that’s a sign that this is how they run most of their projects. Almost no manager or company does this as a one-off. This is the way that they operate because they view it as “how things are done” and because nobody has forcibly stopped them from doing it.

If the project fails, nobody is going to die. If the company folds, you can get another job. You don’t have to suffer in order to stroke someone’s ego or to make a company more profitable.

They are trading money for your time and skill. They don’t own you just because they deposit money into your checking account. Keep reminding yourself of this, because it is incredibly easy to succumb to the abuse and start to see it as normal. I speak from experience.

While you’re reminding yourself that you’re a person and not a “resource,” start working to get yourself out of the situation.

If you just joined the company and your alarm bells are going off, go back to the network of people that you met during the job search. You have an advantage because you probably still have everything spun up. In fact, you may have even had other offers or other positions that you were working on when you accepted the offer to the nightmare job.

Take advantage of that.

For the rest of you, I’m going to give you some advice that many of you may chafe at – with regards to your current job, you should start clawing your time back. I don’t care if you (or your boss) think this makes you a “slacker,” you need to focus on the things that matter.

Take time during your day to upskill on things that you see a market in and are interested in (honestly, your employer should be encouraging you to do this anyway). Network (in person or virtually). Start putting feelers out for jobs that interest you.

Prioritize getting out of the abusive situation and into a better one. I know that will feel like you’re lying to your current employer (and, in fact, it may occasionally require that you do lie to them in order to get out) and that we’ve been conditioned to think of that as bad and wrong but you don’t owe an abuser anything. Keep reminding yourself that you are leaving because they are hurting you (and they are) and that this isn’t just a situation where you simply want to do new things.

Abuse is not normal or acceptable in any situation. Not in your relationship with your family, not in your relationship with your friends, and certainly not in your relationship with your employer (who will happily replace you just as soon as they think it makes sense to do so).

Do not let them gaslight you. Do not let them make you feel guilty. They will try. I’ve seen it first hand more times than I care to think about. Abusers will try every trick in the book to manipulate you in order to get what they want. You may need to work very hard to keep it from working on you.

When you give notice, they may even try to guilt trip you or attempt to convince you how “important” you are or even try to say that they aren’t accepting your notice. Screw that. You’ve arranged a way out and you’re taking it no matter what they try to do. They don’t get to keep you.

Make sure you use up your vacation and sick time before you leave. That’s a part of your salary and not all states require it to be paid out to you when you quit. Not taking that time doesn’t make you “dedicated” or a “team player,” it means you’re being taken advantage of.

Besides, you shouldn’t be “dedicated” to a place that is abusing you in the first place (though I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to really convince yourself of this).

Companies will still hire you if you leave a toxic job shortly after taking it. It’s not the black mark that so many articles and insecure bosses make it out to be. In fact, it’s generally only the bad ones that try to view “short resume entries” as a sign that an employee is bad instead of as a sign that the company they worked for was bad (or, at best, not a good fit).

You only get one life. Don’t let someone run you into the ground, ruin your health, and possibly end your life just so they might have the chance to profit from your suffering. There are better options out there.
Interviews Are Not Like a Normal Work Day

October 9th, 2022

A couple of days before I’m writing this, a post from a “senior” engineer came across my feed in twitter. In it, he was talking about an interview he gave less than 24 hours before, and about how the candidate couldn’t figure out how to close a tag in markup after he told the candidate that they weren’t allowed to use a library that they were going to leverage.

He used this as an argument for “this is why we need interviews. ‘Senior’ developers can’t even use markup properly” (paraphrase).

Thankfully, the people that I follow who were responding to this were taking this person to task for his behavior, though far too many people in the thread were jumping to his defense.

Let’s get the obvious (to me, at least) part of this out of the way – there is no way that I would want to work with/for a person that might drag me in public after I interview with them. That’s a huge red flag and I think the candidate dodged a bullet there.

Now that I’ve gotten the “Don’t be a shite person” thing covered, I’d like to talk about why coding interviews aren’t a good indicator of a candidate’s abilities.

The ability to interview well and to actually do the job are two distinct skillsets and have very little to do with each other. Daily work (in theory, at least) is a relatively psychologically safe situation in which you are able to leverage your knowledge, skills, and ability to learn in order to solve problems. An interview is a contrived stress test largely designed as a hazing ritual to make the interviewer feel smart and/or superior.

I say this as someone who interviews people regularly and tries to break this cycle.

My daily work involves spending time thinking about problems, looking things up, asking people questions and writing short, experimental pieces of code under test to fulfil the use cases that are going to provide value to a business.

In a live-coding interview, I’m going to have a problem dropped in my lap with no time to think about it, with a development environment that I haven’t customized (or worse, a whiteboard), while being watched and judged by people that I don’t know and don’t feel safe around so that I can “prove” that I am “worthy” to work with them.

Anybody see a difference here?

Work is filled with considered, largely unpressured choices. The interview is filled with snap decisions about a thing I have not had time to think about in a hostile environment (and don’t pretend that live coding interviews aren’t a hostile environment. You’re putting someone’s livelihood on the line. The list of things more hostile than that is fairly short).

That’s not getting to know someone and their abilities. That’s an unnecessary stress-test. And it’s especially going to work against people in marginalized communities – everything from BIPOC to people with PTSD to people with autism and countless others.

It’s not due diligence. It’s needless cruelty. (And I can speak as a Native person who has PTSD. Interviews as most people conduct them suck and make me want to crawl under a rock).

Want to know another secret? I’ve been writing code professionally for about 20 years now and it’s generally agreed upon that I do, in fact, know what I’m doing (most of the time). That said, I make plenty of stupid mistakes even when I’m not under pressure. We all do and we need to admit it.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve forgotten to initialize a List<T> and then spent time trying to figure out why the code blows up when I do something with that list. Granted, TDD and improved IDE tooling have helped me spot those mistakes faster now, but they still happen.

John Peel may have been able to say “I never make stupid mistakes – only very, very clever ones” but I’ll tell you here and now that I am quite capable of making stupid mistakes. Sometimes I’ll cringe at them in the moment, but I’ve gotten better about laughing instead (which is something that an actual senior developer should be able to do, in my opinion).

If I, a senior+ developer (my current title is Architect), make mistakes like this in a no pressure environment, imagine what live coding in a high-pressure situation is like. Now ask yourself what that situation is like for someone with less experience or who has experienced more trauma than I have.

Don’t do that to people. Just don’t. There are better ways to figure out if someone is a good fit for your team.

And for the love of everything decent, even if you are still giving live-coding interviews (for whatever reason), don’t publicly drag the person the next day. I don’t care how bad you thought they did from a technical standpoint.

For the people out there who are being interviewed – if you see your interviewer speak badly about other candidates (or, even worse, if they do it in the interview – and I’ve been in a few of those as a candidate), consider if you want to be exposed to this on a daily basis.

Provided that you are able to cover your bills, you have options and you should be someplace where you can grow and thrive. If you can’t cover your bills and need the job, take it and keep looking. The saner people and companies will understand.
Fast Paced Environments

September 11th, 2022

Since at least the startup boom in the late 90s and early 2000s, a painful number of businesses have been trying to market themselves as “fast paced.” They use it as a selling point and they’re very proud to proclaim how “fast paced” they are.

Look at a job description, and you’ll see things like “Fast Paced Environment” and “Multiple projects.”

The thinking seems to be that “startups are chaotic, fast paced places where you work to exhaustion and everyone there seems wild about it, so we’ll be fast paced too.”

First off, startups don’t have to be like that either.

Second, people are finally starting to value living their lives again instead of pouring their health, mental and emotional well-being, and soul into a company that will discard the desiccated husk when they finally collapse.

Third, being “fast paced” actually hurts your company and your employees in the long run.

Stop that shit. For the love of everything decent, stop that shit.

“Going fast” seems like a great idea – after all, look at all the activity that’s going on out there. Our people are really killing it. They’re out there doing stuff.

But does it really matter? Seriously. Stop and think about it for a minute.

The truth is that, NO “going fast” and “doing stuff” don’t matter if you’re doing the wrong things. They also don’t matter even if you are doing the right things if you do them in such a way that you burn out the people who are actually doing the things.

I’ve seen a lot of businesses over my career that have been absolutely obsessed with the velocity of their teams, how many cards they complete in a sprint, and how many features that they ship – only to act shocked when none of it positively impacted their bottom line, every last person that worked for them quit, AND they couldn’t hire new people because their reputation was in the toilet.

The businesses that get ahead almost seem “boring” by comparison. Their people work at a reasonable pace, have time for their lives, and get enough sleep. Weekend work is nonexistent outside of extremely rare emergencies.

People come in, do their work without running around as though the building was on fire, get to bring their whole selves to work in a psychologically safe environment, probably enjoy working with most of their colleagues, and then they get to have a life outside of work.

Novel concept, right? It shouldn’t be. It should be the norm.

In an actually agile environment, it generally is.

“Fast Paced Environment” isn’t the selling point that many companies think it is. It’s often (correctly) interpreted as code for “over worked and understaffed.”

Hell, even the Navy Seals live by the motto “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” And if you don’t consider them to be high preforming, I don’t know what to tell you.

Agile isn’t about “fast paced” it’s about sustainable pace and being responsive to feedback – often by delivering functionality in small vertical slices that allow customers or other stakeholders to experience additions in value on a short timescale.

The stakeholders and customers give feedback on the functionality that’s been delivered and the team can course correct based on what they find out.

No late night work. No weekend work. Just small, ongoing experiments that deliver value every couple of weeks. Work, present, get feedback, adjust, repeat.

Nothing about that has to be “fast paced.” In fact, the faster you go past a certain point, the more mistakes that tend to be made and the more rework has to be done.

Stop running your people and your business into the ground. Don’t glorify the “fast paced environment.” Instead, consign it to the garbage heap of history where it belongs.
“Quiet Quitting” Is Just Setting Boundaries

August 28th, 2022

A lot of business and online publications have been absolutely losing their minds with something they’re calling “Quiet Quitting.” They’re painting it as a practice where workers are basically slacking off all day and talk about how it’s going to ruin the careers of the people that are doing it and damage the companies that they currently work for.

But if you read the articles, you find out that “Quiet Quitting” is literally… doing your job and then going home…

It’s not slacking off or sitting in your chair and spinning around in circles for 8 hours or anything weird. It’s seriously just doing your job as it’s written and then leaving in order to live your life.

The mind boggles.

So what makes this so upsetting to businesses and publications? The answer is that people aren’t going “above and beyond” anymore. They aren’t working themselves into the floor doing the job of multiple people for the same amount of pay. They’re learning to work in order to live instead of living in order to work and this TERRIFIES bosses and companies that rely on exploitation in order to maximize their profits.

It’s even more terrifying to bosses when you look at the larger picture of the current employment landscape. Workers have more power right now than they have had for quite some time between The Great Resignation and a dramatic increase in union activity. People who run abusive companies are probably seriously starting to lose sleep over this, and that’s part of why you’re seeing such an effort to smear and stop it.

I can guarantee you that the decent companies and bosses out there aren’t in a panic about “Quiet Quitting” and are shaking their heads along with the rest of us.

I can guarantee this because I know some of them.

For generations, we’ve been fed the lie that if you work hard, you’ll get ahead and the company will take care of you. Job hoppers are looked down on and sacrificing for the company that employs you is celebrated.

I’d say that the company taking care of you might have been true at one time, but by and large, it wasn’t true in the past either (apart from people in upper management or similar positions).

It’s always been a lie and people are finally starting to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

Work isn’t your life. Your company isn’t a “family” (and be incredibly suspicious of any company that calls itself that). The company you work for will happily fire you if it considers it to be in its best interest. If you died on the job, they’d have the position posted on CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice, and LinkedIn before your funeral was over.

Don’t feel bad about simply doing your job and then leaving to spend the rest of your day living your life.

Don’t feel bad about not “going the extra mile” because you might not get a raise or promotion that probably doesn’t exist at your current company.

Don’t feel bad about changing jobs because a better opportunity comes along (whether you define “better” in terms of pay, learning opportunities, or any other criteria that you have set for yourself).

Your life is yours. It doesn’t belong to the place that deposits money into your bank account. The only thing they should expect in return for that money is a reasonable amount of work done in a reasonable amount of time. Past that, they have no claim on you and if they disagree, there are a lot of other places out there that are willing to trade money for your work.

The more people who start to enforce healthy boundaries with regard to work/life balance, the faster “normal” will change in a direction that is more healthy for actual people and is less open for exploitation.

Yes, change is scary. Pushing back is hard. We’ve been brainwashed from an early age to please the people “above” us. And, admittedly, not everyone has the power and privilege to do it. That’s why those of us who do have that power and privilege should exercise it – because, in the long run, it will help those who have less institutional power and we all end up better off.

Oh, and about the brainwashing to please people “above” us – want to take a guess as to who doesn’t get brainwashed with that nonsense? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.
If It’s Not In Writing, It Didn’t Happen

July 31st, 2022

During your career, you’ll be faced with times when someone will tell you something along the lines of “You’ll be getting a raise/bonus of $x if you meet these metrics” or “We won’t try to take the IP of things you work on during your own time” or even something as simple as “We are signing off on this decision verbally. Go ahead and do it.”

Don’t believe them, and do not take any of these statements at face value.

Anyone who tries to do anything like this without putting it in writing has a high likelihood of conveniently “forgetting” that they ever said anything in the first place. While it’s true that verbal contracts can be upheld in court, it’s extremely difficult to prove the conversation even happened without proof (and voice recording laws vary by jurisdiction, so if you want to record it, you need to check on the laws where you are beforehand).

The problem is that these kind of people try to never put anything in writing. Convenient, right? Trying to get someone who works by using lies and “forgetting” to commit what they’re promising to writing is like trying to get a fish to jump out of a stream and into a frying pan. Good luck.

You’re going to have to treat them like a potentially hostile party – which is what they effectively are. We’ll break down tactics and strategies for this into a few different categories.

Pre-Employment

Read every piece of paper that you get sent – the job offer, benefits information, any IP related legal verbiage, any piece of paper that restricts your ability to work outside of the company or invest without clearance (financial institutions like to surprise you with this one after you’ve already joined), etc. In fact, ask for a copy of their employee handbook while you’re at it.

As you read it, strike out the parts that you do NOT agree to. Initial them. DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING YET. Send them back. If there are any guarantees that you were given verbally which were not in the documents you have been given, request that those items be added as well.

This is a contract negotiation. Treat it like one – part of that means that you need to look at everything that’s in writing and think of how it can be used against you. If you have access to a lawyer, run it past them. If not, you’re going to need to get at least a basic understanding of contract law. If the company refuses to make changes, and you have the ability to walk away, I strongly suggest you do so.

Keep copies of all of these things. Make a copy of the initial documents. Make a copy of the documents after you’ve made any changes. Make a copy of the documents you get sent back (compare them to your changes). Make a copy of the documents that you finally sign. Put them in a safe place (I’d advocate having a digital copy in at least 2 places and possibly a printed copy kept in a safety deposit box or, at the very least, a fire safe).

While working as an employee

If you are working with someone that tries to only give orders, etc in a verbal format, follow up every meeting with an email summarizing your understanding of what was said and ask if your understanding is correct. It’s probably a good idea to send it to all attendees – both so they can have a summary for their own use as well as to make it more difficult for the person to backpedal later.

If something that is written can be interpreted in multiple ways (frequently with one of those ways being to your detriment or their explicit benefit), ask for clarification.

Save all important correspondence (both what you receive and what you send). Be aware that a lot of corporate email systems auto-purge content that is over a certain age (supposedly because it “uses less space” but the real reason is often to destroy paper trails without getting in trouble), so save it as a PDF and keep it in a safe place.

Having a CYA file and never needing to use it is considerably better than getting blindsided by malfeasance and having no way to defend yourself.

Working as a contractor or a company

EVERYTHING needs to be in writing. The contract should spell out what your deliverables and responsibilities are, the compensation and how it is delivered, how things are wrapped up in the event that something happens, etc. Save all emails to/from the client. Anything in writing needs to be preserved – often for quite a long time after the job is finished.

Run all contracts past your lawyer. If you don’t have a lawyer and you are running a company, stop what you’re doing and find one that you work well with. Do not proceed any further until you have one.

I could write on this section for a while, but instead I’ll refer you to Mike Monteiro’s talk “Fuck you, pay me” on YouTube. He and his lawyer cover the subject masterfully.

Isn’t this really cynical?

YES. It is and I’m glad you noticed.

The unfortunate truth is that you can’t treat business like you would a relationship among your friends. They operate on completely different principles.

A relationship with friends (in a healthy relationship at least) should be one of equals where everyone treats everyone else with respect. It’s driven by mutual interest and caring for each other.

A relationship with a business (especially when you are an individual or a smaller business), is based on transactions and has an inherent imbalance of power. You may be acting with caring for the other party (that’s a discussion for another time), but the larger corporate entity is almost certainly, AT BEST, going to be acting due to financial motivations.

At worst, you’re going to be dealing with someone who actively tries to screw you because it makes them feel powerful. I’ve dealt with people like this. It sucks, and at the end of the day, the only thing you have to protect yourself is what you have in writing and potentially what you can prove in court.

Don’t put yourself in a position to be exploited. Protect yourself, your career, and your mental and emotional wellbeing instead.

Category: Ethics

Things That Help Foster Psychological Safety

Things That Destroy Psychological Safety

It Actively Hides Bad Actors

It Upholds The Status Quo

“Good Intent” Doesn’t Matter When It Causes Harm

Pre-Employment

While working as an employee

Working as a contractor or a company

Isn’t this really cynical?