Teams

Short-circuit evaluations of logical expressions can cause problematic behavior, and so can short-circuit expressions in human communications. In stressful times such as looming deadlines or other project troubles, it’s easy to slip and start taking shortcuts in our communication and overall behavior. The closer we live to survival mode, real or perceived, the less we act like who we strive to be. Ask anyone on their first night of Minecraft. Holes are dug, dirt is flung and friends are blamed when a creeper blows up their obviously inadequate mud hut. ...

At some point, your co-worker (peer or otherwise), or even an entire team, will massively screw up. Or you will. Perhaps you already have. If the latter is true, congratulations – you’re in a great place to make a positive difference. I’m going to assume, perhaps barring certain egregious transgressions, that you already manage failure from a place of empathy and growth, not through shaming or punitive means. If that’s not the case, you’ll first have to look elsewhere for help to make that change. ...

While my perception of my own knowledge path has been something like “I know nothing” -> “I know everything” -> “I know nothing”, engineers at any level can become overly convinced that their own approach is the correct one. A junior engineer straight out of school may be overly biased toward approaches taught there, which may or may not be effective in, for instance, a heavily product- and market-driven environment. Someone with a few years of experience may, due to their own definition of what success looks like, believe they have arrived and there’s not much more to learn. (This was me during the dot-com bubble.) A senior engineer with a decade or more of either going deep or wide can become too set in their ways and reluctant to incorporate different thinking, like single-brain groupthink. The rock star engineer, if you subscribe to such a thing, may well have developed an ego matching the size and approach attributes of a tropical island dictatorship. ...