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0 pointsYZF1y ago0 comments

Maybe it means the manager assigned work to someone junior that was beyond their capabilities? I suggest the manager has a talk with themselves along these lines: "I've noticed you've assigned Jimmy to work on improving the scalability of the widget producer. In retrospect this was beyond where Jimmy is right now in his journey as a software engineer. Let's reflect on this incident and try to make sure that we have people working on things that help them grow but don't put them in a position where they don't have the experience to do the job right and also to realize they don't have that experience".

Seriously though, I don't think there's "healthy conflict". There are healthy relationships where you can someone they're full of it without it being an insult or you can discuss how to write better software without it being perceived as a personal insult. An environment where people want to grow, are curious, are friendly, and just talk about how to do things better. Once you're in "conflict" territory it's something else. Unfortunately in most organizations you actually do have to get into conflict territory to impact change but I don't see that as a positive thing, just a negative that is a fact of life.

EDIT: This "I noticed blah" pattern is what's taught in formal management training as a method of giving feedback. I know because I've done those. The problem is that wrapping negative feedback in some formulaic pattern is transparent and doesn't work. So the person receiving this immediately strips away your formula and hears the negative feedback. I know that's what I do when someone uses those tools on me. The way forward is not to use those tools but to engage in a true positive way and foster a positive atmosphere. A smart person already knows there's a problem when their code got rolled back. The discussion shouldn't be about their performance "issue" but just about assigning people jobs they can handle and giving them tools and support to that right. There are exceptions when there are more complicated things going on, but the way this is handled when people have good intentions and are motivated is to generally keep helping them stay motivated and have good intentions even when they make mistakes.

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SpicyLemonZest1y ago

I wouldn't say that there's unambiguously healthy conflict, but there's definitely such a thing as unhealthy conflict avoidance.

One generalized example I've seen. Jimmy proposes to make a change that assumes all Foos in production have been replaced with Bars, and will cause an outage if that's not so. Reviewer A says "hey, this seems risky - are you sure the Foos are gone?" "Yes, I'm sure, there's no way that there could be any Foos left". When it turns out that he didn't really check and there were some Foos left, your options are:

* Frank and conflict-laden conversation with Jimmy. By all means say it nicely, but the bottom line is that you can't maintain a collaborative culture if reviewers can't trust the things Jimmy certifies to be true. The underlying unhealthiness might be that it's too hard to verify production state, or that Jimmy isn't competent enough to do it, or that Jimmy is just lazy. You'll have to engage in some conflict to find out.

* Put Jimmy in a penalty box, where everyone knows they can't give him the normal level of trust and need to double check his work. (Won't Jimmy notice, and won't you then have to give him the same conflict-laden conversation? Probably.)

* Let Jimmy run around wrecking things until his relationship with the team is so compromised he's forced to transfer or quit.

Having seen managers pick all three options, the first seems clearly best to me.

YZFOP1y ago

I would first ask myself whether this an honest mistake that anyone could make. If the answer is yes then there's really no need for any conflict. I don't think you have to get into a conflict to find out.

We don't expect people to be perfect. Everyone will occasionally make mistakes. I would not frame it as a loss of trust.

If the answer is no then I agree there's a problem that needs to be root caused. Maybe the root cause is Jimmy had a fight with his spouse, or didn't get enough sleep. Maybe Jimmy just can't do the job we're asking him to do.

Beyond that there are process questions to be asked. Don't you have some sort of staged deployments? dev/stage/prod? The reviewer that was concerned about whether Foos are gone - why was he concerned? Is there an easy way to check that?

I wouldn't say there's never a situation for difficult conversations. But usually those are not the right tool for the job. Jimmy is completely aware (presumably) that he said no Foos are left, and that when his code merged the remaining Foos caused an outage, and that his change had to be rolled back to recover. He is a responsible and trusted member of the team. How does he own up to that? What is your culture? If he is not responsible nor trusted than eventually he'll not be there and that's something to be reinforced positively and understood by a high performance team. It's just my experience that if you're at a point where you're playing those games then it usually isn't going to result in a positive outcome. Those tools are not appropriate for high performance teams in high performance organizations. Maybe they are in different organizations.

EDIT: In the military for example it is common to reinforce what people need to do via some sort of punishment. The difference is that you got people who possibly don't want to be there in the first place and in general you don't fire soldiers. That method sort of works but it doesn't really produce the kind of environment a lot of us would like to be in and there's always conflict between fear of punishment and taking initiative.

I would also say there are other things that can be done in this scenario, including a culture of postmortems, where you review the incident as a team and brainstorm ways of avoiding it in the future. This can be tricky to be done in a truly blameless way but if done right can act as a positive reinforcement. In general it's better that peer pressure and culture are the mechanisms that drive people vs. managerial action simply because the manager can't be everywhere all the time. The manager drives that culture.

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