Recent entries from the blog.
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“I have read a lot of long spiels about craft that frequently end in something like, software work isn’t like other work, and we shouldn’t be judged the same way. We are entirely unique. We are the special ones. I find this both saddening and unconvincing. I think that all labor is skilled labor. I think about the factories and the fields and the ways that demands for speed instead of cadence can hurt people. I think we should seek to understand and value our skills and see effort. But I don’t think we are going to fix anything about how software work is valued by refusing to let it belong to the rest of the world.” Cat Hicks speaks the truth.
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“For a lot of caregivers, telecommuting allows them to manage a workload that is, if anything, way too big. Remote work, then, isn’t just a question of work-life balance; it’s a question of work-work balance. The traditional conception of ‘productivity’ doesn’t account for this.” Amen to this piece from Stephanie Murray, who joins a long line of feminist writers calling out the ways our standard methods for accounting for economic activity ignore the vital work of caregiving. But even setting aside that macro perspective, it’s just good business sense to support your workers in being able to be productive in both work-work and care work. Workers who are well-rested and are able to take care of themselves and their kin are going to do better work, full stop. The best leaders already know this, and they are going to recruit and retain the best workers every time.
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I’ve counseled several people lately on the need to emphasize outcomes over activities or skills in their resumes or portfolios. It’s good advice, and I’m hardly the only one to give it, nor do I have any plans to stop giving it. As someone who has more often than not played the role of hiring manager, it can be very useful to know, say, that someone not only led a product team but led them through a launch with double digit returns. That said, I’m also keenly aware of the limitations of this tactic: for starters, it privileges quantifiable outcomes, when qualitative ones are often even more impactful. And it advantages people who are comfortable taking broad credit for a team’s work, and disadvantages those who are not—categories that generally break down along lines of privilege. Most troublingly, it drives towards a narrative where outcomes are highly visible, but costs and consequences are not. A metric about improved conversion or increased revenue doesn’t reveal anything about the three team members who quit after being bullied, or the person who showed up to work with a fever, or the fact that the one parent on the team was sidelined. If we’re really trying to build humane teams (and I know a lot of people really are trying their absolute damndest to do that), we’ve got to look not only at outcomes but the conditions that created them.
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Robin Rendle writes about job hunting, acknowledging that it’s incredibly uncomfortable in the best of times. But what I most appreciate here is the acknowledgement that looking for a job isn’t about finding that one, true, perfectly destined role, but about finding many possible futures and choosing among them. Having worked with a lot of folks in job transition this past year, I can’t deny that the discomfort is real and often unavoidable. But I do think Rendle’s framing here is helpful, inasmuch as it takes some of the pressure off of the search. And anything that helps make looking for a job a little bit easier is welcome.
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Ethan Marcotte writes about the Hollywood strikes and what lessons they have for the tech industry. In particular, he notes that “there’s no such thing as ‘automation-proof’ labor.” What I notice in the protests of the writers and actors isn’t so much the movie-myth of robots taking jobs as it is something several orders of magnitude more frightening: jobs deskilled until the people doing them are tasked with cleaning up after sloppy and incoherent robots, whose abilities tap out at remixing the workers’ prior efforts. I think the fight here isn’t so much about less work as it is about preventing shitty work from becoming the norm. In that vein, every tech worker should be aligned with not only the actors and writers, but the folks who have already been tasked with the horrendous work of trying to make chatbots seem like they aren’t psychopaths. This is, as Marcotte notes, an existential moment for all of us. His book, You Deserve a Tech Union is out now and highly recommended.
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“Making a more accessible world is a broad and shared horizon, not a checklist,” writes Sara Hendren, in this excellent piece about accessible design. Hendren argues that while seeking out paths to universal design is well and good, we ought not to presume that nothing less than the high standard of “universal” is valuable. But she isn’t arguing for compromising or making tradeoffs so much as being specific about what contexts and people you’re designing for, and in what ways the design serves those needs. I think there’s something instructive about the general shape of many an argument about the perfect versus the good here: as Hendren notes, look for a “shared horizon, not a moral hierarchy.”
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“Performance reviews tied to reward make a zero-sum tradeoff against openness, trust, and safety.” Amen to this post from Elizabeth Ayer about the problems with performance reviews. I will also echo her point that performance reviews almost invariably drive individual responses to systemic problems—placing an extra-heavy burden on people from minoritized backgrounds as well as obscuring the system-level changes that would be more fruitfully addressed. Ayer has some competent strategies for maneuvering through a situation in which you cannot escape the performance review, but I for one hope we can start to build towards the kinds of workplaces that send them into the sun where they belong. One alternative path: transforming reviews into opportunities to uplift, to assess how well people are cared for, whether their needs are being met, and what would help them meet their own high expectations.
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Great post from Hazel Weakly talking about how to start at a new company with care, attention, and respect, while also making a big impact quickly. Among her key points is that new hires should avoid trying to fix things—“I know you want to. Stop it. Bad. No fixy.”—opting instead for listening deeply, inquiring into what you learn, and only proposing to fix things if everyone agrees it needs fixing. This is a neat and wise inversion of the usual advice to ask for forgiveness instead of permission: we tend to assume forgiveness will be faster, but, to borrow from adrienne maree brown, moving at the speed of trust often gets us where we want to go sooner than we may have guessed. And we get to build strong, resilient relationships along the way. Win-win.
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Great post about incident prevention—or, really, about how trying to prevent an incident prohibits your ability to learn from it. I’d expand this out even further to say that in any kind of retrospective (whether about an incident or otherwise) the urge to look for and prescribe preventative measures often works against you, in that it funnels your interpretation of events down a very narrow path. Sometimes the best thing you can do is sit with complexity—get to know it, become familiar with it—rather than trying to simplify it into something else. One tactic I’ve found helpful here: if you can’t wholly let go of the impulse towards prevention, at least delay it a day or two. That will create some space for other lessons to emerge more clearly.
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HBR is getting behind the union movement is a sentence I never thought I’d have cause to write. But this piece argues cogently that leaders can benefit from empowered workers, and that fighting labor power is more often than not a loser’s game. I’d like to tattoo this excerpt on a few company’s foreheads: “If companies continue to assume that organized labor destroys value and to reflexively fight all collective-action efforts, as has been happening at Starbucks, Amazon, and elsewhere, they run an enormous—even existential—risk. They may permanently disenchant their workforce and stamp out employees’ investment in their company’s success.” I will also emphasize the reverse: companies that listen to their workers and build environments and systems with them will be much better positioned to retain critical talent and meet their objectives than those that torpedo whatever goodwill they have left. Choose wisely.
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Rani Molla notes in Vox that while larger tech companies are pushing RTO plans, many smaller tech (and non-tech) orgs are looking to remote cultures as a competitive advantage. This has, I’ll argue, long been the case—that smaller companies could compete with the recruiting behemoths of the big companies by letting people work anywhere they wanted. It’s heated up now because so many more people have had a chance at remote work and don’t care to go back. And despite a lot of orgs claims to the contrary, Molla points out that “arbitrarily calling people back to the office might actually hurt workers’ productivity and innovation by driving fatigue and burnout.” The good news is that people who can’t or won’t make regular trips to the office now have more opportunities in the form of many a small company placing their priorities elsewhere.
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I’m often a bit suspicious of edicts to assume good intentions—while themselves well-intentioned, it’s too easy for those guidelines to cut off consideration of harms, whether they were intended or not. At the same time, intentions do matter, and a culture that defaults to a presumption of malice is not one that can survive for long. So I quite like the framing in this article from Kim Fellner about organizational resilience: she writes, “Err on the side of generosity. Assume reciprocal good will for as long as you possibly can.” This reframes the old instruction in two useful ways: first, it positions good will as an element of being generous; and second, it’s honest about the fact that any such generosity will have reasonable limits. The latter holds open some space to address real harms, when they inevitably come up, without letting intentions get in the way. (Lots of other great advice also in this piece, which is written in the context of movement organizations, but has a lot to say about other kinds of orgs, too, I think.)
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“What happens when designers of minoritized communities who do make it through the door are socialized and hypnotized into an abyss of powerlessness where they believe their own identity is a liability? What happens to their imagination if they enter the clutches of the approving white gaze?” A great and astute article from Vivianne Castillo and Michael J. A. Davis, about what can happen when leaders perpetuate inequitable systems rather than working to undo them. Similar patterns exist among many women leaders who, after ascending to positions of power, often work to preserve the patriarchal status quo. What I appreciate about Castillo and Davis’ analysis here is that it holds these leaders accountable while also recognizing the powerful incentives that lead them astray. And they have very good counsel for how to push back if you’re among the people harmed by this behavior; I will second the advice to “learn the game” of HR systems: those systems are imperfect, but they aren’t immutable.
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In Vox, Emily Stewart calls out the phenomena of people who are fully employed but have nothing to do—one of the many kinds of bullshit jobs that David Graeber so capably wrote about in his book of the same name. Among the things that’s worth calling out here is that while some people may get along just fine for a while when so employed, most people find doing nothing at work to be deeply debilitating. This isn’t the kind of doing nothing that Jenny Odell prescribes; rather, it’s a combination of biding your time and being always ready to perform, like a coiled trap waiting forever to be sprung. It requires a kind of vigilance that can be more exhausting than many kinds of legitimate work. All of which is to say, if you find yourself in this situation, and it doesn’t feel like the gift horse you hoped for, you’re not alone.
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Here’s Sara Hendren talking about commitment and provisionality as key elements of the design process, with reference to the work of urban design group Better Block: “It’s the commitment of a three-dimensional sketch, with a piano and furniture and semi-mature trees, but with the provisionality of impermanence. An idea brought to tangible life, and yet reversible.” I love this not only for its application for better streetlife but also as a framework for thinking about open design processes generally. And it makes for good questions of whatever it is you’re trying to do in your work: what commitment can you make, and what would it mean for that commitment to be provisional and temporary? What would it look like to try something that’s real and tangible but still reversible?
I’ve been thinking about this post from Erin Kissane—which touches on, among other topics, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, a book that is very much part of my personal canon—and her prophecy about the near future of online communities. She writes, “I think things feel wiggly and interesting right now because we really just do not know how things are going to shake out. Which means that maybe people who make things online but don’t have billions of dollars or a seat at the VC table can have more influence over the next generations of online sociability and communal life.” I think she’s right about this, but it also occurs to me that the present haze of uncertainty includes a whole lot of people who find themselves in a weird kind of liminal space with respect to the tech industry, whether because of burnout or layoffs or sheer disillusionment. Uncertainty—especially at the scale of industry—is frightening and stressful, but it’s also an opening to experiment and explore, to make anew. There’s a story out there that says the future of tech is a dystopian mess of legless bots-talking-to-other-bots, and while I think we should heed the warnings, I’m also unconvinced that that particular future is preordained. It’s not the only story available to us, nor must we be the passive recipients of other people’s stories. We can write new stories, too.