6 Working with Humans.md

Chapter 6: Working with Humans

General Social Skills

• Manners
  • "having good manners" => anticipating what causes others stress and taking it out of your interactions, so they can feel secure and peaceful.
  • Accept apologies eagerly; not "np" but "no worries! Things worked out fine."
  • When you go out for lunch, drinks, or anything else that costs money, pay people back absolutely without fail; make sure no one ever feels awkward about whether they'll get their money.
  • When you meet any colleague, shake their hand, smile, and introduce yourself; show that you're glad to work with them.
  • When you lapse in your politeness - by saying something curt, by accidentally wasting someone's time, by cutting someone off, whatever the case may be - apologize thoroughly and earnestly.
  • When others reach out to you, respond as promptly as humanly possible, and apologize when you don't; show that you value their time and consider it a commitment to help them.
  • Don't interrupt in meetings or conversations.
  • Thanks people thoroughly every single time they help you - show that you don't take their help for granted.
• Giving Credit
  • acknowledge that good work to your colleagues, their manager, and your mutual peers.
  • either claim credit for their work or allow others to mistakenly attribute it to you.
  • Thank them directly by email or chat.
    • “Thanks a lot for your help! This saved me a lot of time!”
  • Email feedback to them and their manager.
    • “Cheng went deep on this problem with me and ended up finding a bug that’s been causing crashes for weeks—thanks so much!”
  • Mention their help in a broader email.
    • “Special thanks to Guru, whose help on the storage side was essential to hitting this deadline.”
  • If a team goes above and beyond for you and your team, get them treats to say "thanks.* e.g., cupcakes, donuts, or cookies.
  • For truly exceptional work, get creative.
• A Word About Charm and Positivity
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People?
    • take a geneine interest in others, and give them the benefit of the doubt.
    • => Show them the respect of asking for feedback on a piece of your work.
    • => Ask them how their work is going, what they thought of the company meeting, what they thought of the company meeting.
    • => Ask follow-up questions.
  • Finding fault is not a sport.
    • Giving others the benefit of the doubt.
  • Bring other people up.
    • => finding qualities and actions you genuinely admire and commenting on them when the situation calls for it.
    • “man, that sounds tough!”
  • Seek out others' opinions.
    • You depend on your colleagues' expertise, and you want them to know you value it.
    • Asking for their thoughts explicitly, both in private and in public, is a vote of respect and a strong compliment.
  • Leave when it's time to leave.
    • You can always say, "catch up with you laster" and make your exit.
  • Acknowledge struggle; be supportive.
    • People can become quite emotional when their project is canceled, they cause an outage, their favorite colleagues leave, or whatever else goes wrong.
    • “don’t worry about it, you did your best”
  • Humility vs. Self-deprecation
    • Remember that everyone feels dread and self-doubt; we can share it with our friends, but at work we should keep our chins up.

Delivering Feedback

• When
  • Feedback is a gift, but giving it is a risk.
  • Three situations to give constructive feedback:
    • I'm in a position of authority, seniority, or friendship to them, and I think that the feedback will help them succeed personally; in that case, I have a responsibility to help them improve.
    • The behavior in question significantly compromises our shared work; in that case, giving feedback may be a practical necessity.
    • The criticism is mild and the benefit is large.
• Foundational Principles of Giving Feedback
  • Give people the benefit of the doubt.
    • Tell them you're giving them feedback because you believe they mean well.
  • Give feedback in the most positive way you can.
    • Approach conversations with an earnest goal of helping them succeed for their own sake.
    • Starting from respect and optimism rather than contempt or anger.
• Empathy; Show Your Trust
  • Feedback lands softer if it comes with understanding.
    • “I think that you may have been too harsh with Steve in that meeting. I was also pretty frustrated that he didn’t come prepared, and I completely agree that he needs to know that he has to do better for this project to succeed. That said, I think he might respond better if we approach him a little more gently.”
  • Acknowledge What's Good
    • The praise needs to be tightly coupled to the feedback.
      • “I think the sections about reliability and performance are clear and persuasive. The section on implementation details is well done, but I think might be too much for this audience.”
• Phrase Feedback As an Opportunity
  • We can say, "I think if you do X, something favorable will happen".
    • “I think that the main technical sections are good, but if you add a clear introduction, readers may contextualize them better.”
• Qualify Your Certainty
  • When delivering feedback, expressing certainty increases the intensity for the victim.
    • “You need to cover more of the history in your doc.” => “How much does your audience know about the history of this system? Depending on what they know, I think the doc might benefit from a little more history.”
• Offer Help
  • Couple feedback with an offer of help showing therefore you're not just raning criticism.
    • “I think the postmortem might need a bit more detail about how the caching system works.” => “I think the postmortem might need a bit more detail about how the caching subsystem works. Are you familiar with it? If you like, I’d be happy to spend a few minutes talking over some of the quirks.”
• Deliver Feedback 1:1
  • Deliver feedback 1:! => save your colleague the risk of public emabarrassment.
• Manage Your Tone of Voice
  • Do your very best to find a mild, easy, friendly tone.
• Forget Feedback and Provide Support
• Tough Love
  • Intransigence is going to cause real harm, in every case as a last resort.
  • Once again, we try every gentle tool first, and even when forced to be direct, we'll do our best to encourage.
    • “I don’t think saying that to your boss is going to get good results; I think he’ll experience it to mean that you’re no longer on the same side working toward a common goal, and that is not going to incline him to help you achieve what you want to achieve. I’m telling you this because I think it’s important and I think you can handle the feedback and do better.”

Receiving Feedback

• Seek feedback often, do your best to receive it with an open mind, and express appreciation whether you agree or not.
  • “Do you mind reading this email and seeing if it’s clear for this audience?”
  • “Do you have any feedback on my presentation? I’d appreciate a second opinion.”
  • “Do you think my question was reasonable in that meeting?”

Working With Your Manager

• The Nature of the Relationship
  • You should view your interaction with your employer dispassionately but not cynically; you deliver on your commitments, they deliver on theirs, and you both profit.
  • Managers are representatives of the company and your interests are aligned.
  • We should respect ourselves and our partners, keep our cool, and express our opinions honestly and courteously.
  • We should pretty much do what our boss tells us to do to the extent that ethics allow.
• Managers Have Their Own Problems: Optimizing the Collaboration
  • Managers are accountable for goals - shipping software, maintaining reliability, and driving business metrics.
  • The most important thing you can for your relationship with your manager is give them confidence that you are going to come through for them.
  • The most important thing you can do is build a track record of delivering
  • Proactive, well-organized communication about project status helps put your manager at ease.
    • with a list of project areas and a clear story for each, and you deliver that story with authority.
• Upward Feedback
  • Express minimal anger or frustration, and don't get personal; remember, this is work, not family. Try to make a specific, actionable request or suggestion.
    • “I’ve appreciated that you’re staying very tuned in to what’s happening on this project, but I’ve been thinking that it might be good to batch our communication a bit to reduce the overhead. Would you be open to a brief daily summary email at the end of the day?”
    • Pace yourself. Too much at a time will make them feel beaten down and less receptive to you.
    • Pay attention to the response; if they become defensive, ease off the gas and save it for another day.
• Going Over Your Manager's Head
  • Raising a concern about them directly with their boss is a drastic measure; it harms your trust with your manager, and, if not well justified, your second-level manager will have their own doubts about your judgment.
• Tricky Subjects
  • Disagreement About Technology or Process
    • Keep it to yourself, or offer constructive feedback.
      • “I’ve been thinking we might want to consider doing X instead of Y. X has benefits, but Y has other benefits.”
  • You Want More Feedback
    • If you're not sure where you stand, you can just directly ask for feedback.
      • “I’ve been thinking that it could be beneficial for me get some more feedback on my work. Do you think we could try to have a regular cadence of feedback? It doesn’t need to be too heavyweight—maybe once every two weeks, or once a month, you could give me some feedback?”
  • Slow Advancement
    • You can say, "I'd like to talk about my goals for the next year," and then, in that discussion, say, "I'm starting to thinking about promotion to Level X. What do you think I should do to position myself for that? How do you think I'm doing against that standard?"
    • You can try to get a consistent check from a senior colleague, emphasizing that you appreciate candor.
    • You can be patient if your boss says that you just need to wait a little longer and your situation is otherwise good.
    • You can have a direct, professional conversation with your manager.
      • “I’ve been thinking about my timeline for promotion. I respect what you’ve told me about this, but if you don’t mind, I want to make a case that I’m ready sooner than we’ve discussed.”
      • “I think that on Project X, I needed to step into a leadership role that’s appropriate for Level Y. That was a virtual team with four junior people, and they needed a lot of guidance; I also did all the project management, including sending the updates and maintaining the tracker, and the project shipped on time. The Level Y guidelines say that you need to be able to coordinate projects of two to three engineers. I thought that it may not have been obvious externally, because it was a virtual team, but this work met that standard. Of course, I understand that the promotion process might be more nuanced than I realized. What do you think?”
    • You can quietly, responsibly leave.
  • Project Dissatisfaction
    • The first step is to make it extremely clear that you're going to deliver your current work and that you understand you're not entitled to just do whatever your heart desires. Then, you can ask about the future. You should prepare the most specific idea you can and justify it in terms of business value.
      • “We’re almost getting to the end of Project Jellybean. I’ve been thinking about what comes next after we’ve shipped. I’d really like to do a performance project if that’s possible; I think we have a lot of low-hanging fruit for performance, and it may improve the customer experience a lot.”
      • “My last two projects have been a lot of plumbing. I think they added a lot of business value, and I’m glad to have done them, but I think I could use a change of pace soon—do you think I could tackle some infrastructure work when we finish Project Gumdrop?”

Working with Platform Owners

• Platform Owners
  • their responsibilities are broad-they have obligations to many users.
  • show that you respect the difficulties of their job.
  • build a partnership where their expertise and your feedback improve both teams' results.
• Feature Requests
  • First, it should be framed in terms of what you want to achieve rather than how it should be done.
    • “Feature Request: a way to query a store’s most recent orders,” rather than “include recent orders in getStore API.”
  • Second, it should explain the business purpose of your request.
  • Third, you should describe any and all relevant technical context.
  • Finally, it should be expressed humbly.
• Debugging and Technical Questions
  • Going deep before you ask.
  • Asking clear, context-rich questions.
• Bug Reports
  • Structure
    • What I'm tring to achieve.
    • Exactly what I did, always including real commands or example requests, real version numbers or git hashes, and every possible bit of context.
    • Exactly what I expected to see.
    • Exactly what I saw, including real copy-pasted output.
    • Ideally, some attempt at debugging the issue.