llm/3a862c31-848e-4e32-be93-99402d2b43b6/topic-15-43ab315c-aa94-4818-9251-ba9988bb048e-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Psychological Safety in Teams COMMENTS: 1. > refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian" If they ever hired a second one, they’d have to learn actual names. Or maybe it would be “the asian” and “the new asian”! 2. This first 3 hit me very hard, 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems. I think this problem is rooted in early education: students learn languages, frameworks, and tools first without understanding what problems they actually solve. Once engineers have experience building a few products for users, they begin to understand what matters to the user. 2. Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work. - Sadly most of the arguments are won by either someone in power or experience. Right decisions are made with consensus. You build consensus during creative process and leverage power and experience during crisis. 3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one. - Every decision is a risk management. The smart people convert higher risk into lower risk. Most people struggle here to take the risk because of the fear of failing and just waste time arguing, debating and winning over each other. 3. I think it depends on the team. Some teams I’ve been in, we could go “this is shit, we must be doing this wrong” and we’d go back to the drawing board without blinking. Other teams, just getting _something_ going, even if it was garbage, was a enormous achievement, and saying it was bad and that we should start again would be a recipe for disaster. 4. It is good only if the whole team believes it. If the team mates have a different mindset, they see it as half baked or hacky. And if there is ever some bad feedback, they just use it as a "I told you so" and throw you under the bus. 5. If your self-esteem is sufficiently resilient, you can exploit the same human tendencies behind Cunningham's Law (the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer). Check your crappy end-to-end proof of concept into the team repository, and your teammates will be so horrified and outraged that they'll fix it faster than any sprint could have planned. 6. I personally agree with the premise to ship early, with some rough edges, etc. But teammates may not be supportive. You need the whole team to have that mindset/culture. 7. > Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer. Chiming in to say I’ve experienced the same. A coworker who became a good friend ended up on a PIP and subsequently fired for “not performing” soon after he helped build a non technical team a small tool that really helped them do their job quicker. He wasn’t doing exactly as he was told and I guess that’s considered not performing. Coincidentally the person who pushed for him to be fired was an ex-Google middle manager. I’ve also seen so commonly this weird stigma around engineers as if we’re considered a bit unintelligent when it comes to what users want. Maybe there is something to higher ups having some more knowledge of the business processes and the bigger picture, but I’m not convinced that it isn’t also largely because of insecurity and power issues. If you do something successful that your manager didn’t think of and your manager is insecure about their 8. This is one of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (fear of conflict, caused by absence of trust). Highly recommend the book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea... 9. Usually there are nuggets of wisdom in lists shared like this but I feel like every lesson shared here has immense value. > "remain skeptical of your own certainty" > "Model curiosity, and you get a team that actually learns." These are two lessons that typically require battle scars to learn. For such big ideas to be summed into two sentences is pretty remarkable and puts to words lessons I wish I knew how to share. Amazing article, thanks for sharing! 10. Number 14 really speaks towards the subtle difference between being domineering in conversation and genuinely a sme in an area with little overlap in other people's domain knowledge. I feel like being extremely transparent in explaining the rationale and to a degree teaching really reinforces that boundary. If you get to a point of silent resentment 'debt' in spite of efforts to empathise, consider perspective, and provide clarity, then you have a collaboration problem on the other end. How you choose to address that is dependent on your political capital, and sometimes you need to accept it. Young me naively believed people were like rational automatons who would speak up when appropriate, not take thinga personal, and aspire to the true north that I aspired to as a colleague, and that is no baseline for a healthy collaboration. 11. As much as we meme about it internally, one of my favourite things about AWS was the leadership principles. I always worried I've became cult like biased. Seeing how these converge to similar great ideas is a relief. IMO the most common denominator among all these is trust, in order for many of these to work. From policy setting at strategic level, hiring, to tactical process refinement, the invariant must always be building an environment and culture of trust. Which isn't trivial to scale. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Psychological Safety in Teams
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