This week we discussed the last part of Chapter 3 (understanding what motivates each person on your team).
- On shooting stars… Dennis recalled the first talk he remembered from CodeStock. A CEO had dev he worked with for a while, and they formed a startup. Six years in the CEO found the dev’s work was garbage and that he was generally checked out. When prodded, the CEO found out the dev wanted to work for Google so he worked out how to make that happen. Later the CEO got six referrals from ex-Googlers because he cared enough about that one dev. Don’t give up on somebody unless there’s a good reason to.
- Jameson likes Google’s philosophy that you can go to another team in the company. You probably need to be in a big enough company to do this. At Google your current manager can’t stop you from transferring.
- Jamie shared an example of him giving a better offer to someone on another team first, and then asking that they apply. The fact that they wanted to apply was evidence enough, but the other managers didn’t like that the offer was made first.
- When Jameson was at Pilot, he made recommendations for improvements and heard nothing back and had no support. Another supervisor told his actual supervisor that they need to listen to Jameson or else he’ll leave, which is exactly what happened. You need to keep your people challenged and engage with them as a person.
- Not every superstar wants to manage. The only way to give people more money is to promote them to management because there are salary caps on titles. Not every senior dev wants to lead a team. Maybe don’t put salary caps on titles, and pay people based on what value they bring to the company.
- Bosses that keep people in the middle: not sure if they can find someone better, it takes time to train new people, they like the person. Geoff would add “they don’t care,” which is where his wife is at. Some companies don’t want to fire someone because the company won’t let you backfill the position. If you’re still able to produce without that person, then why would they backfill, despite the fact that they don’t see everyone staying late to finish the work of that lost person?
- Jamie mentioned the author wasn’t worried about losing her superstars; she felt like she could find someone to fill in the position when they left. This is not true of most managers.
- Finding a job where they could shine – SentryOne does this. Jameson said there’s a lot to be said by having a good boss; it can be a form of golden handcuffs. Geoff said it would be nice if there wasn’t such pay disparity toward a software engineer at Google and a landscape architect. Then you wouldn’t have to work at a job you’re not excellent at to make money.
- Jameson on “Have you given Radically Candid guidance?” He was told to fire someone who wasn’t performing. Jameson worked with HR to say that we’ve not been radically candid with this person’s performance, so we need to do that first. Since then things have turned around. 90% of the feedback was around communication about what they’re doing day-to-day, better interaction in meetings especially being remote (e.g., silent with no camera). Your lifestyle and work style need to change when remote.
- Getting a second opinion… How do you decide who it’s best to ask? You may not want to ask someone they work with directly because it could bias their opinion. We discussed some hypothetical scenarios where you’d want to let someone know a person on their team is going through something personal that’s affecting their performance.
- Jamie had someone tell him you can be altruistic and self-serving by getting help for your teammates so that they perform better.
- “New to role; too much too fast” … “Other times, managers map their own capacity onto the people that work for them.” Houston experienced this in his current role, as everything was new. You get stuff dumped on you and there’s an expectation to perform faster than is realistic. You should remove as much friction of onboarding to be productive.
- The author shared a story from Google where someone who needed time to take care of a personal issue was told to go home and not worry about their job. Geoff thinks this is exceedingly rare.
- Someone can be really good at their job, but something doesn’t fit at the company/team/product level. Jameson worked on some projects he just didn’t like the product/application so he couldn’t get invested in it.