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   Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)'s status on Thursday, 02-May-2024 01:02:46 JST Marco Rogers

   I think we need to talk more explicitly about why we're settling on "safety" as the term we are pursuing. As a manager, I've been trying to reconcile that term with some of the real expectations and pressures of the workplace. I don't think we are doing enough to create clarity. And I worry instead that talking about "safety" is creating unrealistic expectations.
   https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112349435602632842

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     Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)'s status on Thursday, 02-May-2024 01:02:39 JST Marco Rogers

     in reply to

     An industry full of people feeling like they're faking it won't ever feel psychologically safe. No matter what else we do around that. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take action to improve the things we do have control over. We should. I'm just saying I also want to see this discourse tackle what I see as the bigger barriers to achieving better outcomes.

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     Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)'s status on Thursday, 02-May-2024 01:02:41 JST Marco Rogers

     in reply to

     I think one thing that can contribute so much more to a feeling of psychological safety at work is knowing your shit and being more successful at your tasks. Instead, what I see is a lot of early career engineers constantly feeling like they're failing. Because the systems are overly complex, and they're not able to keep up with the expected pace of output.

     NaClKnight repeated this.
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     Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)'s status on Thursday, 02-May-2024 01:02:42 JST Marco Rogers

     in reply to

     I'll just go ahead and say what I feel about the current state of the engineering discipline. The industry has grown too fast due to high demand. We never had great structures for actually teaching people. But now we have a huge influx of people who haven't really been taught anything. They're just piecing things together and winging it. With software specifically, that's not the worst thing. This medium can tolerate a lot of mistakes. But eventually the impacts do start to show.

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     Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)'s status on Thursday, 02-May-2024 01:02:43 JST Marco Rogers

     in reply to

     I'm trying to tread carefully here. Probably failing though. I want to say explicitly that I like the work Hicks and her colleagues are doing. It feels like they are investigating what happens on engineering teams in a mor rigorous way. I appreciate that. But these are things that good managers have known and talked about for a long time. Maybe what I'm struggling with is that I know what comes up once you get past these initial findings. Things get more complicated.

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     Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)'s status on Thursday, 02-May-2024 01:02:44 JST Marco Rogers

     in reply to

     Some engineers like to talk about the fear of being fired. But in my experience, tech people don't get fired much at all. Especially when compared to how often we completely fail to deliver on time and on budget. And now we're saying the reason we can't do better until we feel even more "safe". It just feels weird to me.