7 ms·

Sometimes I feel like a lot of managers don't live in reality. Sure, psychological safety as a concept is nice to talk about, but how can an employee be totally

• solipsism 5y ago
  How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project? All of them, as long as it's done internally and not jerk-like. Doesn't sound like you know much about Google culture.
  • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Without any consequences? (Including hidden ones)
  • pyjug 5y ago
    >All of them Really? Why are y'all working on FLoC then? :-)
    • zamadatix 5y ago
      You're asking developers at the largest ad company in the world why some of the development they do relates to ads. It has nothing to do with engineers vs managers, both are and have been willing to push against user interest for the vast piles of money.
    • joshuamorton 5y ago
      Being able to question a project without fear of retaliation doesn't mean that your requests will be followed.
    • solipsism 5y ago
      I can't tell if this is a serious question, or just some quip. Assuming it's serious... It's not an average SWE's job to make product decisions and to steer strategic initiatives. There are people whose job it is to do specifically that. Think just for a second what it would be like if every one of be more than 100,000 employees could bring a product plan to a halt because they had reservations. What's in your power is to ask tough questions (people do).. To make your opinion heard (people do). To change projects if you wish (something Google makes easier than any other company). And to take risks and make choices in the execution of your own job duties. That's psychological safety. You may find this hard to believe, but the people working on FLoC have chosen to. They could easily find a different project if they wanted to. It may be disappointing you you that the average SWE isn't nearly as ideological as the average HN commenter, but it is what it is.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  I think it can exist by the employee forgetting the nature of the relationship in the heat of the moment, but the slightest sigh of frustration by the boss is going to destroy it. It is exceptionally fragile.
  • pyjug 5y ago
    >employee forgetting the nature of the relationship in the heat of the moment Curious to learn others' experiences, but I've never seen this in my career, ever. I've seen _peers_ yell at each other, but never seen an employee slip "out of character" with their superiors, at least publicly. And if it isn't happening publicly, there's no psychological safety, is there? Most people (including myself) have been conditioned to bring their "work self" to work, not their "true self". As such, there's very little chance of "forgetting the nature of the relationship" even in heated moments.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      In my own case it is getting caught up in a discussion and pressing further than my strategic self would. It is as simple as stating "this is going to break" when I would usually do a more muted and subtle "I am not sure that this will work." I am not really one to challenge all that directly normally. But sometimes that slips.
    • wayoutthere 5y ago
      So context here, I’m transgender — but transition was always about bringing 100% of myself to the table at all times. I similarly had my “work self” and “true self” — but keeping them separate was impossible when in that identity-less state a lot of trans people experience mid-transition. So when I was reestablishing my personal identity in my late 20s, I just never made a separate “work self”, and it’s been a deliberate decision. I regularly talk openly with my superiors and make it known that I’m very opinionated but I’m also fallible and open to learning from my mistakes. This kind of openness and trust is absolutely essential at the executive level; the real secret is that none of us really knows what we’re doing and we’re all making it up as we go too. Doing this a few times with the right people will help you learn when asking questions is helpful and when you should get out of the way and follow orders. A good leader has the level of humility to know they’re not always right. In fact, this ability to “fight back” effectively is what gets you promoted above a line manager level. And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives so they can have it at work, and it’s not there for others so it’s a lot harder to build the muscle on the job if you’re always on guard at home.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > How many line engineers at Google And this is engineers at Google we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge. In other words, very hard to replace people. How must more difficult must it be for people who could be replaced tomorrow?
  • bogwog 5y ago
    > we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge I thought Google just hired recent grads that play the leetcode game.
    • skybrian 5y ago
      Google hires lots of different kinds of people, including new grads, graduate students, experienced engineers, people with PhD’s, and professors. Your previous experience is going to affect what kind of work you can get.
  • shemnon42 5y ago
    > usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge. Maybe 2005 Google, but not anymore. A good bachelors degree or enough YoE at most companies gets you the interview, and then the interview result usually does the rest. Those are the "line engineers" that move on to other faangs or unicorns when psychological safety becomes an issue. Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues.
    • thanhhaimai 5y ago
      > Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues. This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
• xlpmark 5y ago
  I think the managers do live in reality. They know perfectly well that this is a power tool that can be used against engineers who are more intelligent than themselves. U.S. companies are very much fear driven. Management always keeps people in doubt and uncertainty. Violating psychological safety is another charge to hit people with. It is the same as the "counterrevolutionary" charge in communist countries, to be used against intelligent dissidents.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project? Heck, how many middle managers can? Psychological safety should mean you should be able to call BS and be okay with others calling your BS (in a non-inflammatory way), but in reality it means stroking others' egos, especially of those in leadership. Employees should have psychological safety to voice concerns within their domain, but that's not a license to start backseat driving upper management. It's one thing for a line engineer to raise concerns about their team's choice of frameworks for a project or the chosen architecture of the system. It's a different issue entirely if the employee is simply "calling BS" on company directives or cynically referring to initiatives as "pet projects". From a managing perspective, there is a stark difference between people who voice concerns reasonably and those who simply like to complain. The good team members raise their concerns with an open mind, seek more information to understand why certain decisions were made, come prepared with alternative suggestions, and most importantly are willing to disagree and commit if they don't get their way. The bad apples do things like "call BS" on initiatives without understanding the whole story, aren't interested in learning more, don't have any constructive suggestions, and tend to drag their feet or spread dissent through the ranks when they don't get their way. Psychological safety doesn't mean employees get a free pass to be disgruntled or push back against what they're being paid to do. Questions, concerns, and alternate suggestions are welcome and should not be punished, but at the end of the day employees must be willing to commit to the chosen direction and get on board with company initiatives.
• bradleyjg 5y ago
  As long as in the end you can disagree and commit I’ve found that being willing to disagree in the first place is treated as a moderately positive trait by most managers. If you won’t disagree and commit that’s a different story.
  • tharkun__ 5y ago
    I've been what some might consider a "difficult employee" all my life. I speak up. I don't shut up. I have almost no filter (almost as in I did learn to reformulate things but I still don't shut up). If something stinks I'm not gonna pretend that it smells like roses. I can live with some stink but I'll tell you that it stinks and that I want you to start shoveling it away. I have had some co-workers or higher ups that probably found it inconvenient and didn't like me (in fact strike the probably - I know for a fact). Yet it has so far not resulted in me being fired, demoted etc. and in fact the opposite has happened. I've been told to never shut up and that they keep me around precisely because I don't. My luck might obviously run out at some point but so far, from my first internship where I just didn't do the stupid task they gave me and instead replaced their awful sendmail+pop3d setup with a full featured postfix and imap/pop and spam filter combo (well I showed the boss on my last day that I had built it on my computer and what it could do. He offered me a part time job as their network/sysadmin to do it for real on the server and to migrate all their users over) it has worked out. I'm not on 'brilliant jerk level'. Way not brilliant enough and just below jerk ;)
    • bradleyjg 5y ago
      I have a colleague that’s difficult. Upfront I’ll say that I like him a lot personally. He almost got fired recently. He didn’t, in part because a bunch of us stood up for him, but it was dicey. The reason he almost got fired is because he’s very expensive to manage. That dogged unwillingness to never shut up, along with more than his fair share of brilliance, is great when he’s digging into a thorny, ugly problem that most would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist. But when there’s a meeting with $3k/hour in fully loaded cost worth of people in it and he’s going on and on about his pet issue that’s a problem. When every decision you make has to first be delivered to the team and argued in detail to this guy, that’s exhausting. To his credit he’s convincible, but still. Since projects have to be carefully evaluated for fit before being assigned to him that makes him harder to use well. Having to unruffle other employees’ feathers all the time certainly isn’t fun. And so on and so forth. All this means he needs a very strong manager, both in a technical sense (because without that credibility no one will be able to manage him) and in a people skills sense (both for him and for the people he comes into contact with). Such managers are themselves are difficult to find and expensive to employ. To keep him around and aimed in the right direction means a disproportionate amount of one of those people’s time is going to a single employee. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. It sounds like whatever you are doing is working for you. But maybe this provides some food for thought.
• foxhop 5y ago
  Additionally I've been in situations where management turns a blind eye to an obvious sociopath, and sociopathic people are a real phenomenon which prey on people's vulnerability. I tried just be vulnerable, it back fires. Since experiencing that, I've found myself keeping a distance, I tell my truth but I don't share vulnerability since it sucks when it's used against me. I'm in a stronger position not sharing. There are always consequences for over sharing, the obvious answer is don't overshare.
• munificent 5y ago
  > how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship? How can any human feel totally psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc? The answer is that you're thinking in black and white terms about a concept that is a continuum. Even in employee-employer relationships, with a good manager it is entirely possible to have a reasonable level of psychological safety, just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car.
  • 0xBA5ED 5y ago
    >just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car Then again, it's reasonably straightforward to measure physical injury and come to some agreement about acceptable risk. Psychological injury is far more subjective.
    • munificent 5y ago
      Measuring psychology safety is easy: ask them. "Subjective" != "arbitrary".
      • 0xBA5ED 5y ago
        First: I did not say that subjective means arbitrary. Second: The problem with this is, there still must some agreement on what constitutes an acceptable answer when you "ask them". This brings us back to the subjectivity of psychological injury.
      • cutemonster 5y ago
        That's interesting, in that there's a risk that, if they feel really unsafe, they'll want to pretend that all is fine And if the group is small, even if you try to make the answers anonymous, maybe you still would be able to figure out who wrote what, and they'll realize this, and write mostly nice sounding things Anyway, asking and talking about it seems like a good idea. Maybe also asking them to read the article being discussed here :-)
  • 5y ago
• JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
  Anyone with the wealth to not care about the outcome, even if it means getting dismissed. There's more wealthy individual contributors in tech than we might think. It's certainly not everybody, but there are some who could speak their mind, without fearing losing their income and risking their mortgage or rent payment.
  • strken 5y ago
    This isn't the same amount of wealth for everyone, which is interesting. Some of my friends get more psychological security from having no debt and a few grand in their savings account than others who are worth six or seven figures.
• Consultant32452 5y ago
  At my current job I'm getting marked down for not demonstrating leadership. "Leadership", in this context, means supporting and implementing whatever latest buzzword the VP heard at the country club that we are not staffed for and will be a disaster. That's the kind of psychological safety I have.
  • tolbish 5y ago
    Leadership can also mean having the gumption and initiative to push back.
    • Consultant32452 5y ago
      I get that. I've told my boss it's a bad idea. I told my boss' boss it's a bad idea. But the management is all incentivized to do this horrible thing because it pads their resume and likely gives them more headcount. They don't argue with me on the merits, I get vague platitudes about how we're bleeding edge, this is where the market is headed, etc. Their incentives are not aligned with quality output.
      • cutemonster 5y ago
        I wonder if there're any ways to solve that, other than finding another job / moving to another team in the company
• jvanderbot 5y ago
  There is a thing, called the matrix organization, which has many problems. One of its strengths, though, is that you have a "boss" who is responsible for your career advancement but is not responsible for assigning and grading your work and is not concerned with your opinion about leadership so much. You work on technical tasks for other people, who make sure your work is ok, and your supervisor makes sure you are OK. That person is your advocate in all things that fall in the tense employee-employer tug-of-war. Inside the "group", there is psychological safety. On "tasks" there is often less of it, but you always have your group. Or at least it should be that way.
  • darkerside 5y ago
    I think this often papers over the tension instead of resolving it. The best way to resolve the tension that comes from doing a poor job is to do a better job. The second best way is to find a better job (within or outside the team/organization). I realize that sounds heartless, but I believe the first is usually possible (assuming competent hiring) because most people want to do good work. If you disconnect the career manager from the work being done by the employee, you make it harder for good managers too effectively redirect their employees, which results in worse outcomes.
  • flyinglizard 5y ago
    And the same structure prevents accountability, promotes political infighting and causes a misalignment of objectives all around. I hated every single minute of working inside such organizations. The elephant in the room is that there has to be a level of tension, of slight mutual discomfort, of a bilateral transaction present in employer-employee relationship. It needs to be very dull and implied but it has to be there to make sure incentives are aligned and objectives are consistently met. Tenured public service and unions show what might happen when this inconvenient element is missing.
• coldtea 5y ago
  >Sometimes I feel like a lot of managers don't live in reality. Sure, psychological safety as a concept is nice to talk about, but how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship? That talk is not actually meant to matter, it's just cant...