118: Alternative to Inefficient Workflows

Identifying and eliminating inefficient team workflows

Hey there, and welcome to Snippets of Text! It's a daily publication where you can find three or more snippets about ongoing work in software engineering, parenting, technology, and work. Today's snippets are all about ways to increase flow at work, build trust, and foster autonomy. I'd love to read your thoughts on them, so feel free to leave comments below!

Off Topic: Trust and Autonomy

The default assumption is that you can do anything unless a specific policy or agreement prohibits it. We're starting from a position of trust. More freedom leads to more learning, and more understanding leads to better performance. By focusing on execution, we limit the system's growth potential. By making ourselves indispensable, we make our teams and organizations less resilient.

Once a decision has been made, it should be shared along with the rationale and perspectives that shaped it so that others can learn too. Consensus is impossible at scale and needs to reflect how adaptive systems work. Recognize that freedom and autonomy feed motivation. Create an environment where it is safe to try and fail, and teams will learn and grow in extraordinary ways.

Accept that we operate in a changing world where centralized control is too slow and disconnected from reality. Push authority to the edge of the organization—where the information is—so teams can adapt and steer.

Structural mediocrity has an inertia all its own. The team is self-managed. Effective teams are lean—small enough to move. But they are also multidisciplinary, containing all (or most) of the skills they need to achieve their mission.

Unrelated: Challenging Corporate Norms for Success

Consider that throwing more people at a corporation isn't the only way to get more profit out of it. Scale is the opposite of efficiency. To zoom out, what I'm talking about cuts down on waste. You're free only to add things if you need them. This includes functions like HR or legal, but it also has more mundane stuff like office space and the gas or train fare it costs to commute. They avoid venture capital. They don't use pragmatists and idealists. They don't scale (e.g., via job interviews). They don't obscure individual contributions as they grow.

Financial security is an illusion. Worse, being an employee is a considerable risk. Humans have a cognitive bias known as the endowment effect, wherein we value things more when we own them than if we were buying them. Those of us in the CS education system, for a quarter of a million dollars, have a lot of endowment. We are adamant that you should know how to whiteboard an alpha-beta pruning algorithm and tell us its worst-case runtime. Are you going to use that in your day-to-day work?

Art is worth appreciating, and it has a place in the world. But art should be distinct from anything productive in a commercial sense. We, as programmers, can be distracted from our fates and autonomy by asinine gamification. A lousy software development team is the only thing more expensive than a good software development team.