Will Larson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I have definitely worked with that and experienced that where you don't want to piss off engineers. And so are you saying that because that's changing, leaders maybe don't have to worry as much about upsetting engineers plus you just generally think we shouldn't treat engineers that way? Yeah, I think a little bit of both, but I think there's been, in this previous era, where hiring and retention were one of the biggest ways you evaluated middle management. Losing team members was huge, huge issue. And so you started to coddle a little bit, which is actually bad, again, bad for the engineers, bad for the teams, bad for everyone, bad for efficiency of the organization. But now something that I love is we get to give engineers real hard problems and we get to actually hold them accountable. And that means we can put them in senior roles. One of the things that I've been pushing on, I wrote my last book, Staff Engineer about what is the career path for senior engineers. One of the challenges is if we aren't comfortable holding engineers accountable because we just want to retain all the engineers, then we can't put them in senior roles. And so I think we're actually seeing a bit of a shift where we can actually hold them accountable, which means we can put them in senior roles, which means the engineers can actually get what they've been trying to get the entire time, but we haven't been able to because we've been coddling them a little bit too much. Okay. So there's a few directions I want to go and I'm just going to poke around and see where we go. The first is you're a big advocate of systems thinking. We were chatting about this before. I think a lot of people have heard this term systems thinking and there's books about it. It's sounds great. I want to be a systems thinker. What does that actually mean? How do you find you apply it in your work? How do people get better at this way of thinking?…

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