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I've had a lot of interview questions about team dynamics and "raising the bar" and I keep thinking back to the job that I was subtweeting here https://twitter.com/modernserf/status/1004851464928456709
i joined this company in late 2016, and i was on a team that was building metrics dashboards -- a little bit of dataviz, a lot of plumbing.
over 2017, the team was reshuffled -- one of the engineers became the eng manager, a few more eng joined, and the team added a bunch of data scientists
the next six months might have been the best of my career -- i was working with people i liked, i was building stuff that was useful for customers and technologically satisfying for me.
i dont think i fully appreciated this until later, but i knew i was doing good work -- not just high-quality code, but a high-quality product -- because i understood what success looked like.
that said, i must have been at least a little restless -- this was already the longest i had stayed at one tech job -- because i spent the first three months of 2018 at the recurse center.
and maybe i sensed that things were starting to go downhill here; my team started on the happy side of the infamous "pivot to video", and by 2017 the wheels had come off of that bus.
certainly when you're building data visualizations all day, you can't help but notice that the trend lines are all sloping in the wrong direction
when i came back to work in april, i knew things were not going great, though i didn't yet know why. but in the interim our PM had been pushed out (not fired, but told she had no future here) and the project we had started before I left was in a holding pattern
I can't remember the details; I think we might haver blocked on a data dependency? I got right back into work, but as any of my managers can tell you, I am perfectly capable of inventing work for myself. at one point i made the cover of Unknown Pleasures as a react component
another thing that had changed is that the other frontend engineers on the team had started doing group code review in the cafeteria. we'd all gather around a laptop and go through the meatier PRs together; sometimes to look for bugs, but mostly to transfer knowledge.
but inevitably, these code review sessions would turn into group therapy. I had a fairly bland relationship with our manager -- up to this point, I cannot remember the content of any of our 1:1s -- but their 1:1s frequently ended with them crying in the bathroom
i guess i should introduce the other engineers here, because this is really their story more than it is mine. One had joined the team in the summer of 2017 as an intern, but she was clearly talented; maybe the most promising engineer i've ever worked with.
Another engineer had joined us as a junior dev in early 2017, and had "leveled up" since then. She had a good product sense (I think she had previously worked as a PM?) and did solid work as an engineer; she was also pretty active in one of our ERGs.
The last engineer was someone I knew from the meetup & conference scene. We had weirdly parallel careers -- we had started at this company around the same time, and I think we maybe even gave our first BrooklynJS talks on the same night.
Frankly, I was somewhat envious of her at this point -- she got into more conferences than I did, she had a bigger twitter following, she got paid more than me. (this is a story about what a Good Ally I am, so I need to offset that by embarassing myself here.)
All three of them, only a few months ago, had been integral parts of a successful team, and now their 1:1s were ending in tears. what was going on here?
now, _obviously_ sexism is a component of this -- you have four people on a team and the three women are having a wildly different experience with their male manager than the one man.
but i think when men imagine sexism in tech they picture men slapping women's asses or writing company-wide memos about how women's brains are designed for nurturing children and not bro'ing down and crushing code.
i think this image -- while it _does_ represent reality, misses the vast majority of the sexism in our industry. much of the prejudice faced by marginalized people in our industry is much more subtle, a low-grade but continuous pressure that slowly crushes the people underneath
our manager wasn't slapping anyone's asses, but he was holding us to different standards, probably in a way that was even invisible to him.
but a manager makes thousands of tiny judgements about an employee's work that could go either way, and i consistently got favorable rulings where the women i worked with would not have. these tiny judgements accumulate over time, and either build or drain your social capital.
the worst part about this is the feedback loop -- your social standing affects your emotional state, the work you are given and how subsequent judgement calls go, and soon enough you get into a position where you're an emotional wreck and nothing you do will be good enough
now let me give a few concrete examples. when i was accepted to RC, the company didn't have any sort of sabbatical program, and i had only worked there for 1.5 years anyways. but I got a sabbatical, and my healthcare was covered over the break, with no strings attached.
when I got accepted to RC, I told my manager "I'm not asking to leave, i'm offering to come back." And neither my manager nor I were "macho" guys, but weirdly I feel like that overt Power Move increased my social capital, even though it created a lot of work the company.
I was going to a lot of conferences during this period and it never once even occured to me that I should ask _permission_ to go (I usually paid my own way, which avoided some of those discussions, anyways) -- I merely informed my boss that I would be out of town for a week.
The most egregious example has got to be the time I got drunk at work on a friday evening (we were a big drinking company) and then, for god knows what reason, deployed code I had written earlier. There was a bug and my manager had to fix it.
I feel like many people would have been fired for that, but my manager never even _mentioned_ it again.
Of course in addition to all this I was one of the best frontend engineers at the company, with both a keen product sense and a deep understanding of software infrastructure, and I generated PRs at about the same rate as the rest of the team put together
but my coworkers weren't afforded any such accomodations. The ERG and the conferences were bones of contention with the manager -- apparently he felt like they hadn't "earned" these activities, and they were distracting from their day-to-day work
(ain't that how it always goes with ERGs and other DEI work? you're doing all this stuff for the company's benefit but you're expected to do it as a second job.)
my friend from brooklynjs was hit the hardest by this. part of this was that she was several years more senior than the others, and had higher expectations to fulfill.
but also she was, frankly, much more aggressive than the other two. We were at similar points in our careers, but I was four years older; I had mellowed out in my 30s but I was a real fuckin' asshole in my 20s as many men are.
She was not half the asshole that I was at her age, but men are given far more leeway to be "brilliant jerks" than women are; again in some ways being a jerk and getting away with it actually _increases_ your social capital.
(I just remembered another "incident" from early in my career where I replied-all to an email from the company CEO about how the project we were working on was dumb and "have you even considered" doing some other thing, which somehow ended up with me getting a raise)
anyways, her brilliant jerkishness was not celebrated here; she became the black sheep of the team and eventually ended up on a PIP
so at this point, we realized that it was probably too late for her, but maybe we could salvage something for the others, and our code review/support group discussions moved to a Signal chat.
Now, the most mortifying part of the story for me is unpacking what my involvement and motivations were.
I became the spokesperson for the group: I had the social capital they lacked & would be seen as an "impartial observer", for all the reasons discussed above, and I had a management-friendly explanation of the team's dysfunction that completely avoided mentioning sexism
we knew that allegations of sexism would go to HR, which cares only about protecting liability. we knew we wouldnt be able to prove anything; if anything, it would probably just mark my other team members as "troublemakers".
the alternate framing was: our team was being pressured to build something that it could not -- a dashboard that would tell the company how to be profitable again. because of this, we were operating without purpose or a definition of success, and this was damaging the team.
this was all _true_, of course -- it was not the part that was important to us, but it captured how things had _changed_ for us since the year before, and it framed the problem as something that the engineering org could handle on its own.
What were my motivations? Was it the right thing to do? Yes, and:
- it was a labor struggle that was somehow _also_ friendly to senior management, and would increase my social capital
- i would get "ally cookies" (ugh)
- it was a labor struggle that was somehow _also_ friendly to senior management, and would increase my social capital
- i would get "ally cookies" (ugh)
but the part that kept me up at night (and the most mortifying part of the story) was: over the course of this whole ordeal, I had developed a crush on the meetup friend (which blessedly never went anywhere.) Was I being a 'white knight'? Was I doing all this to "impress girls"?
All of this is basically irrelevant to the story, but I understand that the audience who needs to hear this story are the those who can use their social capital to protect marginalized people. They're going to have these same self-doubts, and its important to address them.
Anyways -- I brought up our grievances with the manager of the data science side of our team, then the VP of engineering, and then we all met as a group and hashed it out. And then what happened?
Well, first, I got a promotion. (It was already in the works before this began, but its thematically appropriate.) Then our team "graduated" i.e. it was reorged out of existence, and we all ended up on different teams.
After the reorg, the one on the PIP continued reporting to the same manager again and was ultimately fired. She ~relocated to San Francisco~ a few months later. The manager was put back on the IC track and eventually left the company.
What are the conclusions? Well for one, its not hard to out-perform the rest of your team when they hate their jobs and are in a depressive tail-spin
And, uh, I guess group code review really does "raise the bar" for your team, but maybe not in the way that your boss was expecting
