Engineer’s Notes on Picking Teams Worth Working With
Who you work with defines your future as much as what you work on
In capitalism, businessmen are researchers, engineers like Elon, and empire builders like Bezos. They are the employers, not kings or Governments. Hence, I decided to look at this from a manager/employer perspective.
One of the most popular perspectives is summarized here:
Why do I trust this random dude on Internet?
Jason M. Lemkin is the guy behind SaaStr and a well known name among SaaS entrepreneurs. He has built a few businesses and managed hundreds of people. That’s experience tough to get by outside of Armed/Defense Forces.
Why is his thought process incomplete?
We have seen insecure leadership punish folk for taking initiatives. ‘Overstepped her bounds’ is one explanation we’ve all heard. This encourages employees to become yes men. The idea of leading from below, though obvious to emperors we study in history books — is alien to modern businesses.
Proactive employees are punished for taking initiatives
This wrecks employee morale. Dejected and disengaged sentiments arise. It also hurts morale of other team members. It’s easy to perceive inconsistency in management decisions. In their minds, it speaks about how meritocratic they are and then punish the one guy for going above and beyond!
Undoubtedly, eager beavers are tough to work with. They do overstep. Is it better to consider them jerks or to coach them?
I have worked with other eager beavers as well. For instance, doing a hack-y temporary bug fix is not good manners. In cases like these, the better way is to mentor this guy. Tell him how s/he could have done this better. Then explain why her hack isn’t cool as it creates more work for others.
Mentoring an eager beaver, outweighs the cost of unenthusiastic people.
There are plenty of teams which do the above. This wise stranger replying to the earlier tweet, summarized it:
I guess that’s enough context building on where I am coming from. Let’s get to the meat of this essay:
How do you pick a team worth working with?
If you are a proactive person, even more so if you are not.
It’s better to grow on your strengths. Let the proactive person create new frontiers for your skills and strengths.
Pick teams which mentor proactive people.
Pick teams which take pride in promoting people who are young or from similar backgrounds as you.
A tolerance for proactive, jumpy people is necessary but insufficient for winning teams.
When you are interviewing with a team, ask your interviewer
- Have they mentored someone recently? Are they mentoring someone for the last few months?
- What incentives (direct or indirect) do they have for mentoring others?
Related: Is the mentee growing enough to inspire/challenge the mentor? - Do they scale by hiring more people or up-skilling employees? Do they promote internally? If not, do they explain why?
Things to Avoid
- Teams which have communication failures e.g. when you talk to interviewers the company messaging is inconsistent. One person might pitch college pedigree of existing employees. While another person is pitching how meritocratic they are
Communication failures are easiest to spot. It’s symptomatic of larger problems within the company. When you have a high temperature, you know you are unwell, but you can’t guess why. That’s fine.
If the team does not value hiring, that means the people you work with will neither be effective, nor motivated.
Some of the most common reasons behind inconsistent communication are these:
- leaders are poor communicators of their vision/roadmap
- mid-level managers are poor at executing the vision/roadmap
- they don’t have a sense of what “quality” or skills are needed to accomplish desired goals
There is a motley mix of reasons why communication can be broken. Either way, you don’t want to work with such a team.
- Teams which measure effort or input or take pride in process
e.g. teams which track number of hours spent on a problem instead of work quality are optimizing for the wrong metric
When we know we are being evaluated on number of hours spent, humans tend to obey Parkinson’s Law. It states that work expands to fill the time available.
Awareness of how we are investing time is definitely important. Sometimes it correlates with discipline and being able to do deep work. Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition. Discipline sometimes does leads to quality. We must not mistake discipline as a proxy for quality.
Discipline is a necessary but insufficient criteria. Measure quality of work, and you get all the necessary criteria for quality work.
Ask your interviewers in engineers what they have accomplished in last 4 weeks? 6 months?
Notice if they are highlighting actual accomplishments or merely following process. Processes are not good or bad. But taking pride in following process shows that it is acting as a proxy of quality, which is bad.
This is not advice. These are my personal notes that I am sharing freely. I encourage you to think about “what do I want my ideal team to look like?”.
