Gregory's ServerA real challenge for me in this life is that for years and years because of my areas of research I have it firmly in my brain that "performance orientation" is generally speaking a pretty maladaptive thing and I am used to thinking of "performance cultures" quite negatively in terms of, this is a place where you don't feel you can be authentic or show your effort (only outcomes) and that's a known bad thing but in business, uhhhh.....the word performance is MUCH more positive 😂
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In truth though, a LOT of what we have learned about "what creates long-term achievement" can be summed up as "pretty much not what we think." But like, this is rational....long-term achievement would be plentiful and common and easy to access and probably people like me wouldn't be studying it if the things that drove it DID easily match our conceptions about it 😭 In retrospect it was SO funny going from doing PhD research on how we form beliefs about achievement deriving from effort vs from essentialist ability and how important it is to not act like skills and abilities are innate and "pre-determined".... ....into a tech company that LOUDLY talked about people having the right "DNA" and "genes" to succeed there (was this the influence of the human genome project, I felt it was??) 😭 I suffered @grimalkina I'm so glad I never worked for a company like this. I'm probably unemployable for US or at least silicon valley companies 🥳 @sashag silicon valley crushed me for a while, truly. But I feel now this lived experience is something I've gotten a lot out of untangling and it provides a lot of fuel for the things I want to help build in the world as alternatives. Everything is eventually material to a psychologist I guess 😎 @grimalkina It is. I recently heard someone say "I never thought I would be on the autism spectrum, because I'm so fascinated by people and communication. And I don't have a special interest. Until it dawned to me: it's people, people are your special interest." And I just thought, shit, that's me 😬 So from a layperson's perspective: absolutely yes :blobcatfluffowo: @grimalkina Uhh... that sounds like a red flag to me! I associate that sentiment with discrimination and inequity. For the record, I don't think that's common in Silicon Valley. I've seen plenty of elitism there, but also a growth mindset and an obsession with self improvement. Not so much talk of "good genes" or innate propensities... @ngaylinn it is highly complex. Many orgs adopt a lot of language of growth mindset but contradict it. There's lots of implicit ability beliefs particularly in how we assess technical talent. I do think it's pervasive and baked into multiple FAANGs where I've gotten a hard look at their perf design. I mean, I was in a people ops org and then consulted across multiple hiring and diversity initiatives as a researcher so while I was sharing a personal anecdote this is also professional opinion. @grimalkina I don't disagree! I'm fascinated by how people say and even think they believe a thing, and yet do the opposite. I've seen that quite a bit in terms of explicit "DEI" stuff, so I'd expect it here, too. It's just harder for me to think of examples, especially ones as extreme / obvious as this! If there are more subtle indicators of this kind of cognitive dissonance that you think are common, I'd love to hear more examples. :) @grimalkina @ngaylinn I've experienced this quite a bit as a technical writer: "We are the Engineers, the blessed few who understand the Deep Magic, who wield the arcane symbols of…" My dude, the writing team has been running their own build because you clowns can keep an environment stable for more than 12 hours. @grimalkina That's even worse than the people who talk about how traits are part of a company's DNA! At least the "company's DNA" folks are only spouting unhelpful nonsense and not outright eugenics. @grimalkina Ergh, yuk. My time trying to be a professional musician taught me that “talent” is unlikely to exist, but motivation and effort sure do. I even knew someone who took offence at being called “talented.”  @grimalkina I have always wondered about this. My time in both academia and finance has led me to believe that money, as an example, is far less motivating than it’s made out to be, and the ways it *is* motivating aren’t what people generally think. @wordshaper I think money/resources are a very fundamental force, but at all levels of resource imo human beings have fundamental psychological needs (I am extremely anti the Maslow hierarchy of needs thinking, which isn't very evidenced -- while obviously, resource need constrains your attention and urgency and creates crisis, I think it is very destructive to act like people without money can't want to create or connect or are as capable of wanting intellectual fulfillment at the same time) @wordshaper but on a smaller level it truly cracks me up that people think there is going to be a magical linear relationship between motivation and like, throwing someone who makes a massive salary a little bonus or something, vs the very fundamental other needs that they are clearly thinking about every single day like autonomy in work and flexibility to be with their families and a million other things that are CLEARLY RIGHT THERE @grimalkina @wordshaper Not to mention whatever is measured in those marginal bonuses often encourages antisocial/harmful practices for people who are in it for the bonus, versus holistically invested and putting in the hidden labor. And that cheapens everything and makes leadership look like dispassionate clout-chasers to the people who care most.  > what creates long-term achievement I always thought long-term achievement was created mostly by dumb luck. Was that wrong? @grimalkina As someone who has been on the 'receiving end' of performance management for many decades I will never have a positive perception of the term performance when applied to human beings. Cars can have a performance. Even systems (as in systems theory) can, but as soon as it is applied to individuals I'm out.  @grimalkina Oh years and years of "performance management" have given me a very negative view of the term :) Other than starting my own shop, I wish I knew a way out of this (what I can only describe as) feudalism. It's pervasive throughout the tech world, even in tech roles at non-tech companies. As with many things, I blame McKenzie and similar management consultants @johnmark MCKENZIE that is going to be burned in my brain now It IS pervasive thinking in the tech world, but I do think there are emerging coalitions of people trying to build a true learning & mastery culture (this is often what we contrast with "performance orientation" in the psych research). It is slow deep social ecosystem work but in our research we see it -- developers who report being on teams that have taken steps to center learning and demand it, lots of powerful knockon effects @johnmark I'm really interested in interventions that help people learn to reflect on/notice these mindsets, and then find ways to change them. We've seen some good impact from relatively lightweight interventions about learning & belonging (like teams holding learnathons). Often a matter of finding the folks who are as frustrated as you and coming together to advocate on it. But so much work to do to figure out more here. @grimalkina Learnathons! That sounds like the sort of thing I could start today @johnmark yasssss!! In our recent toolkit we have shared our research-developed and tested pre and post measures, alongside the learnathon kit AND a premortem kit which you are welcome to remix and adapt to other contexts. This one in particular was about genAI and software because that has been a pervasive fear and stressor for teams lately, but we've seen folks reuse and adapt all of these for very different team topics --> https://www.pluralsight.com/product/flow/developer-success-lab/dsl-navigate-toolkit I hire by reducing the weighting of experience and increasing the weighting of continuous improvement skills, tolerance for complexity, tolerance for ambiguity, critical thinking, adaptability, learnability, and being collaborative by default. I try to expose students to this culture via an internship program - https://wehi-researchcomputing.github.io/students About half the students struggle as they are used to being spoonfed questions. @grimalkina @johnmark I don’t know the term “performance orientation”; I’ve always thought of “performance” as a good thing, but also as something dependent on mastery rather than contracting with it. But I have a much clearer mental model of performance in other contexts than working as a software engineer - in a classroom it’s more or less the grades, but as a dancer and circus performer its much easier to observe the skills. At work we don’t talk about “performance” directly   @grimalkina I was having a conversation some years back with someone with a neuroscience PhD and a psych background. I acknowledged that I was feeling real insecurity about having recently joined “a really high performing team”. She says to me “You know who else is high performing? Dogs in dog shows.” I will never stop thinking about that.  @grimalkina @anthrocypher I seriously wanna frame this. It's so true and puts things into perspective *so* well @grimalkina between how short-term metrics are BS and easily gamed to the detriment of actual progress and the fact that an essential part of being effective in engineering jobs is accurately predicting and preparing for the future… |
Me: "You know, short term fixation on high performance, which obviously none of us want"
The world: WHAT