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John Mark :blobcatverified: ☑️

@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

11 comments
Cat Hicks

@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

Cat Hicks

@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.

John Mark :blobcatverified: ☑️

@grimalkina Learnathons! That sounds like the sort of thing I could start today

Cat Hicks

@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 --> pluralsight.com/product/flow/d

Rowland Mosbergen

@grimalkina @johnmark

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 - wehi-researchcomputing.github.

About half the students struggle as they are used to being spoonfed questions.

Cat Hicks

@johnmark stay tuned for many more toolkits we want to put together in this space ❤️ but for now, foundational research we've done as we learn -->

Here we have some recs on learning and building healthy visibility into effort:
pluralsight.com/resource-cente

Here we share a full learnathon kit plus research into how it helps teams grappling with genAI in software risks and worries: pluralsight.com/resource-cente

Old now but this is a talk I still really like on this topic: youtube.com/watch?v=mVec1TzQIM

@johnmark stay tuned for many more toolkits we want to put together in this space ❤️ but for now, foundational research we've done as we learn -->

Here we have some recs on learning and building healthy visibility into effort:
pluralsight.com/resource-cente

ShadSterling

@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

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