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Top-level
 @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
 @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  |
Gregory's Server
@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