About the value of goodwill in the team

This article in the CircleCI blog about the culture of communication among software developers unexpectedly deeply resonated with my personal values, and I decided that the best way to spread these values ​​and find like-minded people is to make and publish a translation.

People need to know my opinion on various issues. I can’t just say "please don't do that" because they’ll ignore me. "No one will hear your delicacy on the Internet" [1] - this is my position. And I don't want to babysit with anyone. We also did this: at first, I don’t make it clear enough that I don’t like this or that approach, people rewrite a lot of code, and then they get upset when I don’t accept their work.

Linus Torvalds, in the Linux Kernel mailing list on July 15, 2013 ( original, eng. )

I have long suspected that Linus' point of view prevails among techies. The flow of coarse criticism in the spirit of "complete crap!", "Your hands are not growing from there!" Of course, such behavior can be justified when the clarity of the position and clarity of intentions should not be sacrificed to politeness. However, I think that such behavior is more often caused by the fact that it is the easiest way to convey my opinion to the opponent.

A few years ago, I had great pleasure in reading a speech that Jeff Bezos [2] delivered to Princeton graduates [3] of 2010 ( link, eng. ). If you have not read it, then do not take a few minutes of your time. In his speech, Bezos mentions a lesson that his grandfather taught him during one of their annual trips across the country. "Jeff, one day you will understand: being kind is much more difficult than being smart."

He continues:

Today I will tell you about the difference between talent and personal choice. If the mind is your gift, then kindness is your conscious choice. When your gift is with you, it is easy and pleasant to use and worth nothing. The choice can be difficult. If you are not careful, you can be carried away by your talent, and this will not affect the best for your ability to make choices. A benevolent approach can be a difficult choice, especially if you are in a bad mood, or you easily notice another person’s trivial mistakes. It is much easier to cut the truth from the shoulder without bothering with other people's feelings and not to leave room for ambiguity.

Let's talk about choosing the path of good.

I have been thinking about it for years. Let's be honest with ourselves: Linus can afford to be what he is, and in his style to manage the Linux Kernel distribution. After all, Linux is an incredibly successful project in almost every aspect, despite the fact that its undeniably brilliant chief architect sometimes loses his temper, splashing everything around.

If we try on his argument for the majority of the rest of us, then it quickly loses its appeal. A team working in an atmosphere of crude criticism loses cohesion and morale; spends extra time and energy on negative emotions, on restoring a spoiled mood, on overcoming gaps in communication due to loss of trust, not to mention the fact that people are forced to work in less human conditions than they could. It may seem to someone that being straightforward is easier and saves time, but in the long run it is a saving on paper clips, resulting in losses on everything else.

Alas, the mere knowledge of the fact that criticism on average degrades the overall integral on the team does not make the transition to the bright side easier. What will help us choose the path of good?

The trust.

Trust is a powerful tool for creating a culture of goodwill for two reasons:

1. Those to whom advice or criticism is addressed will pay due attention to even the most tactful comments, knowing that they are most likely worth it;
2. Those who play the role of critics know that they do not need to raise their voice to be heard.

In general, that's all. If you really trust your colleagues and are sure that they are not just wasting their time and your time, you will carefully listen to their comments, and then the simple "please do not do that" (again quoting Linus) will be the most reliable guide to action.

Thinking over this article and working on it, I recalled comments on various bugs and pull-requests [4] in our CircleCI, and I want to give a few examples of what I have just written.

Daniel is looking for ways to expand something or make it more universal:

(It would be great to put this in the data-fields to make it easier to switch the display in production and do A / B tests)

David constantly remembers potential infrastructure issues:

(I think at some point this may break the $ in size list size limit, but we will deal with this problem when and if it occurs)

Allen often asks to clarify the meaning and purpose of the changes:

(I'm confused here.

Let's go back a step and you will explain what we want to achieve? At what point should we take care of the division into owner and creator and cases of fork / non fork?

Also, if github has not changed the API, I’m definitely confident that the "owner"! = "Username" in the case of private forks. Take, for example, NNN, our client. We have seen repositories like XXXXX, where the username = YYYYY, and the owner NNN)

At CircleCI, every employee has his own character and style of communication at work, but our common feature is correctness and trust in colleagues. Some of this trust is based on the knowledge that colleagues will listen to our words without the need to resort to harsh expressions, but most of it comes from the fundamental knowledge that it is human nature to make mistakes. Mistakes are small and large, but we believe that it would be more correct to ask whether it was an accident or a consequence of missing parts, rather than defining by default that a colleague in life is wrong and incompetent.

It should also be mentioned that at least we have this atmosphere of trust for good reason. Each person working in CircleCI, regardless of experience or specialization, is a brilliant specialist, diligent and attentive to details - in other words, trustworthy. We do everything we can to make sure that the people we hire are trustworthy and that, in turn, they can trust the rest.

Of course, there may be situations where the approach that I described does not work, but we can say from experience that it works perfectly for us, and we do not plan to abandon it in the future. And between us: would you really like to work in a team where there is so little trust that there is no room for goodwill?

... I knew you would say no.

Footnotes:

[1] Reference to the tagline of the cult film "Alien" - "In space, no one will hear your scream."
[2] Founder and CEO of Amazon
[3] One of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the United States, the alma mater of such famous scholars as Richard Feynman, John Nash and Alan Turing.
[4] a proposal for making changes to open source software made by a third-party developer.