books

February 4th 2025, 5:23:47 pm EST #

Bad news doesn’t travel up.

I started my career on an eXtreme Programming team where we constantly evolved our processes and openly discussed what wasn’t working. Being my first job out of college, I thought this was standard practice. After working at several companies since then, I’ve learned that such transparency and commitment to process improvement is actually quite rare.

The book, “The Fearless Organization” dives into this a bit.

People don’t speak up because of:

  • Don't criticize something the boss may have helped create.
  • Don't speak up unless you have solid data.
  • Don't speak up if the boss's boss is present.
  • Don't speak up in a group with anything negative about the work to prevent a boss from losing face.

Speaking up brings career consequences.

It sure does.

October 31st 2023, 7:36:14 am EDT #

You’ll be better off reading books by the likes of Beck, Fowler, Farley, and Forsgren than by following tech YouTubers with opinion based hot-takes.