Pushing Through Friction (Web Unleashed 2019)

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2 Senior Engineer: You know, I've ﬁgured out a way to improve our database performance by 75%.

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3 Senior Engineer: You know, I've ﬁgured out a way to improve our database performance by 75%. me: Yeah? Wow, that sounds amazing.

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4 Senior Engineer: You know, I've ﬁgured out a way to improve our database performance by 75%. me: Yeah? Wow, that sounds amazing. "Yeah, except it’s not going to happen."

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5 Senior Engineer: You know, I've ﬁgured out a way to improve our database performance by 75%. me: Yeah? Wow, that sounds amazing. "Yeah, except it’s not going to happen." Weird. Is it because it’s a lot of work?

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6 Senior Engineer: You know, I've ﬁgured out a way to improve our database performance by 75%. me: Yeah? Wow, that sounds amazing. "Yeah, except it’s not going to happen." Weird. Is it because it’s a lot of work? No, it’d take maybe two weeks to complete.

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7 Uh... then why not do it? Seems like an obvious win. What gives?

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8 Uh... then why not do it? Seems like an obvious win. What gives? Yeah, I emailed the head of that team. Shared my idea with proof that it'd work. But they're in the middle of an 18 month project and I didn't get a response. I guess my idea just isn't important enough.

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9 Wait, what? Your idea improves database performance by 75% across the entire product, takes two weeks, and is tabled for working on an 18 month project?

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10 Wait, what? Your idea improves database performance by 75% across the entire product, takes two weeks, and is tabled for working on an 18 month project? Yeah, I'm frustrated.

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11 Did you ever follow up outside of sending an email?

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12 Did you ever follow up outside of sending an email? Look man, I did my part. I looked into a hard problem and found a solution and oﬀered it to the relevant team. And at the end of the day nobody cared. So I'm frustrated.

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Outcomes ● A senior engineer at a company developed a brilliant idea to dramatically increase product performance at minimal engineering cost. 13

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Outcomes ● A senior engineer at a company developed a brilliant idea to dramatically increase product performance at minimal engineering cost. ● That idea will not be executed, and as a result, customers will suﬀer. ● That senior engineer feels like their ideas, no matter how brilliant, do not have an impact. 15

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Dan Na Staﬀ Engineer, Squarespace Internationalization Platform

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talks.danielna.com @dxna 19

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Dan Na, Squarespace Web Unleashed 2019 | September 14, 2019 | Toronto, Canada Pushing Through Friction

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Agenda 1. What causes friction? 2. How can organizations and individuals overcome friction? 26

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What is friction?

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More friction ● You git blame a ﬁle that's used everywhere but nobody understands it and the person who wrote it left the company ﬁve years ago. ● You begin work to update an old, untouched but critical part of the codebase, only to realize there are no tests. 36

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Organizational friction ● New hires often feel lost, disengaged and unhappy. 38

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Organizational friction ● New hires often feel lost, disengaged and unhappy. ● Teams are building redundant or non-complementary features. 39

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Organizational friction ● New hires often feel lost, disengaged and unhappy. ● Teams are building redundant or non-complementary features. ● You look around the lunch room and everyone looks the same. 40

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Friction lies within the gap between how things are and how they should be; your reality and your ideal. Friction is all the work it’s going to take to get there. 41

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You've promised to ship a thing on a deadline and you unexpectedly discover that the underlying system is wildly inaccurate. 42

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A single point of failure gives her two weeks notice. 43

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Why does friction occur?

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“ When I started at Uber, we were almost 1,000 employees and were doubling the headcount every six months. An old-timer summarized their experience as: "We're growing so quickly that every six months we're a new company." A bystander quickly added a corollary: "Which means our process is always six months behind our head count." 46 “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” Will Larson, then Senior Engineering Manager, Uber

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Tech company categories by headcount Category # of employees Startups < 100 Mid-sized 100 - 2,000 Large 2,000 - Google (100,000+) 47

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Tech company categories by headcount Category # of employees Startups < 100 Mid-sized 100 - 2,000 Large 2,000 - Google (100,000+) 48

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Startup Priorities ● Ship fast ● Figure out the product ● Find customers 50

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Startup Priorities ● Ship fast ● Figure out the product ● Find customers 51 Mid-sized Priorities ● Scale the product ● Scale the organization ● Don’t implode

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The success criteria moves from individuals shipping code out the door as fast as they can to teams executing, in concert, with operational excellence. 53

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Aviation Safety

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1. There are ﬁve checklists and mandatory control checks that are required to be run prior to ﬂying. The pilots never ran any of them. 56

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1. There are five checklists and mandatory control checks that are required to be run prior to flying. The pilots never ran any of them. 2. Pilot interviews and voice recordings also showed that mandatory flight control checks were not performed on this flight, nor were they ever performed. 3. The crew received an alert message indicating that the rudder’s load limiter had activated. This is abnormal. The crew saw the alert. We know this because it was verbalized. Action taken? None. 58

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4. The pilot was unable to push the power levers far enough forward to achieve takeoff thrust. Worse, he actually verbalized that he wasn’t able to get full power, yet continued the takeoff anyway. 5. The pilot realized the gust lock was engaged, and said so verbally several times. At this point, the aircraft had about 5,000 feet of runway remaining, which afforded plenty of time to abort the takeoff. They chose to continue anyway. 60

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The Normalization of Deviance http:/ /danluu.com/wat/

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The normalization of deviance is when deviant behavior becomes the norm. To anyone outside of your organization it's obvious that what you're doing doesn't make sense, but to those inside the organization it's normal and standard procedure. 62

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Real Onboarding WTFs ● We don't have a staging environment? 65

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Real Onboarding WTFs ● We don't have a staging environment? ● How do we deploy to prod? Ask the CTO to do it. 66

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Real Onboarding WTFs ● We don't have a staging environment? ● How do we deploy to prod? Ask the CTO to do it. ● I didn’t have a 1-on-1 with my manager until a year after my start date. 67

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Real Onboarding WTFs ● We don't have a staging environment? ● How do we deploy to prod? Ask the CTO to do it. ● I didn’t have a 1-on-1 with my manager until a year after my start date. ● There was a hard limit on how much code we could deploy, so we switched our indentation from spaces to tabs and bought ourselves a few more months. 68

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Organizations and processes incur friction slowly. 69

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Summary so far ● Friction is an inevitable outcome of company growth, which we can’t control. ● But friction is often made worse by the normalization of deviance, which we can control. 70

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How do we ﬁx it?

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Organizations

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Organizations Short-term: Discrete Fixes 73

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74 ORGANIZATIONS: SHORT-TERM DISCRETE FIX #1 Document single sources of truth and keep them updated

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Single points of failure ● Leads to burn-out ● When those individuals leave the company is screwed 77

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Eﬀective docs criteria ● Single source of truth ● Updating docs is part of the acceptance criteria for shipping new work. 78

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ORGANIZATIONS: SHORT-TERM DISCRETE FIX #2 Adopt processes to vet technology decisions 79

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Goal: Major bump a dependency 80

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● ES5 ● ES6 ● CoﬀeeScript ● IcedCoﬀeeScript Goal: Major bump a dependency 81

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● ES5 ● ES6 ● CoﬀeeScript ● IcedCoﬀeeScript Goal: Major bump a dependency 82 ● Semi-colons ● No semi-colons

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● ES5 ● ES6 ● CoﬀeeScript ● IcedCoﬀeeScript Goal: Major bump a dependency 83 ● Semi-colons ● No semi-colons ● Prettier ● eslint

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● ES5 ● ES6 ● CoﬀeeScript ● IcedCoﬀeeScript Goal: Major bump a dependency 84 ● Semi-colons ● No semi-colons ● Prettier ● eslint ● Jest ● Jasmine ● Mocha ● No-tests

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ORGANIZATIONS: SHORT-TERM DISCRETE FIX #3 Solicit the WTF of new hires 87

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Organizations Long-term cultural behaviors 91

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ORGANIZATIONS: LONG-TERM CULTURAL BEHAVIOR #1 Address hard truths -- kindly 92

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“ Dr. Smith’s penmanship is frequently illegible, but he becomes very testy and sometimes downright insulting when a nurse asks him to clarify what he’s written down. So, rather than ask him, the annoyed nurse will proceed to the nurse’s station, consult with another nurse or two, and collectively try to decipher Dr. Smith’s scrawl. 94 “The normalization of deviance in healthcare delivery.” Banja, 2011

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95 Photo by Oskar Yildiz on Unsplash

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96 1. Continue towards a failed launch OR 2. Stop the project.

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97 1. Continue towards a failed launch OR 2. Stop the project.

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98 Manager: Hey Dan, I wanted to let you know — we've decided to stop the project.

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99 Manager: Hey Dan, I wanted to let you know — we've decided to stop the project. me: What?! Why? Do you know how hard we've worked on this?

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M: Yeah, we do. I want to make a few things clear. Number one: we recognize your team’s eﬀort on this. We think you've done amazing work in response to a really hard ask. We also think you've learned a ton and we know that everything you've learned will only help you ship harder and more visible projects moving forward. We are super proud of all of the work you've done. 100

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But the data on the project isn't lining up. We miscalculated and it's our fault, not yours. We've received new data that proves our original forecasts were wrong, and instead of having you spend the next four months working on something we don't think will work, we'd rather put you on a project that we think is better positioned for success. 101

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Yeah, absolutely. Take some PTO and get your mind right. We just want to make sure we're honest with you because we value your trust. 103

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Okay. Well, thanks for letting me know. Yeah, absolutely. Take some PTO and get your mind right. We just want to make sure we're honest with you because we value your trust. 104

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ORGANIZATIONS: LONG-TERM CULTURAL BEHAVIOR #2 Celebrate the glue work 105 https:/ /noidea.dog/glue

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“ Of course coding is an important skill in a software engineering team. But there are a ton of other skills that we need to bring to work every day. Skills that can mean the diﬀerence between a project that succeeds and one that fails. 106

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“ 107 Like noticing when other people in the team are blocked and helping them out. Or reviewing design documents and noticing what's being handwaved or what's inconsistent. Or onboarding the new people and making them productive faster. Or improving processes to make customers happy. I call all of this glue work. “Being Glue”, Tanya Reilly

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Make glue work promotable work. In fact, make glue work mandatory for promotion. 108

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ORGANIZATIONS: LONG-TERM CULTURAL BEHAVIOR #3 Make psychological safety paramount 109

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“ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of conﬁdence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up... It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’ 111 “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” NYTimes, 2016.

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Individuals

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INDIVIDUALS Develop and own your sense of agency 113

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114 Autonomy Mastery Purpose Intrinsic Motivation via “Drive”, Daniel Pink

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115 npm install billing-components

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116 “Oh, originally we thought we were building a suite of billing components. Over time it became only checkout.”

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118 npm install billing-components npm install checkout-ui

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Pragmatic optimism to see what realistically could be made better; Courage to acknowledge what needs to be ﬁxed and be accountable; Persistence to stick to it. 119

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Making the best engineering decision will often have friction. There’s often the correct path and the easy path. Take the correct path, even if it’s hard, because it ultimately leads to better outcomes. 120

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MAJOR CAVEAT Being a hero, or an asshole, doesn’t scale. 121

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INDIVIDUALS Strategies 122

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INDIVIDUALS STRATEGY #1 Have important discussions face to face 123

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INDIVIDUALS STRATEGY #2 Get to know other people on other teams and in other orgs 124

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INDIVIDUALS STRATEGY #3 New idea? Try it once. 125

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This is the job.

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127 Look man, I did my part. I looked into a hard problem and found a solution and oﬀered it to the relevant team. And at the end of the day nobody cared. So I'm frustrated.

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128 Hmm, it doesn’t make logical sense to block this work. The improvement is massive and quick! Look man, I did my part. I looked into a hard problem and found a solution and oﬀered it to the relevant team. And at the end of the day nobody cared. So I'm frustrated.

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129 Hmm, it doesn’t make logical sense to block this work. The improvement is massive and quick! Look man, I did my part. I looked into a hard problem and found a solution and oﬀered it to the relevant team. And at the end of the day nobody cared. So I'm frustrated. I know!

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130 Are you sure that team understands what you’re proposing? It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t care.

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131 Are you sure that team understands what you’re proposing? It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t care. Well I sent the email didn’t I?

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132 Are you sure that team understands what you’re proposing? It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t care. Well I sent the email didn’t I? How many emails do you get per day?

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133 Are you sure that team understands what you’re proposing? It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t care. Well I sent the email didn’t I? Like… a hundred... How many emails do you get per day?

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134 Did you try talking to them in person? Did you try writing up a formal RFC that outlines your ﬁndings and circulating it for advocates?

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135 No... Did you try talking to them in person? Did you try writing up a formal RFC that outlines your ﬁndings and circulating it for advocates?

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136 No... That could be the best way to get this done. That team is probably swamped too. Did you try talking to them in person? Did you try writing up a formal RFC that outlines your ﬁndings and circulating it for advocates?

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137 No... Okay, I’ll give it a shot. That could be the best way to get this done. That team is probably swamped too. Did you try talking to them in person? Did you try writing up a formal RFC that outlines your ﬁndings and circulating it for advocates?

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@dxna talks.danielna.com squarespace.com/careers Thank you.