Engineering
Happiness
Laura Thomson
@lxt / laura@[laurathomson|mozilla].com
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Process
Software
System
—Any Software Engineering 101 Textbook
People
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Hypothesis - happy engineers:
don’t quit, produce code, and don’t complain
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(assumptions: competence, motivation, fit)
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Metrics
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Don’t quit?!
Retention/turnover
But turnover sucks as a metric:
(Extremely) trailing indicator
Compared to what? ~30% mean turnover in SV
Changes (spikes) are notable, but too late to be
actionable
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Where is turnover useful/actionable?
Look for anomalies
Local maxima point to specific problems
Junior? Senior? Management? Technical?
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“People leave managers, not jobs”
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Not only managers:
Company/project/culture jumped the shark
Stopped learning
Burned out
Better offer
(Good manager can mitigate but not fully overcome these things)
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Productive?!
Critical happiness metric at the micro level, per
person (will come back to this)
Less so as a macro measure of morale
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Complaints?!
“If the worst thing they have to complain about is the
art hanging on the walls…”
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Complaints?!
“If the only thing they have to complain about is the
art hanging on the walls…”
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Complaints?!
Sentiment on internal channels (Slack, Basecamp,
Yammer, etc)
Silence
Again: more about individuals than overall
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Leading indicators of morale?
Hours worked
Downtime or # pages/alerts
Tech debt
Stock prices / Market share
Technology (TIOBE, HN, etc) in decline
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“Glassdoor Bingo”
(What companies? What causes?)
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Technical debt is an energy vampire for good engineers.
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Analytics lead monitoring.
Surveys:
infrequent, qualitative
standu.ps, tinypulse (etc):
frequent, quantitative (graphite for humans)
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Unhappiness,
causes of
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Not to be confused with
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Not to be confused with
Going into management
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“Burnout is defined as a state of chronic stress and
frustration that leads to:
physical and emotional exhaustion;
feelings of cynicism and detachment; and
a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of
accomplishment.”
“Where do you fall on the burnout continuum?”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/high-octane-women/201205/where-do-you-fall-the-burnout-continuum
(Downloaded June 1, 2015)
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Burnout causes:
long hours
too many pages
too much travel
too much bullshit
missing out on life/family/opportunities
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Mastery
Autonomy
Purpose
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Pink, Dan. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
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Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory
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Hygiene
work environment - hardware, tools, snacks
management / policies
salary / benefits
safety
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Messing these up makes people unhappy.
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Motivation
achievement / recognition
interesting projects
learning new stuff
growth / advancement
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Getting these right makes people happy.
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Motivation
Hygiene
Awesome
Terrible
Just a paycheck
Early stage startup
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Work on things you are good at and enjoy
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What type of engineer are you?
Senior / Junior
Structured / Chaotic
Team / Loner
Purist / Pragmatist
Starter / Finisher
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Upwards, to the right, and straight on ’til morning.!
(Questions?)
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