README of Alex Ives
Motivation for this document
For folks who are currently or planning on working with me, I wrote this as a guide to help you have an idea about how I like to work. I tried to be as honest in here as I could manage.
My role
Really, I just want members of my team to be able to bring their best self, and I want you to feel valued by the organization. I think the best way to pursue that is building trust. My job is to foster trust with the team in all directions. That means:
- Advancing an environment where team members feel safe voicing ideas and asking questions and trust that they won’t be judged for them.
- Building trust between the members of a team, and with me, so that when disagreements happen we all have the empathy to understand each other’s positions and move forward.
- Bridging trust between the team and leadership so that engineering leadership trusts that we’ll execute on their vision, and members trust engineering leadership is pointing the ship in the right direction.
What do I value most?
There are three things I value more than anything else: Trust, Action, and Transparency.
Trust is the basis of leadership, without trust, nothing works. I want you to be able to trust me, and I want to be able to trust you. If I don’t, or you don’t that’s something we have to work to fix.
Action matters. Even if you don’t know what to do, saying “I don’t know what to do, but let’s find out” is an action. Also a valid action: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help with that right now due to conflicting priorities, please reach out to Alex if you have questions!” I’m here to back you up, but if something is needed the worst thing we can do is nothing. (In some cases: the action is deciding we’re doing nothing, rather than defaulting to it because nobody said anything).
Transparency is a part of trust. If something happens in the dark, it may not have happened. If we can show people what we’re doing, and show people what we’re thinking, it’s easier to establish the trust that we’re not doing nothing.
My Expectations
- Trust: I trust you to make the best plan and decisions you can with the information you have available to you. I’m not super interested in assigning blame, and if you or someone else make a decision or commit to a timeline that turned out to be the wrong one, the best way forward is just that, forward. If you need help with a plan, I’m here to help.
- Do what you say: If you say you’re going to do something, and you say when it’s going to happen, I trust you to do that. I’m not going to hound or remind you about it. If the circumstances change, I expect you to tell me. If I see the circumstances change, I’ll tell you too! This is SUPER NORMAL.
- Everybody can contribute: There are two sides of this: If you have an idea or input about something, you can share it. At the same time, if someone comes with an idea, it’s our jobs to give it a fair hearing and evaluate it.
- Everybody should contribute: If we’re having a discussion about a critical topic, I want your input. We want to avoid bike-shedding, but the more people who come in contact with a plan, the more likely I think that plan is to succeed.
- Taking time off: I expect you to take time off when you need to. I’m not interested in policing it. I do expect you to find coverage for important issues that need to move forward, and document the status of all of your ongoing work before you go out. My preferred format for this is to file an issue in the team tracker with details about what your ongoing projects are and what should be happening with them.
1:1s
I do 1:1s weekly. I think it’s important since we don’t all sit together, so it doubles as bonding/trust building time. Primarily, I want you to drive what we talk about in your 1:1 time. That’s your time with me to say whatever you want to say!
If you don’t have anything to talk about, that’s okay! The following are common 1:1 topics:
- Let’s talk about something you achieved in the last week.
- Let’s talk through a problem you’re having and see if we can solve it.
- Planning/discussing your growth: This could be feedback, or we might spend time doing private retrospective kinds of things, or maybe we’re making a plan to uplevel your career.
- Talking about routine management topics: for example, you’re planning to take a big block of PTO, neat!
- Talking about cool or interesting things like a delicious new food you tried or how cute your dogs/cats/fish/birds/kids are.
Things I don’t want to use 1:1 time for:
- Mundane status updates: If something is in progress and that’s expected, and you don’t have issues or blockers about it, we don’t need to talk about it. If you’re worried about it, or I’m worried about it, we can raise it! If not, this precious time is better spent on one of the above suggestions.
- Venting is okay, but if it’s about work I reserve the right to try to build empathy with whatever you’re venting about. Also if our 1:1s end up mostly being venting time, we may need to figure that out too!
Quirks
- I’m very bad at hiding my feelings. I “Wear my heart on my sleeve” as they say. This often means I tend to be direct. I don’t like beating around the bush and if I have a question I ask it (holding it in doesn’t work that well for me).
- Sometimes I get part way through something, get distracted, and forget to fini ^ If I do this, it’s not because I don’t care, sometimes my brain checks things off.
Where to focus on your first 90 days?
- Build Knowledge: The best way to start contributing is to build up your knowledge about how our systems work, and ask questions! Given the complex nature of our domain, asking questions is actually a form of contribution! If you think something doesn’t make sense, there’s a chance it actually doesn’t make sense.
- Make Connections: Collaboration is key, and core, to building good software and systems. Spend time getting to know your peers inside and outside the team.
- Ship SOMETHING: I’m not expecting you to ship anything big or complex, but I want to work with you to make sure that you have code in a production code base somewhere in those 90 days.
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