Google discovers the key to good teamwork is being nice

Awful headline: "nice" != "psychological safety". Nice can be interpreted in so many ways, such as "avoiding conflict", which is not a good way to provide psychological safety.

But otherwise, while this isn't "news" anymore, psychological safety is one of _the_ most important things needed for a team to perform well and it's somewhat surprising that this isn't true in many places.

But first reverse a linked list and FizzBizz on the white board.

Is your point that the strategy works for Google employees but doesn't generalize?

I could certainly see how telling people that it's OK to ask stupid questions works differently in a selected-for group.

You get what you measure, in this case clever whiteboard solutions to trivial problems.

In other news: the sky is blue.

This result is not nearly as obvious as you think (or hope). Even here on Hacker News you will constantly see people insisting that being an asshole is the best way to get good results out of a team, and that people like Linus Torvalds are the models we should emulate. It's helpful to have empirical evidence from a respected company indicating this is not true.

If only more people actually were though.