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Comment by pyjug | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel like a lot of managers don't live in reality. Sure, psychological safety as a concept is nice to talk about, but how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship?

How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project? Heck, how many middle managers can? Psychological safety should mean you should be able to call BS and be okay with others calling your BS (in a non-inflammatory way), but in reality it means stroking others' egos, especially of those in leadership.

>It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own. — Buddha, Dhammapada

Indeed, like all of Buddha's teachings, it also applies to the author of course.

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> How many line engineers at Google

And this is engineers at Google we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge. In other words, very hard to replace people. How must more difficult must it be for people who could be replaced tomorrow?

> we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge

I thought Google just hired recent grads that play the leetcode game.

Google hires lots of different kinds of people, including new grads, graduate students, experienced engineers, people with PhD’s, and professors. Your previous experience is going to affect what kind of work you can get.

> usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge.

Maybe 2005 Google, but not anymore. A good bachelors degree or enough YoE at most companies gets you the interview, and then the interview result usually does the rest. Those are the "line engineers" that move on to other faangs or unicorns when psychological safety becomes an issue.

Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues.

> Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues.

This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

Smith College?

What's extraordinary about the claim?

How so? It seems common-sense that people in a less secure position would be more careful of others' feelings, and so issues would likely come from those in a more secure position.

There is a thing, called the matrix organization, which has many problems. One of its strengths, though, is that you have a "boss" who is responsible for your career advancement but is not responsible for assigning and grading your work and is not concerned with your opinion about leadership so much.

You work on technical tasks for other people, who make sure your work is ok, and your supervisor makes sure you are OK.

That person is your advocate in all things that fall in the tense employee-employer tug-of-war. Inside the "group", there is psychological safety. On "tasks" there is often less of it, but you always have your group.

Or at least it should be that way.

I think this often papers over the tension instead of resolving it. The best way to resolve the tension that comes from doing a poor job is to do a better job. The second best way is to find a better job (within or outside the team/organization). I realize that sounds heartless, but I believe the first is usually possible (assuming competent hiring) because most people want to do good work. If you disconnect the career manager from the work being done by the employee, you make it harder for good managers too effectively redirect their employees, which results in worse outcomes.

And the same structure prevents accountability, promotes political infighting and causes a misalignment of objectives all around. I hated every single minute of working inside such organizations.

The elephant in the room is that there has to be a level of tension, of slight mutual discomfort, of a bilateral transaction present in employer-employee relationship. It needs to be very dull and implied but it has to be there to make sure incentives are aligned and objectives are consistently met.

Tenured public service and unions show what might happen when this inconvenient element is missing.

As long as in the end you can disagree and commit I’ve found that being willing to disagree in the first place is treated as a moderately positive trait by most managers.

If you won’t disagree and commit that’s a different story.

I've been what some might consider a "difficult employee" all my life. I speak up. I don't shut up. I have almost no filter (almost as in I did learn to reformulate things but I still don't shut up). If something stinks I'm not gonna pretend that it smells like roses. I can live with some stink but I'll tell you that it stinks and that I want you to start shoveling it away.

I have had some co-workers or higher ups that probably found it inconvenient and didn't like me (in fact strike the probably - I know for a fact). Yet it has so far not resulted in me being fired, demoted etc. and in fact the opposite has happened. I've been told to never shut up and that they keep me around precisely because I don't.

My luck might obviously run out at some point but so far, from my first internship where I just didn't do the stupid task they gave me and instead replaced their awful sendmail+pop3d setup with a full featured postfix and imap/pop and spam filter combo (well I showed the boss on my last day that I had built it on my computer and what it could do. He offered me a part time job as their network/sysadmin to do it for real on the server and to migrate all their users over) it has worked out. I'm not on 'brilliant jerk level'. Way not brilliant enough and just below jerk ;)

I have a colleague that’s difficult. Upfront I’ll say that I like him a lot personally.

He almost got fired recently. He didn’t, in part because a bunch of us stood up for him, but it was dicey.

The reason he almost got fired is because he’s very expensive to manage.

That dogged unwillingness to never shut up, along with more than his fair share of brilliance, is great when he’s digging into a thorny, ugly problem that most would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.

But when there’s a meeting with $3k/hour in fully loaded cost worth of people in it and he’s going on and on about his pet issue that’s a problem. When every decision you make has to first be delivered to the team and argued in detail to this guy, that’s exhausting. To his credit he’s convincible, but still. Since projects have to be carefully evaluated for fit before being assigned to him that makes him harder to use well. Having to unruffle other employees’ feathers all the time certainly isn’t fun. And so on and so forth.

All this means he needs a very strong manager, both in a technical sense (because without that credibility no one will be able to manage him) and in a people skills sense (both for him and for the people he comes into contact with). Such managers are themselves are difficult to find and expensive to employ. To keep him around and aimed in the right direction means a disproportionate amount of one of those people’s time is going to a single employee.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything. It sounds like whatever you are doing is working for you. But maybe this provides some food for thought.

Totally understandable if you ask me. There's difficult and there's difficult. I've had someone like you mentioned before as well. Especially the pet issue part of it. Really bright guys that know what they're doing and they're awesome if you can focus them. But left unchecked ROI just isn't there. No we can't spend 80% of our time refactoring everything to match _their_ ideals.

To make another example of where I personally can't shut up: if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally, then I will say that it stinks and why. That doesn't always mean doing it in the big 3k/hour meeting like in your example. And I'm not talking about a 'pet issue'. I can obviously be overruled and that's fine. I've brought it up and have it black on white that they were warned and they made the decision anyway. Fine by me. Don't blame me afterwards. I won't do unpaid overtime later to fix your shit.

But I sure have seen way more than 3k/hour spent in meeting upon meeting after the warnings weren't heeded and it did explode in their faces.

> Really bright guys that know what they're doing and they're awesome if you can focus them ... [They sometimes want to] spend 80% of our time refactoring everything

Actually being unable to focus oneself reasonably well without the help of a manager sounds almost a bit dumb to me

I'm surprised you're writing "really bright"

> if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally,

To me, you seem to be the opposite to those "really bright" people, in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?, focus on the right things, and avoid doing dangerous things.

Those others, need help with focusing. Whilst you help people focus correctly?

> I'm surprised you're writing "really bright"

Most people are not equally bright in all departments :)

Yes, they're bright guys, I stand by that and they do awesome work of what they do. When left unchecked, they just focus exclusively on what they love and think makes the most sense. This may not always fully align with the overall company goals customer wise. And obviously you're getting only _my_ viewpoint of this, not theirs.

They do remind me of myself more than 15 years ago, telling my dad about Linux From Scratch and Gentoo and how that's the only way to be. He was obviously right when he said that no, they don't have the time for that at their place of work and I declared him insane (in my head) because obviously, that was _the only_ way :) It definitely made me learn a lot of stuff, so for myself at the time it was the right thing.

> in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?

I try I guess. Sometimes it's really hard, because they don't want to be helped and/or actively seek to introduce policies that are detrimental to the company overall (not talking about the "bright guys" above in this case, e.g. the rollout plan I mentioned was the business people, not us tech guys). And again, my viewpoint only that you are getting here.

At my current job I'm getting marked down for not demonstrating leadership. "Leadership", in this context, means supporting and implementing whatever latest buzzword the VP heard at the country club that we are not staffed for and will be a disaster.

That's the kind of psychological safety I have.

Leadership can also mean having the gumption and initiative to push back.

I get that. I've told my boss it's a bad idea. I told my boss' boss it's a bad idea. But the management is all incentivized to do this horrible thing because it pads their resume and likely gives them more headcount. They don't argue with me on the merits, I get vague platitudes about how we're bleeding edge, this is where the market is headed, etc. Their incentives are not aligned with quality output.

I wonder if there're any ways to solve that, other than finding another job / moving to another team in the company

I think it can exist by the employee forgetting the nature of the relationship in the heat of the moment, but the slightest sigh of frustration by the boss is going to destroy it. It is exceptionally fragile.

>employee forgetting the nature of the relationship in the heat of the moment

Curious to learn others' experiences, but I've never seen this in my career, ever. I've seen _peers_ yell at each other, but never seen an employee slip "out of character" with their superiors, at least publicly. And if it isn't happening publicly, there's no psychological safety, is there?

Most people (including myself) have been conditioned to bring their "work self" to work, not their "true self". As such, there's very little chance of "forgetting the nature of the relationship" even in heated moments.

In my own case it is getting caught up in a discussion and pressing further than my strategic self would. It is as simple as stating "this is going to break" when I would usually do a more muted and subtle "I am not sure that this will work."

I am not really one to challenge all that directly normally. But sometimes that slips.

So context here, I’m transgender — but transition was always about bringing 100% of myself to the table at all times. I similarly had my “work self” and “true self” — but keeping them separate was impossible when in that identity-less state a lot of trans people experience mid-transition.

So when I was reestablishing my personal identity in my late 20s, I just never made a separate “work self”, and it’s been a deliberate decision. I regularly talk openly with my superiors and make it known that I’m very opinionated but I’m also fallible and open to learning from my mistakes. This kind of openness and trust is absolutely essential at the executive level; the real secret is that none of us really knows what we’re doing and we’re all making it up as we go too.

Doing this a few times with the right people will help you learn when asking questions is helpful and when you should get out of the way and follow orders. A good leader has the level of humility to know they’re not always right.

In fact, this ability to “fight back” effectively is what gets you promoted above a line manager level. And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives so they can have it at work, and it’s not there for others so it’s a lot harder to build the muscle on the job if you’re always on guard at home.

> I just never made a separate “work self”, and it’s been a deliberate decision

This is amazing self-awareness. I wish I had it earlier in my career.

>And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives

This is interesting, but I don't entirely agree. I have seen both sides as an Indian male who has worked both in India (privilege) and SV (no privilege). It's not a matter of "fighting back" or "being open", it's just in-group mechanics at work. There is a tacit understanding among people in positions of power about who is the "in-group" that doesn't need to be expressed or acknowledged even. For example, in India, even as a junior engineer I would be invited to important meetings whereas more experienced female engineers wouldn't. If I'd simply shown up and done the bare minimum, I would have quickly risen up the ranks, IMO. I had the exact opposite experience in SV, being seen as the "out-group" of the "worker bee" class by default.

Aren't you proving their point my admitting you're not part of the in-group by default in America?

Sorry if I wasn't clear - GP's thesis was that white men are overrepresented in senior positions _because_ they can more easily "fight back" and "be open" than others. In other words, they still believe in meritocracy, it's just that white men are afforded the chance to be more meritorious.

I'm disputing that thesis based on my experience. You don't need to be vulnerable or "be open" at all - you just need to be part of the in-group. I know "Senior Director of Engineering" who had no clue what the hell was going on. They never spoke up in meetings, or did anything useful at all - it was clear to everyone they added no value whatsoever. Turns out they were just floating from startup to startup moving up in seniority in the process. Presumably, nobody bothered to question them during the interview process as it was assumed they were "competent" based on their background and past positions.

Ah, while I may not forget the nature of the relationship, which sort of tempers the whole deal, I’ve definitely publicly lost patience with my boss.

It was actually kind of interesting, since I thought as you did before that.

Anyone with the wealth to not care about the outcome, even if it means getting dismissed. There's more wealthy individual contributors in tech than we might think. It's certainly not everybody, but there are some who could speak their mind, without fearing losing their income and risking their mortgage or rent payment.

This isn't the same amount of wealth for everyone, which is interesting. Some of my friends get more psychological security from having no debt and a few grand in their savings account than others who are worth six or seven figures.

Additionally I've been in situations where management turns a blind eye to an obvious sociopath, and sociopathic people are a real phenomenon which prey on people's vulnerability. I tried just be vulnerable, it back fires. Since experiencing that, I've found myself keeping a distance, I tell my truth but I don't share vulnerability since it sucks when it's used against me. I'm in a stronger position not sharing.

There are always consequences for over sharing, the obvious answer is don't overshare.

>Sometimes I feel like a lot of managers don't live in reality. Sure, psychological safety as a concept is nice to talk about, but how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship?

That talk is not actually meant to matter, it's just cant...

> how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship?

How can any human feel totally psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?

The answer is that you're thinking in black and white terms about a concept that is a continuum. Even in employee-employer relationships, with a good manager it is entirely possible to have a reasonable level of psychological safety, just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car.

>just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car

Then again, it's reasonably straightforward to measure physical injury and come to some agreement about acceptable risk. Psychological injury is far more subjective.

Measuring psychology safety is easy: ask them. "Subjective" != "arbitrary".

First: I did not say that subjective means arbitrary. Second: The problem with this is, there still must some agreement on what constitutes an acceptable answer when you "ask them". This brings us back to the subjectivity of psychological injury.

That's interesting, in that there's a risk that, if they feel really unsafe, they'll want to pretend that all is fine

And if the group is small, even if you try to make the answers anonymous, maybe you still would be able to figure out who wrote what, and they'll realize this, and write mostly nice sounding things

Anyway, asking and talking about it seems like a good idea. Maybe also asking them to read the article being discussed here :-)

>psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?

Obviously, "total" in this context means in the workplace. Also, psychological safety essentially means "ability to express yourself and make mistakes without the fear of negative consequences" - it has nothing to do with shielding yourself from cancer, climate change etc. Ironically, the Buddha, who was quoted in the OP grew up with "total psychological safety" as you defined it, and you know where that led him.

> just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car

Again, this is not a comparable analogy at all. If you're unable to in no uncertain terms say "this project is going to hurt users" out of fear of getting fired/looking like not a team player, that is not even a "reasonable level" of psychological safety.

> If you're unable to in no uncertain terms say "this project is going to hurt users" out of fear of getting fired/looking like not a team player, that is not even a "reasonable level" of psychological safety.

We're talking about software engineers in big tech companies, right? They're extremely well paid and would have no problem finding a new job.

Except for the ones on visas, interns, and recent grads. Anyone who doesn't want to or can't cram for four hours of consecutive leetcode is also going to struggle.

I have told my managers many many times "I think this feature/change is bad for users" without fear of negative repercussions. If the entire existence of the project itself is user-harmful, then you have bigger problems than psychological safety.

Fair enough, good for you. I'm not sure if you're a Googler, but nevertheless, my point was that this luxury isn't afforded to the vast majority of people in tech. I highly doubt it's even afforded to the majority of Google engineers either (based on my acquaintances), but that is beside the point. Somehow whenever you mention Google in any context, a bunch of people come forward to defend Google culture -- so, my mistake that I sort of pulled Google into it.

I think psychological safety comes from similar expectations of the employer/employee relationship. You don’t have to agree on the specifics, as long as you agree on the methods.

> How can any human feel totally psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?

Speaking my mind does not increase the speed of climate change, the chance that I might get cancer, or the probability of earthquake. Therefore, it is easy not to think about those things while discussing work.

How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project?

All of them, as long as it's done internally and not jerk-like. Doesn't sound like you know much about Google culture.

Without any consequences? (Including hidden ones)

>All of them

Really? Why are y'all working on FLoC then? :-)

You're asking developers at the largest ad company in the world why some of the development they do relates to ads. It has nothing to do with engineers vs managers, both are and have been willing to push against user interest for the vast piles of money.

Being able to question a project without fear of retaliation doesn't mean that your requests will be followed.

I can't tell if this is a serious question, or just some quip. Assuming it's serious...

It's not an average SWE's job to make product decisions and to steer strategic initiatives. There are people whose job it is to do specifically that.

Think just for a second what it would be like if every one of be more than 100,000 employees could bring a product plan to a halt because they had reservations.

What's in your power is to ask tough questions (people do).. To make your opinion heard (people do). To change projects if you wish (something Google makes easier than any other company). And to take risks and make choices in the execution of your own job duties. That's psychological safety.

You may find this hard to believe, but the people working on FLoC have chosen to. They could easily find a different project if they wanted to. It may be disappointing you you that the average SWE isn't nearly as ideological as the average HN commenter, but it is what it is.

> How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project? Heck, how many middle managers can? Psychological safety should mean you should be able to call BS and be okay with others calling your BS (in a non-inflammatory way), but in reality it means stroking others' egos, especially of those in leadership.

Employees should have psychological safety to voice concerns within their domain, but that's not a license to start backseat driving upper management. It's one thing for a line engineer to raise concerns about their team's choice of frameworks for a project or the chosen architecture of the system. It's a different issue entirely if the employee is simply "calling BS" on company directives or cynically referring to initiatives as "pet projects". From a managing perspective, there is a stark difference between people who voice concerns reasonably and those who simply like to complain.

The good team members raise their concerns with an open mind, seek more information to understand why certain decisions were made, come prepared with alternative suggestions, and most importantly are willing to disagree and commit if they don't get their way.

The bad apples do things like "call BS" on initiatives without understanding the whole story, aren't interested in learning more, don't have any constructive suggestions, and tend to drag their feet or spread dissent through the ranks when they don't get their way.

Psychological safety doesn't mean employees get a free pass to be disgruntled or push back against what they're being paid to do. Questions, concerns, and alternate suggestions are welcome and should not be punished, but at the end of the day employees must be willing to commit to the chosen direction and get on board with company initiatives.

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