I wish I could be more honest with my failures, but people have abused my trust so many times I have lost count. at some point you just have to cut your losses and keep it to yourself, or to a few select few.
That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Sometimes it can help to continually plan and provide gentle interventions that expose the team to individual examples of what you are looking for. As long as that doesn't too severely overlap with what amounts to activities or embarrassing admissions that could torpedo a team member's career later on when you're gone. A very hard ask overall.
Probably the hardest part: If you can do it yourself, as an individual, congrats you get to feel like you could inspire people. But that's you as an individual. The group-organism experiences growth prompts as stress just like individuals do, but with far worse tools for coping. And one of the worst counter-pressures is the ever-present possibility of faking it for a bit and then just changing jobs to escape the awkward stuff, maybe getting a raise in the process.
> we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Yea this is a real problem. I wish stats and probability were more emphasized in high school. And it really doesn’t matter if people understand the math, the primary goal should be to get students at least familiar, and hopefully comfortable, with the concepts of chance and randomness. And having students internalize the concept of a confidence interval could help form a mental model of how to go about making assertions and the danger of overstating things.
The overstating things part is definitely ingrained in the American culture at least but I feel that this could really chip away at that
If they are there to watch you burn it's because they fear failing so bad they want to reinforce their world view or control their surroundings such that no one around them attempts anything they can fail at.
Unironically they are failing at those things because they don't work. Now get this, if you go off and do something right... They have failed again.
99% of people want you to suffer and fail at everything you do. The trick is realizing they don't matter whatsoever no matter who they are.
That seems detached from reality and a dangerous, more than productive, idea. They are more probably uninterested or superficial (which is in a way the same). You do not need to feign enemies to get detached.
Or, you should find a better environment.
Rational individuals understand immediately that cooperation gives more return than its opposite. If you show to be an asset, you are everybody's asset. Sure, there is an epidemic of irrationality - but it did not hit every environment, and there exist cultures which had that idea of cooperation permeated societally. (Especially as the whole point of "society" is cooperation.)
For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often.
Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.
One thing I'm learning is that it's not advisable to share these failures with potential /partners