Now, Together

natashajaffe.substack.com

23 pointsmooreds3 comments

I use a variation of this. I call it “lets do miserable toil together” or “misery loves company”.

Where if there is a lot of gruntwork that is plain toil and is unpleasant to do solo. I plan a time window in advance that a bunch of people get together to do that same work.

Gives team support to individual, gets the work done fast and makes it less unpleasant.

Counterpoint, sometimes your engineer is taking ages to do small tasks because they’re incompetent, and if you do the task together you find it’s actually just you doing the work for them.

Had to deal with this recently after trying everything to stick to my world view of “anyone can learn this”.

Yeah, if this happens a lot (you needing to do the task with them only to realize they can't do it at all) then that is a strong signal on their performance, at least in whatever area the task belongs to. And I'm sorry - it's no fun to run up against this scenario.

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