Notes on Engineering leadership

Too many ideas die and smart people are discouraged by a barrage of unnecessarily critical feedback too early on. This is great advice, and one of the hardest things to do as a new manager.

It is exceptionally easy to poke holes and create FUD around new ideas. Especially at a place where everyone is smart (and wants to show it). New ideas are incredibly fragile when exposed to FUD, and FUD is cheap, so you should expect a lot of it!

As a leader you are in a great position to empower your team and create space for exploration and for ideas to grow by acting as a dampener of FUD, not an amplifier of it.