This normalization of deviance means that people within an organization stop seeing problems as problems, making it impossible to learn from them. Stagnation kills resilience. ​ A change-resistant culture, however, risks burning out those new people, as they find that they are unable to make any meaningful changes. ​ Knowing what decisions were made and why can help prevent “we’ve always done it this way” as a fall-back reason for doing something. If you understand the constraints and trade-offs around why a past decision was made, you’ll be better equipped to understand if they are still relevant in your current context. ​ push authority for decision-making down closest to where the work gets done ​ If different members of an interview panel have very different views of how the organization works, that can be a sign of deeper issues. This often indicates implicit power structures or lack of clarity around process that can be frustrating to deal with and difficult to change.

Sharing suffering is actually one way to minimize suffering, and minimizing suffering is at the core of my beliefs on compassionate teams. ​ If you're a senior engineer wondering what's next, try turning your attention to your team. I would bet that you'll learning something worthwhile.

“The trick, therefore, is to allow for some types of changes to be fast and fluid, while requiring others to be slower and more deliberate. Some changes should require nothing more than a quick chat, while others need a stakeholder meeting, and others need an all-hands company meeting.”

As a company scales the number of meetings initially grows faster then headcount. With more people comes more coordination. Most companies ...

“Edgar Schein’s writing on organizational culture, via Erik Hollnagel”