Have you asked your engineers to scale a mountain?
How passionate leaders can mistakenly attribute slow progress to a lack of buy-in
Building strong engineering cultures and best practices is hard. It requires a high degree of drive as well as passion. It is not surprising, then, that engineering-first organizations tend to attract driven and passionate engineering leaders. This is mostly a great thing. Like everything else, though, passionate leadership comes with its own set of pitfalls and blindspots.
Here’s one: I have sometimes seen passionate leaders act under the belief that an engineer’s drive to do the right thing (whatever that may be) should propel them through any obstacle. Any resistance or slow progress on the part of the engineer is interpreted as a lack of buy-in. Unfortunately, when the goal is an engineering or cultural best practice, “lack of buy-in” can nearly amount to a moral failing. This does not make a resistant engineer look good, to put it lightly.
All leaders need to do the work of selling their goals. Sometimes the goals are wrong. But let’s say that the goal is Good and Right and the engineers know it. Despite being worthy, your goal will see little traction if it is not worthwhile. In product speak, the ROI needs to make sense.
Today I will tell a story about a worthy goal (standardized, high quality interviews), a vertical climb (interviewer training), and a misattribution (“engineers are resisting training because they don’t care enough”). I will then wrap things up with a happy ending and some final takeaways.
A worthy goal
This story takes place several years ago at an engineering-centric company approaching its hockey stick growth phase. These were the most fun years of my career to date.
We had an incredibly ambitious product roadmap and were growing fast. That fast growth necessitated upping our pool of eligible engineering interviewers. The current set of folks (an original small pool of senior engineers) was quickly wearing out under the onslaught of job candidates.
It was quite obvious that we needed to grow our pool of interviewers. What’s more, we needed to do this without compromising on the quality of our interviews. The answer was standardized interviewer training with robust criteria and quality checks throughout.
A vertical climb
I was told to begin interviewer training several months in and was excited to help. I loved seeing our org grow with talented new hires and believed that a consistent high bar for the interviewing process was key.
I told my team during standup one day that I was starting training soon and that this may impact my sprint bandwidth for a little bit. Afterwards my teammate pulled me aside. He had also been picked to start training. “Yay!” I thought, “A training buddy!”
He gave me a look (perhaps I had said that last bit out loud) and told me that this was actually his second attempt. He had started training months ago but didn’t finish.
Why?
“Well”, he explained, “you need to train up in several different interview types.”
“Oh that’s good. I want to make sure that I can-” I began.
“AND you need to shadow multiple interviewers.”
“Well I guess that’s so you come away with a comprehensive-”
“And then they shadow you.”
“That makes sense, too-”
“And you have to hunt each of these people down to see who is doing which type of interview when and then hope that your calendars align so that you can do enough of each. And there’s no good way of knowing who is already certified in which type of interview so you kind of have to ask around. Don’t forget to chase people down afterwards to review your interview scorecards.”
“… Oh.”
It turns out that the interviewer training process was not just expensive - it was downright unaffordable.
A misattribution
We were growing fast but were still small enough that folks were encouraged to schedule 1:1’s with anyone at the company. This was very cool. I actually had a standing monthly 1:1 with the senior engineering leader who owned our interviewer training process as well as other core aspects of our engineering culture. My next 1:1 was coming up and it seemed natural to bring up the issues my teammate had outlined and which I had begun to experience firsthand.
This conversation seemed to crash and burn from the start. I had assumed that he simply didn’t know how inefficient the process was. I was wrong. He knew about the mountain.
So why did he continue to push?
“A good engineer” [I am paraphrasing] “should be strongly invested in hiring and in maintaining our bar! Not only this, they should be motivated to help their friends who have been shouldering the interview burden all this time!”
Ah.
His passion for the Big Goal had told him that any engineer who resisted or was too slow in scaling the mountain was not bought in. The goodness of the Big Goal was obvious and so this was a failing on the part of the engineer. In short, he had incorrectly attributed a lack of progress to a lack of engineering morals.
A happy ending
I could have left the conversation there with a muttered apology and a promise to get with the program. That is not the kind of leader he was, though, and it certainly wasn’t indicative of the culture he and others had worked so hard to build. Instead, we began by agreeing on the worthiness of the goal. Once that was settled, I pointed out that engineers, no matter how driven and passionate they may be, only have so much energy and time to spend outside of the sprint. Water does not flow uphill and engineers won’t scale completely unnecessary cliff sides. They will, consciously or otherwise, do the things that align with their internal ROI (Reward Over Investment) calculation. If you want to rollout a Big Push that requires active participation and effort (investment) by your engineers, then you need to make the engineers’ ROI make sense.
It turned out that R (reward) was high and the engineers engaged in interviewer training already appreciated this. The issue was with I, investment. After our conversation, the leader opted to shift the coordination of interviewer training on to the recruiting team. Recruiting already had the information they needed in order to schedule shadowing sessions and match trainees up with folks who had been certified in the various interview types.
I gained my certification within a few weeks, joining a bumper crop of new interviewers. We hired great people.
And my training buddy teammate? He went on to take on a new role reducing toil across several teams, mine included. This was quite fitting; shifting the coordination of interviewer training to the recruiting team had been his idea, after all.
Final takeaways
Passion is vulnerable to attribution error. In practice, this can look like “if they resist my Big Push then they don’t care enough about the Big Goal”.
Remember that engineers will, consciously or otherwise, perform a ROI calculation when choosing how much to invest in your Big Push. If the ROI does not make sense, expect to see slow progress if not outright resistance. The engineers’ ROI calculation is not a bad thing; it’s good! This is a natural check on your decision making as you grow in authority and impact while moving farther away from your engineers’ day-to-day.
If you are seeing slow progress and you have already done the hard work to confirm that your goal is worthy, sit down with your people and dig into the inputs to ROI. They may very well grasp and value R (reward) just fine but balk at a costly I (investment). Do what it takes to make your worthy goal worthwhile.
My story about interviewer training could have easily missed out on its happy ending if not for our 1:1 culture and this leader’s desire to hear me out. Because my senior leader had made himself available and because he wanted to learn more, we were able to determine that the slowdown was not due to a lack of buy-in; it was all about that vertical climb.
Validate the worthiness of your goal, articulate R, minimize I, and stay curious.