alt Hacker NewsThe foundation of this approach is non-controversial: Don’t micromanage, be a good coach, don’t force work to go through the manager, and other simple truths.
When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.
Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.
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> Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.
The article talks about just a few such terms that are a symptom of the mindset of the leader-follower approach. Weak Saphir-Worff applies imo.
For example, I got way better as a dance teacher when I stopped using phrases like "do this", "this is correct", "that is wrong", etc and instead put all that effort into "try this", and "if you do that, this happens". Students were more open, less confused, saw possibilities instead of problems to fix.
But I get it, if I hadn't seen this change myself and heard others talk about it I would also be skeptical. It sounds a bit too good to be true.
After a couple years I realized the key part of “As an X I want Y so that Z” is the “so that Z”.
When managing teams these days, the only part I keep is the “so that Z” — what beneficial change in the world does this ticket make?
If the ticket name is just “fix this bug” then I’m not certain the engineer knows why it’s important, and knowing the importance of your work is itself important.