On not being the best anymore

Cédric Spalvieri — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 07:25:59 +0000

This post was originally published in french on my blog skwi.fr.

There was a time when I thought that being a CTO was like being a Jedi Master : wise and with an absolute knowledge of web development ... or at least, the widest knowledge in the company.

Through the years, I changed my perspective about this job. Getting old made me more open about people and the variety of their intelligences. But I also didn't have the choice.

When I got from development to management, my job shifted from something technical to something more human centred. This shift didn't happen overnight, but my commitment to technical work was surely getting lower and lower. It wasn't the best context to maintain a technical expertise.

Reading blog posts, doing code reviews or getting my hands dirty are still important things to do. It helps me being relevant when setting the technical path for the team.

But it's important to admit that once I became CTO, I can not keep on being the best developer on the team.

And to be honest, it's healthy to strive for this situation. Not by getting less and less good, of course, but by working on elevating my team level and recruiting people with a higher level than me.

Being a CTO does not mean being the teacher, the one with all the knowledge, schooling its pupils. A CTO should be more like a coach, who may not be in a better physical condition than its athletes, but who knows how to help them get the best of their strengths.

This is not an easy step, especially after spending years building a technical expertise. But it's a mandatory step if you now want to build an outstanding team.

The Tribe effect in the tech industry

Cédric Spalvieri — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 10:17:37 +0000

This post was originally published in french on my blog skwi.fr.

Man is by nature a social animal — Aristotle

As human beings, we are driven by a need to belong to a community. This need is so important that there are specialists in a field called Tribal psychology (mainly studied regarding our behavior about politics).

Studies in this field had shown that our need to belong is unconscious and systematic. It can be triggered by any way to differentiate two groups of people, may it be as trivial as over- or under-estimating the number of dots on a page. When people are told that the are over-estimators (may it be true or not) they immediately act in opposition to under-estimators.

In our line of work, this group segmentation can be seen between production teams vs. support teams, designers vs. developers or, more recently, backend developers vs. frontend developers.

Fortunately, in most companies, the pseudo-antagonism between these tribes is not a major issue, and it’s often “just” a little humor.

But making fun of socio-professional traits is not that innocent. Studies have shown that once this tribe feeling is set in our mind, it can trick us into seeing the same truth, the same facts, in two different ways, depending whether we belong to a tribe or another. If it’s true for a proven truth, you can imagine how tribe conflicts can escalate when they are about intangible facts (should we talk about mobile OS preferences?).

What’s even worse is that our need to prove the superiority of our community is so real that we are able to accept a bad situation for our group if it’s means that the opposite group will know an even worse situation. This is true even if there is a third situation, a good one, that both group could benefit on the same level.

As irrational as it seems, that's the way we are. We are likely to shoot ourselves in the foot if it can show that our group is more valuable than another.

The first way to limit the impact of this bias in our work environment is to be aware of it, and to try to identify it within our behavior and the behavior of others.This can seem easy and obvious but it’s not. We easily behave in a way that divide groups, sometime just for fun, without any intent to harm.

It’s also important to create an environment that reduces group formation by encouraging diversity and mixing groups in a physical and/or a timely way (try to avoid having “the sales team office”, “the Chicago guys”, or the “our R&D team”).

My last piece of advice is more general, but be kind to others, and try to walk in their shoes when interacting with them.

Sources:
Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection - Dan M. Kahan
Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination (1970) - Henri Tajfel
Image credit:
Claude Charbonneau - Checkmate
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DEV Community: Cédric Spalvieri

On not being the best anymore

The Tribe effect in the tech industry