[Aurornis]

I feel like there could be a lot of value in understanding the psychology of teams and using it to build an environment where they can thrive.

However, every person I've worked with who was into these workplace-psychology books started thinking of themselves as expert diagnosticians of other people's psychology. Every personality or problem got mapped back to a scenario from a book they read, even when it wasn't a good fit. They started believing they understood other people better than those people understood themselves.

You couldn't talk to them about problems unless you could figure out which book(s) they were using, read them yourself, and then played a game where you explained things to them in a way that would get them to match the stereotyped situations in their books.

So instead of saying that the requirements are changing too haphazardly and too often (which would get you labelled as being too rigid or a complainer or something) you would have to explain that the requirements changing process is harmful to the team's psychological safety or other buzzwords. They've read enough books saying that a manager's job is to provide psychological safety, they see themselves as the hero manager, and therefore they need to fix this problem to provide psychological safety for the team.

I loathed it all so very much. It's refreshing to go back to managers who just talk to other people like people. I'm sure my good managers also read some of these books, but they didn't put any one book on a pedestal or take it all too literally.

[krystalgamer]

co-worker started reading "Extreme Ownership" and it improved his mindset and approach to problems. at the same time became extremely unbearable towards own team. if someone was complaining it was hard to get follow-up on a task from someone external he'd jump in and say "you're not owning it".

the tipping point for me was when he started preaching "Never Split the Difference". he'd gotten so cocky to the point he'd start meetings with "I already know how this is gonna end".

i don't mind these books as long as they come from a place of need, but it seems the main crowd are wannabe master manipulators. also, they can often be distilled to a couple chapters, not sure why they're so long.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Reminds me of my sister doing a course in Nonviolent Communication and then for a while violently forcing all communication with her to follow these principles or she would get really angry.

[ambicapter]

Hahaha my only experience with an "NVC" adherent was their absolutely terrible communication and workplace productivity habits.

[StilesCrisis]

The problem is when someone writes one viral blog post, then decides to pad it out and sell it as a book. If you can find the original post, you get the entire substance for free in ten minutes.

[skeeter2020]

It's funny when popular blog writers get criticised for turning blog posts into books (usually while leaving the original posts accessible) when I feel this is way more honest than doing exactly what you say. Resilient Management by Lara Hogan and An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson do the former and are two of the most useful SW Management books I've ever read.

[StilesCrisis]

If there is enough content to fill a book, then it's fine. The issue is that usually, there's enough for about two chapters, and then it's just padding.

[jfyi]

> the main crowd are wannabe master manipulators. also, they can often be distilled to a couple chapters, not sure why they're so long.

Yes! Very similar to my own criticisms. It's thinly veiled authoritarianism. Nobody handing you one of these books is ever doing it for your benefit despite framing it that way. The message always is, "this is the behavior I expect out of you".

As to the content density, they all tend to ape Dale Carnegie's work. Carnegie himself borrowing heavily from Ben Franklin, who actually had a lifetime of interesting anecdotes. If you don't have that, you spin out 80 pages worth of filler.

[harryf]

Wow. The book we need should be titled something like "Of Software Teams and Cargo Cults"

"... a book had washed up on the shore... 'Extreme Ownership' ... soon the tribe was worshipping the book"

It happens over and over again in software history. I remember people running around panicking about TDD "But we only have 99.8% test coverage" until eventually it started to get shot down by "Show me the ROI on tests"

[norome]

I'd say it's a reflection of an earlier stage of interpersonal maturity to try and put people into categories. More socially attuned people realize the complexity of other people and situations and synthesize all the available information to make a decision that is truly reflective of reality.

[ambicapter]

I would even go so far as to say this is the general pattern of individuals learning models with explanatory power for dealing with reality. First, you learn the model, you try to apply it absolutely everywhere even in places where it won't work, you learn its limits, you then synthesize it into your holistic understanding along with every model you've learned thus far.

[rdtsc]

> I'd say it's a reflection of an earlier stage of interpersonal maturity to try and put people into categories. More socially attuned people realize the complexity of other people and situations and synthesize all the available information to make a decision that is truly reflective of reality.

It's interesting to think how this affects self-perception. Basically this applies to how one views and treats themselves. One approach is to read book, take a test and put yourself in a bin: "well, I'll never be able to do xyz, the book said I am an abc". There is a danger there self-limiting and making the same mistake putting others in bins.

[pietherr]

You must have read Changing on the job :p

[antihipocrat]

This seems to be common in large corporations. Your example (requirements changing haphazardly) is a very common occurrence, it's a class of problem where the inevitable failure can't be isolated to one or two things with certainly.

Failure could be team burnout and attrition, it could be a major bug due to fast tracking validation (or not checking AI output), or a fundamental architectural issue with future repercussions that with a clearer mindset would have been considered .. or myriad other things in combination.

The person calling out the risk knows that it will 100% cause a failure somewhere. Exactly where and how the failure will occur cannot be predicted beforehand and it actually doesn't matter as the end result will be a missed delivery or incident.

Unfortunately the executive decision maker needs a concrete failure in order to implement a concrete solution.

[onion2k]

Working with someone who thinks Team Topologies is an instruction manual is not fun.

[ozim]

Working with anyone who reads a book and treats it as an instruction is not fun.

Just like working with fresh college grads who are ambitious and think college knowledge is an instruction.

[CuriousSkeptic]

Try handing them a copy of “10X Org”

(the authors tries to abstract over team topologies, adding some additional design dimensions)

[a_bonobo]

Doesn't that happen with any first-year psychology or med-student, too? You have some basic knowledge of what could happen, which therefore means that it does happen, right now, here. It normally goes away with more experience and exposure, and yeah, some personal growth.

[rjsw]

Not just first-year. I don't think psychologists ever lose their urge to perform experiments on any people they meet.

[SmirkingRevenge]

So many of those books are basically like those "Here's one weird trick to succeed at X" style articles in book length form.

[sasaf5]

I am very curious: did you figure some of the books they were using?

[Aurornis]

That's a good question. Some of the perspectives in the book can be helpful. The limitation is that the scenarios and themes in the books are always a little too perfect to reflect real life.

Like you're watching a movie and everything is going disastrously wrong, then the hero shows up and the tone completely changes for the better. Everything starts going right.

The most valuable parts are probably reframing the situations and looking for different perspectives as a way to broaden your thinking. I try to take them as as additional perspectives to have available.

I think the thing I disliked the most about having the books applied to me was when they were treated as an instruction manual for all situations. People would read those books and then start to fit every situation into something from the book.

The Team Topologies book that another comment brought up is a common offender. For years you could tell when someone had read the book because they'd try to force every organization to fit into the prescribed team and interaction formats. If it wasn't working out they'd switch to one of the other formats instead of thinking critically about what we needed for our unique situation.

[hirsin]

Re: Topologies I found it resulted in a lot of reorgs founded on the seeming belief that Conway's law is both immediate and retroactive - if we change the teams and what they own, their features and code will similarly now become cleanly organized.

It's a shame because the underlying message of not overloading teams with extremely broad feature areas is good, and was exactly what we needed.

[gpi]

"You are a stream-aligned team"

[a_c]

People learn and relearn the core concepts from different paths. A recent trend due to coding agent is that people are learning software engineering is not about syntax and frameworks. It is just the way it is. People build up concepts with things they already understand. The same happens when someone doesn't use a book. It just went implicit and way harder for you to find the magic combo.

[nick_]

My most recent manager was exactly like this.

[fcarraldo]

I suspect people who act this way would do so with or without the books. Cargo cult mentality says more about the person than the source material.

It’s good to read others’ perspectives and expand your own. It’s even good when you disagree with the author. But you need to read multiple perspectives and adopt a habit of learning.