Treating Devs Like Human Beings | A Conversation w/ Kelly Vaughn, Jean Hsu & Lena Reinhard
Sometimes among all the sprints, the pressure to ship faster, tools to measure lines of code written, it seems like we as an industry forget a simple fact: developers are knowledge workers, not robots
To remind us what it means to be a human, we invited some of the most empathetic engineering leaders we know to Interact and asked them to sit on a panel together. The conversation that followed is one of the most insightful and relevant conversations we've heard all year. Whether you are an IC, manager or manager of managers, we promise this conversation will help you become a more empathetic leader and colleague.
Today's episode of Dev Interrupted features Kelly Vaughn, Director of Engineering at Spot AI; Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range; and Lena Reinhard, an engineering leadership coach.
“I remember we had this one workshop where at the end we had people share their biggest takeaway and this person said, ‘I feel like I just learned an API for humans.’
We were just so focused on the engineering aspect that we kind of forgot these are all humans. I think it's very different from other functions. As a product manager or designer or marketing or sales, you kind of need that to be successful in your role. Even a junior PM needs to know how to treat the people around them as humans to be successful, to build alignment, to get things done. I think that’s a little less true in engineering.”
Episode Highlights:
(3:34) Hot take: no coding exercises in technical interviews
(13:35) Why the panelists are so passionate about this topic
(28:52) How to conduct a proper 1:1
(36:44) 'BS metrics'
(46:38) Burnout isn't the '24 hour flu'
(53:41) Discussing burnout with your manager
Or if you prefer, you can watch the entire interview on our YouTube channel, and be sure to like and subscribe when you do!
You can also read our follow up article “6 Keys to Human-Centric Software Development”
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