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Three Human Problems in a Technical Trench Coat

Abbey Perini on January 25, 2024

In technical roles, we want to believe everything has a technical solution. However, software development involves humans, so what can seem like a ...
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Kim Arnett 

🎉🎉🎉
Excellent post Abbey! I hope people read this and find the courage to take it back to their teams and spark improvements for their team.
sends to my team too

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Abbey Perini

💙💙💙 Still not over watching that Taylor Poindexter talk and thinking "Kim does all of this"

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Kim Arnett 

🥺💙

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Ben Halpern

Really great post!

This has me curious about looking at this question from the perspective of the reviewer — I wonder what steps can be taken to help people adopt some of these practices in a way that limits stress and overload on their part.

Let's say you have buy in from reviewers that these are important things worth considering — but there is potentially extra burden on the reviewer's part that might not entirely be overcome by buy-in and practice.

I'm just wondering out loud what some steps to think in that direction are.

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Abbey Perini

Which things do you think are extra burden on the reviewer's part? Because I feel like I put a lot more on the review-ee 🤣

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Ben Halpern

Yeah that's where I think it's hard to articulate in some ways. Like, everybody involved has a role and we ultimately want to maximize mutual effectiveness and growth without burning anyone out in the process.

So, while yeah you put more on the review-ee, it just made me think about the overall pendulum of making sure we all get on the same page.

It's only a half-thought so don't read too much into my comment 😄

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Abbey Perini

I get it. There's a reason people get whole degrees in communication 🤣

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Ingo Steinke, web developer

You may be thinking "I had to struggle to find out what to do, and it made me a better developer. They should have to struggle too."

Now I start to understand StackOverflow and large parts of the Linux community. 😂

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Kieran Venison

Really good read and some solid points, thanks! Especially love the emphasis on how critical it is on a team feeling safe to ask the stupid questions

Trust is relatively easy to lose but extremely hard to rebuild!

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Jonas Scholz

Great title, nice memes!

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Jagadeesh Barbari

Thank you for the great post Abbey Perini! Well written.
Nice point 👍 - A collaborative, psychologically safe feedback process can quickly increase code quality and productivity