Camille Fournier Quotes

“As much as we might adore everyone on our team and want to keep them together, having a strong team means that sometimes people’s best path for success lies outside of it. It’s our job as managers to help them toward it. It’s a sign of success when people from our teams go to other teams and take on more responsibility there.”

“They see specialization as the opportunity to work on the most difficult and most impactful technical problems. (By contrast, a dedicated generalist is probably more motivated by working on the hardest business problems.)”

“Within 30 days of a new person joining my team, we take at least an hour to go through a document that contains the questions we look at here in a moment, helping me understand what makes them tick and setting expectations about their growth path over the next year.”

“A bunch of people who never talk to each other and are always working on independent projects are not really working as a team.”

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.”

“A very common clash occurs between people who are extremely analytically driven and those who are more creatively or intuitively focused.”

“As you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.”

“As you grow more into leadership positions, people will look to you for behavioral guidance. What you want to teach them is how to focus. To that end, there are two areas I encourage you to practice modeling, right now: figuring out what’s important, and going home.”

“At their worst, alpha geeks can’t let anyone else get any glory without claiming some of it for themselves. They are the origin of any good ideas but had no part in creating the bad ideas, except that he knew they would fail. The alpha geek believes that every developer should know exactly what she knows, and if you don’t know something, she will gleefully point out your ignorance. The alpha geek can be very rigid about how things should be done and closed off to new ideas that he didn’t come up with. Alpha geeks get very threatened when people complain about systems they built or criticize their past technical decisions.”

“Autonomy, the ability to have control over some part of your work, is an important element of motivation. This is why micromanagers find it so difficult to retain great teams. When you strip creative and talented people of their autonomy, they lose motivation very quickly. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you can’t make a single decision on your own, or feeling like every single piece of work you do has to be double- and triple-checked by your manager.”

“Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however.”

“Don’t rely exclusively on consensus or voting.”

“Even if your company doesn’t love him, you want him to love you, because he’ll go back and tell all his friends about the summer he had working for your company. That can have a big impact on your ability to hire full-time from the graduating class, and the fact that you pulled interns from that school probably indicates a serious interest in hiring new graduates full-time as well.”

“Figuring out what to do in a workplace is hard enough for experienced hires, so it’s an especially tall order for an intern.”

“Good 1-1s are not status meetings.”

“Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.”

“However, tech leads will be working on one major new technical skill: project management. The work of breaking down a project has a lot of similarity to the work of designing systems, and learning this skill is valuable even for engineers who don’t want to manage people.”

“Humans, by and large, feel good when they set small goals and meet them regularly.”

“I feel the need to say this because I think that sometimes we give ourselves a pass at caring about our colleagues because we’re introverts, or we don’t want to make friends at work.”

“I understand that you don’t feel like that human side is all that interesting in the workplace. Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however. The bedrock of strong teams is human connection,”

“Instead of filtering requests, they relay them to the team and then relay the team’s response back up to management. This is not a value-add role.​”

“It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected. In all of this uncertainty, the only person you can rely on to pull through it is yourself.”

“It’s hard to accept that 'new manager' is an entry-level job with no seniority on any front, but that’s the best mindset with which to start leading.”

“It’s unlikely that you’ll get fired for being a bad mentor (unless, of course, you behave in an inappropriate manner — please don’t hit on your mentee!). For many mentors, the worst that can happen is that a) the mentee is a drain on their time and they get less coding work done, or b) they do such a poor job that someone whom the organization might otherwise want to hire/keep around has a bad experience and doesn’t join the organization, or opts to leave the organization sooner than she otherwise might. Sadly, the second outcome is far more likely than the first.”

“Knowing yourself is step one. Step two is going after what you want.”

“Listening is the first and most basic skill of managing people.”

“Managers who care about you as a person, and who actively work to help you grow in your career.”

“Many pieces of management advice tell new managers that part of their job, if they are effective, is to be a shield (or, less politely, a 'bullsh*t umbrella'). They should help their team focus on what they need to get done without being distracted by the wider drama, politics, and changes happening in the company around them.”

“My job as tech lead was to continue to write code, but with the added responsibilities of representing the group to management, vetting our plans for feature delivery, and dealing with a lot of the details of the project management process.”

“Regular 1-1s are like oil changes; if you skip them, plan to get stranded on the side of the highway at the worst possible time.”