And this is engineers at Google we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge. In other words, very hard to replace people. How must more difficult must it be for people who could be replaced tomorrow?

Maybe 2005 Google, but not anymore. A good bachelors degree or enough YoE at most companies gets you the interview, and then the interview result usually does the rest. Those are the "line engineers" that move on to other faangs or unicorns when psychological safety becomes an issue.

Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues.

This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

I thought Google just hired recent grads that play the leetcode game.

You work on technical tasks for other people, who make sure your work is ok, and your supervisor makes sure you are OK.

That person is your advocate in all things that fall in the tense employee-employer tug-of-war. Inside the "group", there is psychological safety. On "tasks" there is often less of it, but you always have your group.

Or at least it should be that way.

The elephant in the room is that there has to be a level of tension, of slight mutual discomfort, of a bilateral transaction present in employer-employee relationship. It needs to be very dull and implied but it has to be there to make sure incentives are aligned and objectives are consistently met.

Tenured public service and unions show what might happen when this inconvenient element is missing.

If you won’t disagree and commit that’s a different story.

I have had some co-workers or higher ups that probably found it inconvenient and didn't like me (in fact strike the probably - I know for a fact). Yet it has so far not resulted in me being fired, demoted etc. and in fact the opposite has happened. I've been told to never shut up and that they keep me around precisely because I don't.

My luck might obviously run out at some point but so far, from my first internship where I just didn't do the stupid task they gave me and instead replaced their awful sendmail+pop3d setup with a full featured postfix and imap/pop and spam filter combo (well I showed the boss on my last day that I had built it on my computer and what it could do. He offered me a part time job as their network/sysadmin to do it for real on the server and to migrate all their users over) it has worked out. I'm not on 'brilliant jerk level'. Way not brilliant enough and just below jerk ;)

He almost got fired recently. He didn’t, in part because a bunch of us stood up for him, but it was dicey.

The reason he almost got fired is because he’s very expensive to manage.

That dogged unwillingness to never shut up, along with more than his fair share of brilliance, is great when he’s digging into a thorny, ugly problem that most would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.

But when there’s a meeting with $3k/hour in fully loaded cost worth of people in it and he’s going on and on about his pet issue that’s a problem. When every decision you make has to first be delivered to the team and argued in detail to this guy, that’s exhausting. To his credit he’s convincible, but still. Since projects have to be carefully evaluated for fit before being assigned to him that makes him harder to use well. Having to unruffle other employees’ feathers all the time certainly isn’t fun. And so on and so forth.

All this means he needs a very strong manager, both in a technical sense (because without that credibility no one will be able to manage him) and in a people skills sense (both for him and for the people he comes into contact with). Such managers are themselves are difficult to find and expensive to employ. To keep him around and aimed in the right direction means a disproportionate amount of one of those people’s time is going to a single employee.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything. It sounds like whatever you are doing is working for you. But maybe this provides some food for thought.

To make another example of where I personally can't shut up: if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally, then I will say that it stinks and why. That doesn't always mean doing it in the big 3k/hour meeting like in your example. And I'm not talking about a 'pet issue'. I can obviously be overruled and that's fine. I've brought it up and have it black on white that they were warned and they made the decision anyway. Fine by me. Don't blame me afterwards. I won't do unpaid overtime later to fix your shit.

But I sure have seen way more than 3k/hour spent in meeting upon meeting after the warnings weren't heeded and it did explode in their faces.

Actually being unable to focus oneself reasonably well without the help of a manager sounds almost a bit dumb to me

I'm surprised you're writing "really bright"

> if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally,

To me, you seem to be the opposite to those "really bright" people, in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?, focus on the right things, and avoid doing dangerous things.

Those others, need help with focusing. Whilst you help people focus correctly?

Most people are not equally bright in all departments :)

Yes, they're bright guys, I stand by that and they do awesome work of what they do. When left unchecked, they just focus exclusively on what they love and think makes the most sense. This may not always fully align with the overall company goals customer wise. And obviously you're getting only _my_ viewpoint of this, not theirs.

They do remind me of myself more than 15 years ago, telling my dad about Linux From Scratch and Gentoo and how that's the only way to be. He was obviously right when he said that no, they don't have the time for that at their place of work and I declared him insane (in my head) because obviously, that was _the only_ way :) It definitely made me learn a lot of stuff, so for myself at the time it was the right thing.

> in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?

I try I guess. Sometimes it's really hard, because they don't want to be helped and/or actively seek to introduce policies that are detrimental to the company overall (not talking about the "bright guys" above in this case, e.g. the rollout plan I mentioned was the business people, not us tech guys). And again, my viewpoint only that you are getting here.

That's the kind of psychological safety I have.

Curious to learn others' experiences, but I've never seen this in my career, ever. I've seen _peers_ yell at each other, but never seen an employee slip "out of character" with their superiors, at least publicly. And if it isn't happening publicly, there's no psychological safety, is there?

Most people (including myself) have been conditioned to bring their "work self" to work, not their "true self". As such, there's very little chance of "forgetting the nature of the relationship" even in heated moments.

I am not really one to challenge all that directly normally. But sometimes that slips.

So when I was reestablishing my personal identity in my late 20s, I just never made a separate “work self”, and it’s been a deliberate decision. I regularly talk openly with my superiors and make it known that I’m very opinionated but I’m also fallible and open to learning from my mistakes. This kind of openness and trust is absolutely essential at the executive level; the real secret is that none of us really knows what we’re doing and we’re all making it up as we go too.

Doing this a few times with the right people will help you learn when asking questions is helpful and when you should get out of the way and follow orders. A good leader has the level of humility to know they’re not always right.

In fact, this ability to “fight back” effectively is what gets you promoted above a line manager level. And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives so they can have it at work, and it’s not there for others so it’s a lot harder to build the muscle on the job if you’re always on guard at home.

This is amazing self-awareness. I wish I had it earlier in my career.

>And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives

This is interesting, but I don't entirely agree. I have seen both sides as an Indian male who has worked both in India (privilege) and SV (no privilege). It's not a matter of "fighting back" or "being open", it's just in-group mechanics at work. There is a tacit understanding among people in positions of power about who is the "in-group" that doesn't need to be expressed or acknowledged even. For example, in India, even as a junior engineer I would be invited to important meetings whereas more experienced female engineers wouldn't. If I'd simply shown up and done the bare minimum, I would have quickly risen up the ranks, IMO. I had the exact opposite experience in SV, being seen as the "out-group" of the "worker bee" class by default.

I'm disputing that thesis based on my experience. You don't need to be vulnerable or "be open" at all - you just need to be part of the in-group. I know "Senior Director of Engineering" who had no clue what the hell was going on. They never spoke up in meetings, or did anything useful at all - it was clear to everyone they added no value whatsoever. Turns out they were just floating from startup to startup moving up in seniority in the process. Presumably, nobody bothered to question them during the interview process as it was assumed they were "competent" based on their background and past positions.

It was actually kind of interesting, since I thought as you did before that.

There are always consequences for over sharing, the obvious answer is don't overshare.

That talk is not actually meant to matter, it's just cant...

How can any human feel totally psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?

The answer is that you're thinking in black and white terms about a concept that is a continuum. Even in employee-employer relationships, with a good manager it is entirely possible to have a reasonable level of psychological safety, just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car.

Then again, it's reasonably straightforward to measure physical injury and come to some agreement about acceptable risk. Psychological injury is far more subjective.

And if the group is small, even if you try to make the answers anonymous, maybe you still would be able to figure out who wrote what, and they'll realize this, and write mostly nice sounding things

Anyway, asking and talking about it seems like a good idea. Maybe also asking them to read the article being discussed here :-)

Speaking my mind does not increase the speed of climate change, the chance that I might get cancer, or the probability of earthquake. Therefore, it is easy not to think about those things while discussing work.

Obviously, "total" in this context means in the workplace. Also, psychological safety essentially means "ability to express yourself and make mistakes without the fear of negative consequences" - it has nothing to do with shielding yourself from cancer, climate change etc. Ironically, the Buddha, who was quoted in the OP grew up with "total psychological safety" as you defined it, and you know where that led him.

> just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car

Again, this is not a comparable analogy at all. If you're unable to in no uncertain terms say "this project is going to hurt users" out of fear of getting fired/looking like not a team player, that is not even a "reasonable level" of psychological safety.

We're talking about software engineers in big tech companies, right? They're extremely well paid and would have no problem finding a new job.

All of them, as long as it's done internally and not jerk-like. Doesn't sound like you know much about Google culture.

Really? Why are y'all working on FLoC then? :-)

It's not an average SWE's job to make product decisions and to steer strategic initiatives. There are people whose job it is to do specifically that.

Think just for a second what it would be like if every one of be more than 100,000 employees could bring a product plan to a halt because they had reservations.

What's in your power is to ask tough questions (people do).. To make your opinion heard (people do). To change projects if you wish (something Google makes easier than any other company). And to take risks and make choices in the execution of your own job duties. That's psychological safety.

You may find this hard to believe, but the people working on FLoC have chosen to. They could easily find a different project if they wanted to. It may be disappointing you you that the average SWE isn't nearly as ideological as the average HN commenter, but it is what it is.

Employees should have psychological safety to voice concerns within their domain, but that's not a license to start backseat driving upper management. It's one thing for a line engineer to raise concerns about their team's choice of frameworks for a project or the chosen architecture of the system. It's a different issue entirely if the employee is simply "calling BS" on company directives or cynically referring to initiatives as "pet projects". From a managing perspective, there is a stark difference between people who voice concerns reasonably and those who simply like to complain.

The good team members raise their concerns with an open mind, seek more information to understand why certain decisions were made, come prepared with alternative suggestions, and most importantly are willing to disagree and commit if they don't get their way.

The bad apples do things like "call BS" on initiatives without understanding the whole story, aren't interested in learning more, don't have any constructive suggestions, and tend to drag their feet or spread dissent through the ranks when they don't get their way.

Psychological safety doesn't mean employees get a free pass to be disgruntled or push back against what they're being paid to do. Questions, concerns, and alternate suggestions are welcome and should not be punished, but at the end of the day employees must be willing to commit to the chosen direction and get on board with company initiatives.