How can I gain skill at advocating for my team to make technical or workflow choices?
Patrick McKenzie's advice[1][2] is good, but what if the costs, risks, or revenues aren't large enough? What if my real reason is to compensate for my personal weaknesses?
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Example 1: Automated Tests -- I can say they can prevent bugs that harm the business.
But the real reasons I want a project to set up automated test tooling?
1) I find it harder to read a codebase without tests.
2) If I've written a test I can run, I find it easier to focus.
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Example 2: Clear subteam ownership of product areas + a usually-empty UI to list production errors -- When I'm the dev on error-watch duty for a service, I want tools and team agreements which let me:
1) Glance at a UI listing un-triaged errors and see one.
2) Quickly see severity and which team owns that part of the product.
3) Pass to them.
4) Glance at a UI listing un-triaged errors and see zero.
I can say that a team habit to keep 30-40 production errors un-triaged makes it easy to miss a serious problem. But who would miss that error?
Me.
So, the real reason why I want prod errors in a Zeroable Inbox[3]: I find it hard to multitask. I am accountable to deliver code changes for my team, but I fail when I'm responsible for a list of 30-40 errors I shouldn't put elsewhere. I keep anxiously re-scanning for a new actually-harmful one.
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I could inflate the business value or shame people about "best practices". What are better ways to persuade a team to adopt what are secretly just accommodations of my mental disabilities?
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/
[2] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-teach-the-oss-community-about-marketing/
[3] Zeroable Inbox: A todo list with social rules to quickly move any item to some proper other place.
In fact, by blaming yourself for these outcomes, you’re showing an unusually high level of conscientiousness, which means there’s a good change you’re more thorough than average.
Profit increases when the process is tweaked to mitigate exactly these kinds of issues.
You’d want to pitch your improvements in terms of decreasing costs by improving efficiency and reducing error rates. No need to tie it to alleged personal weaknesses... they want to hire cheaper people than you with even more weaknesses.