Managers should encourage employees to leave Slack once they outgrow it
Michael Lopp · The human side of world-class engineering leadership | Michael Lopp (Apple, Palantir, Slack) · Jan 25, 2024 · at 41:46
Michael Lopp discusses employee career growth and retention while reflecting on his leadership role at Slack.
0:00 / 0:38exact quote · 38.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And here's a controversial one. There's times we spent a year. I'm like, you don't need to be here anymore. You have learned everything that you're going to learn here at Slack. It's time to go somewhere else. And I wouldn't say it like that, but there's truly a healthy part of the job is when you're like, this role that you want is in here. It's over at Stripe or it's over at OpenAI or something like that. And we're going to make, figure that out. And this is not a performance management situation. I'm not managing them out. I'm just like, I don't think I can give you what you need here and I can manufacture quite a bit of things, but that's truly your job is to make sure that there is to make sure you understand that thing and you're growing in the right direction. So even maybe outside of the company, that could be the right thing.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Michael Lopp
Building successful software is getting harder despite AI and modern tools
“No, I think it's getting harder, actually. Well, number one is because there's so many, when, back in the Barlow days, this is pre-web, this is software that you print on a disk and ship to humans, so you've got, you know, you're shipping it once a year, so th…”
Lopp: Borland vastly influenced Microsoft's programming language strategy
“It was all of the languages led the charge on the languages. I would argue vastly influenced Microsoft programming language strategy.”
Contracting out engineering or design for a startup is a disaster
“I think there's literally founders who think cool, but it's going to kind of Contract out the engineering or kind of bring in some con, you know, an upside firm to do this. This is a hugely horrible, bad idea. If you're trying to build software as to not, and …”
Lopp: Building software without product managers is a disaster
“I got an engineer. He's amazing. And I got a designer and he's amazing. We don't really need product people. Like who are these folks? We know what we should do here. That's also a disaster. So like, I'm just picking one of the many sort of. Initial conditions…”
Scaling requires unglamorous process operators alongside visionaries like Stewart Butterfield
“You need those Stuart Butterfields. You need those Dr. Carps and those sorts of folks, but you also need like that set of folks that are just like turning the crank, building the crank and turning the crank. These are incredibly important. By the way, not sexy…”
Measuring unstructured engineering time destroys the conditions for creative invention
“There is no accounting. Because it's, the moment we do that, then the project managers show up and they say, cool, have you done your wolf time? Great. Check. Let's do that. Thanks so much. Great. Good job, everyone. Now we're operationally sound. It's the sho…”