It’s hard to grow without trust
Ben Kuhn makes a great observation in his latest post: Trust is a key enabler of growth (and conversely, lack of trust a key inhibitor). If you don’t trust someone’s work, you’re going to spend extra effort double checking their output — reviewing their designs, second-guessing their technical decisions, fine-combing their PRs, etc. This can dramatically impact bandwidth and output of your team. The worst case occurs when trust is low and the cost of verifying correctness is high. People will just default to rolling their own solutions in that case instead of building on top of other people’s work, resulting in lots of duplicated effort. Lack of trust is also why the true cost of a bad hire far exceeds the nominal value of their salary and the opportunity cost of the hiring decision — they consume more bandwidth than they add because their work can’t be trusted.
How do you build trust? There’s no shortcut — trust must be earned. To become a trusted engineer or operator, you need to:
Consistently produce high quality work
Pay attention to details, think about edge cases, anticipate failure modes
Be highly responsive and take the initiative — be the person on support rota that makes everyone sleep well at night
Be serious about reviewing other people’s work and give detailed, actionable feedback
I think the last point is generally under appreciated. The most effective engineers and operators are not just good ICs but actively work to build trust in others by helping them improve. They want to be trusted, but they also want to be able to trust others because they know it will make the whole team more productive. A high degree of ownership ties in directly with this. If you take ownership of your team’s product/system, you’ll spend more time on quality control and ensuring changes to it can be trusted.
