How do Individual Contributors Get Stuck?

A Primer

Occasionally, you may be asked to give constructive feedback on your peers, perhaps as part of review season. If you aren’t a naturally critical person but you want to give someone a valuable insight, you may find this task daunting. To that end, I suggest the following:

Pay attention to how they get stuck.

Everyone has at least one area that they tend to get stuck on. An activity that serves as an attractive sidetrack. A task they will do anything to avoid. With a bit of observation, you can start to see the places that your colleagues get stuck. This is a super power for many reasons, but at a baseline, it is great for when you need to write a review and want to provide useful constructive feedback.

How do people get sidetracked? How do people get stuck? Well, my friend, here are two incomplete lists to get you started:

Individual Contributors often get sidetracked by…

1. Brainstorming/architecture: “I must have thought through all edge cases of all parts of everything before I can begin this project”
2. Researching possible solutions forever (often accompanied by desire to do a “bakeoff” where they build prototypes in different platforms/languages/etc)
3. Refactoring: “this code could be cleaner and everything would be just so much easier if we cleaned this up… and this up… and…”
4. Helping other people instead of doing their assigned tasks
5. Jumping on fires even when not on-call
6. Working on side projects instead of the main project
7. Excessive testing (rare)
8. Excessive automation (rare)

Individual Contributors often get stuck when they need to…

1. Finish the last 10–20% of a project
2. Start a project completely from scratch
3. Do project planning (You need me to write what now? A roadmap?)
4. Work with unfamiliar code/libraries/systems
5. Work with other teams (please don’t make me go sit with data engineering!!)
6. Talk to other people (in engineering, or more commonly, outside of engineering)
7. Ask for help (far beyond the point they realized they were stuck and needed help)
8. Deal with surprises or unexpected setbacks
9. Navigate bureaucracy
10. Pull the trigger and going into prod
11. Deal with vendors/external partners
12. Say no, because they can’t seem to just say no (instead of saying no they just go into avoidance mode, or worse, always say yes)

“AHA! Wait! Camille is missing something! People don’t always get stuck!” This is true. While almost everyone has some areas that they get overly hung up on, some people also get sloppy instead of getting stuck. Sloppy looks like never getting sidetracked from the main project but never finishing anything completely, letting the finishing touches of the last project drop as you rush heedlessly into the next project.

Noticing how people get stuck is a super power, and one that many great tech leads (and yes, managers) rely on to get big things done. When you know how people get stuck, you can plan your projects to rely on people for their strengths and provide them help or even completely side-step their weaknesses. You know who is good to ask for which kinds of help, and who hates that particular challenge just as much as you do.

The secret is that all of us get stuck and sidetracked sometimes. There’s actually nothing particularly “bad” about this. Knowing the ways that you get hung up is good because you can choose to either a) get over the fears that are sticking you (lack of knowledge, skills, or confidence), b) avoid such tasks as much as possible, and/or c) be aware of your habits and use extra diligence when faced with tackling these areas.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out my book, “The Manager’s Path,” Available March 2017!