When we start growing and moving through the laddering of promotions or switching teams, we start experiencing different types of leadership from diverse perspectives.

When referring to leadership, every company or I dare to say even teams within the same company, define a level of accountability and delegation, that suits them better.

Rarely appreciated, this plays an important role when defining responsibilities. And, I believe it’s quite important to define and draw a line between accountability and delegation.

Wait! Before we get immersed in the topic, let me try to clarify things a bit.

In my appreciation the one in the leadership team is the one accountable, responsible, and who owns the problem (or whatever other subject), meaning that if something unexpected happens, although it’s a team responsibility, it will be mostly on that person's back.

Once that’s defined, in bigger groups where responsibility is shared, we would have some level of delegation depending on how flat the company/team is, just to name one possibility. This means that, for example, in flatter companies, responsibility for decision-making, the team is expected to get more involved.

But where do we draw the limit between delegation and accountability? Who should be the one making the decisions? Do I trust the team to leave the freedom to make decisions to something that I am accountable for? Is it only a matter of trust and experience? is it just a reflection of the sense of having control? If we go to the other extreme does it mean we are gatekeeping information?

As you can see, things are starting to get mixed up, that’s what I regularly see on teams when responsibility is shared, and this definition is not discussed or clarified beforehand, in some sort of team agreement or even an informal discussion.

So let’s rephrase and put it in one sentence, although the responsibility is shared, there will be always someone accountable in the laddering of management and leads if something happens, even if that needs to bubble up to the CEO.

If we go back in time and think about the old days, we might probably end up in situations where the hierarchy was defined in stone and hardly challenged by others.

Times when speaking out to managers, or being called “bosses” back then, were regularly seen as lack of proffesionalism. Or maybe, we just thought it was impolite, as I, at least, tended to believe they were not interested in knowing about my feelings or opinions.

Fortunately, management has evolved into something different, and we now can find places with the intention to follow other ideas. Yet not ideal, but better than the old days.

What I am referring to as the new management is where team members feel more engaged, empowered, and take responsibility for success as a group effort. In a team where suggestions matters, responsibilities fluctuate across the team and communication flows up and down with not much restriction or friction.

There are, of course, levels of interpretation, on how deep we want to go with delegation. We can ask for feedback and then the leaders will decide, or just let the team decide and the leader just agrees on it, just to name two extremes. That is exactly the level of delegation that for me needs to be stated somewhere, whether it's implicit or explicit, to avoid misunderstandings in the responsibilities scheme.

Usually, failures are probably the biggest trigger that forced us to think and set up a balance in the delegation levels we have during a post-mortem analysis.

Situations that by setting and preparing ourselves in advance could be avoided.

From another angle, the premise "we are in this together", easy to break, can fall apart when recognition comes into the picture. Who’s going to take the credit? Ideally, this shouldn't be the most important matter, but it can break the trust and commitment of the team if only the one accountable takes the prize.

Things are not always that simple, another problem I have seen with delegation is that leaders or managers, put pressure on the team, with the excuse of “we are flexible and modern”, just to prevent them from taking decisions and being exposed or finger-pointed by others. Which slowly turns into a lack of alignment, trust, commitment, etc.

Eventually, when you become a leader or manager (you name it), what took you there should be your mantra, not suddenly changing your spectrum and becoming what you normally hate.

As a side note, I have noticed that in the IT world most managers come from engineering backgrounds. I am not saying that they don’t have the skills but it’s funny how they can change career paths and become a senior manager in 1 year, and in most cases, that change is based on wishes over the skill set, myself included.

To highlight this topic, I sometimes use the word meritocracy to define that path we have to discover, but as it’s currently misused, especially in politics, I heard a replacement in a song that says that smooth seas never made a good captain which seems to emphasise how I experience things in a more elegant way.

The confusion between accountability and delegation

Within that transformation, there are certain misunderstandings that can cause a team to fight for the wrong problems or get lost in the processes.

We can all agree that there are different types of managers. But just making one segmentation between the ones that like to have everything under control and the ones who like to delegate most of their work, there is a balance that needs to be defined.

Ownership in the sense of I take responsibility, I trust you to move this forward, but I can't expose or blame you if in the end this never gets done.

It’s the manager/leader's responsibility to make that happen, so that is exactly the point where I see the gap between accountability and ownership. I do agree that managing and measuring success as a manager is difficult. But as it’s a matter of delegation, it doesn’t mean it’s your responsibility now, and I (as manager) am out of the picture.

Enough about exposing the issues, what can we do?

If I were to become an Engineer Manager now, I think I just know what I wouldn’t do. I only have a little experience as a Product Manager, but back then although there was a lot of stakeholder management, I had no reporting lines coming to me.

Even considering that I just came back to coding, I do see myself in people management over something purely technical. Or at least that is what I have been told by former colleagues and my own vision and preference.

Having said that, what would I do if I get into this situation?

Build an environment where there’s no such thing as pressure or rush. I know that's difficult but If I can absorb that and abstract it from the team, I will.

No room for egos. A place where people feel comfortable sharing experiences and opinions. Where introverts are not afraid about sharing, and the ones with imposter syndrome can open up.

Transparency overall. When I know what to do or not, whether I am lost or not, the team will know about my feelings, and if I ever feel overwhelmed or incapable of playing the role, I will be the first one to admit it.

Not playing the blaming game, whether we win or lose, we are a unit, but if something goes wrong or expectations are not met, I will be the one to blame and take action to make things better.

If I ever have a strong opinion about someone’s career path I would ask in advance if they are looking for ideas or a piece of advice from me.

I would define expectations, and responsibilities by roles together with the team, and reflects on them from time to time.

Unfortunately, as with most of the human problems in industry organizations’ schemes, there’s no such guide we can follow. I based my recommendation on my experience from the other side of the fence.

But, just asking ourselves and clarifying the questions I have shared across the article, could lead to a better understanding of scoping the responsibilities accordingly within our environment.

Mixing leadership, delegation, and accountability

Over the years there have been changes in the way interview processes are handled, which I believe are causing interviews to evolve into something unnecessarily complicated.

This observation, generally called "the broken process of job interviews", I wouldn’t personally call it broken as companies are still hiring, but! I won’t ignore there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Although every company develops its own custom interview process, there are common patterns in how the whole process is split. For that particular reason, I will divide this article into two different parts, one referring to the non-technical interviews and the other focusing on the technical parts we might encounter.

There's no particular audience for this article, as an interviewer or an interviewee I hope you can get something out of this.

Whether you end up getting hired or not, to me, communication across the interview series is the most important factor that will make a process potentially good or bad.

From a starting point, job descriptions tend to be a copy-paste from each other, which makes it hard to understand what are they actually looking for in terms of profiling.

Once you get immersed in the interviews, in most cases, expectations, focus, and takeaways from every particular interview are rarely shared.

And in case the result ends in a rejection, communication, sometimes, gets forgotten.

One of the most common examples of the last point is emails. I am talking about those template emails saying they decided to go further with other candidates, with no feedback whatsoever. Or even canceling your application from scratch without mentioning the reasons why they have decided to withdraw your application in the first place.

Not to mention the number of times I get ghosted after I ask for feedback.

Companies are in the right of doing this, but for me, this is already part of the culture, so if I spot some of those behaviors I won't probably apply again nor recommend this opening to another friend.

Having big companies setting the bar high in terms of complexity and how difficult it is to pass their interview process, has side effects on other companies which follow the same approach and decide to take this as a metric of success.

Far from being the reason for their success, one of the main reasons why they are complex is due to the filter they are forced to make based on the number of applications they have. In the long run, this will give more false negatives, but companies who are getting tons of requests are eligible to take that risk.

The first takeaway of the article, avoid copying other companies’ processes! The big names are the ones dictating the way to do these processes in a way that fits their needs. But that doesn't mean this process will be useful for all companies.

I understand that in places that receive tons of applications with higher salaries in the market, there's a bigger filter that needs to be done. Meaning that if the salary you will end up getting is a life game-changer, I will expect it to be more challenging than others.

But why do others follow the same thing? As for my understanding, it is just because is trending.

Related to this, how many times have you got questions during the interview process but once you started to go deep into the company code, those good and amazing good practices were not even close to the reality

The one I like the most in this regard is TDD, which is also something I tend to see on job postings as well. I got asked to follow TDD and BDD practices during code challenges, just to find 0% code test coverage on the company code after I manage to get the job.

This reflects a lack of customization and profiling in the process, rather than imitate and go for something standard, you can take this opportunity to look for a candidate that would fit YOUR daily tasks and team culture.

Inclusion plays a more important role in this equation than people regularly think.

The lack of empathy when companies ask you to invest time in applications or code challenges, without offering anything in return, always surprises me.

I have been told that I should invest more hours in the assignment, just because I have described some solutions with comments, or because my test coverage wasn’t 100%, among others. Is incredible how generous people are with the time of others, isn't it?

Furthermore, considering free time investment, what if I have kids? what if I am doing several interviews in parallel because I am in a rush of getting a new job? what if I have side jobs? Does it mean that I am not eligible for applying for these openings? That’s hard.

So, please make sure those requests are optimized, or consider offering a paycheck among other types of benefits if those tasks are time-consuming.

About this particular subject there's a book and also a newsletter that I would like to recommend, that it doesn't only apply to recruitment:

In this link, you can subscribe to weekly recommendations and check out the book, which has helped me to understand better the importance and complexity of this subject.

One simple starting point is to make your interviews inclusively friendly, by including minorities as part of the process, so that people reflect more, and get a sense of the environment. It will also help out to filter those profiles that show some flags during those sessions.

I can understand that for companies, especially the ones offering visa sponsorship, where there is a huge investment/risk at stake, before submitting an offer they would like to be as convinced as possible.

Companies aren't doing us a favor when hiring us, we are just going to be paid for our work, it should be a bidirectional negotiation.

But lately, I have completed and started processes with up to 6 phases or sessions, including 3 only discussing technical-related subjects. Why are tech companies so obsessed with measuring and testing technical skills? Especially for senior positions, where tech-related subjects only imply a partial amount of our work, the rest is dealing with other problems where soft skills have a bigger impact.

I find it odd, that the senior and experience I get, the more complex it is to get a job. Crazy!

Side note, in case you are curious to know what defines seniority to me, you can find it here.

Slow feedback circles, make it easy for interviewees to get tired, and long sessions are an overflow of information.

Having these sessions can potentially lead to a lack of tracking of the process, difficulty in syncing the process with the people included, and difficulty finding the right and motivated people to do it.

Hire people not roles! Find what type of profiles meets your expectation without looking in-depth at technical implications, as that is the easiest part to learn in the long term. Soft skills are harder to change or adapt.

At a company I used to work for, the most important part of the interview process was in a bar or coffee place, depending on the candidate's preferences. A session where we spend some time chatting informally about work and life. It really worked both for us to check if there was a match, and for the interviewee to get a sense of what it was like to socialize with us.

Train the interviewer is important, and avoid forcing people to take interviews just because they have the knowledge. During a few interviews I did in the past, I had the feeling I did well but the interviewer didn't feel like doing the interview so I was just the victim that person uses to complain about him taking more interviews.

Moreover, make sure candidates take interviews from the company side, and represent the profiles you are looking for.

Measure the knowledge (aka seniority) is tough. Just the fact that an hour interview is going to define the salary you will get makes people feel nervous, which is one of the reasons why I normally panic before taking any time-framed technical interview.

I believe the interview should be bidirectional instead, where we as interviewers also take a primary role, for which I recommend this article.

Be careful with the people you put to interview, first impressions are really important, and not all devs, no matter how senior they are, are ready to make interviews and assess a person, or even less able to provide objective and not biased feedback about it. This is definitely a skill outside of regular work that needs to be developed.

I'm not the first person to say that live coding interviews are far from reality and that the only thing it does is put a person in the spotlight, while the others are looking at you while coding and suffering because of the pressure.

No matter how hard you try, if there is one person being evaluated and the interviewers/s know the problem, its context, and its possible solutions, it's definitely not a pair programming session.

We can call it a collaborative session, where devs will help you to proceed if you get stuck.

These sessions are supposed to evaluate your communication skills, but I hardly ever do I feel comfortable.

Although I am not a big fan of this particular type of interview, I must say they were cases where the result was successful as the interviewers were able to build and create a safe environment and the assignment was rather simple, as the main focus was on communication and in how to move things forward on iterations.

I am referring to things like Hackerrank type of exercises, that I would only consider as an option if it's a mandatory skill for the job opening.

As a frontend developer, it’s unbelievable the number of interviews I have failed because of those exercises, that I have never done on a job in 10 years. Or maybe I did, there was time for research and analysis.

So, please try to mirror problems that are likely to appear in the real job.

I am not ranting against performance, as a front-end developer, I invest time in practices on how to improve it, but only when necessary.

In real-life scenarios, I work on problems when they actually become one, or I have metrics that can potentially become one. The need to over-engineering everything just to prepare for every single case scenario is a flaw for the business, that could easily scale to something difficult to maintain.

Although is good because there no much pressure other than solving that on the spot (which is hardly a situation you will experience at work), it implies that you take extra free time to work on its solution, and not everyone is willing to do that.

In these cases what worked for me was to set an expected time to spend on it, otherwise is hard to measure if more people can spend more time on interviews than others, and the final evaluation won't be fair.

Scope the investment of time, evaluate comments, and don't be picky when looking for the details. Remember that usually, people don't have much time to work on this considering the context switch and iterations.

I prefer the take-home type of assessment, where you can also see the prioritization of the features and time management. And never ask for everything to be finished.

As in most processes, feedback should be mandatory. There was one time, that I spent a week developing a technical assessment from which I had good feedback first, but at the moment I was having the next round the interviewers started to ask questions without having an idea of my solutions. For me that was a lack of respect, I spent a week of my free time doing something they even didn't dare to check.

Those were the drawbacks I have noticed in the interviews I have done in the last few years, both as interviewer and interviewee.

Unfortunately, there's no only solution we can follow. We need to adapt the process to our business and provide different alternatives to the candidates so that we will improve engagement and inclusion.

Since I can remember I have been someone who is afraid to say that I am good at something. Not because I am modest, not because I am humble, it just doesn't come up.

That ability or weakness, has taught me different things across the variety of places that I have lived and worked at.

With time I have learned that sharing my vulnerabilities proves that I am aware of my weak points, or areas that I know I need and would like to improve.

And from another perspective, exposing and opening those black boxes, generally help managers and colleagues to share feedback with me.

Being that outspoken hasn't always worked the way I wanted, there were times when people took that weakness to their advantage to make me feel the hierarchy that was between us. In other words, making me feel inferior.

That's why, in different opportunities, I had to hold on and get back my confidence and self-esteem again because I was feeling undervalued. 

I start with the baseline that we all have good intentions, and if I begin observing these behaviors I would probably ask for feedback, and share feelings with my personal manager. As we humans are subjective, those actions could also happen because of a misunderstanding.

Keeping an open communication is essential to staying aligned with reality. Surrounding myself with good people that I trust, with the same core values, and the ones I want to learn from ends up being my best tool to return to being calm and boost my motivation back up again.

Despite we most of the time blame it on people, toxicity isn't always because of the people, but maybe the environment which is triggering those survival and defensive mechanisms.

Talking about work environments, I have also been told once that I was too talkative or expressive, and work is a place where feelings and emotions need to be put aside, otherwise is a lack of professionalism. As old-fashioned as this might sound, these things are still happening.
 (There's a book to help me go over this particular topic, “No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work”).

These situations are quite easy to spot, and because of this, I have developed a skill to read people the moment I start working with them.

The road to this point wasn't easy, it took me some time to understand, that I wasn't doing something wrong, and I just needed to find a place with a working culture that fit my profile. This is now the main factor from which I decide whether to take or not a new opportunity, putting things such as technology and money aside.

Another side effect is that whenever I share any of the previously mentioned feelings or emotions ( or anything linked to mental health), people feel sorry for me. And that, I believe, is one of the reasons why we hide or prevent sharing experiences like this one.

I think it is devastating to get special treatment just because I feel different about something. It actually has the opposite effect on me, and I will probably fade out of my presence there.

The same goes for any type of inclusion, people are not looking for special treatment or fake recognition, in the end, minorities want equality, without feeling judged.

On top of that, but now more under control, I have suffered a lot because of my insecurities and anxiety. So that I will never forget managers and co-workers who took my openness to help me out or land a hand without expecting any type of recognition in return.

You can always learn how to be good technically but those things, in my experience are way harder.

I'm not writing this to feel better than the others, to show off something nor is it something that makes me proud. But just the fact that I am able to share it, makes me feel relieved that I have learned how to live with this, despite the ups and downs.

Taking care of yourself without feeling selfish for not getting involved is for sure one of the biggest challenges I have faced.

As a side note, related to mental health, and to close this part I would like to state that we need to stop normalizing working 24/7 or burnout at work. Companies nowadays offering well-being programs are already a warning. 

To whoever has or had similar feelings what has worked for me is, to try to control the environment. I don’t believe those who say that nobody can change the world working 40hs a week. Live your life, not the goal of others.

The taboo of ignoring the psychological aspect was there since day one, hiding everything under the carpet. Is this happening more nowadays or people are now feeling more comfortable and supported while sharing these things?

It's nice to see kids from younger generations referring to this subject without feeling judged. People from my generation are still in general a bit introverted about sharing emotions, which can also have some cultural and personality implications as well.

I do share my personal views, and how I deal with these things. But it was part of an internal introspection that probably the experience of living abroad accelerated, and took me some time to get the courage to open up this box and start learning and sharing.

From one side it helped me to be more conscious about stress in general, not only for me but with friends, family, and colleagues. And, how this was manifesting in physical manners, in my case insomnia, anxiety plus some eating disorders.

The change in paradigms and frameworks has also contributed to helping me feel better.

In the old times, when the most common way of working was the waterfall model, having the need to prevent and prepare yourself for every possible scenario was stressful as hell. And if any situation alternated the plan - that took ages to define - the effects were catastrophic.

Then agile came into the picture fighting the flaws of trying to prepare for every situation and just build and react faster. And the results speak for themselves that in unpredictable situations this is a better way of working.

While searching if I was the only one feeling this way I found this well-written article about the same subject https://matthewstrom.com/writing/agile-anxiety.

That level of transparency to understand that we can't predict the future helps us to be more relaxed, we have time to re-think, fail, learn, and understand that the worst-case scenario is not that bad, generally speaking. I can imagine that in some specific domains those variants that I exposed have a different impact.

Definitely, agile doesn't mean let's do whatever, and eventually, we will find our way. There are things like roadmaps, strategy definitions, and missions, that help us define a detailed short-term plan and vague long-term plan for the unpredictable future. This means that if something comes into the picture that we didn't foresee we will be able to react faster, without feeling that we spend much time preparing for something that never happened.

Believe me, having that as a premise for me was a game-changer.

Along the way, and learning the hard way I have managed to not blame myself for not being able to predict, but that urge is not something that I can give away that easily, even more, when we tend to congratulate people for predicting it, making me feel under-performing if something that I didn't see ends up affecting us.

Having a mix of planning and aligning with the business, and being practical when making changes even if the data that we have is not enough, helped me to fight that anxiety back.

Since social networks became part of our daily basis, the working environment has been affected by some behaviors from that world.

Those concepts and behaviors are far away from being something new, but people, myself included, tend to show a reality that is not happening.

The show-off revelation, in different types of companies that I have worked for or others that I research about (culture-wise), seems to be a repetitive pattern. A phenomenon that can also be seen in the evolution of Linkedin. Nothing against the tool itself but the usage we got into.

Moments when decorating every situation we are in at work, putting ourselves on top of everything, rather than showing the reality or the learnings we have accomplished. Because not showing success all the time or focusing on improvements could be seen as signs of weakness or pessimism.

When did intentions, or fake results become more important than the actual outcome?

This situation together with gatekeepers contributes to me feeling bummer because I am the one not knowing the future, but in reality, we are all pretending to be comfortable with something we probably aren't. And this lack of transparency and alignment will slowly evolve into something toxic.

MANUOBREGOZO

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