On values, revisited

An interviewer asked me recently: What are your core values as a software developer and manager?

I've written about values before. But it's been a few years, with many challenges and learnings along the way. Was I going to say the same things? Had anything actually changed?

Kindness and Curiosity

Software is a team sport. The code is rarely the challenging part. Communication, collaboration, coordination: human interactions are at the core of where we work, and how we move systems forward.

Something I've learned is that effective communication relies on openness, and these open lines of communication must be established and nurtured with my reports, peers, and stakeholders. Kindness and curiosity, applied regularly, is what keeps that openness alive past the first few months.

Healthy, open communication is the stage for feedback, vulnerability, and how we show up when things are broken or unclear. It's much easier to have a hard conversation when the space for the conversation is already established. When the lines of communication close, a team can quietly fall apart.

Stewardship

This one's about ownership, but with a wide, strategic lens.

An engineering managers, we're not just responsible for a slice of the codebase or our direct reports at a given point in time. We work in complex, dynamic systems. We're navigating terrain — technical and organizational — and our job is to increase the team's leverage, reduce the risk, and find the optimal positions to win.

This is situational awareness, and it applies equally to growth of people and systems. It's acknowledging that we're responsible over how systems change over time, and so does the criteria for a good decision. This applies to evolving complex software systems, growing engineers, and building high-trust, effective teams.

Stewardship means we're asking: what does this look like in a year? Does this action move us closer to a goal?

Clarity

I almost called this one Intentionality, because that's really what it's about. Clarity is the outcome; intentionality is the practice.

Anyone who's been through a scaling period knows what unmanaged complexity feels like. It creeps in as extra meetings, blurry ownership, metrics that measure the wrong things, systems that no one fully understands anymore. Left alone, it becomes a ceiling.

Clarity is the discipline of pushing back against that. It's choosing language, abstractions, caveats, and targets. It's making the tradeoff explicit instead of letting it make itself. It's being deliberate about what signals you're listening for and what success actually looks like.

Those are still my three. Kindness and Curiosity, Stewardship, Clarity. I don't think this is a huge departure from what I've written about in the past, just an updated articulation and emphasis.