pypudding

It’s not just about trying hard that beats the mediocrity, there’s also the macroeconomy and the politics in the global scale, plus a lot of untold coincidences and personal anecdotes in the personal level that you just happen to not know.

And maybe you don’t really want to be pushed to become “successful”.

I’m turning 29, and I decided to believe that, hey you can try your best, but the rest is not up to you.

Very well said. Retro is a collaborative effort, and the decision makers for the team need to participate in retro meetings to address difficult topics. Yup it's overlooked by many teams since it's hard to quantify what a good process or methodology is - for example, how often do you measure employee satisfaction and engineering quality? How do you know the retro processes positively correlate with any meaningful outcome? The industry is not there yet, so processes like retro will stay in the two extremes.

That's nice. AFAIK SRE retros are harder to get product buy ins. It could really depend on the team and the service they provide...

It's definitely great when done well. How about the tougher ones like incident retrospectives(or postmortems)? Is it also a team effort?

We had three kinds of retros - product(half an year), sprint(monthly), incident(per rotation). Yes product folks join the first one, but definitely not the more frequent engineering retros, which is also where the mentioned issues surface faster, also is taking the most time. How's it like for you?

I think FAANG have enough resources that the bottom-up projects are not necessarily for solving a huge pain point like startups. The projects may be related to the engineer's personal growth goal, or an optimization of an existing internal process. Usually the engineer owns 100% of such projects so it's really up to them to make a case for it.

yes, I wish the PMs also say that. :)

well yes, assignment is fine, but given eng's limited bandwidth and the product's conflicting priorities mean the action items coming out of retros are deprioritized, unless someone can really make a case for them.

Friday retros actually drained the energy out of me. Retros need to be intentional so forcing people to be intentional at 3pm on Friday is likely doing the opposite. I wish there's an easier way to async do retros.