Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)
Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.
I think this is actually where the study is interesting. Because the “no duh!” Comments actually have merit on their face. But the argument is that these are tiny slights—not harassment, not pervasive toxicity. By definition it’s the kind of thing management doesn’t notice. So I think the argument is that employers consider those employees to be some default percentage of the workforce, and the argument is that you can move the entire performance bar up by hiring/training managers to be thoughtful and consistent.
Ok actually you sound kind of awesome. The article is about how thoughtless, petty slights demotivate employees. You are talking about the opposite of thoughtlessness: doing something that takes effort for you, going out of your way to stretch out of your default for their benefit. They see you making the effort. And on a team that size, you’re not fooling anybody—they know it’s effort. I imagine they appreciate that quite a lot.
People like dazzling conversation from their manager for like two weeks. Manager who will flex against their own instincts out of respect for my needs? I’ll line up behind that person every time, even if they’re a little awkward here and there.
Travel APIs is our core backend engineering team, responsible for developing capabilities that make the award travel ecosystem computable, thereby enabling our users to travel smarter. In practice, this means wrapping expertly crafted code around flight schedules, booking and routing rules, loyalty programs, credit card features, and partner API integrations. We build for security, reliability, fault-tolerance, and performance. It's a polyglot team that chooses the right tool for the job, working in java, node.js, and golang. Creating these products involves a lot of data, and while this isn't a "big data" or data engineering job, it's certainly medium-size data. Strong relational database skills are a must, and the ability to explore different datasets and relate them together will serve the team well. If you're not very familiar with AWS, that's OK... but you will become quite familiar with it.
Travel Mobile Apps exists to build mobile apps that delight our end users and make them smarter travelers. The mobile team works closely with the Travel APIs team to implement our capabilities in beautiful, useful mobile apps. The forthcoming TPG mobile app will launch this summer for iOS. Up to this point, we have been iterating and testing with users on a single platform in order to speed up development. Now, we're looking for an experienced software architect who can introduce us to the Android ecosystem and help us reach a wider market.
Travel AuthX is our web applications team, dedicated to front end consumer-facing experiences. The TPG web application is still in its planning phases, but this team is also responsible for launching the new website for our sister brand, ExpertFlyer, which is already in beta and nearing production-readiness. AuthX partners closely with the Travel API's team, but it takes an expansive view of "front end," with some backend APIs under its ownership in order to allow the team to iterate and test consumer features quickly and autonomously. Our tech stack is React/Redux, Node.js, Golang, and Aurora RDS. This is a newly formed team built around a collection of hand-picked leaders from our organization, and we intend to move quickly on some big goals as the travel industry comes back to life.
If any of this excites you, give me a shout with "Hacker News" in the subject line. [email protected]
- Mitchell Stoutin, Sr Director of Engineering, TPG & EF
> It’s obvious that the police will want a device that produces more convictions, no point in disputing that.
Is that obvious? If this were as overwhelming an incentive as you say, we wouldn't have accurate breathalyzers for alcohol. But we do, and it's simple to see why. 1) Cops aren't the only customers; medical establishments, individuals, and workplaces also have a legitimate interest in measuring impairment. 2) Tech like this doesn't remain novel forever, it can be checked for accuracy, and if you made a device that exaggerated impairment your reputation would tank, your company name would become a political hot potato, and your sales would never materialize. 3) There is definitely a point in disputing the idea that cops are indiscriminate gangsters roaming the streets trying to lock up any citizen they don't like the look of. Police have their personal and institutional biases, but by and large, most are interested in tools that allow them to safely and fairly administrate the rule of law. Police don't have much career or institutional incentive to arrest someone for a DUI at a traffic stop or not—they just stop bad drivers and check. It's prosecutors who are trying to rack up conviction numbers as a matter of career advancement and political viability. But even that gets checked: their work will be subject to an adversarial legal system, at which point any evidence that the device doesn't work would come out in court and tank their conviction rate.
So... where do you see perverse incentives here, again?
How small the slight is.
How big the effect is.
Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)
Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.