During a round of layoffs, it is natural to feel an amount of relief when we are spared. One might reach out to make sure they are doing alright and continue with the rest of your life occasionally touching bases with them if you build good enough rapport during your time together. As Dave Chappelle puts it everything is funny till it happens to you. To me this joke means if you haven’t experienced both ends of the equation it is hard to have perspective. Been in the industry a hot minute? You have probably experienced a termination. My favorite are the fun ones, nothing on the calendar and suddenly HR is joining the call as if the manager is unable to let you know to dust off your resume because employe xyz access has been revoked. But this is not about the process, reasons, or who is at fault – instead let’s concentrate on the after.   

What does it mean to leave no one behind? Variations of this phrase are usually popularized by institutions that operate, behave, and foster brotherhoods (not the travelling pants one) but military and brothers in blue to pick a few. These institutions have the type of true stories about brotherhood that make you want to join the rangers, heck become a navy seal not necessarily for the training or serving but for the lifelong brotherhood. Why can’t we as a community have some of that?

As an industry we don’t see each other as being members of a brotherhood. This could be because we don’t consider what we do a craft or because we worship the outliers, gods we know by name like John Carmack. I don’t have a good answer for you but luckily, we don’t need one to leave no one behind.

In no order of importance here are some of the things we can do for our engineering brothers. Doing any of these things or all these things will get us closer to innovating and flourishing faster than any other industry.

Stop scaring the junior developers and would be junior developers! Here is the thing, unless someone already invented Matrix type technology where you can learn something at mastery level by just plugging into the computer, the junior developers of today will be the seniors of tomorrow. Be honest, don’t promise fame and bags of money, but the craft is not dead, and AI is far from killing it. Things to do instead: get them indoctrinated into the brotherhood, inject passion about the craft, and talk to leadership to see if there is room for internship programs (add to the list).

Promote humility instead of glory. Granted we engineers have a song and dance routine with our egos but there is always room to grow and learn from others.  We might lose some on this one and that’s ok – sometimes just like the student, humility doesn’t come until the ego is ready. Great things are built when many good smaller pieces are put together.

Really care about your engineering brother. We often hear we don’t go to work to make friends or coworkers are not friends. There is nothing inherently wrong with the statement and not what this is about. Care enough about the craft to care about the craft others practice and produce. So, this really means, if you see areas others can improve, provide guidance. I keep hearing advice that says producing code doesn’t get you promoted, to only work on things with visibility, and there is nothing wrong with that but don’t neglect building the foundation of your engineering department by elevating the craft.

Debug the community. This one should be easy for you all. You don’t need to be a manager with weekly 1:1 to touch bases and see if anyone is stuck especially working in the same company. Now extend this outward, reach out to previous brothers in arms, see how they are doing, get a different perspective on the tech landscape as they see it and take a moment to see if you can be useful to their craft. Being useful is reciprocal without looking for it, by teaching you grow.

This is by no means extensive, but I do hope we continue the conversation and build a community that topples even the sciences.

Photo by Leah Newhouse: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-enjoying-music-concert-325521/