People Leading People: Camille Fournier, Former CTO of Rent The Runway, on Manager READMEs

Season 2 of People Leading People is here and for our fourth episode, we sat down with Camille Fournier, Former CTO of Rent the Runway and author of The Manager’s Path to talk Manager READMEs: Are they helpful or hurtful to your team?

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast network, and if you’re inspired by what you hear, give us ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. Continue reading for key takeaways, the full episode transcript and more ways to listen to the podcast.

On Manager ReadMes

“I think that it’s a good thing to write down and to know about yourself and to think about for yourself. I think when you then share it with people, I don’t think that it actually shortcuts that trust-building in a way that most people want it to short cut that trust-building because at the end of the day, you probably don’t know yourself as well as you believe you know yourself.”

“I mean, this has been true for me personally, you know throughout the years. Like, we all, I think we all have blind spots. We all have things we believe about ourselves very strongly that you know, I believe I am a very open person and you can tell me, you know, anything. You can give me any kind of feedback and I will be able to take it. And a lot of people believe that about themselves. A lot of Manager READMEs contain that sentiment. Very few people, probably myself included, are actually really able to do that.”

Advice for new managers

“I mean first things first like spend time with your team. It is, it is to this day, it is still shocking to me but you know, I think more and more people are getting it: If you’re not doing one on ones every week with everyone on your team, especially as a new manager, you’re not building trust. You can write all the READMEs you want in the world, you are not going to build trust with your team as if you are actually spending time with them. Doesn’t mean you know, if you’re a remote team you’re doing a zoom are you doing whatever but you are spending that one-on-one time with people you’re talking to them. You’re getting to know them getting to know them both of their work also as person.”

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People Leading People: Season 2, episode 4 | Camille Fournier (transcript)

Jillian Gora:  People Leading People is a podcast about the stuff that pops up when you lead people at work. Join Brennan McEachran, CEO of SoapBox and me Jillian Gora, Customer Experience at SoapBox, as we interview the people leaders that inspire us most. 

Jillian Gora:  Hey podcast listeners! On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about manager READMEs and whether or not they’re a bad trend.  Manager README documents are all the rage these days. Managers use them to communicate expectations to their team, and show a bit of vulnerability in the hopes of building trust with the people they manage. To many people these docs offer a way to fast forward through the sometimes awkward, sometimes annoying get-to-know-you phase of the manager employee relationship, but our guest, Camille Fournier, thinks they’re a waste of time. On today’s episode, we’ll explore why and talk about other ways managers can build trust with their teams.

Camille Fournier is the Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma, a financial company in New York City. Prior to joining Two Sigma, she was the Chief Technical Officer of Rent the Runway, served as a software engineer at Microsoft and spent several years as a technical specialist at Goldman Sachs. Camille is a well-respected voice within the tech community speaking on a variety of topics such as engineering leadership, distributed systems, scaling teams and technical architecture. In 2017, she released her book, The Manager’s Path: A guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change. Welcome Camille. So happy to have you with us. 

Camille Fournier: Thank you for having me always- always a pleasure to talk to folks. 

Brennan McEachran: Well, I really appreciate it. I think you know, I saw a tweet about Manager READMEs and thought, hey, there could be an interesting conversation here. I’m maybe someone you have a beef with because I’m the author of the now widely popular post that surfaced a lot of these READMEs. So I might be, I might be the reason why they’re spreading. You might be the reason why they’re- the spread is slowing and I thought, “Hey this could be a good conversation.” But-

Camille Fournier: Yeah

Brennan McEachran: Maybe before we jump into it, I’d love for you to share with the listeners your own background. How did you get into the seat you’re sitting in now?

Camille Fournier: Yeah, sure. So I have, I have a somewhat typical tech background, I guess I would say. I have a undergrad in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. I worked at Microsoft for a little while. I have a master’s degree in computer science. I worked at Goldman Sachs for a long time. So, I moved, I wanted to live in New York City, and so I took a job in New York City. Actually, I had no idea what Goldman Sachs was at the time that I interviewed there.

This was before, before the 2008 vampire squid era of investment banking and I actually had a great time. I was there for about six and a half years. When I left, so I did a bunch of mostly large-scale distributed systems development there. I left Goldman and went to a company called Rent the Runway which hopefully many of your readers, or listeners I should say, have heard of where I became the CTO there. And I, you know, that was a very- I was there for about four years. That was an amazing experience for me. I grew the team there from about 15 to about 65 and you know grew myself. I learned how to really be a manager really with, with walks through fire in a lot of ways.

Brennan McEachran: Yeah.

Camille Fournier: Which was awesome. I left there in 2015. I think, God time flies. I had, I just had another baby a few months ago, three months ago so I’m still a little like baby-sleep-deprived. 

Jillian Gora:  Yep, fair. 

Brennan McEachran: That’s totally fair.

Jillian Gora: Brennan, Brennan knows that feeling well. 

Brennan McEachran: Ours is five, ours is five months and I-

Camille Fournier: Oh yeah 

Brennan McEachran: I’m feeling it as well. 

Camille Fournier: Yeah. Yeah. So I took a couple years off and did a bunch of different things. I did a lot of teaching, actually engineering management. I wrote a book on engineering management called Manager’s Path, you know, attempted to start start-ups in various failed ways. And then I, about two years ago, I joined Two Sigma which is a hedge fund here in New York City. Very technical hedge fund. We have about 700 engineers at the company.

I run platform engineering, which is about a hundred -hundred or so of those engineers. We own all of the, you know, base platform systems everything from like the Linux distributions to all the developer tools, our monorepo to all of our bespoke storage systems, kubernetes all of that. So that, that is what I’m doing these days and helping with the engineering leadership here at Two Sigma.

Jillian Gora: Amazing. That’s a lot of engineers to oversee.

Brennan McEachran: A lot of engineering back there too, and I think, I love how you put it: You walk through fire with Rent the Runway. Or, I think you wrote it at some point saying, you kind of get promoted as the company gets successful and you just keep adding people below you- and you really learn right? One of the things that you have hopefully learned, or talking about are Manager READMEs and maybe why they’re not the best way to go about it, but for those who don’t know Manager READMEs are a document that you write about yourself as a manager. And the goal, or at least the intent, is to try to fast forward some of the, you know, trust-building pieces of the relationship-building phase of getting to know your direct reports. The idea being hey if we can kind of just be direct and open about you know some of the habits and tendencies that I have as a manager we can fast forward and jump right into, you know, a healthy happy productive working relationship. But maybe it doesn’t always go as planned. Maybe it’s not as helpful as it seems. I’d love to hear your thoughts, your reactions to it, why you sent the angry tweets? 

Camille Fournier: I think angry, angry is a is an overstatement. I would say I have, I have an opinion on them, and I try to express my opinions strongly when I have strong ones. But you know, I’m, I like to say many of my opinions are sort of strongly stated but loosely held a little bit. You know, I’m always open to, to being disproven, to changing my mind and I do change my mind about a lot of things.

So I’ve been hearing about Manager READMEs on and off for a while. They’ve become very popular recently within the last six to nine months I would say. But I think it’s, I think it’s interesting to, for the audience to hear that like, Manager READMEs are not a new concept. 

Jillian Gora: No.

Camille Fournier: You know, engineers for a long time have thought about, “How do I manage well?” And when you put people who are used to engineering, who are used to thinking about, “How do I teach someone how to use my code? I write a document for my code or read me for my code.” It is inevitable that at least some of those engineers, turned managers, will write a document for themselves that is how to work with me. A famous example of this actually is someone who I will not name but a very, very, very senior person at Google apparently did this many many years ago.

Brennan McEachran: Okay. 

Camille Fournier: So the first thing I would like for the audience to hear is that a lot of IC’s, individual contributors, particularly more senior ones who’ve been around the block, roll their eyes in a way that you would not believe at your Manager READMEs. And I think there is a, I think it’s like, like I think that is, you know, I may be more sensitive to that personally. But you know, the reason that they do that is that it seems very pretentious to a lot of people.

Brennan McEachran: Yep.

Camille Fournier:  To create a document that is basically like, “Here is how, you know, I want you to read this document about how to work with me.” 

Brennan McEachran: Yeah.

Camille Fournier: And I think a lot of people find that to be a very, just generally off-putting thing to do. Not all of them. Of course, like, you know, when I was tweeting about it, I certainly got a number of very reasonable people that were like, “Look, I think there’s nothing wrong with these. There’s a lot of value in them.”

Brennan McEachran: Yeah.

Camille Fournier: But there are definitely a lot of people out there who actually, when you write these, you are damaging your relationship with people in a way that you may not realize.

Brennan McEachran: It’s very…

Camille Fournier: It’s just, from the get-go.

Brennan McEachran: You’re exactly right. It’s very polarizing and even, you know, that post I wrote where, you know, was lucky enough people shared theirs outside of their own company with me and I post them online because I thought, “Hey. This would be a really interesting way to see into some of these organizations and how they’re managed and what it would be like to work there.” And the comments I got were, you know, one part, “These are great. I’m going to do them.” And one part, “Oh my God. I can’t believe people do this.” Right? Like that sounds like a terrible boss or terrible support and it would go back and forth between the two of those. Do you think it’s more about here’s a document to read about me? Like, do you think it’s more in the delivery than it is in the concept? 

Camille Fournier: So, you know, I think to break down my thinking on the matter, it’s a few things. First of all, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with articulating in written form the things that you believe about yourself and how you manage people, your management philosophy, the things you know you do well, the things you know you don’t do well. There is, like doing that written exercise is a great thing to do and I would actually recommend everyone do that at least once. 

Brennan McEachran: Yeah. 

Camille Fournier: I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing down some of the, like nuts and bolts of how to work with a person like, what hours are you in the office? What’s the best way to contact me? None of that is, you know, objectionable in any way. However, when it comes to the first document which is like who, what do I believe? What is my philosophy? How, what do I believe I’m good at? What do I believe I’m bad at? And you know, and how should you work with me beyond, again those nuts and bolts things.

I think that it’s a good thing to write down and to know about yourself and to think about for yourself. I think when you then share it with people, I don’t think that it actually shortcuts that trust-building in a way that most people want it to short cut that trust-building because at the end of the day, you probably don’t know yourself as well as you believe you know yourself.

I mean this has been true for me personally, you know throughout the years. Like, we all, I think we all have blind spots. We all have things we believe about ourselves very strongly that you know, I believe I am a very open person and you can tell me, you know, anything. You can give me any kind of feedback and I will be able to take it. And a lot of people believe that about themselves. A lot of Manager READMEs contain that sentiment. Very few people, probably myself included, are actually really able to do that.

And, and so what happens is that you write this thing down and you pour your heart into it and you give it to people and let’s say that they just like, they’re like, “All right, great. Like I read this, I believe this. And they start working with you and you don’t act that way because you’re probably not going to act that way all the time, maybe even most of the time. Like, there are a lot of very delusional people out there and, you know, so what happens is you’ve now actually made it harder to develop that trust, I think. You’ve actually, you’ve actually kind of..

Brennan McEachran: Very quickly broke that trust. 

Camille Fournier: Yeah, you know, you’ve really, you’ve really broken trust because what will likely happen, and I mean look, I’ve seen this happen. I’ve probably done this to people, is you project a particular image. You say a particular thing. You say, “I’m really open to feedback, come give me feedback, come give me feedback.”

Somebody believes you, naively. They come and give you feedback, and then you get mad or you react poorly or you, you know, you punish them in some way. And they realize, “Holy crap. Like I, you know, I’ve now damaged my relationship with my manager because I thought that they said that they would, you know, they would do this. And they just, they aren’t.” And I just, like I don’t like, I don’t like setting people up to be put in these gotcha situations. And I just, my, I do believe that a lot of what happens with these Manager READMEs is that, you know, we like to think that we’re being really transparent and we’re building trust and actually what we’re doing is we’re kind of putting our employees in a bind. 

The other thing that I think is kind of just, you know, you are in a power relationship with people and sometimes I think, you know, engineering manager or especially new engineering managers don’t, they really are uncomfortable with acknowledging that. Yeah, they can be very uncomfortable to acknowledge that. So, you know, you’re sort of- you’re forcing people to pretend that you are a thing that you believe you are even when you’re not. Kind of behaving that way and, that’s just, there’s something very uncomfortable about that kind of interaction to me.

I really don’t like that personally. 

Brennan McEachran: So do you think. I think there’s like a few things that are break it out. Right like most of them just by nature if we’re writing them about ourselves, they’re going to be aspirational over reality. Right? Like I aspire to be great at…

Camille Fournier: Yeah.

Brennan McEachran: These things, again, the gotcha situation’s a tough one because obviously no one knows how they’re going to react with, you know, infinitely variable type of feedback. Do you think, if they’re positioned to be “Hey, here’s what I aspire to be. Please, let me know if you find I’m not acting that way,” versus like, “Hey, here is here’s what you should expect of me?”

Jillian Gora:  Almost as a tool that I mean you’re almost, in that way, if you’re framing it that way, it almost feels like you’re giving your individual contributors a tool that they can use to then manage up and say, “Well, you said you’re open to feedback, but I just gave you feedback and you’re not. I’m confused. How should I be giving feedback?” Like could you argue that maybe? That it’s kind of, it could be empowering depending on how it’s framed?

Camille Fournier: I mean, in reality it will be empowering only if you actually do what you say you will do. And I just like, unfortunately, I cannot emphasize how rarely I see people actually walk-the-walk. So yeah, that’s you know, that’s just my personal lived experience of this. 

Brennan McEachran: If we take away that one gotcha, right? And I think the one gotcha that we’ve largely been talking about so far has just been the, “I’m super open to feedback. I don’t take things personally. Please bring me everything and anything at any point in time. You know, and I promise everything will be better for that.” If we take that away and we jump to, “Hey, here’s like a, you know, an about document. Here’s some of the lingo and slang that we use on our team and at our company. Here’s some of the processes and why we run them. And if you hear us use these words, this is what this means.” If we take away the one gotcha of, “Hey, I’m super open to feedback.” Do you think it still has value? 

Camille Fournier: Oh, yeah. I mean look, I think there is value. I think if you are like literally documenting very clear processes and things like that, there’s definitely value. It’s just that when I have read these, they are often much more like self confessionals a little bit. They’re much, much, much more about, “This is my personality. These are my quirks.”

That’s one of my, one of my least favorites is the quirks section because you know, I do think that when you’re a manager you do have quirks. I have quirks. We all have quirks. But what happens when people write those quirks down is they actually, instead of working on them and sort of committing themselves to like, “Look I know that I have these quirks and they’re actually probably not good, that’s why I’m kind of writing them down and admitting to them,” it actually tends to kind of reinforce them and say, “Look you knew I was this way. When you’re mad that I did X, Y, or Z like you knew I was this way.” And that is not okay in a manager to report relationship. Like, there are situations where that might be the right way to interact with a person. But like, when it comes to like, “I am the manager and you report to me and I know that like, it’s bad that I yell when I get frustrated and I write I have a quirk: I yell when I get frustrated…” And by the way, I am one of those people who has had a history of yelling when she gets frustrated. 

Brennan McEachran: Yeah.

Camille Fournier: That is not excusable behavior..

Brennan McEachran: Right.

Camille Fournier: …when I do it. So, you know, like I think that what I’ve just seen is people tend to stray much more into the, “my behaviors and expectations around my behavior.”

Brennan McEachran: And almost like, getting an out or an excuse for having some of those.

Camille Fournier: Yeah.

Jillian Gora: When I, when I’m in an individual contributor role, I do appreciate getting a bit of a heads up to say something like, you know, I know, and this was in actually a blog post I think, but I’ve had this experience before too where, you know, a manager says, “Hey, I might not be always praising you and giving you great feedback, but it doesn’t mean that you’re not doing a good job.” And hearing stuff like that is actually helpful because then instead of having that spinning top track in your mind of, “You haven’t given me feedback in a while, I wonder if I’m doing okay. I’m probably not doing a good job. That’s probably why they’re not giving me great feedback.” You can at least say, “Okay. They said that they’re bad at this. I’m just going to ask them about this one thing and make sure that it’s just the fact that they’re bad at giving feedback and not that it’s, that I’m doing a poor job.” And kind of having that as a top track and having that as a thing that I can go to to then say, “Hey, I know you said this about yourself. Can we just have a conversation?”

Brennan McEachran: Yeah, I mean, I can see both sides, right? Because if it’s used as an excuse, “I’m bad at giving feedback.” Well, a big part of your job as a manager is to…

Jillian Gora: Getting better at that.

Brennan McEachran: …and get better at it. But if it’s, “Hey, I’ve been told I’m bad at it. It’s something I’m really working on. If you find you’re in a situation where you need feedback, please let me know.”

Camille Fournier: Yeah.

Brennan McEachran: Right?

Camille Fournier: Yeah, you know, I definitely, right because like I sort of feel like, look as a manager if you want to, you have to work with the people that you have and expecting like, it’s a fine line right? There are times when you are a manager, you are allowed to manage your team to some extent, like however you want to and you will deal with the consequences of that. So if you don’t like giving feedback a lot, you are not probably going to manage people well who like to get a lot of feedback. And if that’s okay with you, then fine, like, you know, be upfront with it. But like you can say that’s fine, but you will lose people who want more feedback and I don’t think what will happen is that most of your team will just like proactively ask you for feedback. 

It is much more likely that they won’t do that and they will just feel sort of insecure or unhappy or whatever about the fact that they’re not getting this thing that they want. And again, maybe there are plenty of people out there who don’t care about that. And so if you want a team of people who match that? That’s fine. But you know, it’s not, it just doesn’t generally work particularly at like managing earlier in your career. Like, the more senior you become as a manager and the more senior the people that you are managing in some sense you could almost argue like, look if I’m a really senior manager you are expecting people who work for you directly, who are other managers to fall in line a little bit more because it’s just, you just like, it’s much less of a coaching relationship. It’s much less of like a mentoring relationship. It’s much more of like, “Look, we’re all adults here and we kind of know we’re just trying to get something done.” I wouldn’t say much less, but there’s, there can be less of that at the more senior levels. 

But when you are a new manager managing a team of individual contributors, and that’s, that’s the reason I care about this a lot is actually because I think trends like this hit those people the earliest. Right? It hits the people who are new to this job who don’t know what they’re doing. 

Jillian Gora: They’re the ones Googling trying to find answers. 

Camille: Yeah. They’re the ones that are like, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m stressed out. This is really really hard. What can I do to make this job easier? What can I do to do this job better?” And I think that grasping on something like this at that level can be very dangerous. Because you know, you’re not, you actually probably need to learn how to manage your whole team. You probably don’t have nearly as much flexibility to say my way or the highway at that level of management. 

So, you know, that’s that’s again where I think, I think it’s assuming a lot to assume that if you write it, that somebody especially who is so early in their career who’s being managed is going to be able to get out of that rabbit loop as you said, I’ve like, I’m not getting feedback. It’s all about me. I think it’s a little bit. I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation that just because you wrote it down and they’ve read it, that they’re going to be able to get out of that Loop.

Jillian Gora: Sure, so okay. So understanding that I think for a lot of people when they’re writing these Manager READMEs overarching what they’re trying to do is build that trust. Kind of have a little bit of transparency in some way just build a bridge between them and their direct reports. So if we’re saying, let’s just say these aren’t this isn’t maybe the right tool to do that, what would be two to three concrete tips that you would give to those new managers who are frantically Googling for management advice. How would you say, “Cool you’re new here. Here’s how you’re going to build trust with your team.” What would you, what would you tell that person? 

Camille Fournier: I mean first things first like spend time with your team. It is, it is to this day, it is still shocking to me but you know, I think more and more people are getting it: If you’re not doing one-on-ones every week with everyone on your team, especially as a new manager, you’re not building trust. You can write all the READMEs you want in the world, you are not going to build trust with your team as if you are actually spending time with them. Doesn’t mean you know, if you’re a remote team you’re doing a zoom are you doing whatever but you are spending that one-on-one time with people you’re talking to them. You’re getting to know them getting to know them both of their work also as person.

So that is absolutely by far the number one tool if you want to build trust you got to do the work. You got to put in the time. The other thing is like trust does take time, right, trust is not something that you can usually shortcut with anyone, right? You know, you’ve got to get to know people they’ve got to get to know you. You’ve got to have some successes together.

You’ve got to go through some hard times together. So it’s all about building the trust is all about putting in time in my mind. It’s all about, you know, spending time with them talking to them listening to them getting to know them you know,  helping them through projects helping them, you know succeed at things. Doing what you say you do.

So the nice thing I think about, the thing that I do think is very valuable about doing this README exercise, you don’t have to share it with your team. You can write it down and say these are, this is what I want to be. Like as a leader, I want to be these things and then write that down and you know every month or so ask yourself, “Am I being that leader that I said I wanted to be? These are these are the ideals that I hold. These are things I believe in myself. Am I being true to myself?” You know, I think that’s another, that’s a very useful part of this exercise that I would absolutely recommend everyone do. 

Brennan McEachran: Awesome. Okay, so I’ll summarize that, cause I thought there was a lot in there that was really good. One, like sit down every week with everyone on your team individually and just spend the time, because it takes time and that’s part of your job. Part of your job is to do that. I think a lot of new managers don’t necessarily feel like distracting their individual contributors, you know once a week and talking about life and work as part of their job and goals and career.

Two: Like follow up and follow through with your word and do what you say you’re going to do and build those little bridges that add up. And I think the last one which is great is like use the Manager README as your own document of tracking, “Am I acting the way in which I aspire to be?” 

Jillian Gora: like a manager don’t read me.

Brennan McEachran: Yeah.

Jillian Gora: That was a bad one. I’m sorry.

Brennan McEachran: A manager goals, goals vision board, Pinterest board, or something. 

Camille Fournier: Yeah. 

Jillian Gora: Yeah, great. Awesome. 

Brennan McEachran: Awesome. 

Jillian Gora: Okay. Well, we’ve come to that time in our episode where we want to ask you a secret question. So if you could pick a number between one and three, please. 

Camille Fournier: Okay. How about one? 

Jillian Gora: One, okay. So secret question number one, what’s the one thing you’ve done as a leader that has made you 10 times more productive?

Camille Fournier: Hmmm, one thing I’ve done as a leader that has made me ten times more productive. Oh boy, let me think. I think, I guess, you know, it’s always hard to say how do you even measure productivity as a manager but…

Jillian Gora: Five times or 10 times more productive? 

Camille Fournier: Yeah, so, so look, I actually pride myself in being kind of lazy in terms of like I do not like working crazy crazy hours. I actually am always looking to say, “How can I, you know, I’ve, take the hours that I’m going to be in work and I’m going to do as much done as possible in these hours and then not have to worry about it after hours”  And so I think that the way that I do that is a few things. Like first of all, when you actually restrict your time, you don’t do things that are less important, all that often.

I mean you have to kind of learn how to measure what is important and work on what’s important and just not worry about the stuff that isn’t important. And so I guess if I could say, you know maybe 10 times but I don’t if it was 10 times but like really just aggressively focusing on what is actually important for me to be doing right now. And one way you can do that is by saying. “I’m not going to let myself work 60-80 hour work weeks. I’m going to you know cut that off. I’m going to say, “All right. What can I get done? I’m coming in at work at 9:00 a.m. I’m leaving work at 5 p.m. What can I get done in these hours and I’m not going to touch work for the rest of the day and just you know, and how do I make sure I’m getting done what actually needs to get done in that time.”

You know, you have to learn how to do that right? I think most of us work into that kind of schedule, but I actually think that forcing yourself to be restricted about how much time you spend thinking about work and actually working will force you to figure out how to prioritize, will make you more productive.

Brennan McEachran: Saying no, saying no to things that don’t move before it.

Jillian Gora: And always, you know, I think I do agree like ruthless prioritization of just what is the work that actually needs to get done and it’s not necessarily always about saying no, but just understanding why you’re doing something and then being able to explain that to people if they’re wondering why you didn’t do certain things or whatever.

Brennan McEachran: Yeah.

Jillian Gora: Very cool. Awesome. Well over to you now, we’d love to know: What are what are you working on? Do you have any asks of our listeners anything you want to share with the community? 

Camille Fournier: Yeah. Sure. Well, I guess obviously I have written a book. It’s called The Manager’s Path. If you are in management, engineering management, if you’re management curious, I’ve had a number of people who are just starting out in their career who have actually enjoyed reading it.

So, you know, if you haven’t, check it out. I am always hiring. I work for Two Sigma. If you are in New York City and looking for jobs, check us out. It’s actually a incredibly nice place to work. I’m very happy there and I would, you know, I would love to see more great people come join our company. And you know, If you agree with me about Manager README or disagree with me about Manager READMEs that is cool.

I, you know, I think a lot of people get surprised by strong opinions on some topics and they think it’s like I think people are bad for doing doing something. I do not think anyone who wants to do Manager READMEs or has done them is a bad person. Oh my goodness, I absolutely don’t think that. I do think you should be aware of the potential downsides.

That’s, that’s, my you know, that’s that’s my only goal in this is to say, “Look you want to do them just go in eyes wide open. This is not going to solve your trust problems overnight. This is not going to, you know, immediately make you a better manager with your team and there will be some people who will find you a little bit silly for having done it in the first place but you are, you want to do it? Like go nuts, management…”

Jillian Gora: Fill your boots. 

Camille Fournier: You know, like I’m not going to come over to your office and berate you for being a bad manager. I promise. I promise.

Jillian Gora: Awesome. 

Brennan McEachran: Awesome. 

Jillian Gora: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Brennan McEachran: Really appreciate your time.

Camille Fournier: Thank you for having me. 

Jillian Gora: It was awesome. 

Brennan McEachran: Thank you. 

Jillian Gora: Thank you so much.