This Silicon Valley’s Sauce is Not So Secret Anymore

“Contribute to fostering a culture of psychological safety, inclusivity, collaboration and continuous improvement within the team through participation in retrospectives and feedback.”

This phrase featured in a run-of-the-mill ad for a senior front end developer that l saw last week from a Fintech company and it made my heart sing. They are not a Silicon Valley darling but a London based company. Not one of the unicorns with silver spoons in terms of the way they understand people topics, a growing scale-up in a crowded area. Like it, over the past few weeks, others had asked for similar things.

This is, undoubtedly, very encouraging. It means that two years after the Accelerate report revealed it to be foundational for any company with technological ambitions and a few years after the Google Aristotle findings that showed it to be paramount to any team’s chance to be highly performant in the digital world, and tens of years after academia first spoke about the topic, it is starting to matter at scale. That this Silicon Valleys secret sauce is not that “secret” anymore. And what great news that is for all of us!

Furthermore, this is not on the “what you get” list of the job ad but on the “what we need out of you” list which means the respective organisations recognises it not as a nice-to-have perk or add-on but as a sine qua non requirement to have a highly performant team.

What does this mean for the developer though? Likely nothing - when else have they been exposed to such a requirement? Chances are they don’t even know what it means and that they will find it a bit of a strange fad at first. That it will take that new team’s habits, conviction and knowledge to demonstrate the company’s commitment to the idea. That’s if they exist, if it’s more than just PR theatre and it probably is, they are of the new wave of startups “woke” enough to know that their profit and success hinge firmly on their ability to do the human work from hereon.