So if you ever took a psychology class, or attended a fancy party with someone who did, you might be familiar with the marshmallow experiment. My wife will ask my kids from time-to-time “do you want to do your homework now or later?” It might not come as a surprise to you that they always say “later”. On these kinds of requests, I have been known to cryptically utter the comment “one marshmallow” within earshot.
I have found myself doing the same thing at work. When building teams and products, sometimes people like to make the easy decisions first. Ask for the strongest engineer to be on your team. Pick the shortest task to complete at the start of the sprint. There are lots of places where you can find a clear “one marshmallow” moment.
Sometimes you benefit from delaying that immediate gratification. For career management purposes, you might need to take a different approach to deliverables. Sometimes you might actually benefit from this too. I have seen multiple times when people have delayed the most risky thing on their project, to the end, only to have that blow up and cause them to miss a deliverable. If you defer taking the easier tasks, you might make some painful conversations less painful by taking on the riskier work first, and making adjustments early in the delivery process. We can discuss the pain of changing deadlines later. Let’s get back to those marshmallows!
Deciding when you want to take one marshmallow vs two marshmallows is important. If you are learning to become a manager, it might be easier for you to manage a strong engineer who basically does not need managing. What will you learn from that? A large number of engineering managers optimize themselves for this situation, and essentially push all the necessary crucial conversations and decision making elsewhere. At one point in my career, I was one of a few managers of teams who did not have any names to contribute to a reduction-in-force moment. The leader of the group quite rightly asked everyone else “why aren’t you addressing the problems in your teams instead of just waiting for me to RIF them for you?”
It is a really good question. I had already put the people who needed corrections on performance improvement plans, and in some cases they did not recover. I chose to take on the work of trying to improve people on my team, as well as taking some of the “more interesting” management challenges. Eventually it became clear to everyone that when you got moved to one of John’s teams, you were either a high maintenance rockstar, or a struggling developer. The challenge for some people was figuring out which was which.
We are coming up on the month of March. This is “international quit your crappy job” month for many people, because your bonus check is in the bank, and you did not get the rewards you were expecting for your work.
When looking at your next job, will you have lots of experience with tough projects and tough situations because you are a two marshmallow thinker? Or will you struggle to be considered for more lucrative opportunities and upgrades to your role because you opted for one marshmallow one too many times?
It is… food for thought.
Thank you for reading along! In the spirit of today’s post, I suggest you buy this clearly-Amazon-affiliated-hideously-overpriced bucket of marshmallows. You can use this to experiment on anyone in your household as to whether or not they are a one or two marshmallow person. See you next week.
