Treat Them Like Adults

Will Larson has a controversial take on how the tech industry treated engineers during the boom years: we coddled them too much.

'I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults.'

The logic was always 'engineers won't want to do that' or 'we can't give them that news.' So companies shielded them from hard decisions, difficult trade-offs, uncomfortable realities.

But Larson argues this backfired. You can't put someone in a senior role if you can't hold them accountable. And you can't hold them accountable if you've been protecting them from everything hard.

'Actually it's not good for the engineers to be sheltered from what is important.'

This directly applies to how we raise children.

Every time you shield them from a difficult emotion, you rob them of the chance to build resilience. Every time you solve a problem they could struggle through, you take away their growth opportunity.

Larson's insight: the constraint of being held accountable is actually what allows people to take on bigger responsibilities. Coddling keeps them small.

The goal isn't to make childhood hard. It's to stop reflexively smoothing over every rough edge. Let them feel the difficulty. That's how they develop the muscle to handle more.