Top all-time · #15376
Psych Safety
Company blog · psychsafety.comcareerbusiness
Psych Safety is the company blog at psychsafety.com, writing about career and business. Since 2025, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this site for its write-up of Google's Project Aristotle, which found psychological safety was the key factor in highly effective teams. Commenters cite it as evidence for hiring and team-culture points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Our team of experts around the world will help you make psychological safety real. We are psychological safety. For Your Organisation For You and Your Practice We don’t just teach one model or framework of psychological safety. We teach all […]
Most-linked posts?
- /googles-project-aristotle/3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-06-04
What Hacker News says?
Studies have been performed and they come to the conclusion the highest performing teams are the ones with greatest psychological safety: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
Comment linking /googles-project-aristotle/
on “Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI”Submitted The Vasa as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility. And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their w…
Comment linking /googles-project-aristotle/
on “Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output (2023)”Submitted John Boyd and the OODA Loop as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYears ago when Google still maintained a facade that they weren't a Corporate America defense contractor, theyconducted a 2 year study study into what made a team effective: Project Aristotle [1]. The key factor? Psychological safety. Fast forward to the present day and we are in permanent layoff culture. The maverick facade from Big Tech was dropped long ago. Employees are graded on a curve and 5-10% of those regar…
Comment linking /googles-project-aristotle/
on “A manager is not your best friend”The interviews are wrong. Check with your favorite frontier LLM. There has been a lot of research on what's predictive for job performance and what's not, but it's largely ignored. An easy example: Google's "Project Aristotle" - https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ tl;dr: psychological safety was the determining factor of highly effective teams. Then Google goes and does large-scale layoffs. Think abou…
Comment linking /googles-project-aristotle/
on “You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title”This is the real problem with performance reviews in companies, which then feeds into opportunities, promotions and compensation. It's just a popularity contest. And this is particularly harmful to people who are neurodivergent, particularly if they're on the autism spectrum, because neurotypical people, who end up making all these decisions, view such people negatively for literally no reason. You could spin up a t…
Comment linking /googles-project-aristotle/
on “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2002) [pdf]”All of these tech companies have fallen into the Wall Street trap and it will be their ultimate undoing. Meta probably more than most. I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in te…
Comment linking /googles-project-aristotle/
on “Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective”I don't agree with this argument. In the 1990s (and earlier) and 2000s startups were "rebels", almost countercultural (to Corporate America at least). Think about the famous 1984 Macintosh ad that evoked George Orwell. There's a famous story about Steve Jobs remembering a magazine called the Whole Earth Catalog from the 1970s with a picture captioned "Stay hungry, stay foolish". If you listen to Steve Jobs talk abou…
Comment linking /googles-project-aristotle/
on “The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon”