There are no adults in the room
letterstoanewdeveloper.com
letterstoanewdeveloper.com
If you've realized this, you are one of the adults in the room.
If you're listening to a person who claims to have it all figured out, you're the cultist.
>there are no true adults in the room at any organization.
Im an engine mechanic by trade, and ive worked in shops with no adults. theres no OSHA "days free" sign because management is well aware that people are getting hurt and doesnt need to call attention to it. These are shops with a high percentage of "fatal 4" accidents: flying objects, swinging objects, rolling objects and lack of PPE. disability rosters are usually 3-4 people deep. guards on machines are routinely off, or if present, dangling by a bolt. your senior-most tech is a temp. Most of the people you work with can remember at least one amputation in the past year.
The absolute worst Ive seen had a mechanical maintenance tech with 3 missing fingers (crushed that year) and a manager with a bone growth stimulator on his arm from a mangling accident at a metal lathe he wasnt qualified to operate.
For white collar jobs, that seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Dilbert wouldn't be as popular otherwise.
There’s the risk of sinking the business by doing dumb things, but that takes a while, and many execs have made a career out of hopping from company to company, collecting giant paychecks and not sticking around long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their idiocy.
I don't know the story-telling skills of GGP so your guess is as good as mine.
The net result was that this 600 pounds got slowly put on my foot, rather than slamming onto it. That was the difference between minutes of pain and months of rehab.
(And, yeah, it falling may or may not have been my fault...)
In most white-collar jobs. My first white-collar job involved (among other things) probing live 270VDC circuits, overseeing tests in liquid-nitrogren-cooled chambers, and working in close proximity to live radiating antennas. Sure, I spent most of my time at my desk, but that was still ample opportunity for serious, permanent injury.
I see the same thing in white collar jobs, but the damage is harder to see. Physical and mental health rather than broken bones and lost limbs.
There's no reason everyone should have to be a hero all the fucking time. But often the only way to fix it is if everyone refuses. Not saying unionize, but if everyone slows down to a sustainable pace then what can they do about it?
Edit: I see I cut too close to reality for some here and I want to apologize if you felt this sarcasm was off base but really I feel that my comments are indicative of reality and I am bringing something new to the conversation here.
Exactly what they did starting in the 70's and 80's, start shipping the jobs to someplace else. There's always somebody who is desperate. I'm not personally against trade with countries such as China, but it damn sure needs to be more accountable than it has been.
Unfortunately I don't think the way we traditionally have unions in the states enough. We need a much larger group of people to stand up and demand a better system. We might need to have unions for entire industries ala some European countries, and even that might not be enough.
A rational group cannot break the trend, if the psycho alpha male co-worker still wants to fight for priority (and VP status). Even a union in one company cannot enforce anything, because anything that lowers productivity will destroy the company.
Any union that has power across multiple companies ends in restrictive practices, anti-competitive behaviour, and barriers to entry to the workforce, where the psycho alpha male union boss calls the tune (mafia all over again). Then whole national industries die in the face of cut-throat international competition ...
When I was a new developer (the topic of that entire blog is advice to new developers) that was a surprise.
> not only are the solutions never clear, the problems are never clear either.
Love that description!
I can see both sides of this. I've been in situations where, when multiple options are presented, the groupthink is "well... there's no easy answers". To the extent that there's no one 'perfect' option, yes, but there are definitely some demonstrably/qualitatively bad options. But without some agreement that some people in the room do have the experience to make some judgements, decisions are left to 'populate vote'.
The other issue I've seen is that people just look for "solution X" and are unprepared to deal with the new questions/problems that arise from now having essentially a new business landscape.
20 years ago, I helped a company move from paper order forms (taking weeks to process) to electronic - a month's orders from hundreds of reps from around the country were entered, correctly, in 10 hours. Literally overnight, it changed their entire business, in terms of predictions, materials ordering, shipping/logistics - all of the previous processes were now up for rethinking and rebuilding. The shift happened so fast - this was, essentially a skunkworks projects - that it created a lot of internal political upheaval few were prepared for.
The core I was getting at is even when problems are clear and solved, the solution will often bring about new 'problems'.
Businesses cannot afford to be wishy washy, there are long term infrastructure and process investments that must be made - there are different ways they can be made but you need to grok the costs and benefits to appropriately make or reverse those decisions without exposing your business to ruin.
In fact, when you get a job, you are now an adult in the room, so you better act like it. It's one of the many ideas that when you bring it up to the conscious level it's drop-dead obvious, but the idea that there will be other responsible people can lurk in the lower parts of your mind for a long time, and it can take a lot of time to clear the idea out. Thinking about it consciously is unfortunately not a full solution to that problem, but it certainly can be a huge help.
It's the same sort of thing as imposter syndrome; it's not that you're literally an imposter, in fact many sufferers of imposter syndrome may well be above average, it's a statement about internal perceptions.
I was blown away that anyone actually had that attitude toward others. I was probably 21 I think?
I mean, I get it on one level with respect to politics, but screw that.
This article is changing a familiar meaning, or speaking in a more limited way (though for a constructive and worthwhile message).
It's true that people in organizations don't have all the answers, and you also shouldn't expect to have all your ducks lined up for you anymore.
But the article could also encourage the naive idea that the organization doesn't know anything, and that everyone is totally fumbling along.
We currently have dotcom employers who want cheap and impressionable labor, encouraging the idea that experience is useless (e.g., big dotcom CEO proclaiming they only want to hire 20yos), and the article doesn't help counteract that big-corporate messaging.
In reality, unless you're at a startup of only 20yos, you'll have battle-scarred people who've seen some mistakes before, and who'll be able to recognize and avoid a lot of similar mistakes in the future. And hopefully they'll try to pass on some of that experience the easier way, to those listening, and through good practices.
There is some poetic justice, though, to the cyclic nature: we go from being a new developer who overestimates themselves and underestimates everyone else, to being an experienced developer (who has finally grown to be half as smart as we initially assumed we were)... and we get ignored/dissed by the new-grad hires. :)
Of course, the more-experienced people don't know near everything. They avoid some mistakes they've seen before, and are maybe more likely to recognize when they're staring at a potential new mistake... but, to some degree, they're winging it, like the article said.
I had a "non traditional" education.
I was a great High School student, but once I was in college I struggled, mostly due to non educational issues (poor reading comprehension, depression, general issues I think would be termed ADHD) and I dropped out. I managed to work my way into the tech industry with luck and just making stuff work. The fact that I didn't and wasn't going to know what to do I chalked up to my own reading comprehension and other issues. So I just accepted it and kept "moving forward".
Meanwhile a lot of friend continued on through college being very successful and accomplishing a lot and then... really struggling when the working world wasn't fair, and perhaps most importantly didn't provide a prescribed path to high fives, good grades and knowing they were doing it right and would get good outcomes.
So I'm often working with CS grads and I see the same thing from some of them, folks struggling when they're not told what to do, how, and confidant in their own actions.
Education seems to provide a lot of specific environments that just don't exist outside that and it tends to be a bump in the road for a lot of people.
Personally, don't think it would take a great deal of adjustment to really improve the structured educational setup that would provide specific curriculum ... but also more open ended experiences.
Some folks who completed it with me went on to work on a CS degree as well.
We talk a lot and many of them think a bootcamp like experience before a CS degree would be a good idea. A sort of fast paced, intense, and "ok now it is time for you to hit the internet and figure out steps 7 through 10" might be a good place to start for a lot of them.
But more specifically to your point working with people is so important. I did some customer service years ago, and I find myself using that all the time, no job asks for it, but when talking to customers (and people who talk to customers) it is indispensable.
Several people in my program wanted to do fun stuff like work with video games, which is totally fine! But they were not prepared for the not-so-fun linear algebra, Unix gruntwork, UML modeling and algorithm analysis involved in the course study. Sadly some people washed out, others cheated their way through it (neither of which is exclusive to CS students, to be sure). Seems like doing bootcamp first would give them a chance to decide not to go with CS and just start their career from there, or do something else altogether. Or like your cohort, discover that they just want to know more.
And yeah, nothing taught me how to work with people like working for tips–your livelihood literally depends on your figuring out how to make them happy! Or at least making them think they're happy :)
He rushed through college and graduated quickly with good grades (< 4 years if I remember correctly). I putzed around, had bad habits, muddled my way through every course, got 90% through my degree and said "fuck it, I can't do this school thing anymore" in my 5th year and got a job.
I never finished my degree, but he languished while I excelled in my career. He's at least as smart if not smarter than me.
What I did do is co-op (work for a semester, and then take classes for a semester). I wrote my own software. I created my own websites. I built and managed a primitive social network for my gaming buddies. I took a generic job at a no-name mortgage company for very little pay and worked my way up. He didn't do any of these things. He got out into the real world expecting things to be handed to him, and it never happened. He never did the work-work, just the school-work.
I don't know how else to account for it, we went to the same schools. I simply didn't learn the same lessons he learned. Most of what I still build on to this day was the more practical in the field work from the bottom up and fight for it experience. His was from schooling.
From what I can see, most people are trying to do their best but being a staff principal senior engineer does not necessarily you can answer everything (but usually they know who to ask or what to do to get an anwser)
It is not that people are incompetent, but you can't be an expert at everything.
Agree 100%.
I tell people who are speaking for the first time that it is likely they are among the top 1-3 experts in the room on their subject (unless it is super basic). This is because knowledge is so vast, and, in the tech industry, so ephemeral. (Some kinds of knowledge aren't ephemeral, but many kinds are subject to rapid evolution.)
"What should a student know?" "Everything"
"What should a lab technician know?" "Almost the same as the student"
"What about a graduate?" "In which book is that thing that the student should know?"
"And the associate professor?" "Where is this book?"
"And the professor?" "Where is the associate professor?"
The higher someone is the less overall they know. I know regulars that I would put way higher than some of our experts. And its not only technical knowledge but also problem solving, attitude and craftsmanship.
Thats what happens when promotions are given based on "years worked" or "office politics" instead of work excellence.
Sad reality in a lot of companies in IT.
Promotions to new positions based on performance in the previous position don't always work out great either.
I'd suggest their skillset changes as they grow into their new role. As they transition from writing code to people wrangling, the code skills stop being important and new ones take their place. Same with attitude, they have to transition to a new focus.
Yet this industry interviews them like they are expected to.
My take is that engineers between like 4 and 15 years experience and are not managers of some sort have the hardest duties. As a novice you get help or are not handed the really hard tasks and as senior you talk about the hard tasks or do some pre-study and leave the implementation as a exercise to someone else.
Promotions are more about having a ticket away from hard engineering tasks than engineering competence.
I can't count the number of people I worked with who sold me their dev team as the universal weapon for software engineering. Just to see them cobble together a solution on outdated tech that they didn't even understand half as good as they said.
I think we should be more humble. Which is hard, because everyone wants to be seen as valuable.
This is the symptom of an industry that do not value experience and even oppose it.
There are places and teams that do have competent, experienced people that know how to solve tricky problems, and there are also teams where too many key people basically don't know anything and attempt to silence the voices of anyone who have experience and expertise from making them look dumb.
In some places "everyone is trying their best" to solve tough problems, in other places "everyone is trying their best" to get promoted. These two orgs are not the same.
Every adult who becomes a parent seems to realize very quickly that their parents also had no clue WTF was going on.
So yeah, no different with what we do, since we're literally always building new things that haven't been done before.
"Where do people get the confidence to say that their work is so uniquely novel that it's "something that has never been done before in the history of the universe", that the field is obviously totally different from another field they know nothing about, etc. ?" --Dan Luu
I think it is less that these things "have never been done before" and more "we haven't bothered to learn anything from people who've done things like this before". Same with parenting.
Regarding the parent issue and disregarding companies for a moment.
Not sure what you mean exactly by having no clue. You mean things like the family finances / jobs / schools stuff or parenting rules or what to do with illnesses and stuff like that?
Because I think saying nobody has a clue is a bit harsh. Some people are indeed more organized and have a better grasp on their plans and outlooks. I wouldn't say my parents had "no clue" or could have afforded to have no clue about what was going on.
I often hear this and it's probably meant as some sort of encouragement or anti-impostor syndrome talk, but it can also backfire. There is indeed value in thinking about how your family is faring, whether the finances are working out, whether you should move for a better job. It would be foolish to say nobody has any clue, so doing anything without thinking about it will be just as good.
Except that line should kick in WAY before the VP level. Getting out of the "schoolkid mentality" is key to success in your career.
* if you're blocked on a task, you need to specifically tell your boss and/or the person blocking you
* if a task is stalled on someone else's desk, you need to go chase it down, not just say "not my problem anymore"
* if a process is broken, you need to work on fixing the process, not just complaining or shrugging
Basically, you need to focus on SUCCESS and RESULTS, not just effort and following the rules.
Putting that together really helped give me the push to start my own business... if founders are just people with an idea who do work to make a company, I can be a founder.
Being mostly self-taught, I often feel like I don't have any ammunition "against" the more academic folks, and it makes it difficult to maintain an open/curious mindset. What do I need to prove to stop the constant attempts to gaslight me? I strive to be a team player, but the amount of condescension is maddening sometimes.
1) Focus more on assisting your peers with their work. This doesn’t mean telling them what to do, but look for people who are struggling to keep their head above water on work that you know how to do well, and help them out of that place.
2) Let people win. Not when it’s important to you, but know when you’re in the “I’m right but this isn’t going to sink our project” place and let them have those wins. It will help take their “make sure that one stays in line” radar off you. Bonus points if you can make them feel like you learned something from them.
3) Quit. I don’t mean right away, but if you’re not generally enjoying your workplace, for ANY reason, or even for NO reason—quit. Some of this is basically like dating. When you don’t like someone, you just keep looking. There are more fish in the sea, as they say.
4) Remember that disagreements are fundamental to collaboration. There simply isn’t time to reach consensus on everything, even in a zero asshole environment. So teams are built on sparse networks of trust. There are likely a very small number of bottom lines that hold the org together. Everything else is a “nice to have”. Keep that in mind, and if you want to feel valued at a high level, you’re going to need to figure out what those bottom lines are, who is trusting who to watch them, and how you can help them long enough to become part of that trust network.
5) I heard a quote recently that I’ve been thinking a lot... Paraphrasing: “The master doesn’t convince anyone she knows the right way. She just works, and her work is flawless.” Just something to think about when you’ve got an assignment that doesn’t quite match what you think the ultimate strategic goal should be. You can still execute at a high level and feel good about that.
What is their behavior? Are there any more-charitable explanations for their behavior?
It's fine to doubt and to question - that's how we learn - but they may have experience and competence that you're discounting. I hope you're lucky and work with seniors who can give honest answers, like "we've always done it this way, we're not sure it's optimal" when appropriate, and good explanations otherwise.
2. I do not think the expression "adults in the room" is meant to describe omniscient individuals, I believe it refers to the quality of judgment and motivation people have.
I believe adults and uncertainty are orthogonal.
3. The general point this essay is making is correct.
Workplaces are full of people who are not good at their job, only think about their bottom line and will resist anyone threatening their safety by trying to 'help' as the author suggests.
I'm looking forward to a blog post on how to navigate office politics, because that is the most important skillset of working at any large corporation, as soon as you have a mediocre skillset that isn't obviously mediocre to the manager caste.
> goes for the politically correct never-offend-anybody stance of 'nobody knows eeeeverything, right?'
I feel like you may have unreasonable expectations - everyone starts out with a mediocre skillset. Do you expect everyone to be experts? Or are you simply frustrated with the corporate ladder?
Specifically, using "workplace principles" (actually look these up if you want a quick laugh) to cover for the mistakes of tech managers and/or when junior devs didn't deliver 100% with almost zero guidance or backing.
What is not brought out much is, well if you cannot use the standard of knowledge and competence that school and childhood taught you to expect, what should you expect? The one-sentence answer is too vague to really serve as a useful guideline.
My wife, when working one of her first jobs, had a boss who was such a crack addict that she cleaned out the cash register of her own business every night, forcing my wife to ask the first several customers of the day for exact change. This, is not just not perfect, it's not ok, and you would want to quit any job where the boss is like that. But, she didn't have enough experience yet to know what was the actual, real-world level of expectation you should have for how together the people in charge should be.
Perhaps I am expecting too much from one article, but it mostly seems to say (properly): "don't expect the same standard of knowledge and competence that your childhoold trained you to expect", without saying much about what to put in its place.
When I was a junior being handed design or detailed work specs it seemed like part of an over-arching grand plan. Now I realize.. we just hang on and try to stay alive; albeit with-in something resembling a meta-narrative.
Sometimes, regardless of age or experience, you have to decide when you should step up as the "adult" in the room and either leave or call something out as crossing a personal / professional ethical boundary.
Big tech co's and startups try to word HR legalese and cultural "principles" to subvert and minimize the affect of personal boundaries and expression.
If you want to learn about a company's workplace health, ask what they define "honesty" as, from the standpoint of a founder and that of a new college grad / employee working for them.
But what bewilders me is that there ARE achievements in the world that you have to wonder how they succeeded. The engineers and scientists of NASA put men on the moon without email and mostly paper based information sharing systems. You can't just muddle your way though such efforts - how did that mission succeed? It is REALLY the case that a handful of "more aware than most" individuals had a such a strong direction providing influence on their peers (or subordinates - or superiors even) that made such an achievement possible? It seems like stretch to me.
How did they do it, if most of them were just muddling their way through?
Now, they also failed spectacularly a few times.
Email or Slack do not change anything.
The archive of the comment is here:
https://thelistservearchive.com/2013/09/13/older-and-wiser/
("the listserve" was an experimental mailing list where a member was chosen at random to post to the rest of the list)
But most people are completely oblivious to that fact.
It’s much more comforting to focus on things like clean code, anything you can devise a set of rules for and read a big book about and then action the advice in the book. See, best practices say we should do this.