Seek First to Understand

> Whenever you arrive in a new context, you will see a whole pile of things that you would just love to sort out. If only these people could just… communicate better, work in smaller chunks, have more effective meetings, resolve that silly political spat, take a moment to listen to that quiet developer who clearly understands what is going on, care about that build, document or even automate that weird query they seem to run every three days.

> The thing is, this is just how they get work done. If you point it out, they will still do it because this is what works. And you can’t fix the world overnight. And they don’t know what you know. And you don’t know what they know. And you may be wrong about a bunch of this anyway!

Wow. These two paragraphs are verbatim the biggest issues I've been dealing with in my current workplace. It's like Dan has been monitoring me and taking notes. It's really encouraging to hear about his experience and lessons learned — especially because of how much of an emotional struggle it has been to establish an official data engineering presence on our very old-fashioned team. It helps me know that the things I've been struggling with are much more common than I realized.