I can only show you the door. You're the one who has to walk through it.
--Morpheus
Previously, I have written concerning issues I have with my business partner. They include the possibility of paying $700 for a single, static web page. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have discovered the secret. And for just 20 easy payments and one really hard payment, I will share that secret with you:
Patience.
Patience is a weird, psychologically advanced and abstract concept. You probably haven't heard of it. Normal people probably don't use it much. I think this is literally the first time I've deliberately used it.
It turns out, sometimes other human beings just have a completely different way of reasoning about the world, and I can't just tell them the right answer (for the purposes of this post, and as you may know already, I am always right, about everything, all the time). I have to show them. Slowly. Sometimes you have to just lead them there, and let them figure it out for themselves.
I watched an SDE III do this in a meeting at Amazon once. In about two to five sentences, this senior engineer had not only proven that I was wrong but eloquently swayed me completely to his side and convinced me that his strategy was the right one (I had unwittingly been operating on an assumption that I thought was the team's charter, and he directly challenged that assumption head on and said we should re-define our role in the organization). That part was actually normal, logical arguing. However! Within 10-30 minutes of arguing, he convinced every other member on the team...except one. And this one guy, he wasn't listening. He didn't see. I deployed Passionate Argument. No effect. I deployed Passionate Argument again. Repeatedly. I finally had to resort to my ultimate weapon, the one that almost never fails: Passionate Argument + Whiteboard. It was all Ineffective. But the senior dev did something completely different. He talked patiently with the last, stubborn supporter of the Old Way of doing things, and actually listened. And I don't mean listened as per the rules of the debate. I mean he really listened, a lot, like for tens of minutes, and asked questions, and they were still talking after the meeting was over. I watched them go off into the hallway, watching the senior engineer just listening to the broken tenets of the Old Way, pretending he didn't already know each one by heart (i was the only one around long enough to remember), gaining traction in the argument inch by painful inch, and I thought to myself "I never want to do that." Wait, no I didn't. I mean, in real life, yeah that's what I was thinking but for the purpose of this story, I officially thought...something poignant about patience.
Anyway. I never wanted to use patience. Turns out that's an essential skill. So I'm going to get really good at it right now, as fast as I can. I'm sure that's how this works. This is going to be a hard one to master. Typically, my interaction with people of opposing points of view is to push evidence in their face in real life, or skim past most of what they've written in some blog (or worse, stack overflow). Or assume they are just dumb and come home and write mean things about them in my blog. In real life, you can't do that.
In real life, when I am arguing with someone, I can occasionally see about 1, sometimes 2 steps ahead in their chain of logic. My entire life, I have wanted a remote control with a fast forward (not continuous fast forward, but more of the dvd 'next chapter' kind) button that would let me skip to the 2nd or 3rd of the arguments they were about to make, because I didn't want to bother listening when I already knew what they were going to say (I also like to do this with during dramatic moments in TV shows like Lost--for example in Lost, anytime two and only two characters are talking but not looking at each other and instead are staring poignantly into the distance, that conversation is just emotional/relationship/drama filler, and has nothing to do with advancing the plot). Anyway.
It looks like the thing I really need to do is be patient with other people. I hate it, but I love making money more than I hate listening to people I disagree with. So, this $700 web page problem? I am currently obliterating it with patience. Its kind of a slow obliteration--almost done though. I suppose one downside of this method is it takes so fucking long. It is kind of amusing to see how everything changes when you take a simpler approach. In fact, its downright weird. Its not like a typical argument, or a mathematical proof, where you have to lay all of the facts out clearly, and in the right sequence. When you are using a patience-based strategy, you handle one step at a time, and you basically just gently and carefully nudge the other person in the right direction, allowing them to discover the facts on their own, because once they discover a fact themselves, it becomes their fact, and its no longer an argument. For bonus points, pretend they convinced you (I haven't done this yet, but I want to try it).
Now that I'm writing about it this way, I'm realizing that the senior engineers I admired at amazon did this all the fucking time. I still don't want to be them though--they went weeks without writing any code. Weeks. And I'm not exaggerating about the weeks part. Actually I should have written months, but I didn't think you would believe me.
P.S. most of this post was bullshit. I'm actually not as impatient as I make it seem. I have realized I need to be more patient, though, and I really did fast forward through probably a third of the scenes in Lost. Kind of ironic that I still got bored by the show. Seriously, though, that entire fucking series could be done in about 2, maybe 3 episodes of Doctor Who.
No comments:
Post a Comment