It is a sincere privilege to be in an occupation where I get to work with so many smart people. However, there are big downfalls, one of which I am growing impatient with – patronizing the intelligence of co-workers.

Too often people skirt around the core of this issue with generalizations that developers are egotistical, socially inept, and “too smart for their own good”. All though those may be both foundations for and symptoms of the core problem, the real issue is generally found in everyone and is much more selfish. Most intellectuals don’t appreciate other people’s intelligence.

It’s true…but why? Here is my hypothesis…

Let’s say someone spends a week running research and development on a particular sticky piece of code. The solution is well thought out, assumptions tested, and code spiked to ensure that out of all possible options this path was the most correct. Now that person shares the answer with the rest of the team – what do you think the most common answer would be? The most common answer most of the time comes out “Duh…obviously…”, and herein lies my heartburn.

People don’t appreciate other peoples’ knowledge. People don’t appreciate other peoples’ wisdom. Most importantly, people don’t appreciate the provided, immediate shortcut of the other person’s journey.

Just because you can grasp the answer does not mean you have the knowledge, wisdom, experience, or work ethic to come to that answer. Additionally, even if you do – praise the person for giving you a shortcut to higher knowledge! Rejoice in the fact you have a colleague or maybe even a mentor!

I could have simply preached, be humble and appreciative, but that is not enough because that is a topic intellects can understand and as a result undermine it. Truly being humble and appreciative is an act that is continually learned through continuous self realizations. The next time you respond to your co-worker, boss, or intern reflect on what you just said and how you said it…you just might catch yourself being a jerk who says “duh…”.

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We all do it.

File, Open. Scroll down, scroll down, pause. WTF!^$%@!. Scroll up, pause. Scroll down. “Wow……, dude you have to come look at this…”

Yeah, we have all been there, finding code that we love to hate. It’s sloppy, hard to read, and looks like a monkey with no fingers pounded it out. Code so ugly only it’s mother could love.

But really who can blame software developers for hating other developers code? A large part of software development is artistry and intellectual matter. I assume that literary authors have a difficult time truly enjoying other authors’ work because either they believe it is horrible or they deeply respect it but then have a sense of jealousy.

So what can we do to find enlightenment instead of anger in these moments of discovering rotten intellectual stew?

Laugh

It is very easy to get angry, but why? The damage is already done, so let’s do something constructive.

Pretend that you wrote the code 5 years ago. Hell, maybe you are looking at your own old code – oh the irony! Whether a co-worker, past employee, or you wrote the code – take a moment to chuckle at it. Chuckle at it’s complexity, chuckle at it’s comments, but most important chuckle at fact that you once were at this point too and that is why you are now wise enough to recognize a better way of doing things.

Learn

One of the largest life lessons I could ever learned was to take every single moment, reflect on it, and attempt to learn something new.

Although there may be a dozen better technical implementations, take the opportunity to speak to the original author and try and understand what they were thinking. In my career, the most enlightening moments have been listening to the innocence of interns.

Learning goes both ways, and be sure to also teach offenders why some code is smelly. Teach the wisdom, direct the plan, and help (or review) the execution.

Leave It Better

I don’t know who started the “Campground Rule” but Uncle Bob used it in his book Clean Code:

We should leave the code cleaner than we found it – Robert Martin

Identifying and laughing at bad code helps you accept it, but only fixing it helps you find new love in it.

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If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way. – Bertrand Russell

When applied to business, this quote shines so much light on why there can be a resistance to change. Attempting to make company changes with a push mentality rarely works and really requires the pull model of a crafty salesman.

Just remember that when trying to pull people into your way of thinking, you need to be selling them solutions to their problems and not yours.

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A) Yes
B) Yes, but not without some changes
C) Why do you need to know?

For some reason, people are offended when people answer a question with another question; however, it is my belief that unless the question was given in great detail the answer may not be 100% correct (or correct at all for that matter).

A bad habit most developers have (myself included) is to be hasty in responses by non-developers. Rip off your headphones, respond in the most terse answer, put headphones back on, and turn back to your screen. Regardless if you are being disrupted, or you are having a bad day, here is why you want to engage most questions with another question:

Hidden Agendas Are Revealed

First and absolutely foremost, asking the question why is a defensive move. More times then not, when people ask questions in a vague, hurried, or terse manner it is to hide or cover the real question they are attempting to answer. And why are they hiding these details? Most of the time it is because they don’t want to know the real answer to the question, they want to validate the answer they most want whether it is the truth or not.

Asking them why slows them down and causes them to validate themselves. Most importantly, it removes you as the scapegoat. After all, the developers said we could…

Shows Interest In The Problem

Engaging in a meaningful conversation is perceived as high value activity to others because it shows sincere interest in helping them to solve their problems. As a result, you will be perceived as a high value employee because of your interest.

You Become A Valued Team Player

If you are perceived as a high value employee because of how you interact with the team, it only leads to believe that you will become a valued team player. Valued team players are generally liked and as a result promoted…and all because you answered questions with questions.

Answering questions with questions is only perceived poorly by those who are attempting to hide something whether it is illegal, immoral, stupid, or their own ignorance. Overcome all of these pitfalls by taking the time out to dig deeper and provide real helping hand.


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After a recent trip to my family’s house, my wife and son came down with a stomach flu. Catching the flu is something you really can’t avoid via a healthy life style, but it did remind me of this quote:

Those who think they have no time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness – Edward Stanely

In short, remember to make time to “exercise”. Apply the metaphor however you wish; physical exercise, quality controls such as unit testing, or the act of continuous learning, just remember to do something at least every other day that challenges you to new heights.

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I have been going through a lot of self reflection as of late, and as you can imagine there are a number of things that haunt my current psyche.

One of these such things is coming to the realization of just how special I thought I was as a college graduate. After all, I had shed the skin of the cocky teenager and had a true grasp of who I was and what I was capable of. I had degrees. I worked at Microsoft. Martin Fowler look out – there’s a new guy in town…

Although I can say (with little ego) that I did have a lot going for me, and I had accomplished a lot - I knew little to nothing about the real world.

You see, college never allowed me to learn through failure. As Alan Watts below puts it, I was placed in this “nursery society” where I was allowed to believe that real life was about pretending, having fun, and no matter what things will be alright.

Translating that into software development, I never had to write programs that lasted more than the next weekly project. As a result, my solutions were short sited, problematic, and all-round crap. But I didn’t need to care, as long as the teacher did not find that one little bug I swept under the rug or care about code maintainability or the fact that there were no tests – after all, it’s always a sunny day in Disneyland.

In a sense, college wired my habits to approach solutions wrong. I went to college to grow into an adult, and came out an over confident child.

Recent graduates and veteran developers alike take heed – we all have a lot to learn about our profession and even more about ourselves. Never allow your confidence to block your ability to learn from the mistakes of yourself and others. After all, we all graduated from the University of Mickey.

For the true significance of Disneyland is that it reflects our notions of children – what they are, what is good for them, and what will please them. Children are a special class of human beings which came into existence with the industrial revolution, at which time we began to invent a closed world for them, a nursery society, wherein their participation in adult life could be delayed increasingly – to keep them off the labor market. Children are, in fact, small adults who want to take part in the adult world as quickly as possible, and to learn by doing. But in the closed nursery society they are supposed to learn by pretending, for which insult to their feelings and intelligence they are propitiated with toys and hypnotized with baby talk. They are thus beguiled into the fantasy of that happy, carefree childhood with its long sunny days through which one may go on “playing” – in the peculiar sense of not working – for always and always. – Alan Watts, Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality

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Being frustrated with your coworkers from time-to-time is not unique to any single occupation or person. Everyone has days where they want to severely hurt the person in the next cube. The question that begs to be answered: What drives us to these feelings?

The obvious answer that everyone would like to shout at the top of their lungs is – The Other Person Is Being An Idiot!!!. Although this maybe the case, why does it bother you so much? Why not chuckle at the poor fool and move along with your day? It is my belief that there are 3 core reasons why, but the last one you might not be ready to hear…

They Have A Passionate Personality

A lot of people I know are insanely passionate about what they do to a fault (this includes myself). As a common result, communication with insanely passionate folks tend take on a feeling of almost arguing. As the saying goes:

…this is good, now that we are arguing we are finally talking…

Unfortunately, both passionate and lesser passionate coworkers will always perceive the other person as being blunt, stubborn, or even a verbal bully. Your understanding of this personality type might ease the pain when having to deal with them as you can concentrate more on what they are attempting to say rather than how they are saying it.

Everyone Takes Personal Pride

Even including the most apathetic people that did sloppy work, I have never found someone that did not take some amount of personal pride in their work. This is especially true for our occupation since developers have a sense of “creation” in their work.

Where pride comes into play is not so much “who” you are talking with but more “what” the topic is about. If you are discussing a found bug, is there friction in the conversation because it occurred in your code? Is the other person being defensive because it happened in their code? Are you both being combative because you disagree on the solution?

You do not need to be a developer to have personal or professional pride in your work; however, this rub point occurs a lot in our occupation considering every conversation we have deals with the intellectual creation of another.

You Don’t Get Along With Yourself

Here is the one you are not ready to hear. You can’t stand yourself. Trust me, it’s true.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. – Hermann Hesse

Like personal types tend not to work well together. Believe it or not, you do need a good balance of personality types and ideas. However, this is a tough pill to swallow because we all suffer from the same delusion that a bunch of clones of yourself would work faster and more efficient than any other group of people.

Being in a frustrating situation with coworkers is only natural; however, how frustrated you get is directly related to how well you understand the situation. If you keep your cool and give yourself some time to really analyze the situation, I bet you will find a very predictable human reaction behind it.

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In this fast paced and economically burdened society, it is only natural for the majority of us to ask ourselves how can we fortify our careers. Do we solidify our current positions? Or should we diversify our experience and resume?

A number of people have asked me this question lately all with the same concerns – they feel their current skill set does not provide them with all the job opportunities they need in order to feel comfortable.

The truth is it is completely possible to land a job without knowing anything at all about the technology or domain for which you are applying for. The only thing you need to prove is your ability to quickly learn and adapt (however, I hope that it is obvious that the less you know the more convincing you will have to be).

Many people are fearful of even applying for positions where they do not meet (or exceed) the requirements of the job description. Pffft I say.

Remember in Star Wars how C-3PO talked himself into the graces of Uncle Owen?

Uncle Owen: You, I suppose you’re programmed for etiquette and protocol.
C-3PO: Protocol? Why, it’s my primary function, sir. I am well-versed in all the customs–
Uncle Owen: I have no need for a protocol droid.
C-3PO: Of course you haven’t, sir. Not in an environment such as this. That is why I have been programmed in–
Uncle Owen: What I really need is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
C-3PO: Vaporators? Sir, my first job was programing binary load lifters very similar to your vaporators in most respects.”
Uncle Owen: Can you speak Bocce?
C-3PO: Of course I can, sir. It’s like a second language to me. I’m a–
Uncle Owen: yeah, alright. Shut up. I’ll take this one.
C-3PO: Shutting up, sir.

There are three simple rules to remember. Master these and you will never be scared of unemployment again.

1. You will never fit the job description 100%

Don’t even get me started on this topic because for some stupid reason employers ask for job skills that even most astronauts don’t possess. Getting hung up in the fact that you don’t fully qualify all the skills is the first stumbling block.

Even if you aren’t their picture perfect candidate, you might be the best for the job out of everyone that applied.

2. Find and flaunt parallel skills

C-3PO didn’t know binary vaporators, but he did know binary load lifters. Don’t know Java? The last 4 years of C# just might be enough to prove you understand it enough.

You would be amazed at how many parallel skills you can draw with what skills are being asked. Really ask yourself, are they asking for an Exchange Server expert or are they asking if I am a capable email administrator that can handle an Exchange server?

3. Shut up

When they decide they like you – shut up. Don’t give up any more information than you need to as it will only hurt you. Just like C-3PO, you might find yourself getting jettisoned if you ramble on.

It is always better to gain new experience and skills; however, do not worry about lacking the knowledge of everything the universe has to offer. Proving that you know how to learn, unlearn, and relearn is the greatest thing you can offer an employer.

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