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> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpret

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea. That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal. In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.

mvuijlst 4y ago
Heh. "The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already". Famous last words.
- engineeringwoke 4y ago
  Also a common trope, playing out the "manager" or "business person" as an idiot when in fact often times there are bigger things at play. Looking down on people who aren't like you is not generally a positive. Understanding them is the source of empathy.
  - shlant 4y ago
    to be fair I am seeing very little empathy for the author in a lot of these comments
    - gnfargbl 4y ago
      That's really fair criticism. OP, if you're still reading, please don't take anything I wrote here as an attack on you. Instead, it was meant to be a reflection on your situation from someone who struggles with many of the same communication issues, in many of the same ways.
    - engineeringwoke 4y ago
      I am sympathetic towards OP's situation and made similar mistakes when I was younger, but telling people what they want to hear is not helping them and isn't actually empathetic. I've spent most of my life around non-neurotypical people, and this does seem pretty self-inflicted. People like this don't need to read any more technical books or learn any more about software engineering. They would be more effective in every facet of their life if they spent some time reading history, philosophy, and psychology... or just talking to people. No one exists on an island, and the issue is almost always that they don't find things external to the self "interesting" because they are self-centered. Notice that all three subjects I mentioned above are about other people.
    - intended 4y ago
      Yes. OP is being raked over the coals for this, and people are working hard to assume many things about him, be uncharitable. Once that is done, people circle around and then accuse OP of arrogance/narcissism/know-it-all-ness. Some people want OP to have proven that he knows how to take criticism in his article - a strange ask, given that many seem to not even have finished reading the article in the first place. It looks like many people here dont know what makes them tick - the things they accuse the OP of, are things they can see themselves do, and so see it in the OPs behavior. Maybe it is simply that people cant imagine the world OP inhabits.
ainar-g 4y ago
> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal. Then why didn't the manager ask that instead of mentioning some article some other company?
CoastalCoder 4y ago
Could you expand on why you see the OP's position as patronizing? AFAICT, the OP identified a minimal set of questions he thought needed to be asked to give a good answer, and tried to ask them. Are you taking exception to how he sought that information, or something else?
- bluesign 4y ago
  Problem is communication there. > A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it All questions can be reflected easily. > Is our checkout page not performing well? > Will a new checkout solve our problem? Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ? > Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway? Do they understand the implications of such a switch? > What would be the implications if we switch to React? Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite. Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"
  - peteradio 4y ago
    If the manager has no clue then why are they bringing the ideas? They could spend all day long pitching dog shit that engineering has to bat away, is that the managers job to be the ideas guy?
    - bluesign 4y ago
      From what I understood, manager in this context is not technical at all. They read somewhere their competitor using a new technology, and asking if it makes sense if they use that too.
larve 4y ago
Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology). If me asking what the goal is is perceived as patronising, when I’m just trying to do my best, then sure I can work on that. But that requires good faith on the side of the manager. It’s not my decision to shut things down.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I think that this approach limits leadership. Often people are asked to solve both technical and nontechnical problems. People can reasonably ask you both to define "better" and to achieve it. If you expect requirements for everything then you'll place a limit on your influence.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    This is what I was going to say but phrased better. The issue isn't autistic vs. allistic, the issue is that you've decided you don't want to devote any brainpower to questions which are not directly technical. Sometimes that's fine, but it also means you are probably at the apex of your professional development. So do it, but also realize it means you're unlikely to get promoted further, and your opinion about technical topics will (rightly!) get ignored because you weren't in the rooms necessary to see any bigger picture.
    - jart 4y ago
      I thought it was. The alistic manager wanted to plug into the social gravity of React and the autistic employee wanted an explanation for his labor he could understand. All people regardless of autistic or allistic are usually self-interested and not consciously aware of what motivates their desires. For example, I doubt the manager was capable of explaining what attracted him to React any more than the OP could understand why being part of a famous community might benefit them. Only thing that helps in these situations is for one side to know the other side better than they know themselves. It's easier to work with people if you can mentally model what motivates their desires. That's called empathy and whether or not you've got it distinguishes senior from junior engineers. It should also be a hard requirement for managers.
anchochilis 4y ago
Yep. If my manager asks a question like that, there are three appropriate responses: (1) Unfortunately that would be challenging for us because X. (2) We've been talking about that for ages, because X, Y, and Z. I'd love it if we could make time for a rewrite next quarter. (3) Hmm, interesting. Can you share the blog post? (Buys me time to think and follow up later). What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method.
- blastro 4y ago
  > What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method. Hilarious.
larve 4y ago
Thank you for reading. Of course, this is a highly edited hypothetical situation, and not what happened. I try very hard to understand how I can phrase differently so that we can answer these questions and work together. I think in other comments it became clear that the intent of the questions are not the problem. In fact, I am asking them because I trust the manager to have good answers. Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen: - I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read. - The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext. If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.
- anchochilis 4y ago
  > it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext Has it occurred to you that just as it is difficult for you to adapt to the communication styles and thought patterns of allistic people, your manager experiences the same difficulty adapting to those of autistic people? While I believe organizations and managers should try to accommodate neurodiversity and help all types of people be successful in the workplace, it's not unreasonable to expect you to expend some effort adapting as well. In all your follow-up comments you seem to have some excuse or clarification for why you don't need to adjust your behavior and the problem is obviously that your manager isn't trying hard enough. When your manager asks a casual question, he is not asking for a formal document describing pros, cons. He's looking for you to make a judgment call, express an opinion, or for you to say "hmmm, I might spend some time this week looking in to that." Reacting to a two-sentence exchange by spending a week working on a doc is a communication anti-pattern.
yobbo 4y ago
> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently Yes, this is more likely. But autistics expect communication to be true and relevant. When it is not, it sounds like incompetence and dishonesty to an autistic. If anything, allistic people allow a certain benefit of doubt in communications before assuming incompetence/dishonesty. And then they generally play along with incompetent/dishonest people if the social context requires it.

mvuijlst 4y ago

Heh. "The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already". Famous last words.

engineeringwoke 4y ago
Also a common trope, playing out the "manager" or "business person" as an idiot when in fact often times there are bigger things at play. Looking down on people who aren't like you is not generally a positive. Understanding them is the source of empathy.
- shlant 4y ago
  to be fair I am seeing very little empathy for the author in a lot of these comments
  - gnfargbl 4y ago
    That's really fair criticism. OP, if you're still reading, please don't take anything I wrote here as an attack on you. Instead, it was meant to be a reflection on your situation from someone who struggles with many of the same communication issues, in many of the same ways.
  - engineeringwoke 4y ago
    I am sympathetic towards OP's situation and made similar mistakes when I was younger, but telling people what they want to hear is not helping them and isn't actually empathetic. I've spent most of my life around non-neurotypical people, and this does seem pretty self-inflicted. People like this don't need to read any more technical books or learn any more about software engineering. They would be more effective in every facet of their life if they spent some time reading history, philosophy, and psychology... or just talking to people. No one exists on an island, and the issue is almost always that they don't find things external to the self "interesting" because they are self-centered. Notice that all three subjects I mentioned above are about other people.
  - intended 4y ago
    Yes. OP is being raked over the coals for this, and people are working hard to assume many things about him, be uncharitable. Once that is done, people circle around and then accuse OP of arrogance/narcissism/know-it-all-ness. Some people want OP to have proven that he knows how to take criticism in his article - a strange ask, given that many seem to not even have finished reading the article in the first place. It looks like many people here dont know what makes them tick - the things they accuse the OP of, are things they can see themselves do, and so see it in the OPs behavior. Maybe it is simply that people cant imagine the world OP inhabits.

ainar-g 4y ago

> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal. Then why didn't the manager ask that instead of mentioning some article some other company?

CoastalCoder 4y ago

Could you expand on why you see the OP's position as patronizing? AFAICT, the OP identified a minimal set of questions he thought needed to be asked to give a good answer, and tried to ask them. Are you taking exception to how he sought that information, or something else?

bluesign 4y ago
Problem is communication there. > A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it All questions can be reflected easily. > Is our checkout page not performing well? > Will a new checkout solve our problem? Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ? > Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway? Do they understand the implications of such a switch? > What would be the implications if we switch to React? Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite. Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"
- peteradio 4y ago
  If the manager has no clue then why are they bringing the ideas? They could spend all day long pitching dog shit that engineering has to bat away, is that the managers job to be the ideas guy?
  - bluesign 4y ago
    From what I understood, manager in this context is not technical at all. They read somewhere their competitor using a new technology, and asking if it makes sense if they use that too.

larve 4y ago

Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology). If me asking what the goal is is perceived as patronising, when I’m just trying to do my best, then sure I can work on that. But that requires good faith on the side of the manager. It’s not my decision to shut things down.

UncleMeat 4y ago
I think that this approach limits leadership. Often people are asked to solve both technical and nontechnical problems. People can reasonably ask you both to define "better" and to achieve it. If you expect requirements for everything then you'll place a limit on your influence.
- morelisp 4y ago
  This is what I was going to say but phrased better. The issue isn't autistic vs. allistic, the issue is that you've decided you don't want to devote any brainpower to questions which are not directly technical. Sometimes that's fine, but it also means you are probably at the apex of your professional development. So do it, but also realize it means you're unlikely to get promoted further, and your opinion about technical topics will (rightly!) get ignored because you weren't in the rooms necessary to see any bigger picture.
  - jart 4y ago
    I thought it was. The alistic manager wanted to plug into the social gravity of React and the autistic employee wanted an explanation for his labor he could understand. All people regardless of autistic or allistic are usually self-interested and not consciously aware of what motivates their desires. For example, I doubt the manager was capable of explaining what attracted him to React any more than the OP could understand why being part of a famous community might benefit them. Only thing that helps in these situations is for one side to know the other side better than they know themselves. It's easier to work with people if you can mentally model what motivates their desires. That's called empathy and whether or not you've got it distinguishes senior from junior engineers. It should also be a hard requirement for managers.

anchochilis 4y ago

Yep. If my manager asks a question like that, there are three appropriate responses: (1) Unfortunately that would be challenging for us because X. (2) We've been talking about that for ages, because X, Y, and Z. I'd love it if we could make time for a rewrite next quarter. (3) Hmm, interesting. Can you share the blog post? (Buys me time to think and follow up later). What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method.

blastro 4y ago
> What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method. Hilarious.

larve 4y ago

Thank you for reading. Of course, this is a highly edited hypothetical situation, and not what happened. I try very hard to understand how I can phrase differently so that we can answer these questions and work together. I think in other comments it became clear that the intent of the questions are not the problem. In fact, I am asking them because I trust the manager to have good answers. Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen: - I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read. - The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext. If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.

anchochilis 4y ago
> it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext Has it occurred to you that just as it is difficult for you to adapt to the communication styles and thought patterns of allistic people, your manager experiences the same difficulty adapting to those of autistic people? While I believe organizations and managers should try to accommodate neurodiversity and help all types of people be successful in the workplace, it's not unreasonable to expect you to expend some effort adapting as well. In all your follow-up comments you seem to have some excuse or clarification for why you don't need to adjust your behavior and the problem is obviously that your manager isn't trying hard enough. When your manager asks a casual question, he is not asking for a formal document describing pros, cons. He's looking for you to make a judgment call, express an opinion, or for you to say "hmmm, I might spend some time this week looking in to that." Reacting to a two-sentence exchange by spending a week working on a doc is a communication anti-pattern.

yobbo 4y ago

> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently Yes, this is more likely. But autistics expect communication to be true and relevant. When it is not, it sounds like incompetence and dishonesty to an autistic. If anything, allistic people allow a certain benefit of doubt in communications before assuming incompetence/dishonesty. And then they generally play along with incompetent/dishonest people if the social context requires it.