4 ms·

One really important lesson I learned early in my career came about 4 years in. I had finally moved to Silicon Valley, and I was still relatively junior, but a

One really important lesson I learned early in my career came about 4 years in. I had finally moved to Silicon Valley, and I was still relatively junior, but always had ideas on tweaks or features we could add to the product. The senior engineer was very scruffy and cantankerous at times, which made him unapproachable to many people. But he was very good and very experienced. However, every single time I brought an idea to him about a change I thought would be useful, he never said no. Not once. We would talk about it, and usually say "okay, well give it a shot." Of course, not all my ideas were winners, but he never shot them down outright. He was extremely supportive of other people's ideas, even from a junior person like me, and it really made a very deep impression on me. As other people have said, it's very easy to say no, point out why something won't work, and kill further discussion to keep the status quo. It's a lot harder to say that someone's new idea is a good one and even harder to lend support to it. To this day, every time I talk with someone about a feature or idea, I think about my experiences with him, and try to pass that support that I received along to the more junior engineers I work with.

j45 14y ago
I think sometimes when a senior person has so much experience in how the dots connect, interact, how the data impacts other data, they might run into a groundhog day syndrome where people keep making the same "discoveries" over and over, without looking to see if an idea has been tried before. There's an ERP implementation I oversaw and I did turn a little scruffy and cankerous some days for this reason. I learnt from the owner of the company on how to overcome it: despite it all, anyone who approached me with a curiosity and a question of could this work, was welcome to experiment within reason. Anyone who blindly made a statement about this will work cuz it's so simple and go back through re-learning what the organization already had learnt 10 years ago was met with a little resistance. The more you know about a system, the more you know to blindly assume. One thing that can get to be tiring is when non-technical people make baseless assumptions and trivializations. Having to constantly walk people through the building blocks of why a certain thing upstream will break something else downstream will wear on anyone. Dealing with management by committee, design by committee, over-trivialization by people who can't understand the details / aren't technical are all very real challenges, and maybe his scruffy exterior kept certain behaviours at bay, for better or worse.

j45 14y ago

I think sometimes when a senior person has so much experience in how the dots connect, interact, how the data impacts other data, they might run into a groundhog day syndrome where people keep making the same "discoveries" over and over, without looking to see if an idea has been tried before. There's an ERP implementation I oversaw and I did turn a little scruffy and cankerous some days for this reason. I learnt from the owner of the company on how to overcome it: despite it all, anyone who approached me with a curiosity and a question of could this work, was welcome to experiment within reason. Anyone who blindly made a statement about this will work cuz it's so simple and go back through re-learning what the organization already had learnt 10 years ago was met with a little resistance. The more you know about a system, the more you know to blindly assume. One thing that can get to be tiring is when non-technical people make baseless assumptions and trivializations. Having to constantly walk people through the building blocks of why a certain thing upstream will break something else downstream will wear on anyone. Dealing with management by committee, design by committee, over-trivialization by people who can't understand the details / aren't technical are all very real challenges, and maybe his scruffy exterior kept certain behaviours at bay, for better or worse.