Don’t Take My Advice

A Brief History of My Teeth

When it comes to teeth, I hit the genetic jackpot. I’m pretty sure that, instead of enamel, my teeth are coated in some sort of thin layer of stone. I’ve never had a cavity and my teeth in general seem impervious to the variety of maladies that afflict other people’s teeth. So this morning, when I was at the dentist, the visit proceeded unremarkably. The hygienist scraped, prodded, and fluoridized my teeth with a quiet efficiency, leaving me free to do little but listen to the sounds of the dentist’s office.

Those sounds are about as far from interesting as sounds get: the occasional hum of the HVAC, people a few rooms over exchanging obligatory inanities about the weather, coughs, etc. But for a brief period of time, the hygienist in the next station over took to scolding her patient like a child (he wasn’t). She ominously assured him that his lack of flossing would catch up to him someday, though I quietly wondered which day that would be, since he was pushing retirement age. I empathized with the poor man because I too had been seen to by that hygienist during previous visits.

The first time I encountered her a couple of years ago, she asked me if I drank much soda, to which I replied that I obviously did since my employer stocked the fridge with it for free. I don’t drink coffee, so if I want to partake in the world’s most socially acceptable upper to combat grogginess, it’s Diet Pepsi or Mountain Dew for me. She tsked at me, told me a story of some teenager whose teeth fell out because he had a soda fountain in his basement, and then handed me a brochure with pictures of people’s mouths who were apparently ravaged by soda to such a state where I imagine that the only possible remedy was a complete head transplant. My 31 year steak of complete imperviousness to cavities in spite of drinking soda was now suddenly going to end as my teeth fell inexorably from my head. That is, unless I repented my evil ways and started drinking water and occasionally tea.

I agreed to heed her advice in the way that one generally does when confronted with some sort of pushy nutjob on a mission–I pretended to humor her so that she would leave me alone. When I got home, I threw out the Pamphlet of Dental Doom and didn’t think about her for the next six months until I came back to the dentist. The first thing that she asked when I came in was whether I was still drinking a lot of soda or not. I was so dumbfounded that I didn’t have the presence of mind to lie my way out of this confrontation. I couldn’t decide whether it’d be creepier if she remembered me from six months ago and remembered that I drank a lot of soda or if she had made herself some kind of note in my file. Either way, I was in trouble. The previous time she had been looking to save the sinful, but now she was just pissed. Like the man I silently commiserated with this morning, she proceeded to spin spiteful tales of the world of pain coming my way.

Freud might have some interesting ideas about a person that likes to stick her fingers in other people’s mouths while trying to scare them, and I don’t doubt that there’s a whole host of ground for her to cover on the proverbial therapist couch, but I’ll speak to the low hanging fruit. She didn’t like that I ignored her advice. She is an expert and I am an amateur. She used her expertise to make a recommendation to me, and I promptly blew it off, which is a subtle slap in the face should an expert choose to view it that way.

It Isn’t Personal

It’s pretty natural to feel slighted when you offer expert advice and the recipient ignores it. This is especially true when the advice was solicited. I recall going along once with my girlfriend to help her pick out a computer and feeling irrationally irritated when we got to the store and she saw one that she liked immediately, losing complete interest in my interpretation of the finer points of processor architectures and motherboard wiring schemes. I can also recall it happening at times professionally when people solicit advice about programming, architecture, testing, tooling, etc. I’m happy–thrilled–to provide this advice. How dare anyone not take it.

But while it’s often hard to reason your way out of your feelings, it’s a matter of good discipline to reason past irrational reactions. As such, I strive not to take it personally when my advice, even when solicited, goes unheeded. It’s not personal, and I would argue it’s probably a good sign that the members of your team may be nurturing budding self-sufficiency.

Let’s consider three possible cases of what happens when a tech lead or person with more experience offers advice. In the first case, the recipient attempts to heed the advice but fails due to incompetence. In the second, the recipient takes the advice and succeeds with it. In the third and most interesting case, the recipient rejects the advice and does something else instead. Notice that I don’t subdivide this case into success and failure. I honestly don’t think it matters in the long term.

In the first case, you’re either dealing with someone temporarily out of their depth or generally incompetent, who might be considered an outlier on the lower end of the spectrum. The broad middle is populated with the second case people who take marching orders well enough and are content to do just that. The third group also consists of outliers, but often high-achieving ones. Why do I say that? Well, because this group is seeking data points rather than instructions. They want to know how an expert would handle the situation, not so that they can copy the expert necessarily, but to get an idea. Members of this group generally want to blaze their own trails, though they may at times behave like the second group for expediency.

But this third group consists of tomorrow’s experts. It doesn’t matter if they succeed or fail in the moment because, hey, success is success, but you can be very sure they’ll learn from any failures and won’t repeat their mistakes. They’re learning lessons by fire and experimentation that the middle-of-the-roaders learn as cargo cult practice. And they’re not dismissing your advice to offend you–they earnestly want to understand and assimilate your expertise–but rather to learn from you.

So when this happens to you as a senior team member/architect/lead/etc., try to fight the urge to be miffed or offended and exercise some patience. Give them some rope and see what they do–they can always be reigned in later if they aren’t doing well, but it’s hard to let the rope out if you’ve extinguished their experimental and creative spirit. The last thing you want to be is some woman in a dentist’s office, getting irrationally angry that adults aren’t properly scared of the Cavity Creeps.

Because I Said So Costs You Respect

Do you remember being a kid, old enough to think somewhat deductively and logically, but not old enough really to understand how the world works? Do you remember putting together some kind of eloquent argument about why you should be able to sleep at a friend’s house or stay out later than normal, perfecting your reasoning, presentation and polish only to be rebuffed? Do you remember then having a long back and forth, asking why to everything, only to be smacked in the face with the ultimate in trump cards: “because I’m your parent and I say so?” Yeah… me too. Sucked, didn’t it?

There are few things in life more frustrating than pouring a good amount of effort into something only to have it shot down without any kind of satisfying explanation of the rationale. For children this tends to be unfortunate for self interested reasons: “I want to do X in the immediate future and I can’t.”  But as you get older and are motivated by more complex and nuanced concerns, these rejections get more befuddling and harder to understand.  A child making a case for why he should own a Red Rider BB Gun will understand on some level the parental objection “it’s dangerous” and that the parental objection arises out of concern for his welfare. So when the “enough — I’m your parent and I say so” comes up it has the backing of some kind of implied reasoning and concern.  An adult making a case that adopting accounting software instead of doing things by hand would be a money saving investment will have a harder time understanding  an answer of “no, we aren’t going to do that because I’m your boss and I say so.”

This is hard for adults to understand because we are sophisticated and interpersonally developed enough to understand when our goals align with those of others or of organizations. In other words, we reasonably expect an answer of “no” to the question “can I go on vacation for 8 months and get paid?” because this personal goal is completely out of whack with others and with an organization’s. So even if the explanation or reasoning aren’t satisfying, we get it. The “because I said so” is actually unnecessary since the answer of “that makes no sense for anyone but you” is perfectly reasonable. But when goals align and it is the means, rather than the ends, that differ, we start to have more difficulty accepting when people pull rank.

I remember some time back being asked to participate in generating extra documentation for an already documentation-heavy process. The developers on the project were taking requirements documents as drawn up by analysts and creating “requirements analysis” documents, and the proposal was to add more flavors of requirements documents to this. So instead of the analysts and developers each creating their own single word document filled with paragraph narratives of requirements, they were now being asked to collaborate on several each with each subsequent version adding more detail to the document. So as a developer, I might write my first requirements document in very vague prose, to be followed by a series of additional documents, each more detailed than the last.

I objected to this proposal (and really even to the original proposal). What I wanted to do was capture the requirements as data items in a database rather than a series of documents filled with prose. And I didn’t like the idea of having several documents with each one being a “more fleshed out” version of the last document — there’s a solution for that and it’s called “version control”. But when I raised these objections to the decision makers on the project, I was rebuffed. If you’re curious as to what the rationale for favoring the approach I’ve described over the one I suggest, I am as well, even to this day. You see, I never received any explanation other than a vague “well, it might not be the greatest, but we’re just going to go with it.” This explanation neither explained the benefit of the proposed approach nor any downside to my approach. Instead, I was a kid again, hearing “because I’m your parent and I say so.” But I wasn’t a little kid asking to stay out late — I was an adult with a different idea for how to achieve the same productivity and effectiveness goals as everyone else.

In the end, I generated the documents I was required to generate. It wasn’t the end of the world, though I never did see it as anything other than a waste of time. As people collaborating toward a larger goal, it will often be the case that we have to do things we don’t like, agree with or approve of, and it might even be the case that we’re offered no explanation at all for these things. That is to be expected in adult life, but I would argue that it should be minimized because it chips away at morale and satisfaction with one’s situation.

Once, twice, or every now and then, most people will let a “just do it because I say so” roll off their back. Some people might let many more than that slip by, while others might get upset earlier in the process. But pretty much everyone is going to have a limit with this kind of thing. Pretty much everyone will have a threshold of “because I say so” responses beyond which they will check out, tune out, leave, blow up, or generally lose it with that in some form. So I strongly recommend avoiding the tempting practice to “pull rank” and justify decisions with “because it’s my project” or “because I’ve decided that.” It’s sometimes nice not to have to justify your decisions — especially to someone with less experience than you and when you’re in a hurry — but the practice of defending your rationale keeps you sharp and on your toes, and it earns the respect of others. “Because I say so” is a well that you can only go to so many times before it dries up and leaves a desert of respect and loyalty. Don’t treat your coworkers like children when they want to know “why” and when they have legitimate questions — they deserve better than “because I’m in charge and I say so.”