Bedside manner
How’s your bedside manner? Do you think about how you interact with people with less experience or knowledge than you? You should. At a very specific task level nerds almost always know more than everyone about their work. Consider the code feature or document you have just finished. Unless you have paired with someone for the entire task you know the most. In fact, almost everyone is trusting that you have done a good job and that you have done it the best way. This includes most of your colleagues, your boss and especially your customers.
At higher levels of abstraction or with larger tasks the effect is reduced but still there. The chances are that your boss knows much less about your current project than you. Ditto for the customer.
If you are more of a nerdherder than a nerd then your boss and customers are definely at your mercy with regard to information and trust.
When you deal with all of these people who know less than you and are relying on you how do you interact with them? Do you think about the fears they have? Do you respect the trust they are putting in you? Do you take time to ensure they understand as much as they want to and are capable of?
Understanding the goals, fears and concerns of the people who rely on your expertise and judgement will help you do a better job. It will also help you to advance your career - nobody likes working with someone who doesn’t seem to care about others and no (sensible) manager would consider placing such a selfish person in a position of increased responsibility.
October 13th, 2005 at 11:28 pm
The problem of computers might be characterised as the problem of raising nerds with the brains of a computer; the better the nerd is, the more his brain understands and thinks like a computer. And less like a human, there is a cost to any skill and that is in other skills like social interaction and understanding of the needs, capabilities and fears of people.
Where these come into inescapable conflict is with a computer job that involves humans - either support or teams of more than one nerd. Then, the nerd is faced with conflicts that are quite possibly irreconcilable for many as the computer demands one thought process but the people demand another.
I wonder if it is asking too much to ask a computer brain to “think” of the other people in the organisation. I’ve never had much success in appealing to nerds to be sensitive to the needs of others; and this might be slanted as “selfish”, but it goes way beyond that to the need to think like a computer. In computing, there is no such thing as self, so nerds don’t think in those terms.
On the other hand, I’ve had a lot of success in explaining the quid pro quo. Sometimes it is hard work, but if I can find the right dose of “reality” and feed it to the team in a concise enough story that relates their interests of computing to the wider picture, then it works well. It might be explaining why the users think as they do, and how they really haven’t the time, the lifestyle, the need, nor the brain to think how the nerds want them to. Or it might be simply explaining that even though the client has proposed a dumb and mentally painful set of requirements that will never work, the client is prepared to pay top dollar in contract rates for that work to be done.
October 14th, 2005 at 9:01 am
Good comment Iang. It is so true that the personality and approach needed for successful nerdery is strongly correlated with what could be described as a poor bedside manner.
I’ve seen a few hardcore “klingon” types change when they realise that not everyone is the same as them. The changes are mostly positive and bring about an increase in empathy. The trouble is that sometimes the changes push people towards contempt for people who don’t understand the finer points of whatever technology and project he/she is working on.
Regardless, I do think that it is selfish not to consider others’ needs and concerns and to at least try (within the bounds of one’s nerdery) to change for the better.