Esther Derby has this neat post entitled “People who lower productivity” that reminds me of such a person from my past. He is a relatively famous programmer, is always nice and sociable, but has an ego problem that matches his extreme raw hacking brilliance. Anyway, in the mid-nineties I drew the short straw and got the job of porting some C language Windows 3.1 gui code he had written to Windows 95. It was a giant struggle due to the needless complexity and some odd little quirks. The thing that was sticks in my mind as needlessly difficult was that instead of ORing together symbolic constants for window-styles from windows.h (WS_X | WS_Y) he opened up the header file added the relevant constants together (probably in his head) and then pasted the raw magic number into the C file. Now, I didn’t know if the constant values had changed between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 so I had to spend an hour or so working out what style constants he originally meant and then getting them into the source file. AAARRGHHHHGHHH!

Unfortunately for the company he is back and from all accounts hasn’t changed much. Leopards. Spots.

P.S. This one’s for you Sasha.

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.

Seth Godin wrote a post in which he is critical of creating things that are good enough. He is saying that good enough is the opposite of the pursuit of better (or as he calls it the relentless pursuit of better).

This is, to borrow a phrase, crazy talk. Good enough is an important stopping point on the way to better. If you don’t stop at good enough then you won’t ever reach better. I think that Seth’s own example of JetBlue turning one third of the toilets on its planes into a ladies only toilet demonstrates this. Did JetBlue delay launching their airline until this epiphany came to them? Clearly they didn’t. They created a package that was better than their competitors which had good enough aspects and great aspects. Coming back to make the good enough bits better is fine but they went with good enough knowing that waiting for better on everything would kill them.

Perhaps a better idea (sorry) is to make sure that at least some aspects of our products/services are better and that the rest are good enough and then made better as soon as is sensible. I wonder if Seth would agree?

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