Beyond Writing Code

Category: work

  • Why Everyone Else Knows More Than You Do, and What To Do About It

    Why Everyone Else Knows More Than You Do, and What To Do About It

    The developers you work with know stuff that you don’t, and you know stuff that they don’t. Obvious, right?

    So why does it seem like everyone else knows more, and you’ll never catch up? Why does it seem like you’re a little kid on a tricycle, trying to pedal faster while the big kids zoom by on their bikes?

    This is how I feel sometimes. Not shown in photo: all the big kids on their big kid bikes. Photo by Tommy Bond on Unsplash

    The answer is that it’s true: everyone else you work with does know more — collectively. Taken all together, everyone else knows more than any one person does.

    The mistake you’re making is the subtle assumption that if one person in the group knows something, everyone else — or at least most people, other than you — must already know it too.

    Let’s say someone asks a networking question, and you don’t know the answer, but one of your colleagues does. Then you’re having trouble getting API authentication to work, and one of your colleagues advises. Another developer helps you with a thorny NodeJS issue. Someone else teaches you how to fix a build failure. And another colleague whips up a quick script to get you some data you need. After a while you start to worry if you are the least knowledgeable person in your group… your company… maybe ever.

    Everyone else is on their tricycles too

    Here’s what you’re not seeing: Your network-savvy colleague might have been the only person on the team who could field that question. It’s not true that just because one person knew that, everyone else did. Also, that network pro might not have a clue about API authentication, or Node, or build failures, or scripting.

    Even harder to see: you definitely know things others on your team don’t, and I’m not just talking about your bank account password or the name of the imaginary friend you had when you were little enough to ride an actual tricycle. You have job knowledge, industry knowledge, business knowledge that others around you do not.

    For many years, I had a hard time seeing this. I assumed that everyone around me must already know all the things I do, for some reason. But again, it’s not true that just because one person (you, in this case) knows something, everyone else does.

    The person who helped you with the API might not know React like you do. The developer who solved the Node issue might not write clean code like you do. The script-writing whiz might be totally lost if you start talking about code security.

    Sometimes you’re the big kid on the three-speed bike, and one or more of your colleagues are on their trikes, wishing they could zip around like you do.

    You can DO that?

    Years ago, I worked with an experienced developer named Nick. Knowledgeable, skilled, kind, thoughtful — Nick was a role model for me. He’d written a lot of the code for the application I was working on.

    One day, when I was still new to the team, we were in a staff meeting. The boss started talking about some technology I’d never even heard of. I was just a little kid on her tricycle, trying to keep up with the knowledgeable big kids, so I decided it was best not to interrupt the meeting to ask.

    I was making a note to myself to ask someone later, when Nick politely interrupted the boss and said:

    Photo by Marcos Luiz Photograph on Unsplash

    “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What is this?”

    Yep. In a room with some super-knowledgeable peers, Nick had just admitted to not knowing something. The world did not end. Nobody rolled their eyes, or hinted that Nick should know this already, or otherwise had any judgmental reaction. In fact, a few people looked relieved. I’m sure I was one of them.

    The boss apologized for getting ahead of himself and took a verbal step back to explain what he was talking about.

    You know, I don’t even remember what the technology was. I don’t think anyone even mentioned it again after that meeting. But, twelve years later, I remember being floored that someone who I thought “knew everything” could just state calmly, in front of his colleagues, that he didn’t know something.

    Ask, and ask publicly

    In that moment, I saw that it was part of the role of a lead developer to speak up and ask when you didn’t know something, because your newer colleagues might not have the courage yet. Since I wanted to be a lead developer, I was going to have to get used to speaking up.

    Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

    Later, I saw that the pressure to appear knowledgeable is universal, no matter what your experience level. If you’re new, you might feel you have to prove to your team that you know what you’re doing. If you’re more experienced, you might feel like others will judge you for not knowing as much as they thought.

    Let’s smash the stigma around asking questions or asking for help. There’s no shame in not knowing something. The problem arises when you don’t take action to try to find out — either you don’t try at all; or you do try, but when you get stuck, you don’t ask for help.

    How do we smash the stigma? Ask questions, and ask in a way that others see it. I know, it’s less intimidating to message a trusted colleague privately. When you keep it quiet, you maintain the illusion for others that everyone around them knows everything. When you model the behavior of humbly asking for help, you teach others that it’s okay to do the same. When others start to join you, you’re changing the culture for the better.

    Photo by Mars Sector-6 on Unsplash

    Pro tip: modeling good behavior, teaching others, and changing the culture for the better are things leaders do. When you speak up, you’re not highlighting your weakness, you’re demonstrating your strength. No joke. My boss told me recently that one of the key factors in hiring me was that I was not afraid to ask questions.

    Furthermore, when you ask your questions publicly, others can benefit from the knowledge transferred. Someone else, when they encounter the same problem or question, will get stuck just like you did. When you ask in a more public way, everyone else benefits. When Nick asked our boss for more information during our staff meeting, the whole team learned.

    Change that culture

    So, raise your hand in that staff meeting, post that question to your team, or use (or establish!) a Slack channel specifically for developers across teams to ask questions and help each other out.

    When a colleague asks something you don’t know, add a comment that you’d like to know as well. They, and others, will see that they’re not the only one with that question.

    Photo by Randalyn Hill on Unsplash

    When a question comes through that you do know how to answer, share your knowledge! Some days, you’re the big kid on the bike, and someone else is calling out to you from their tricycle, trying to keep up.

    Above all, always be kind, regardless of the question or who is asking. A question might seem basic or obvious to you, it might be answered by a simple web search, it might be better asked in another forum, it might have been answered two days earlier in the same forum… it doesn’t matter. Be kind. Establish the norm that questions are always responded to with kindness and without judgment.

    That’s what a leader does.

    Do you feel like that little kid on the tricycle sometimes? What do you do to help the people around you feel more comfortable admitting when they don’t know and reaching out for help? Let me know in the comments.

    Originally posted 13 June 2022 on Medium.

  • Naming things, in spades

    Naming things, in spades

    Naming things is hard. One of the hardest things in computer science, as the saying goes.

    I once spent a full day trying to find the perfect name. Does that seem excessive? Well, consider these factors:

    • I was coding a major feature of the application. All users, whether they were customers or colleagues, would use whatever name I chose. It would even be an option on the main menu.
    • A large part of the codebase would also use the name. Developers would see it a lot.
    • I refused to choose an obscure name or a name so long that it would get abbreviated. Nobody should have to ask what it meant.
    • Many potential names were already in common use for related, but not identical, concepts. Some of those names would even appear on the same screens.

    I finally found the perfect name. We integrated it into the application design, the code, and the way we talked and thought about that feature.

    You know where this is going, don’t you…

    Many months later, we changed one of the tools we used as developers. The new tool used the same name for yet another related, but not identical, concept. 😭 After much agonizing, we changed the name of the feature, and I spent another full day updating every reference to it across the entire application and all of our documentation.

    So, as someone experienced in the sport of naming things, I can help. Let me make it easier for you.

    S

    That’s right… S.

    True story: I once spent hours trying to troubleshoot a program where all of the variables had single letter names. By the time I figured out how C, D, E, H, P, M, N, R, S, and W all fit together, I had forgotten what I was looking for and why.

    Also, it was causing a production issue, and it was several hours past my bedtime. I was groggy and desperately trying to fix everything before user traffic started to pick up in the early morning hours.

    Photo by Surendran MP on Unsplash

    “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” the code’s author said when I confronted him about it the next day. 😠

    Would it help to have comments telling you what C, D, E, H, P, M, N, R, S, and W all represent? Maybe, but sooner or later someone’s going to change the code without updating the comments, and then the outdated comments might actually make things more confusing.

    So, rule one: No single letter variables. Please and thank you.

    The only exception might be a small for loop where it’s clear that c or i is a simple counter, like this:

    for (let i = 0; i < 9; i++) ...

    Otherwise, please call a spade a spade, not an S.

    Say what you mean

    That said, info is not much better than i. Info about what? You can do better than that.

    92.84% of the time, adding info and data and details doesn’t contribute to the conversation. It’s okay for customer to refer to an object with all the details about the customer. You don’t need to call it customerDetails or customerInfo. Think of how much nicer it will look when you use dot notation: customer.firstName beats customerData.firstName.

    Granted, 7.something% of the time (I can’t be bothered to do the math on my made-up statistic), you won’t have a choice. You have to differentiate between customer and customerDetails, and there’s just no getting around it. You’ll know those times when you see them. Keep it simple until the code strong-arms you into doing otherwise.

    Rule two, then: call a spade a spade, not a digToolInfo.

    Someone using a digToolInfo to unsettle() some plantingSubstrate. (Photo by Anaya Katlego on Unsplash)

    Keep it short

    You don’t call the bank and ask “what is the current value of the total amount of money in my account?” You don’t call the bank at all these days, but that’s beside the point. You’d just ask: “what’s my balance?” No need to call it currentValueOfTheTotalAmountOfMoneyInTheAccount when it’s a balance.

    It might be a currentBalance if you need to distinguish it from some other kind of balance — previousBalance, maybe, or projectedBalance. If balance is just as clear, though, use it.

    How DO people get their bank balances these days, anyway? I log in to my bank website and look it up, but I bet by now that’s old school. Probably you record a video of yourself dancing to a song about your bank balance and post it to TikTok, and a bot from your bank will text you with the value and a relevant movie clip as commentary.

    Just checking that bank balance (Photo by Amanda Vick on Unsplash)

    Rule three: it isn’t acompactToolUsedForDiggingInOrderToPlantInTheGarden.

    Okay, I think you’re getting the idea. Call that spade a spade, and you’re good to go.

    Have you ever had to deal with code that just made no sense? Did you get angry at whoever wrote that garbage, only to look it up and find that you wrote it, six months prior? I feel you. Worst programmer ever is Me From The Past.

    Think of it this way instead: you’re so much better of a programmer now than you were six months ago! Learning and growing, that’s how you’re rocking it. Go you!

    Originally posted 30 May 2022 on Medium.

  • Recognize your wall

    Recognize your wall

    I’m not saying it’s time to go stare at the wall. Well, maybe I am.

    Maybe you’ve been firefighting most of the day, one urgent situation after another popping up like ads on top of a recipe blog. Perhaps it’s been an endless stream of meetings. Or maybe you’ve been working heads-down for hours (lucky you!), writing code for some huge project. Whatever the situation, it’s now late in the day, you’re dragging… but you’re trying to get “just one more thing” done before you dash out the door.

    Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

    First of all, is it just me, or is there always “just one more thing” immediately after that “one more thing” you’re working on? An endless stream of what seem at the time like final tasks, each one inspiring the need for the next…

    Secondly, let’s take a good look at how well you’re accomplishing that “one more thing.” Mmm hmm.

    I can hear some of you now, saying, “Oh come on, I can totally code for 13 hours straight! My code at 8pm is just as good as my code at 8am.” I hear it because I’ve said similar things in the past. And I’m not here to suggest that you’re wrong. I mean, you’re probably wrong. But who knows, maybe your ability to code for long hours is truly exceptional. 🏅

    I am here to suggest that you start to learn the signals that tell you when you are simply Done Coding For The Day, regardless of what the clock says or how long you’ve been at it. In other words, learn how to recognize when you’ve hit a wall. Here are some warning signs to watch for.

    You’re forgetting stuff

    You spend an hour debugging your code, only to find out that you’d assigned a variable the value "INSERT_REAL_VALUE HERE" instead of the correct value. You meant to go look up said real value and add it before committing that code. You forgot. Looking up the value takes you 20 seconds. Well, there’s an hour you won’t get back.

    Or you send your boss an email about a spreadsheet, but you forget to attach the spreadsheet. You send a second email with the attachment, forgetting there are actually TWO spreadsheets you need to send. You send the second attachment. Two minutes later, you remember that you never added this morning’s data to the first spreadsheet…

    You’re making familiar mistakes

    Even though I’ve been using mostly JavaScript for several years now, other languages I’ve used sometimes still make an unwanted guest appearance.

    For example: when I, yet again, use contains() on an array in JavaScript. JavaScript, yet again, reminds me that it doesn’t know what I’m talking about. It’s includes() that I want, not contains().

    I have to look that up, every time. I had to look it up for this article. For me, the warning sign is not forgetting the function name. The warning sign is forgetting to go look up the function name.

    You’re making newbie mistakes

    If you’re a newbie, making newbie mistakes is normal! Nothing to see here. You can move on to the next section.

    If you’ve been in this field a while, though, and you’re catching yourself using = (assignment) when you mean === (strict equals), for example… it might be time to step away from the keyboard.

    You’ve gone way off course

    Your code worked fine at around 4pm. You were just trying to fix one little piece of one little unit test. Now it’s several hours later, and not only have you not fixed your unit test, you have broken your previously working code in a way you don’t understand. And in the course of trying to fix that, you accidentally changed something else, and now your application won’t even start on your branch. And in your flailing attempt to get the code on your branch to work, you inadvertently committed a bunch of code to an unrelated branch…

    When you are so far down in the pit of despair, my friend: stop digging.

    You literally can’t see 😫

    A comma where a semicolon ought to be. Missing quotation marks. A variable called employeeFirstName in one place and employeeFirstname 20 lines later. These things happen to us all now and then. But if “now and then” has turned into “three times in the past hour,” it’s time to give your eyes a rest.

    Someone at a laptop clutching their head, phone and glasses to one side
    Why do I get an error that customer-file-052122.json doesn’t exist?? I can see that customer-fle-052122.json is right there! (Photo by Elisa Ventur on Unsplash)

    Better late than never

    If you don’t catch yourself faltering in the moment, you might start to notice the results the next day. You can’t change the past, but this is still useful information for the future!

    Pay attention when, in the light of day, you see that all of your code from last night stinks. Or worse, your peers reviews your late-night pull request, and point out at length exactly what stinks about your code. Even worse, most or all of it involves basic mistakes you know you wouldn’t normally make.

    Water under the bridge, but start to connect a certain fuzzy-brained feeling on day 1 with the unpleasant results on day 2. You’ll begin to recognize what might have been signs for you last time, and thereby learn what might be signs for you next time.

    Regardless of whether you can make it through 13 hours straight of coding, or if you run out of steam much earlier than that, pay attention to what the warning signs are for you that things are going awry. You’ll save yourself a lot of stress by learning when it’s time for you to step back from the keyboard and go do something else — or go stare at the wall.

    Originally posted 23 May 2022 on Medium.

  • Something’s gotta give

    Something’s gotta give

    You’ve already got a full schedule when the boss asks you to take on a special project. Or maybe an urgent issue just jumped up above everything else you were planning to do this week. Or you’ve got multiple stakeholders, and all of them insist on being your “top priority”.

    Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

    Before you start canceling evening and weekend plans so you can spend even more time than you already do at work: stop.

    You only have so many hours in the week when you will be able to work effectively. And anyway, sacrificing your personal time might be necessary in a pinch, but it should be a rare occurrence. That time is yours!

    When you start to see that you’ve got more on your plate than you can handle and still deliver the high quality of work you’d like to be known for, here are some strategies to find balance.

    Something else is de-prioritized

    If you’ve got room for five projects in your week, and your manager just approached you with a sixth, inquire about which of the other five you should set aside to focus on the new project. It may be that when your manager realizes you have five important things already planned, that sixth one doesn’t seem so urgent after all. Or maybe they agree that #1 and #2 are still your top priorities, but #3 could wait for later, and this new project should take its place in your workload for the week.

    Someone else to the rescue

    If none of your current projects can be dropped, perhaps there’s someone else who can assist with the new assignment. Or perhaps you can shift one of your items to someone else’s to do list in order to allow you to pick up the newcomer.

    Be warned however that simply adding people is often not helpful. If a colleague is assigned to help you with one of your projects, but you are going to spend more time explaining the project to your colleague than you would spend just working on it yourself, this might not be the time-saver you expect. There are great reasons for working collaboratively, but short term time savings is not always one of them.

    Scale it back a bit

    Let’s say you learn that all six of these projects must get done, and they must all get done by you. Can the scope of any of these projects be scaled back to allow you to handle all of them? Perhaps the columns on the table you’re coding don’t need a sort option, after all. Or maybe you can just handle the “happy path” case for the new screen, the error handling pieces can be taken care of next week.

    Step up now, step back later

    In some situations, you might legitimately have a time crunch that can’t be avoided. There’s a hard deadline next week, and there’s nobody else available to pitch in. If that’s the case, you might choose to negotiate putting in some extra time now in exchange for a little extra time off after the deadline has passed — if you can trust that your management will keep that promise. A few late nights this week might be rough, but next week when you’re cutting out early on a sunny day or taking a morning off to relax, it might all be worth it.

    Estimating your work is part of your job

    It isn’t easy to say “no” (or even “not this week”) to management or other stakeholders. However, accurately estimating how much time a project needs is part of your role. Your boss might not be aware that the “simple” item you are coding will take several days, or that you need several hours of preparation time for that workshop you are leading on Thursday.

    For larger tasks, you might need to break it down into sub-estimates. Then, when your supervisor says “what do you mean that will take six weeks??” you can calmly explain how you arrived at that number to help them understand everything involved with the project. And again, if they say “but I need it done in three weeks,” you have options: drop other work, get some help, scale the project back, and so on.

    Think of it as your manager relying on you, as a professional, to let them know how much time you will need to complete your work. This can help make it a little less intimidating to speak up when the boss arrives to add more to your already packed to do list. And finally, more good news: this gets easier with practice!

    Originally posted 16 May 2022 on Medium.

  • Boredom is an interesting thing

    Boredom is an interesting thing

    Okay, you’ve put off that dreaded task long enough. Finally, you get to work, but the time just drags on. You’d like to get it over with, but it’s just so… boring.

    Ho hum. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

    Yes, it’s true that we all have work now and then that we’re just plain stuck doing. Tedious chores that, whether we like it or not, need to get done, and need to get done by us.

    Just the same, take a closer look at what you’re working on. Maybe your boredom is trying to tell you something. Here are some questions to consider.

    Is it necessary?

    Are you bored because, on some level, you recognize that this just isn’t that important? Could you — or your stakeholder — do without?

    Take a moment to review why the task is important, and if you truly can’t identify a reason, maybe you can skip it. On the other hand, if you do see a valid reason for it, focusing on the purpose of the task might help relieve your boredom!

    Is it the right way?

    Perhaps you’re having a hard time getting rolling on this item because it’s not the right approach. For example, maybe you need to gather some data and analyze it, and you’re combing through a spreadsheet trying to pull out the information you want. Could you (or a colleague) instead write a script to pull the data you want out, rather than sifting through it by hand? Or is there a better way to get the data you’re looking for? Does someone else already have this data extracted?

    Is it yours?

    Maybe you’re not the right person to be doing this task. Can you delegate this to someone else who might not mind doing this? Or have you been asked to take on something that you feel is really someone else’s responsibility, and therefore this seems like a waste of your time?

    Is now the time?

    Are there other priorities right now that should be taking precedence? Could be that your boredom is trying to tell you that, as important as this task is, it isn’t your top priority right now. If you’re handling something at someone else’s request, perhaps you ought to check with them to confirm what their timeline is. It may be that they never intended for you to drop everything and do this now!

    Check in

    Checking in with yourself, a trusted colleague, your manager, or your stakeholder when you’re finding something especially boring might guide you to the root cause of your boredom, and from there you might spot another solution. Or it might give you new perspective on the task, or ideas to help you get through it.

    Has boredom been a “red flag” for you in the past? Are there other emotions or thoughts that act as a signal that it’s time for you to re-evaluate something?

    Originally posted 10 May 2022 on medium.

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