Playing on Hard
User's Manual

During my onboarding at Levels, I was asked to write a “User’s Manual” for me. Here’s a free-form draft (with some slight edits) that I finally didn’t use directly because the actual User’s Manual was much more structured:

I am a “strongly typed” kind of a person: I will take all your utterances at face value, without wiggle room. This is automatic and natural and has been as long as I can remember. This is great when interfacing with computers but not so great when interfacing with humans. I have (very, very slowly) come to realize that most of the words we say are not meant to be taken at face value but even with that intellectual understanding, the automatic response is still literal understanding of words.

“Let’s see what happens” is the favorite phrase of Emperor Gregor from the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (one of my favorite sagas). I have certainly adopted it for 95% of the choices we need to make in engineering. The other 5% are the ones that are so important that we need to be sure of the outcome: security, data integrity, correctness with and without scale. But not: OOP vs structured vs functional programming, unit tests vs end-to-end, this db or that db, and so on. Here as well my setting was naturally at 100%: emotionally, everything in engineering felt like it mattered all the time and there was only one true way. This was, mildly put, obnoxious and at least here I am happy to say that over time I have learned to relax and play out the long game: sometimes things do end up mattering and then we learn and adapt but most of the time it’s just fine. So if you hear me saying “let’s see what happens” you can be sure that a) I may have done things differently but I see no actual danger and I think it might work out and b) I am not being flippant and sincerely hope that the outcome will be as good as you think it will be.

I am exceptionally sensitive to giving credit where credit is due and I will promote colleague’s ideas by giving them monickers like “Hildum’s Razor” or “Jake’s Maneuver”. This is another setting that naturally came at 100% and only through long self-training have I learned to lower it and not interpret too harshly when folks, naturally, forget where ideas come from.

I grew up in socialism, saw its inglorious end, saw the disintegration of the country where I was born. I appreciate practically working systems over theoretically ideal systems any given day (not that I think that socialism is even remotely “theoretically ideal”). All systems have built-in feedback loops - that’s what we call “nature” - and nothing can survive on bad epistemology forever but it can survive long enough to damage and waste countless lives. Which if why I firmly believe that reality based systems, those that have explicit feedback loops built into them, are resilient and adaptable and the only ones worth building and the only ones worth participating in. This goes for the wider political system but we don’t need to go that far: in every company we have the human system and human-technological system and communicational system and so on. Somebody needs to build those and we all need to maintain them and push against the entropy.

After the little soap box speech above let me tell you where I fail: I fail over and over again of giving hard feedback upwards. There is something in me, in the core, that reasons that privately owned enterprises should figure it out themselves rather than me figuring it out for them and that if people want to build and live in crap, it’s their prerogative. I would rather leave than make a fuss that might improve things. I do not understand this impulse and certainly at Levels I feel more comfortable than ever.

My last words will likely be “Time enough for love” (if I am lucky enough to be surrounded by family) or “Humans!” (with exasperation, if somebody else messed up) or “Well, that was stupid…” (if I messed up) depending on the circumstances. My dad recently passed away and his final words to me were “When are you going to Miami?” because he knew I was supposed to travel but I was there, in Serbia, trying to see him while he was in the hospital (and all we got were two minutes over doctor’s personal phone - I will be grateful for those two minutes as long as I live). I don’t pine for other words from him but I do wish I was there along his side all that time.


Last modified on 2024-04-03