It is not cool to be unkind!

In my long career I have run into quite a few people who are afraid to talk to engineers. I have even come across people who were afraid to talk to me. Me! How can that happen? I am one of the nicest people I know.

This is regularly refuted by my wife who tells me I am not always that nice. :-(

The root of the fear of talking to engineers seems to be that people don’t want to ask a dumb question and then be chided publicly. Very understandable, who wants that?

Smart and knowledgeable people can be cocky when it comes to their knowledge. On the one hand they are proud of being an expert in one or more deep topics, but at the same time they often seem to be offended when someone asks a simple question or a question that betrays a less than perfect insight into the complex subject matter they are experts in.

Surely you can't have it both ways; you cannot be at the same time proud of your vast knowledge and disdainful to people who haven't climbed that mountain yet.

There are many problems with that attitude and one of them is that it is contagious and self-defeating.

For a long time, I worked for a big Internet company with lots of users. One of our critical success factors was our network traffic infrastructure, which was very good at getting requests from users in the Internet to the closest available backend with capacity to process the request. They also had a version of that infrastructure for internal RPC traffic, making sure that services could always find a nearby downstream service instance without being worried about datacenter maintenance, network congestion, or servers being overloaded.

Probably needless to say, but  this infrastructure was not trivial to use or configure. In fact we suffered quite a few outages because of a misconfiguration or mistaken assumptions about how it worked.

We had a team in charge of the traffic infrastructure: The Traffic Team. This was a high pressure team because, whenever there was something wrong, it immediately led to users seeing errors. By virtue of the importance of the network, they were in the critical path of everything that went on.

Over time, the Traffic Team had become very adversarial and difficult to work with. According to the prevailing attitudes, everyone who was not in the team were, with few exceptions, idiots who didn't understand anything. That was somewhat unfortunate because the Traffic Team was in the critical path of pretty much every project that was launching new services. Every time you added a new component to the mesh, you had to configure the traffic infrastructure and that meant talking to the Traffic Team to get a review of your design or approval for your configuration changes.

On the internal chat groups of the Traffic Team other engineers were invariably labeled as idiots, morons, and much worse. They had cultivated an extreme us-versus-them culture.

As I said above, one of the problems with that attitude is that it is contagious.

Whenever a new team member joined they adopted the team’s attitude towards outsiders within mere weeks. The results were not pretty; I was personally dressed down by a junior engineer, fresh out of college, for asking a question that was considered to be dumb or for not (in turn) being harsh enough on the software engineers that my team was working with.

The company found it hard to deal with this because the people in the Traffic Team were smart, knowledgeable, and worked very hard. They also saved the company from many disasters. They were great engineers under a lot of pressure and with a terrible user interface.

Attitudes like that are also self-defeating. At one time I managed an SRE team for a very popular high traffic service that was badly behaved. Consequently, there were many conflicts with the Traffic Team. After a few interactions tempers had risen so high that the manager of the Traffic Team demanded I be fired. Obviously that didn't happen, but the resulting compromise was that my team would run its own separate copy of a large part of the traffic stack so as to minimize the interface between our two teams. That's a lot of work and after a few years we of course integrated back into the main traffic infrastructure which is also a lot of work. A more mature handling of the entire situation might have prevented all this work.

But then again, multiple people got promoted for their efforts on both of these projects  :-)

I usually try to be kind to people, but as I wrote above, I am regularly surprised when I find out that people are or were afraid to talk to me. Even as recently as last year my manager told me that he had had a chat with a junior engineer who told him something along the lines of: "I had a long talk with Jos at the Christmas lunch and I was surprised to find that he was really nice!" Why surprised? I am nice, am I not?

Whenever that happens I debug the situation a bit and it invariably comes down to two root causes:

1. The effects of well-known seniority.

2. Differences between written and in-person communication styles.

By virtue of a gray beard and a more or less exalted job title, people commonly know that I have been around in the industry for a while. This counts in an industry where the age distribution is highly lopsided and there are typically not a lot of people around with multiple decades of experience. Quite often, before I join a new team, a manager or director says things like: "We have hired this super experienced and very senior guy who is really going to shake things up." There are many problems with that, but two of them are creating an outsized expectation with respect to what I am able to achieve and an equally outsized expectation about the divine nature of my opinions. A lot of people respect seniority and authority, and that makes them anxious to talk to me.

The other thing is that I can be a snappy communicator, especially in interactive written form (Slack, email, chat, comments on documents). I have definitely been (and sometimes still are) guilty of too much directness and brevity, and that puts people off.

Here is an example: In some SRE team that I was in, we used to get a lot of tickets with requests to do things that were well within the purview of the requesting engineer (either through self-service or by modifying the configuration and sending us a code review). At one point I got so sick and tired of this that I wrote a snarky Wiki page called "SRE is not your staffing org" . From then on, whenever I got one of these tickets, I would respond: "No!",  followed by a link to that Wiki page. 

I thought this was cool. I was wrong.

Many people felt put in their place for no reason other than that they just did not understand how our extremely complicated service and supporting infrastructure worked. All in all it was unkind of me and it is not cool to be unkind. Total Traffic Team behavior on my part.

Fortunately I am not always an a-hole. Once, a long time ago, I was sitting at my desk and I got a chat from an unknown recruiting coordinator who asked me to modify the score on a recent interview. Given the particular thing that had happened, modifying the score was the wrong thing to do and I was about to write some snarky response to her request. However, since I had never heard or read this colleague’s name, I looked her up in our internal people directory and it turned out she had started only three weeks before.

So instead of unleashing a sarcastic torrent, I told her: "Heya, I see that you are new, let me explain: In a situation like this we do not modify the score because <reasons>. Instead we should do <this other thing>."

I later learned this was an example of an answering technique called: Answer, Explain, Educate, which I subsequently embraced.

Annabel (the colleague) responded with: "OMG thank you so much for this answer, I did indeed just start and am trying to wrap my mind around everything that is going on here. This is so helpful, do you mind if I chat with you every now and then with a question because honestly I don't know anybody yet."

This was clearly a much better way to handle this.

It also turned out that some senior recruiter had coaxed her into pinging me and asking that question, probably as some sort of hazing ritual, expecting me to give her an earful.

Why do people become unkind in these sorts of situations?

Of course some people are born a-holes, but I firmly believe most people are not. Instead I think that most of this unkindness is situational: A lot of people are frustrated, annoyed, stressed, or tired, maybe from getting the same under-informed questions all the time, maybe because of some other reason.

Stress and frustration are real and they are well known to lead to crappy communication. As the article linked in the previous sentence states: “Research shows that team members under stress tend to communicate with less empathy, engage less with each other, and focus less on working together.” This is of course totally counterproductive because when things are not going well, we need to communicate with more empathy, engage more with each other, and focus more on working together.

Remember: Stress makes stupid!

Another possible root cause is misplaced status thinking: “If other people are dumb, then I must be smart.” There are so many things wrong with this thought that I cannot even begin unpacking them here. If you suffer from this, please, for the love of all that is holy, get some therapy 🙂.

The third cause I’d like to mention is insider-versus-outsider thinking. There are some deep seated psychological and sociological causes for wanting to ring fence your group and to see your own group as better, smarter, and more beautiful. The outsiders are dumb and really don't warrant the careful consideration of the experts in the in-group. Total high-school behavior, but then again, much of corporate life is.

Whatever the explanation, it is not cool to be unkind. Quite the opposite: It is cool to be kind. That is unfortunately still so uncommon that if you are kind, people are often surprised by it.

So please try it! Surprise yourself and others. You might make some life-long friends!