Everything is harder than you think (No. 57)
Humans are horrible inefficient communicators.
Hey tech leads,
Running a little late on today’s letter. Apologies!
Everything is harder than you think. Once you become a tech lead (or an EM or an architect), you find out that the code, working with code, might have turned out to be the easiest part of working in this industry—at least it will feel that way for a while.
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I don’t want you to misunderstand me. Writing code, especially early in your career, can be challenging. It’s intellectually interesting, it’s rewarding all by itself, and there are constantly new challenges and new things to do. And besides, it probably took you a lot of years to master it.
I say it’s “easy” because, for most of you reading this letter, you’ve probably reached a point in your career where the code isn’t so hard for you anymore. But if you’re right at that inflection point, where you’ve been recently tapped to lead a team or manage, and you’re just now discovering that it’s a WHOLE LOT messier than you thought, you may be missing the certainty of the code.
Don’t worry. In today’s short letter I’m going to clarify things for you. It starts with this simple statement: just expect that everything that involves working with other humans is going to take a lot more coordination and communication than you think it SHOULD.
Let’s go through a few tedious examples. Let’s say you’re working with product managers. There are meetings. There are conversations in the hall. On Jira tickets. On GitHub issues. Decisions get made. And then get changed. And your designs and architectures depend on other products and other teams. And you line up all the decisions from Product, get all the key test cases thought through, acceptance criteria agreed, and then it turns out that new database you were expecting to get installed with THAT ONE feature you need for the whole thing is tied up in procurement and now you need to rework stuff. Reboot. More meetings. More coordination.
Maybe you’re in crunch mode and your organization is really rigid about its agile processes (👎). Every time a developer tries to close out a story, it has to get “accepted” and this acceptance process is long and arduous. First you have to work through the QA team, who don’t seem to row at the same pace as everyone else. There’s this one story with ambiguous acceptance criteria and you REALLY WANT to get it accepted in the final days of the sprint so you can show your team earns a lot of story points. And you have to get product involved again to resolve the debate. And then there are more questions. And follow up meetings. And conversations with your management.
I could go on and on, but you probably get the picture. You probably just want to go hide, throw on some noise cancelling headphones, and start writing code right now. I’m right, right?
Humans are highly effective, incredible creates capable of startlingly amazing things and amazing variety. That said, this also needs to be said: humans are all horribly inefficient communicators.
So today’s thought is really simple. Just accept the idea that everything is going to take a lot more work and coordination than you think it SHOULD. Sometimes it’s going to be easy and quick, and that’s awesome, but it almost always takes more coordination and communication than it should, and that’s totally ok—it’s called work, and it’s fulfilling if you see it the right way.
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