Here’s a screen capture from Silver Surfer #1 issue that I thought was cool. I love where you can find such inspiring quotes in old popular culture. With today’s superhero content, it’s refreshing to read the old comics with different writing styles.
Thoughts
The designer/engineer relationship in the workplace
In the first article [1], the author explains some concrete tips on how to deal with people from different fields in the workplace. I think as an engineering student humility helps in that regard. What I mean, is that I observe some students or engineers or even myself being unnecessarily hard to cooperate with. That might be unintentional since it might just be how they are. But, I believe that some open-minded would certainly help in a situation where you are dealing with professionals coming from different fields.
It makes me think about It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind [2] article, but it might not be as relevant. That culture of always trying to be right, in the end, doesn’t necessarily help the issue at hand. I feel like it’s kind of based on the situation, but it could certainly be on a personal level. That it might just be the attitude of the individual, but could you attribute that to an entire profession?
It makes me think that how to deal with such a situation, is to be reactive, in the sense that, base on the situation and on the information you have at hand, you ought to analyze it and then come on with a proper reaction. I feel like this is the only way to truly address this issue properly. Because, if you base your actions on these tips, you might overdo it and not act properly in the first place.
Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I think they are good advice, but they might not be the right answer. Because people in a way are all unique, they respond differently. Even if you try to accommodate your engineers or the other way around, they might not want that kind of behaviours. They might just not care at all.
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
Now there’s this other article The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)[3], which goes a lot deeper into the relationship and the psychology of software engineers. So, to start from the top, there’s a lot a talk about the current situation of the software engineer in the industry, where we feel frustrated because of the dynamic created with the role structure inside a team. To add to that, I believe it might be a misconception coming from both an internal and an external perspective. When building a product, software engineer tends to feel like there’s no liberty for creativity in the engineering work. I guess that there’s a lot of this coming from the preconception of what is the engineer suppose to do in that team. I think the engineer role can cover so much ground that it makes the role hard to handle for others. I was thinking about how can we quantify the hiring of an engineer, like what to test and how can he fit into the role. But I think to add to this problem of misunderstandings of one’s needs to be creative, is that there must have an understanding of the personality. From what I’ve heard the most reliable test would be the big five personality traits test, which should be a tool for helping fit people inside a team. But I feel like it doesn’t end there. The dynamic of the human psyche is so complex that frustration will arise almost no matter what.
Also, I feel that a lot of this, building a product as a team, hiring, etc. It is done mostly on instinct and not on a rationality based decision. This makes me think of Conway’s Law about a system quality that will represent the state of the communication inside the organization that builds it. Well, as good as you as get at transferring information through your language, this will make you most efficient in whatever project you’re in. This makes me think of the student club I’m part of. We had a lot of difficulties something understanding what we mean, although we’re getting better. But we have such a hard time since we are a team of multidisciplinary individuals building a rescue robot. We have mechanical engineers who worked a lot in car maintenance. We have software engineers coming from video game development which uses technology that surprisingly is useful in robotic. So we are always entangled in this melting pot of information coming from everywhere, different disciplines, different lexicons, etc. I feel that this makes it hard to be productive as a team something since it takes something a lot of mental energy to come back from what you were doing and try to get into that mindset.
Anyway, what I mean is that it feels a lot like there’s a communication issue and that people tend to take mentals shortcuts to get to it. Until we get better at communicating we won’t be able to pass this limit.
Sources
[2] https://forge.medium.com/its-not-enough-to-be-right-you-also-have-to-be-kind-b8814111fe1