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  1. title: Do the Right Thing
  2. url: http://timjwade.com/2018/08/06/do-the-right-thing.html
  3. hash_url: bb4f6a81c146856403184fade90545b7
  4. <p>Some years ago when I was living in an Ashram in rural Virginia, I met
  5. a wise, old man. I knew he was a wise, old man because he embodied
  6. certain stereotypes about wise, old men. First, he was a Gray-Bearded
  7. Yogi. Before this he was a New Yorker and a practicing Freudian
  8. Psychoanalyst. Sometimes he would say a lot of interesting and funny
  9. things, and at other times he would smile and nod and say nothing at
  10. all. I can’t remember if he ever stroked his beard.</p>
  11. <p>One day he said to me, “Asoka,” (the name under which I was going at
  12. the time). “Asoka,” he said, “do you know what is the single driving
  13. force behind all our desires, motives and actions?” I thought about
  14. this for some time. I had my own ideas but, knowing he was a Freudian,
  15. suspected that the answer was going to be something to do with the
  16. libido.</p>
  17. <p>“You probably suspect that the answer is going to be something to do
  18. with the libido,” he said. “But it’s not.” I listened patiently. “It’s
  19. the need … to be right.” I laughed. While I wasn’t totally surprised
  20. not to have got the right answer, this particular one for some reason
  21. blew me away. I wasn’t prepared. I had never framed human nature in
  22. those terms before.</p>
  23. <p>I wouldn’t expect anyone else to have the same reaction. I suspect
  24. others would find this to be either obvious, banal, or plainly wrong,
  25. and if this is you, I don’t intend to convince you otherwise (there
  26. might be a certain irony in trying to do so). What I want to do
  27. instead is document what became for me a personal manifesto, and a
  28. lens through which I began to look at the world. As a lens, you are
  29. free to pick it up, take a look through it, and ultimately discard it
  30. if you wish. But I rather like it a lot.</p>
  31. <p>What happened that day was really only the start of a long
  32. process. Eventually I would see that a preoccupation with being right
  33. was essentially an expression of power and that rectifying (from the
  34. Late Latin <em>rectificare</em> - to “make right”) was about exerting power
  35. over others. I would also see that this preoccupation had perhaps more
  36. to do with the appearance of being right, and that the cost of
  37. maintaining it would be in missed opportunities for learning. And I
  38. would also see that, while the rectification obsession was not a
  39. uniquely male problem, there seemed to be a general movement of
  40. rightness from that direction, and we would do well to examine that
  41. too.</p>
  42. <p>I was the principle subject of my examination, and it has become a
  43. goal to continue to examine and dismantle the ways in which I assert
  44. “rightness” in the world.</p>
  45. <h3 id="a-little-bit-about-myself">A little bit about myself</h3>
  46. <p>Allegedly I come from a long line of <em>know-it-alls</em>. Unsurprisingly,
  47. it’s a behavior that passes down the male side of my family. Of
  48. course, I don’t really believe this is a genetic disposition, and it’s
  49. easy to see how this might work.</p>
  50. <p>As a child I remember my family’s praising me for being ‘brainy’. They
  51. gave me constant positive feedback for being right. As long as I
  52. appeared to be right all the time I felt like I was winning. In
  53. actuality, though, I was losing. I learned to hide my ignorance of
  54. things so as never to appear wrong. I’ve spent most of my life missing
  55. answers to questions I didn’t ask. I became lazy, unconsciously
  56. thinking that my smarts would allow me to coast through life.</p>
  57. <p>Once I left School, and with it a culture principally concerned with
  58. measuring and rewarding rightness, I had a hard time knowing how to
  59. fit in or do well. It would take years of adjustments before I felt
  60. any kind of success. Whenever something became hard, I’d try something
  61. new, and I was always disappointed to find that opportunities were not
  62. handed to me simply because I was ‘smart’. When I didn’t get into the
  63. top colleges I applied to it devastated me. I would later drop out of
  64. a perfectly good college, get by on minimum wage jobs when I was lucky
  65. enough even to have one, fail to understand why I didn’t get any of
  66. the much better jobs I applied for.</p>
  67. <p>I stumbled upon a section in Richard Wiseman’s <em>59 Seconds: Think a
  68. Little, Change a Lot</em> that claimed that children who are praised for
  69. hard work will be more successful than those that are praised for
  70. correctness or cleverness (there is some research that supports
  71. this). It came as a small comfort to learn that I was not alone. More
  72. importantly, it planted in me a seed whose growth I continue to
  73. nurture today.</p>
  74. <p>I still don’t fully grasp the extent to which these early experiences
  75. have shaped my thinking and my behavior, but I have understood it well
  76. enough to have turned things around somewhat, applied myself, and have
  77. some awareness of my rectifying behavior, even if I can’t always
  78. anticipate it.</p>
  79. <p>It is one thing to intervene in your own actions toward others, to
  80. limit your own harmful behavior. It is quite another when dealing with
  81. the dynamics of a group of people all competing for rightness. What
  82. I’m especially interested in currently is the fact that I don’t
  83. believe I’ve ever seen such a high concentration of people who are
  84. utterly driven by the need to be right <em>all the time</em> as in the tech
  85. industry.</p>
  86. <p>Let’s look at some of the different ways that being right has manifest
  87. itself negatively in the workplace.</p>
  88. <h3 id="on-leadership-and-teamwork">On Leadership and Teamwork</h3>
  89. <p>There is a well-known meme about the experience of being a programmer,
  90. and it looks like this:</p>
  91. <p><img src="/assets/two-states.png" class="img-responsive" alt="The two states of every programmer"/></p>
  92. <p>There is some truth to this illustration of the polarization of
  93. feelings felt through coding. However, it is all too common for
  94. individuals to wholly identify with one or the other. On the one side
  95. we have our rock stars, our 10x developers and brogrammers. On the
  96. other we have people dogged by imposter syndrome. In reality, the two
  97. abstract states represent a continuous and exaggerated part of us
  98. all. Having said that, I believe that <em>everyone</em> is in the middle, but
  99. much closer to the second state than the first. All of us.</p>
  100. <p>In my personal experience I have felt a strong feeling of camaraderie
  101. when I’m working with people who all humbly admit they don’t <em>really</em>
  102. know what they’re doing. This qualification is important - nobody is
  103. saying they are truly incompetent, just that there are distinct limits
  104. to their knowledge and understanding. There is the sense that we don’t
  105. have all the answers, but we will nonetheless figure it out
  106. together. It promotes a culture of learning and teamwork. When
  107. everyone makes themselves vulnerable in this way great things can
  108. happen. The problem is that it only takes one asshole to fuck all that
  109. up.</p>
  110. <p>When a team loses its collective vulnerability as one person starts to
  111. exert rightness (and therefore power) downwards onto it, we lose all
  112. the positive effects I’ve listed above. I’ve seen people become
  113. competitive and sometimes downright hostile under these
  114. conditions. Ultimately it rewards the loudest individuals who can make
  115. the most convincing semblance of being right to their peers and
  116. stifles all other voices.</p>
  117. <p>This is commonly what we call “leadership”, and while I don’t want to
  118. suggest that leadership and teamwork are antagonistic to each other, I
  119. do want to suggest that a certain style of leadership, one concerned
  120. principally with correctness, is harmful to it. A good leader will
  121. make bold decisions, informed by their team, to move forward in some
  122. direction, even if sometimes that turns out to be the wrong one. It’s
  123. OK to acknowledge this and turn things around.</p>
  124. <h3 id="on-productivity">On Productivity</h3>
  125. <p>A preoccupation with being right can have a directly negative effect
  126. on productivity. One obvious way is what I will call refactoring
  127. hypnosis - a state wherein the programmer forgets the original intent
  128. of their refactoring efforts and continues to rework code into a more
  129. “right” state, often with no tangible benefit while risking
  130. breakages at every step.</p>
  131. <p>Style is another area that is particularly prone to pointless
  132. rectification. It is not unusual for developers to have a preference
  133. for a certain style in whatever language they are using. It is
  134. interesting that while opposing styles can seem utterly “wrong” to the
  135. developer it seems that this is the area of software development in
  136. which there are the fewest agreements over what we consider to be good
  137. or “right”. In Ruby there have been attempts to unify divergent
  138. opinion in the <a href="https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide">Ruby Style Guide</a> but it has been known to go back
  139. and forth on some of its specifics (or merely to state that there are
  140. competing styles), and the fact that teams and communities eventually
  141. grow their own style guides (AirBnb, GitHub, thoughtbot, Seattle.rb)
  142. shows that perhaps the only thing we can agree on is that a codebase
  143. be consistent. Where it lacks consistency there lie opportunities to
  144. rectify, but this is almost always a bad idea if done for its own
  145. sake.</p>
  146. <p>Finally, being right simply isn’t agile. One of the core tenets of the
  147. Agile Manifesto is that while there is value in following a plan,
  148. there is more value in responding to change. This seems to suggest
  149. that our plans, while useful, will inevitably be wrong in crucial
  150. ways. An obsession with rightness will inevitably waste time -
  151. accepting that we will be wrong encourages us to move quickly, get
  152. feedback early on and iterate to build the right thing in the shortest
  153. time.</p>
  154. <h3 id="on-culture">On Culture</h3>
  155. <p>As I’ve asserted above, none of us <em>really</em> knows what we are doing
  156. (for different values of “really”), and indeed this sentiment has been
  157. commonly expressed even among some of the most experienced and
  158. celebrated engineers. I think that there is both humor and truth in
  159. this but, while I believe the sentiment is well-intentioned, words are
  160. important and can sometimes undermine what’s being expressed
  161. here. I’ve seen people I look up to utter something of the form, look,
  162. I wrote [some technology you’ve probably heard of], and I still do
  163. [something stupid/dumb] - what an idiot! This doesn’t reassure me at
  164. all. All I think is, wow, if you have such a negative opinion of
  165. yourself, I can’t imagine what you’d think of me.</p>
  166. <p>Perhaps instead of fostering a culture of self-chastisement we can
  167. celebrate our wrongness. We know that failure can sometimes come at
  168. great cost, but it’s almost always because of flaws in the systems we
  169. have in place. A good system will tolerate certain mistakes well, and
  170. simply not let us make other kinds of mistakes. A mistake really is a
  171. cause for celebration because it is also a learning, and celebrating
  172. creates an opportunity to share that learning with others while
  173. simultaneously destigmatizing its discovery. I am happy that my team
  174. has recently formalized this process as part of our weekly
  175. retrospectives - I would encourage everyone to do this.</p>
  176. <p>One of the most harmful ways I’ve seen the rectification obsession
  177. play out is in code reviews. The very medium of the code review
  178. (typically GitHub) is not well set up for managing feelings when
  179. providing close criticism of one’s work. We can exacerbate this with
  180. an obsession with being right, especially when there are multiple
  181. contenders in the conversation.</p>
  182. <p>I have been on teams where this obsession extends into code review to
  183. the point where, in order for one to get one’s code merged, a reviewer
  184. has to deem it “perfect”. Ironically, this seems less an indicator of
  185. high code quality in the codebase and more of the difficulty of ever
  186. making changes to the code subsequently. Having your work routinely
  187. nitpicked can be a gruelling experience - worse so when review take
  188. place in multiple timezones and discussions go back and forth over
  189. multiple days or even weeks. Personally, I’ve been much happier when
  190. the team’s standard for merging is “good enough”, encouraging
  191. iterative changes and follow up work for anything less crucial.</p>
  192. <p>It is hard to overstate the importance of language when looking at
  193. these interactions. There has been much talk recently about the use of
  194. the word “just” (as in “just do it this way”) in code review, and I am
  195. glad that this is undergoing scrutiny. It seems to suggest that not
  196. only is the recipient wrong, but deeply misguided - the “right” way is
  197. really quite simple. This serves to exert power in a humiliating way,
  198. one that minimizes our effort and intellect along the way. Of course,
  199. there are countless more ways that we can do harm through poorly
  200. chosen words, but I am glad that we have started to examine this.</p>
  201. <h3 id="on-mansplaining">On Mansplaining</h3>
  202. <p>It is telling to me that the standard introduction to any
  203. mansplanation, <em>well, actually….</em>, is almost the ultimate expression
  204. of rectification. It is appropriate that we have identified this
  205. behavior as an expression of masculine insecurity - the man uses sheer
  206. volume and insistence to counter a position he poorly
  207. understands. More innocent mansplanations still work in the same way -
  208. without contradicting a man may simply offer some explanation (I am
  209. right!), believing this to be helpful to the person whose ignorance he
  210. has assumed.</p>
  211. <p>I am aware that there could be some irony in trying to frame the whole
  212. of this phenomenon in terms of my manifesto, but it is not my
  213. intention to do so. It is rather that mansplaining reveals a great
  214. deal about the harm done and intentions behind rectifying behavior.</p>
  215. <h3 id="doing-the-right-thing">Doing the Right Thing</h3>
  216. <p>I do not want to suggest a feeling of smug superiority - just about every
  217. harmful behavior I have described above I have also engaged in at some
  218. point. I know I will continue to do so, too. But I want this to be
  219. better, and I want to work with people who are also committed to these
  220. goals.</p>
  221. <p>Looking back to the start of my journey, I have to question now the
  222. intent of the wise, old man in his original assertion about human
  223. behavior. Was this yet another example of some unsolicited advice from
  224. a person who exploited their maleness and seniority to add more weight
  225. to their pronouncements than perhaps they deserved? Is this all that
  226. wise, old men do? Almost certainly.</p>
  227. <p>As it turned out, I did not wholly embrace it as truth (none of the
  228. above makes any claims to social science or psychology), but neither
  229. rejected it wholesale. I discovered that while it may not be literally
  230. true, I might arrive at smaller truths by entertaining it as an idea
  231. (the contradiction is probably what made me laugh). I’m grateful that
  232. it was shared with me.</p>
  233. <p>That there is nothing <em>wrong</em> with <em>being right</em>. Rather, it is the
  234. <em>desire</em> to be right that colors our judgment, that leads us on the
  235. wrong path. Being right is also not the same thing as <em>doing the right
  236. thing</em>. And I want to focus my efforts now on this, while trying to
  237. free myself from the tyranny of being right.</p>