I work with other two in a dev team. We all like to curl up
on our computers and do things and we only talk to each other when absolutely
necessary. Sometimes the necessity seems to be social because someone is just
so bored that he needs to vent or have some relief using some “unnecessary”
small talk. Relief is necessary, and so this “unnecessary” small talk is
actually necessary! This is what I usually think about when one of my dev colleagues
tells me a story about his home country or her child.
I’m the most junior member, not only on the dev team, but
the whole department. I am finding it very difficult for people to take me
seriously, and I really think this is unfair because I am making real
contributions to the team and the department including discovering security
holes in systems lazily built in a hacky way to “save time”. I believe that
those shortcuts left us already in a mess that everyone is seeing, but no
change in behavior was realized for some reason worth or studying but that is beyond
the topic I want to discuss here.
Talking is not an easy task, especially when you want to do
it right. A drunken person can talk. A president might deliver a speech to the
UN about a vital global issue. Both of them are talking. I can talk, and so can
Larry King. But in the details that characterizes “talking” there is so much
that takes place and causes various kinds of effects including emotional and
rational. And to cause the right effects, talking must be tailored carefully
and that requires a lot of mental effort.
I am not fan of talking for socialization’s sake. But when
it comes to communication, even superfluous, I do talk in a manner that people
think I am lecturing them, that I’m a show off, or just too chatty. In reality,
what I carefully look forward to is delivering an internal mental representation
of what I have in my head in as much detail as possible, to achieve clarity,
and to obtain other people’s opinion who will be more able to express their
opinions now that they have a clear picture.
I support superfluous communication because of two reasons:
first, you never really know how others may be able to use information that you
think is superfluous (nor can they!), second, things might change in the
future, and the third is that our magnificent human mind allows information to
interact with other information in unexpected wonderful ways: the creative process
is surely not linear and sometimes a lack of focus helps spark ideas, gives way
to explore and discover, and see random useful connections that were just out
of view. Sometimes when you expose yourself to unexpected things, you are able unexpectedly
discover other things. It’s like going on an expedition, but only mentally and
intellectually.
On another note, I always find verbal communication to be
challenging, and I think people find it challenging to focus on what I’m
actually saying and not be distracted by the way I am saying things.
I often find myself in a position wherein someone asks me a
question in a light social context that requires a deep thoughtful answer. The
question can be really simple, and the questioner is most likely insincere
about obtaining a real answer and is relying on a typical social pattern of non-seriousness.
But to properly address the question, a sophisticated answer is required, and
such an answer is not suitable for the current social context. For example, sometimes
people as me how am I doing. This is not a simple question. This question
requires reflection at several existential levels and timeframes of consideration.
Sometimes I say I’m not sure, prompting light-hearted laughter from others
around me, which relieves me, and sometimes I just panic, causing embarrassment
for myself and others around me. I also often surprise people with answers that
escalates quickly from nice weather to extensive genetic diversity or why I don’t
like probabilistic primality tests. That’s not to mention the technical ideas
that I relate to what goes on in my social discussions: see Soy Sauce
Conversations for a simple example.
There are several ways a conversation can evolve. Changing a
conversation’s topic from ‘the weather’ to ‘extensive genetic diversity’ is an
example of the evolution of the topic. I’ll call that “topical evolution”. Topical
evolution simply means a change of topic, gradual or sudden, comfortably by an
appropriate stimulant or related topic painfully through the interruption of an
eager loud person. Of course a change of topic carries with it a change of
emotions and thinking. That’s another kind of conversational evolution that I
experience a lot even without topical evolution: it’s more internal to the mind
and so I will call it conversational cognitive evolution. The Cognitive and
topical conversational evolution types could happen together, but they are
logically independent and can happen separately.
To illustrate conversational cognitive evolution consider
the ways of thinking. A light-weight conversation about how bad the traffic is
in the morning, might be just that, but behind what is being said, there is so
much thinking about how one can model traffic changes mathematically. Of course
you avoid telling your girlfriend this, because she’ll complain that you’re
such a turn-off like mine usually does with me whenever I really tell her
what’s on my mind.
Yesterday she made a remark about my car’s side mirror, but
instead called it a window. She joked about how sometimes she calls a mirror a
window for some reason. This provoked several thoughts in my mind such as how
the brain is flexible enough to allow multiple modes of linguistic processing:
a mirror is some form of a window indeed. Our minds are marvelous and we can
see a lot of that through our mistakes. A robot would never make such a brilliant
mistake, but then a stupid robot with an artificial neural network trained
using an “extended text corpus” is just that. My girlfriend might be
embarrassed and feel a little stupid, but she has no idea how smart I think she
is, until she reads this article (the fact that I am obsessed with her body does
not contradict anything here).
The obvious part of the conversation was apparently about a
linguistic mistake, and about how being hungry makes you silly (or is it really
some form of stress induced brilliance?), but behind the talking was a lot of
heavy-weight thinking. Maybe she was thinking about a brilliant business
scheme, or how to manipulate me like a chess piece to maximize her pleasure
intake.
Well my girlfriend is not really part of our dev team but
her influence on me indirectly influences the team. Just like my father, who is
also not a software developer or even very tech savvy for that matter, but
because he has always insisted that I “develop” a social life, and that I
become more social, and that I need to deal with people, and that I need to
learn how to effectively deal with people, and that I need to go out, and that
I need to stop spending so much time on my computer and that I need to talk more
and that I need to be charming, and that I need to always smile and be social
and that I… I went crazy. But the traumatic stress is very interesting.
I think my dad learnt the necessity of being socially
intelligent the hard way. I am also. Interaction with a system composed of
emotional, intricate, barely stable human subsystems is not easy, especially
when you are of a similar kind of subsystem. I think no matter how cold and
rational one person is, they naturally have that emotional component, even if
they are able to control it. I think those who are really unaware of the
nuances of social interaction and the emotional part of it, are really lucky as
they spare themselves a lot of distraction. This is why I often find myself
wishing to be just as emotionally unintelligent as possible, so I can focus on
the objectives, the technology, the software, the ambitions of a totally
different reality, without even being aware of social or emotional aspects, let
alone worrying about them. Just the opposite of what my dad wants me to be:
emotionally intelligent and a social leader.
I think my dad has a very strong point in wanting me to be
socially smart, because it would make my life a lot easier and would enable me
to take leadership roles and as such progress in my career. Of course this is
also beyond career success because leading in my personal life would require me
to understand people, how to deal with them, how to love them and allow them to
love you. Then why don’t I want it?
I think that just being aware of social things is a waste of
brain/mind power (wait, I need to be very careful to not step into the infinite
space of narrow mindedness! But how can I explain intricately everything I
think without taking forever to finish this article?). The mind is a processor
and consciously or not, exposure to social elements makes my brain, as an
automatic information processor, process and evolve to accommodate the ideas
and thoughts (the whole ontology) creating an underlying mental representation to
be able to process these ideas and thoughts. I am not really passionate about
social intelligence, I am more excited by number theory and algorithms.
To expand more on my desire to lock myself in a library for
a couple of years and delve in a world of wonder and science, intellect and
mathematics, I always find myself with a
clearer and more rested mental state whenever I have time for myself (please
someone explain this to that eager girlfriend of mine). This is why I am sure I
am an introvert, but many times I act (only act) as an extrovert because I am
curious and passionate as I elaborate in the following two paragraphs before I
go back to my development team:
Curiosity makes me want to explore people: their behavior
and what information they hold. People are very powerful information systems if
they actually allow themselves to receive and learn, and communicate and
exchange information with others thoughtfully. The way people behave socially
is very interesting, unexpected, chaotic, biologically intelligent, very unlike
the artificially intelligent systems -to what extent can we call it artificial
anyways? I feel like I need paragraphs of interjections every other word I
write here- computer scientists are building with the former being a reference point
for the latter.
I also am passionate about achievement. And hence I am
interested in motivating my team to talk more, or rather, to communicate useful
information more. Communication can make my team much more efficient and
effective in their software development process both strategically and
technically. From deciding to create a solution and the why behind it, to the
technical details of how. I found them doing things without me knowing (they do
not report to me as I am just a team member at the same level) and then found
out that they could have done things in a much better way. If only we took 10
minutes to talk about it!
This 10 minute is a professional investment. I don’t want to
chat about the weather for 10 minutes. And if this 10 minutes investment is
going to save us hours or even weeks of hard work later, then why not?! The
resistance comes from the fact that talking is not easy as I mentioned above,
because thoughtful conversations requires you to think, analyze and imagine.
And then after all that, you have to convert all of your thoughts, analysis and
imagination to that linguistic representation called natural language, or
English, which, to make things harder, isn’t the native language of anyone on
the team. The inadequacy of natural language to represent thought, or our
inadequacy to use it to do the same, is compounded by the differences in native
languages.
The three of us want our lives to be easier, we all want to
be more efficient and effective because of the internal reward and external
recognition, and we want to be better and spend our precious time doing precious
things. Then why aren’t we talking?
Because of my failure.
I think things, I am writing them down now, I have
communicated them before to the team by emailing and telling and yelling, yet
what I want is not there. What does that mean other than I failed?
My acknowledgement of failure is not an emotional downturn,
but rather a strategic move that entices me to ask myself: what can I do
differently, since I failed all these times, to obtain the result that I need?
How can I allow my colleagues to be more encouraged to make a change even when
I have no authority over them?
