Maximizing your usefulness: how to make your coworkers more useful
Problem: A coworker did some work and it looks like code. He did not do anything wrong, because he codes for a living. The problem is that the work is overly complicated and does not achieve the goal of solving a problem for your client. When questioned, he calls his work ‘smart’, and now you have the problem of challenging his intelligence when you challenge his code.
In a world where we are beholden to the emotions of people with higher titles than us, we must tread carefully with our criticisms.
Why do we try to sound smart?
Nowadays, when we’re hungry we can reach into the fridge for a snack because agriculture figured out how to grow more food in the same amount of space. But at some point, we were chimpanzee-like things fighting over figs in the jungle.
If you can’t grow more food per square mile of jungle, and new chimps are constantly being born, somebody’s gotta die. Either members of nearby tribes, or members of your own. So… who do we kill?
Or let’s start with, who can we kill? We cannot kill chimps who look like the scariest chimps in our tribe, because similarity means they are related, and so will defend one another. We have to go for the uncool chimps. We can also go for uncool chimps of other tribes, however since they are more related to each other than they are to us, their scary chimps might defend them.
Problem: who is cool, who is uncool? In the chimpanzee world, the group labelled ‘related to the scary ones’ are called cool, however our world is more complicated. Rich people can defend themselves better, so the guy with the gold watch shouldn’t be messed with. What about desirable women? What about smart people?
If group membership in the club of the smarts can save you, it makes sense that those who signal proof of smart have leverage over those who don’t. Especially in the world of software engineers, a ‘smart’ profession, many coworkers have and will fall for this trap. But first, what is a signal?
Why do we signal?
If you have ever owned a working dog, you will find something peculiar: when they don’t have any work to do, they start chasing their tails, or otherwise being weird. I thought work is the result of some kind of work-for-reward type of risk/benefit analysis, and when they don’t work they just lay around? Why do useless work?
Calculating risk to benefit takes a lot of brain power, it’s easier to do something that ‘feels’ like work, or in other words to signal proof of work. To test this out, let your dog carry water bottles on your next hike, and see his ‘anxious’ behavior disappear. Then replace the water bottles with rocks — it makes no difference.
In other words, dogs have no concept of proof of benefit. Why would they? They do something that feels like work, and they depend on you, their manager, to make sure you benefit from it.
While German shepherds are primitive creatures with a limited ‘signaling’ capacity, we are not. We can signal proof of beauty, proof of wealth, or proof of smart — but the key after all is to solve problems, not to perform mindless tasks.
How to signal proof of correct thing?
We can push code to production all we want, but what is it all for? What is the point? The point is that you provide a customer, or a client, with leverage. This in turn gives you the leverage to demand money. You can be expensive, or even annoying, but if you can take them from A to B faster than before, they have to pay you.
If the point of the company is to be useful, then the best coworkers are those who represent usefulness the best, or those who signal proof of usefulness.
This gives us a tool to combat unnecessary but ‘smart’ code without challenging anybody’s intelligence. Go back in time to the code commit you wanted to block because, though the solution worked, there was not a single ‘if’ statement or for loop. Everything was a reducer. Everything. Was. A. Reducer. If you had commented, ‘Does this signal proof of usefulness, or proof of smart’, would that give you an avenue to a solution?
A company culture that echos proof-of-usefulness vs proof-of-smart can reduce the noise of unnecessary work as well as reduce conflict. Read more articles here, and remember, in a world where you can be anything, be useful my friend.
