I am not a Boolean
I want to understand why we develop things
In the last week of August 2019 at Passionate People, we participated in a fantastic Public Speaking training. After talking with my colleagues about different experiences, this article was born.
First things first, let’s define what I mean by being a Boolean; for the sake of creating content that my grandma can read, I am going to ignore the technical definition.
Being a Boolean:
A human that only communicates with others using two words (Yes | No). As well should meet the following criteria: The answer given by a Boolean involves many reasons, but does not consider the impact on others.
Many times we have been in circumstances that make us behave like Booleans, maybe because we need to answer quickly to start this new cool project, or because agility matters in the IT world or maybe because we don’t understand all of these fancy business words. Let’s say that it can be several reasons that lead us to behave like Booleans.
Unfortunately, we sometimes forget the fact that making decisions or implementing the XYZ features are always going to affect people, real people, in a good or bad way.
A bit of my story:
So there I was, totally new in the lowlands (aka the Netherlands), first day at my new job, it was a marketing company (I did not have prior experience in that industry), surrounded by a 100% English work environment (first time as well), first meeting of the day scheduled: “Alexa & Frontend Colleague: Onboarding.”
Because an image can say more than 1000 words, this is how it went:
2 days later
He left the company 😭
2 months later
Colleague: Alexa, can you put this red button here?
Me: Yes
Colleague: Alexa, any ideas on how we can solve XYZ?
Me: No
Colleague: Alexa, can you draw blue lines with transparent ink
Me: Yes — ok, ok, this never happen :P (but some people will understand the reference)
After a while, I noticed something was going wrong:
I BECAME a Boolean
So you might think: “But what is wrong with being a Boolean?”
Here I am going to answer: Well, it depends, and whatever you read next can apply just to people with similar beliefs.
Technology as a tool
When I started learning how to code, I fell in love with coding, but not because of the technical aspect; rather the fact that I was able to create things that could help people’s lives. It was and still my main reason.
To create, we need to understand
So, being a Boolean was not helping me to create anything or even understand if I was helping someone or not, I remember being in a room full of smart people creating amazing products but not understanding:
Why is this necessary?
Who is being affected?
Moreover, how?
It made me feel disengaged from my job, and for someone who thinks that time is the most critical resource and who spent around 8 hours a day working at that company, this needed to be solved.
Disclaimer
Of course, I am not saying it is the only way of perceiving your job as a developer, or that technology is not fun or essential for me too, what I am saying is I place the priority in the why.
As a developer, I have worked with fantastic colleagues, and some of them do not prioritize ‘The why,’ but ‘The what’ or ‘The what if.’ For them, enormous tech challenges, complexity, and experimentation are keys to feel accomplished. I entirely understand them. However, I also recognize that it is not my case.
**Proven recipe to be more than a Boolean
Once I accepted my reality and understood how I became a Boolean, I created a recipe, but not any recipe, I created ‘The Recipe,’ four years later, and after much learning, I finally can put it in words.
I called it: WHH (very creative, I know…)
The recipe is straightforward to describe yet hard in the implementation. Are you ready? If yes, right now ask yourself these three questions:
1. What does my company do?
Ask, ask, ask until you understand!
In my case since adopting this recipe, I became the “girl who always asks, when she does not understand,” I ask in meetings, 1:1, slack, emails, when we grab coffee and whenever I have the opportunity…
Four years ago, doing this got me a full overview of what the company did; I could finally give ideas, proposed things, and sometimes asked uncomfortable questions when necessary.
2. How is technology and my role helping with it?
Connect the dots!
Once you collect all of this business data, it’s time to start the process of connecting the dots. In simple words, make a mental map about how the product you are working with is helping the company to continue running.
At that time, knowing this let me identify how quickly we needed to escalate; translating this into product terms meant paying more attention to the tech stack.
Commonly, this point leads to what we often referred to as technical debt :P.
3. How is the product impacting people?
Remember we impact real people.
I am this kind of person who believes that whatever we create in the tech industry and is available to the public is always impacting them, but the essential question is: How?
In my case, I was working with marketing; it involved a ton of data. I started to ask what kind of use cases were active, how our clients were using our platform, and how we avoided using this data in the wrong way.
Yes, I am aware that it is a challenging task. The world is complex; we all have our lives, and the way things can change is out of our control. Still, we can always make an effort and try. So I created a rule for me:
“If I answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to someone, it is because I understand and believe in what we are doing. If I know that this decision is going to harm anyone, I’m going to move somewhere else.”
Today I can say that most of the time, I am more than a Boolean. I try every day not to be one; however, I am not perfect. Because sometimes, circumstances are too complicated, but I do my best, and it makes me sleep well at night :).
Did you scroll until here without reading?
If no, thank you ❤, if yes well if you can get today one thing from this article is this:
Be more than a Boolean; remember that making that decision or implementing X is always going to affect people, real people.
Moreover, keep in mind,
If you are building an atomic bomb, it is better that you know, and you are ok with it.
Do you have any thoughts? feel free to share them (in a constructive way please ;))
** This recipe might not work for you, terms and conditions apply
