Engineering Empathy

Be careful about whom you mark for copies of letters, memos, etc., when the interests of other departments are involved. A lot of mischief has been caused by young people broadcasting memorandum containing damaging or embarrassing statements. Of course it is sometimes difficult for a novice to recognize the “dynamite” in such a document but, in general, it is apt to cause trouble if it steps too heavily upon someone’s toes or reveals a serious shortcoming on anybody’s part. If it has wide distribution or if it concerns manufacturing or customer difficulties, you’d better get the boss to approve it before it goes out unless you’re very sure of your ground.

I see this a lot. Not just in emails (née “memos”) but in meetings or reviews, someone will—inadvertently or not—throw someone else under the proverbial bus, i.e. “broadcasting memorandum containing damaging or embarrassing statements”, “stepping too heavily upon someone’s toes”, or “revealing a serious shortcoming on somebody’s part.” The problem with this is, by doing it, you immediately put the other party on the defensive and also create a cognitive bias for everyone else in the room. You create a negative predisposition, which may or may not be warranted, toward them. Similarly, I liken “if it concerns manufacturing or customer difficulties” to production postmortems. This is why they need to be blameless. Why is it that retros on production issues are blameless while, at the same time, the development process is full of blame-assigning? It might seem innocuous, but your communication has impact. Push with respect and under the assumption the other person is probably doing the right thing. Don’t be willing to throw anyone under that bus. Likewise, be quick to take responsibility but slow to assign it. Don’t be willing to practice Cover Your Ass Engineering.

I’ve been in meetings where someone would get called out as a blocker, literally articulated in that way, and the person wasn’t even aware they were blocking anything. I’ve seen people create JIRA tickets on another team’s board and then immediately call them blockers. It’s important to call out dependencies ahead of time, and when someone is “blocking” your progress, speak to them about it individually and before it reaches a critical point. No one should be getting caught off guard by these things. Be careful about how and where you articulate these types of problems.

On the same topic of communication impact, I’ve seen engineers develop detailed and extravagant plans like “We’re going to move the entire company to a monorepo while simultaneously switching from Git to Mercurial” or “We’re going to build our own stream-processing framework from the ground up”, and then distribute them widely to the organization (“wide distribution” as referenced in The Unwritten Laws of Engineering passage above). The proposals are usually well-intentioned and maybe even compelling sometimes, but it’s the way in which they are communicated that is problematic. Recall The Grapevine: people see it, assume it’s reality, and then spread misinformation. “Did you know the company is switching to Mercurial?”

An effective way to build rapport between teams is genuinely celebrating the successes of other teams, even the small ones. I think for many organizations, it’s common to celebrate victories within a team—happy hour for shipping a new feature or a team outing for signing a major account—but celebrating another team’s win is more rare, especially when a company grows in size. The operative word is “genuine” though. Don’t just do it for the sake of doing it, be genuine about it. This is a compelling way to build the stable relationships needed to unlock the rarity of teamwork described earlier.

Equally important to understanding communication impact is understanding decision impact. I’ve already written about this, so I’ll keep it brief: your decisions impact others. How does adopting X affect Operations? Does our dev tooling support this? Is this architecture supported by our current infrastructure? What are the compliance or security implications of this? Will this scale in production? Doing something might save you time, but does it create work or slow others down?

Teams operate in a way that minimizes the amount of pain they feel. It’s a natural instinct and a phenomenon I call pain displacement. Pain-driven development is following the path of least resistance. By doing this, we end up moving the pain somewhere else or deferring it until later (i.e. tech debt). Where the problems start to happen is when multiple teams or functions are involved. This is when the political and other organizational issues start to seep in. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, has a book that touches on this subject called Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars. 

I believe the solution is multifaceted. First, teams need to think holistically, widening their vision beyond the deliverable immediately in front of them. They need to have a sense of organizational awareness. Second, teams—and especially leaders—need to be able to take off their job’s “hat” periodically in order to solve a shared problem. Lencioni observes that much of what causes organizational dysfunction is siloing, and this typically stems from strong intra-team loyalties. For example, within an engineering organization you might have development, operations, QA, security, and other functional teams. Empathy is being able to look at something through someone else’s perspective, and this requires removing your functional hat from time to time. Lastly, teams need to be able to rally around a common cause. This is a shared, compelling vision that motivates and mobilizes people and helps break down the silos. A shared vision aligns teams and enables them to work more autonomously. This is how decisions get made.

Pull communication is pretty much just how to ask questions without making people hate you, a skill that is very important to be an effective and empathetic communicator.

The single most common communication issue I see in engineering organizations is The XY Problem. It’s when someone focuses on a particular solution to their problem instead of describing the problem itself.

• User wants to do X.
• User doesn’t know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
• User doesn’t know how to do Y either.
• User asks for help with Y.
• Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
• After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn’t even a suitable solution for X.

The problem occurs when people get stuck on what they believe is the solution and are unable to step back and explain the issue in full. The solution to The XY Problem is simple: always provide the full context of what you’re trying to do. Describe the problem, don’t just prescribe the solution.

Part of being an effective communicator is being able to extract information from people and getting help without being a mental and emotional drain. This is especially true when it comes to debugging. I often see this “murder-mystery debugging” where someone basically tries to push off the blame for something that’s wrong with their code onto someone or something else. This flies in the face of the principle discussed earlier—be quick to take responsibility and slow to assign it. The first step when it comes to debugging anything is assume it’s your fault by default. When you run some code you’re writing and the compiler complains, you don’t blame the compiler, you assume you screwed up. It’s just taking this same mindset and applying it to everything else that we do.

And when you do need to seek help from others—just like with The XY Problem—provide as much context as possible. So much of what I see is this sort of information trickle, where the person seeking help drips information to the people trying to provide it. Don’t make it an interrogation. Lastly, provide a minimal working example that reproduces the problem. Don’t make people build a massive project with 20 dependencies just to reproduce your bug. It’s such a common problem for Stack Overflow that they actually have a name for it: MCVE—Minimal, Complete, Verifiable Example. Do your due diligence before taking time out of someone else’s day because the only thing worse than a bug report is a poorly described, hastily written accusation.

Another thing I see often is swoop-and-poop engineering. This is when someone comes to you with something they need help with—maybe a bug in a library you own, a feature request, something along these lines (this is especially true in open source). They have a sense of urgency; they say it either explicitly or just give off that vibe. You offer to setup a meeting to get more information or work through the problem with them only to find they aren’t available or willing to set aside some time with you. They’re heads down on “something more important,” yet their manager is ready to bite your head off weeks later, often without any documentation or warning. They’ve effectively dumped this on you, said the world’s on fire, and left as quickly as they came. You’re left confused and disoriented. You scratch your head and forget about it, then days or weeks later, they return, horrified that the world is still burning. I call these drive-by questions.

First, it’s important to have an appropriate sense of urgency. If you’re not willing to hop on a Hangout to work through a problem or provide additional information, it’s probably not that important, especially if you can’t even take the time to follow up. With few exceptions, it’s not fair to expect a team to drop everything they’re doing to help you at a moment’s notice, but if they do, you need to meet them halfway. It’s essential to realize that if you’re piling onto a team, others probably are too. If you submit a ticket with another team and then turn around and immediately call it a blocker, that just means you failed to plan accordingly. Having empathy is being cognizant that every team has its own set of priorities, commitments, and work that it’s juggling. By creating that ticket and calling it a blocker, you’re basically saying none of that stuff matters as much. Empathy is understanding that shit rolls downhill. For those who find themselves facing drive-by questions: document everything and be proactive about communicating.

There’s a really good essay by Eric Raymond called How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. It’s something I think every engineer should read and take to heart. My number one pet peeve is Help Vampires. These are people who refuse to take the time to ask coherent, specific questions and really aren’t interested in having their questions answered so much as getting someone else to do their work. They ask the same, tired questions over and over again without really retaining information or thinking critically. It’s question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, ad infinitum.

This is often a hard-earned lesson for junior engineers, but it’s an important one: when you ask a question, you’re not entitled to an answer, you earn the answer. Hasty sounding questions get hasty answers. As engineers, we should not operate like a tech support hotline that people call when their internet stops working. We need to put in a higher level of effort. We need to apply our technical and problem-solving aptitude as engineers. This is the only way you can scale this kind of support structure within an engineering organization. If teams are just constantly bombarding each other with low-effort questions, nothing will get done and people will get burnt out.

Avoid being a Help Vampire. Before asking a question, do your due diligence. Think carefully about where to ask your question. If it’s on HipChat, what is the appropriate room in which to ask? Also be mindful of doing things like @all or @here in a large room. Doing that is like walking into a crowded room, throwing your hands up in the air, and shouting at everyone to look at you. Be precise and informative about your problem, but also keep in mind that volume is not precision. Just dumping a bunch of log messages is noise. Don’t rush to claim that you’ve found a bug. As a first step, take responsibility. And just like with The XY Problem, describe the goal, not the step you took—describe vs. prescribe. Lastly, follow up on the solution. Everyone has been in this situation: you’ve found someone that asked the exact same question as you only to find they never followed up with how they fixed it. Even if it’s just in HipChat or Slack, drop a note indicating the issue was resolved and what the fix was so others can find it. This also helps close the loop when you’ve asked a question to a team and they are actively investigating it. Don’t leave them hanging.

In many ways, being an empathetic communicator just comes down to having self-awareness.

Codifying Values and Priorities: Processes

“Process” has a lot of negative connotations associated with it because it usually becomes this thing done on ceremony. But “process” should be a means of documenting and codifying your values. This is why I disagree with the Reed Hastings quote about process from earlier. Process is about repeatability and error correction. Camille Fournier’s new book on engineering management, The Manager’s Path, has a great section on “bootstrapping culture.” I particularly like the way she frames organizational structure and process:

When talking about structure and process with skeptics, I try to reframe the discussion. Instead of talking about structure, I talk about learning. Instead of talking about process, I talk about transparency. We don’t set up systems because structure and process have inherent value. We do it because we want to learn from our successes and our mistakes, and to share those successes and encode the lessons we learn from failures in a transparent way. This learning and sharing is how organizations become more stable and more scalable over time.

When a process “feels” wrong, it’s probably because it doesn’t reflect your organization’s values. For example, if a process feels heavy, it’s because you value velocity. If a process feels rigid, it’s because you value agility. If a process feels risky, it’s because you value safety. We have a hard time articulating this so instead it becomes “process is bad.”

Somewhere along the line, someone decides to document how stuff gets done. Things get standardized. Tools get made. Processes get established. But process becomes dogma when it’s interpreted as documentation of how rather than an explanation of why. Processes should tell the story of an organization: here’s what we value, here’s why we value it, and here’s how we protect and scale those values. The story is constantly evolving, so processes should be flexible. They shouldn’t be set in stone.

Michael Lopp’s book Managing Humans also provides a useful perspective on culture:

It’s entirely possible that too much process or the wrong process is developed during this build-out, but when this inevitable debate occurs, it should not be about the process. It’s a debate about values. The first question isn’t, “Is this a good, bad, or efficient process?” The first question is, “How does this process reflect our values?”

Processes should be traceable back to values. Each process should have a value or set of values associated with it. Understanding the why helps to develop empathy. It’s the difference between “here’s how we do things” and “here’s why we do things.” It’s much harder to develop a sense of empathy with just the how.

What We Value: Priorities

As engineers, we need to be curious. We need to have a “let’s go see!” attitude. When someone comes to you with a question—and hopefully it’s a well-formulated question based on the earlier discussion—your first reaction should be, “let’s go see!” Use it as an opportunity for both of you to learn. Even if you know the answer, sometimes it’s better to show, not tell, and as the person asking the question, you should be eager to learn. This is the reason I love Julia Evans’ blog so much. It’s oozing with wonder, curiosity, and intrigue. Being an engineer should mean having an innate curiosity. It’s not throwing up your hands at the first sign of an API boundary and saying, “not my problem!” It’s a willingness to roll up your sleeves and dig in to a problem but also a capacity for knowing how and when to involve others. Figure out what you don’t know and push beyond it.

Be humble. There’s a book that was written in the 70’s called The Psychology of Computer Programming, and it’s interesting because it focuses on the human elements of software development rather than the purely technical ones that we normally think about. In the book, it presents The 10 Commandments of Egoless Programming, which I think contain a powerful set of guiding principles for software engineers:

1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes.
2. You are not your code.
3. No matter how much “karate” you know, someone else will always know more.
4. Don’t rewrite code without consultation.
5. Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience.
6. The only constant in the world is change. Be open to it and accept it with a smile.
7. The only true authority stems from knowledge, not from position.
8. Fight for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat.
9. Don’t be “the coder in the corner.”
10. Critique code instead of people—be kind to the coder, not to the code.

Part of being a humble engineer is giving away all the credit. This is especially true for leaders or managers. A manager I once had put it this way: “As a manager, you should never say ‘I’ during a review unless shit went wrong and you’re in the process of taking responsibility for it.” A good leader gives away all the credit and takes all of the blame.

Be engaged. Coding is actually a very small part of our job as software engineers. Our job is to be engaged with the organization. Engage with stakeholder meetings and reviews. Engage with cross-trainings and workshops. Engage with your company’s engineering blog. Engage with other teams. Engage with recruiting and company outreach through conferences or meetups. People dramatically underestimate the value of developing their network, both to their employer and to themselves. You don’t have to do all of these things, but my point is engineers get overly fixated on coding and deliverables. Code is just the byproduct. We’re not paid to write code, we’re paid to add value to the business, and a big part of that is being engaged with the organization.

And of course I’d be remiss not to talk about empathy. Empathy is having a deep understanding of what problems someone is trying to solve. John Allspaw puts it best:

In complex projects, there are usually a number of stakeholders. In any project, the designers, product managers, operations engineers, developers, and business development folks all have goals and perspectives, and mature engineers realize that those goals and views may be different. They understand this so that they can navigate effectively in the work that they do. Being empathetic in this sense means having the ability to view the project from another person’s perspective and to take that into consideration into your own work.

Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships. Once again, it comes back to Dunbar’s number: we have a limited number of stable relationships, but developing and maintaining those relationships is the key to figuring out the rarity of teamwork.

A former coworker of mine passed away late last year. In going through some of his old files, we came across some notes he had on leadership. There was one quote in particular that I thought really captured the essence of this post nicely:

All music is made from the same 12 notes. All culture is made from the same five components: behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, and environment. It’s the way those notes or components are put together that makes things sing.

This is what it takes to build a strong engineering culture and really just a healthy culture in general. The technology and everything else is secondary. It really starts with the people.