As
a designer starting out in the beginning of your career, you may not
know what to expect during your first job. You could be given lots of
work and because you are the new designer on team, you do things without
question. You might think you are expected to know everything because
nobody said you should seek out the things you need to help you.
Having
worked in the design industry almost every summer in college, I’ve
learned a thing or two about how a new designer, such as myself, can
navigate through challenges and learn in environments based on implied
messages of what we should or shouldn’t do. Knowing the basic tools and
techniques of good design is essential, but it’s the small details
surrounding how we work which can help us progress and open doors. Here
are a few tips that growing designers should take into consideration
during their first year on the job to accelerate career growth.
Asking for Help Doesn't Make You Stupid
It’s
okay to ask for help, but the issue that some designers may allude to
when they say asking for help is a big no-no is the phrasing. Instead of
directly asking for help, ask for feedback and advice.
If you need help with doing research, join a research session. If you
need help with moving forward in a project, ask designers to join you in
prioritizing ideas. This will provide you with direction. Instead of
receiving a hard-cut answer, you receive validation and perspective,
things that will help you develop your own point of view. Designers don’t receive answers, they problem solve to get there.
Saying “No” is better than saying “Yes” all the time*
Note
the asterisk. You are in control of what you want to do. You can decide
when you reply to that e-mail or if you want to go that meeting. We are
often given so many things to do that we can’t do all of them, yet we
think we have to. Many designers, especially in the beginning of their
career, do everything they are told to do, and this distracts them from
the work they need to do the most. Decide on what is most important to
help get your work done and prioritize.
Don’t say yes for the things that get in the way of producing quality work.
Delegating
tasks and prioritizing is hard, but if you can do that, you will get so
much done (and more). It’s okay to say no for valid reasons because it
tells people that you know what’s important.
Speak up
During
a critique, we are excepted to provide feedback for our peers, but not
everyone does it because they might be self concious of their thoughts,
or they don’t make the effort to help. Don’t be selfish with ideas.
Ideas are meant to be expressed and help our fellow designers design for
the people. Feedback is a gift. Feedback is what results in more iterations and better experiences.
Take Breaks
I
used to work hard constantly, whether it was at home, with friends and
family…You name it. But then I realized, without fault, I will be
working for the rest of my life and work isn’t ever really “done”. I was
taking the time to work on something fleeting, when I could have been
spending time with the people I loved and the things I loved to do
outside of work. Also, too much work can increase stress which can
increase burnout. It makes sense to do as much work as you can to get to
a certain job or rank, but that takes time. Just do what you can and
relax when you feel overworked or exausted. In the end, health is more important than work because without health, we can’t work.
Be Present
As
tempting as it is to work from home, especially for people who have the
privilege of doing so all the time, it is crucial to be present. Even
if the quality of work has not been affected, as designers,
collaboration is such an important aspect of the way we do things. Being
present in the office can make all the difference, especially when
working with the people on your team. It’s not a team if everyone isn’t present.
If you have any questions about design, message me on LinkedIn and I’ll write about it!
Social
media and digital executives in newsrooms already have a tough job
connecting their content to consumers via social media, but Facebook’s proposed changes in the algorithms of its ‘newsfeed’
are going to make it a lot harder. Social networks offer immense
opportunities for reaching vast new audiences and increasing the
engagement of users with journalism. The most important platform in the
world is about to make that more difficult.
Clearly,
this is a blow for news publishers who have spent the last decade or so
fighting a battle for survival in a world where people’s attention and
advertising have shifted to other forms of content and away from news
media brand’s own sites. They are clearly very concerned. Yet, could this be a wake-up call that will mean the better, most adaptive news brands benefit?
I’m
not going to argue that this is good news for news publishers, but
blind panic or cynical abuse of Facebook is not a sufficient response.
The honest answer is that we don’t know exactly what the effect will be
because Facebook, as usual, have not given out the detail and different
newsrooms will be impacted differently.
It’s exactly the kind of issue we are looking at in our LSE Truth, Trust and Technology Commission.
Our first consultation workshop with journalists, and related
practitioners from sectors such as the platforms, is coming up in a few
weeks. This issue matters not just for the news business. It is also
central to the quality and accessibility of vital topical information
for the public.
Here’s my first attempt to unpack some of the issues.
Mark Zuckerberg: making time on Facebook ‘well spent’
Firstly,
this is not about us (journalists). Get real. Facebook is an
advertising revenue generation machine. It is a public company that has a
duty to maximise profits for its shareholders. It seeks people’s
attention so that it can sell it to advertisers. It has a sideline in
charging people to put their content on its platform, too. It is a
social network, not a news-stand. It was set up to connect ‘friends’ not
to inform people about current affairs. Journalism, even where shared
on Facebook, is a relatively small part of its traffic.
Clearly,
as Facebook has grown it has become a vital part of the global (and
local) information infrastructure. Other digital intermediaries such as
Google are vastly important, and other networks such as Twitter are
significant. And never forget that there are some big places such as
China where other similar networks dominate, not Facebook or other
western companies. But in many countries and for many demographics,
Facebook is the Internet, and the web is increasingly where people get their journalism. It’s a mixed and shifting picture but as the Reuters Digital News Report shows, Facebook is a critical source for news.
From Reuters Digital News Report 2017
If you read Zuckerberg’s statement he makes it clear that he is trying to make Facebook a more comfortable place to be:
“recently
we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts
from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments
that lead us to connect more with each other.”
His users are ‘telling him’ (i.e. fewer of them are spending less time on FB) what a plethora of recent studies and books
have shown which is that using Facebook can make you miserable. News
content — which is usually ‘bad’ news — doesn’t cheer people up. The
angry, aggressive and divisive comment that often accompanies news
content doesn’t help with the good vibes. And while the viral spread of
so-called ‘fake news’ proves it is popular, it also contributes to the
sense that Facebook is a place where you can’t trust the news content.
Even when it is credible, it’s often designed to alarm and disturb. Not
nice. And Facebook wants nice.
“We
can’t make money unless you keep telling us things about yourself that
we can sell to advertisers. Please stop talking about news.”
Another
accusation is that Facebook is making these changes because of the
increasing costs it is expending at the behest of governments who are
now demanding it does more to fight misinformation and offensive
content. That might be a side-benefit for Facebook but I don’t think
it’s a key factor. It might even be a good thing for credible news if
the algorithmic changes include ways of promoting reliable content. But
overall the big picture is that journalism is being de-prioritised in
favour of fluffier stuff.
Even Jeff Jarvis, the US pioneer of digital journalism who has always sought to work with the grain of the platforms, admits that this is disturbing:
“I’m
worried that news and media companies — convinced by Facebook (and in
some cases by me) to put their content on Facebook or to pivot to
video — will now see their fears about having the rug pulled out from
under them realized and they will shrink back from taking journalism to
the people where they are having their conversations because there is no
money to be made there.”*
The
Facebook changes are going to be particularly tough on news
organisations that invested heavily in the ‘pivot to video’. These are
often the ‘digital native’ news brands who don’t have the spread of
outlets for their content that ‘legacy’ news organisations enjoy. The
BBC has broadcast. The Financial Times has a newspaper. These
organisations have gone ‘digital first’ but like the Economist they have
a range of social media strategies. And many of them, like the New York
Times, have built a subscription base. Email newsletters provide an
increasingly effective by-pass for journalism to avoid the social media
honey-trap. It all makes them less dependent on ‘organic’ reach through
Facebook.
But
Facebook will remain a major destination for news organisations to
reach people. News media still needs to be part of that. As the
ever-optimistic Jarvis also points out,
if these changes mean that Facebook becomes a more civil place where
people are more engaged, then journalism designed to fit in with that
culture might thrive more:
“journalism
and news clearly do have a place on Facebook. Many people learn what’s
going on in the world in their conversations there and on the other
social platforms. So we need to look how to create conversational news.
The platforms need to help us make money that way. It’s good for
everybody, especially for citizens.”
News
organisations need to do more — not just because of Facebook but also
on other platforms. People are increasingly turning to closed networks
or channels such as Whatsapp. Again, it’s tough, but journalism needs to
find new ways to be on those. I’ve written huge amounts
over the last ten years urging news organisations to be more networked
and to take advantage of the extraordinary connective, communicative
power of platforms such as Facebook. There has been brilliant
innovations by newsrooms over that period to go online, to be social and
to design content to be discovered and shared through the new networks.
But this latest change shows how the media environment continues to
change in radical ways and so the journalism must also be reinvented.
Social media journalist Esra Dogramaci has written an excellent article
on some of the detailed tactics that newsrooms can use to connect their
content to users in the face of technological developments like
Facebook’s algorithmic change:
“if
you focus on building a relationship with your audience and developing
loyalty, it doesn’t matter what the algorithm does. Your audience will
seek you out, and return to you over and over again. That’s how you
‘beat’ Facebook.”
Journalism Must Change
The
journalism must itself change. For example, it is clear that emotion is
going to be an even bigger driver of attention on Facebook after these
changes. The best journalism will continue to be factual and objective
at its core — even when it is campaigning or personal. But as I have written before,
a new kind of subjectivity can not only reach the hearts and minds of
people on places like Facebook, but it can also build trust and
understanding.
This
latest change by Facebook is dramatic, but it is a response to what
people ‘like’. There is a massive appetite for news — and not just
because of Trump or Brexit. Demand for debate and information has never
been greater or more important in people’s everyday lives. But we have
to change the nature of journalism not just the distribution and
discovery methods.
The media landscape is shifting to match people’s real media lives in our digital age. Another less noticed announcement from Facebook
last week suggested they want to create an ecosystem for local
personalised ‘news’. Facebook will use machine learning to surface news
publisher content at a local level. It’s not clear how they will vet
those publishers but clearly this is another opportunity for newsrooms
to engage. Again, dependency on Facebook is problematic, to put it
mildly, but ignoring this development is to ignore reality. The old
model of a local newspaper for a local area doesn’t effectively match
how citizens want their local news anymore.
What Facebook Must Do
Facebook
has to pay attention to the needs of journalism and as it changes its
algorithm to reduce the amount of ‘public content’ it has to work harder
at prioritising quality news content. As the Guardian’s outstanding
digital executive Chris Moran points out, there’s no indication from
Facebook that they have factored this into the latest change:
Fighting
‘fake news’ is not just about blocking the bad stuff, it is ultimately
best achieved by supporting the good content. How you do that is not a
judgement Facebook can be expected or relied upon to do by itself. It
needs to be much more transparent and collaborative with the news
industry as it rolls out these changes in its products.
When
something like Facebook gets this important to society, like any other
public utility, it becomes in the public interest to make policy to
maximise social benefits. This is why governments around the world are
considering and even enacting legislation or regulation regarding the
platforms, like Facebook. Much of this is focused on specific issues
such as the spread of extremist or false and disruptive information.
This
week, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on the future of
net neutrality. Whether you’ve been following the political back and forth,
skimming the headlines, or struggling to decode acronyms, the decision
will have an impact on what we can do online (and who can afford to do
it). Because the internet has effectively been free and open since the
day it was born, it’s easy to lose sight of the impact this vote will
have.
The reality is, the internet is a fragile thing. Open, crazy, weird spaces where people swap stories and secrets, create rad digital art projects,
type furiously and freely with people seven time zones away — these
spaces are rare. People build them, people sustain them, and now, people
are trying to restrict them. If this week’s vote passes — which is
looking increasingly likely — the internet’s gatekeepers will have more
control over their gates than ever before.
Because
we live and breathe the internet, laugh and cry on the internet,
connect with people who’ve tangibly changed our lives on the internet,
we decided to gather some perspectives on this moment in time. Why it
matters, how we got here, and what the future may hold. Here are some of
the most insightful essays we’ve found on Medium to help us make sense
of the fight to keep the net wild and free.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
invented the World Wide Web. Now, he’s defending it. “I want an
internet where consumers decide what succeeds online, and where ISPs
focus on providing the best connectivity,” Berners-Lee emphasizes.
Content and connectivity are two distinct markets, and they must remain
separate. Conflating them risks blocking innovation, free expression, and the kind of creativity that can only thrive online.
What’s happening now is not just about net neutrality, law professor Lawrence Lessig
argues, but about the foundations of our democracy. Tracing the history
of the concept from its origins in the aughts (one of his students, Tim Wu,
coined the term “net neutrality”), Lessig sees the rollback of
Obama-era regulations as a symptom of a larger issue: a democracy that
doesn’t serve its people.
Through statistical analysis and natural language processing, data scientist Jeff Kao
shows that millions of pro-repeal comments submitted to the FCC were
faked. Organic public comments, according to Kao’s analysis,
overwhelmingly supported preserving existing regulations. The report
calls into question the legitimacy of the FCC’s comment process, and the
basis of chairman Pai’s intention to roll back regulations.
In part one of a five-part series on net neutrality, computer scientist Tyler Elliot Bettilyon
takes us back to FDR’s New Deal. Piecing together the history of
“common carrier” laws — those that govern everything from shipping to
telephone lines — Bettilyon contextualizes today’s fight for a free and
open internet.
Social psychologist E Price
interrogates the idea that the internet we’ve grown to love is really
as “free and open” as we’d like to think. “Internet activity is already
deeply centralized,” Erika writes, and major social media sites are
today’s answer to the Big Three TV networks of a few decades ago. The
internet is closer to cable than we think, and it’s (probably) about to
get even closer.
Why should the internet be a public utility? Economist umair haque
debunks the “competition will lower prices” argument against internet
regulation, and makes a compelling case for why going online, “just like
water, energy, and sanitation,” should be a basic right: “It
dramatically elevates our quality of life, best and truest when we all
have free and equal access to it.”
Visit battleforthenet to write or call your congressperson in advance of the vote. You can also text a few words of your choice to Resistbot.
I’ve
been building my smart home over the last few years and was in the
market to add sensors everywhere in an effort to improve the automations
that I was able to achieve.
I
previously had a couple of Philips Hue Motion sensors, and Elgato Eve
Door & Window sensors, but at £35 a piece, adding these to all rooms
and door would get very expensive. I was introduced to the Xiaomi
ecosystem and decided to give it a try. Interestingly this is the first
time that I’ve opted to buy some non native devices and rely on
Homebridge for the integration. Prior to this, I’ve used HomeBridge as a
way to integrate tech that I already owned.
Purchase
I
got all of my kit from a site called Lightinthebox.com. This was the
only site that I found that shipped to the UK and had a wide range
stocked. I initially opted for:
One
thing to note is that the website quoted 5–8 days for shipping — this
was actually more like 19, but for the price I can’t really complain.
Setup
The
setup was fairly trivial. I did however need to upgrade my version of
node running on my RPi3 to work with the plugin. As to not waste
countless hours in node dependency hell, I’d recommend a fresh install
of everything. I took a copy of my config.json file, made a note of
installed plugins and completely wiped my SD card.
Follow these steps to get going (this assumes you’re on an iPhone, running iOS 11 or later)
Download the MiHome app and setup the gateway and configure your accessories. It doesn’t really matter what rooms the devices are placed in.
Open the MiHome app, tap on the gateway, then tap on the 3 dots in the top right corner.
Select about and then repeatedly (and quickly) tap on the blank space until three additional menu options in Chinese appear.
Tap
the second option. This allows you to turn on local access mode. A
password should appear. Make a note as you’ll need that soon.
Tap
back and select the 3rd option. Make a note of the MAC address of the
gateway. There’s a couple listed, one of the router that the gateway is
connected to and one for the gateway itself. If it’s unclear which is
which, try both. (If you run homebridge with the -D flag, you’ll get
debug info which will let you know if you’ve connected to the gateway
correctly).
Install the homebridge-mi-aqara plugin and input the MAC and password from the steps above into your config.json file.
Restart HomeBridge and your accessories should now appear.
Usage
The
first thing to note is how tiny the door sensors are. Here’s an image
with the Elgato Eve as a comparison. Due to the size of the Eve device
and the trim around my doors, I’ve had to be creative with how I mount
it.
Xiaomi (left) vs Elgato Eve (right) door sensors
The
second thing to note is how quickly these sensors update within
HomeKit — unscientifically I’d say this is instant. Even with the latest
firmware the Elgato sensors still have a slight delay if that haven’t
been triggered for a period of time. This still makes them unsuitable
for certain automations, where you need a light to turn on immediately
for example.
Xiaomi door sensors in HomeKit
The
door sensors show up as regular sensors, along with three other
accessories from the gateway; a light sensor, multi colour light and a
switch. The light actually makes a pretty decent nightlight, especially
as you don’t need to physically connect it to a router.
I’ve
got a couple of automations setup where I use a door sensor in
combination with a motion sensor to detect if somebody is entering or
leaving a room. To do this I have a motion sensor on each side of the
door and then use the motion as a conditional rule. For example, I want
to turn on a table lamp in my daughters room when the door opens, but
only between 5am and 8am. This assumes that I’m going in to her room
when she is awake and that I want the light to come on with a soft glow.
It also assumes that if I’m already in the room and leave during that
window that I don’t want to like to come on (if for example she actually
isn’t awake, or she settles back to sleep). To do this, I have a motion
sensor on the landing and in her room (via a D Link Omna camera) with a
rule stating that the lamp should only come on when there is motion
detected on the landing. If there is motion on the landing then I must
be outside of the room, therefore entering. If there’s motion in the
room, then I’m leaving so the rule doesn’t trigger again.
To
get the extra option I used the Elgato Eve app. Firstly setup the basic
automation rules in the Apple Home app, and then add the condition
using Eve.
So
far, I’m really impressed with the Xiaomi system and would certainly
consider adding more devices (although you can only add 30 per gateway)
to my setup.
It’s both more serious and less serious than we’ve admitted
I’ve
recently seen a lot of very anxious responses from people in tech at
anything which suggests that their “core skills” may be devalued,
especially in favor of other skills which they haven’t spent their lives
on. Most importantly, this shows up in the argument over “hard” versus
“soft” skills. That anxiety is itself a signal of how important this has
become. But there’s a hidden assumption we’ve been making that (I
suspect) has increased the anxiety far out of proportion: and maybe
perversely, it comes from not taking soft skills seriously enough. Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on what’s actually happening, and a set of things we can do to help fix it for all of us.
The hard and the soft. Left: “Hammer” by 0Four; Right: “Cloth in the Khiva Market” by eatswords.
1. Some observational data
One
of the most reliable ways I can see anxious responses on the Internet
is to suggest that soft skills may eclipse hard skills in importance for
engineers. By “anxious responses,” I don’t mean “disagreement:” I
specifically mean emotionally charged disagreement. And that emotional charge is a very important data point.
One
very reliable pattern I’ve observed in a lot of situations is that the
strength of people’s emotional response to a statement tells you a lot
about how close this statement cuts to their biggest worries. It’s sort
of obvious if you say it that way, but if you apply it as a detection
method, it’s very powerful: strong responses lead you to where the real
problems are, the real threats to people.
(This
trick is shamelessly stolen from psychology, specifically from
psychotherapy, where it’s a reliable way to figure out which issues are
most salient to someone. A good rule of thumb is, the harder something
is to talk about, the more likely that it’s important. It has many other
applications, as well; for example, if you find people very offended by the suggestion that they might be or like something,
that’s often a sign that this “something” is closely associated with a
group that they’re similar enough to that they’re at risk of being
mistaken for it, but that they have a very strong reason not to want to
be affiliated with.)
What’s interesting in this case is that people are so
concerned about the relative value of soft and hard skills, and not,
say, overall economic fluctuations or an oversupply of engineers, two
other things which could just as easily threaten an engineer’s status.
We
can treat the frequency of strong emotional responses as a sort of
covert wisdom-of-the-crowds signal. With regards to cultural matters,
the wisdom of crowds is an even better signal than it is in general,
because the culture is made up of those very same crowds. Reading the
pattern of conversations and responses over the past few years, the
scale of anxiety I see when the issue comes up suggests a pattern: lots
of people have the gut instinct that the rise of “soft skills” is going
to be big, but are afraid of what that may mean for them.
2. What‘s going on beneath that
Stepping
back a bit, it’s not horribly surprising that it would be big. The
reason the “brilliant, irascible loner” has become increasingly rare is
that very little technology is built by a single pair of hands anymore.
My previous job consisted, in no small part, of trying to build and
maintain a consensus among hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of
people, in order to keep everyone moving in one direction. This was
something extremely difficult; like most people in the field, it’s very
far from what I was trained for, and I had the perpetual sense that I
was faking it and hoping nobody would notice.
When
you’re working with large groups of people, communication and
collaboration complexities quickly become the dominant factor in success
or failure. Concepts like “psychological safety” and “mutual trust”
become the things that dominate your day-to-day work far
beyond any specific technical challenge. At the junior level, it’s
because this affects your quality of life: trying to do good technical
work while surrounded by people who hate you is both difficult and
awful. At more senior levels, this becomes more and more of your
responsibility to manage and create. This is closely tied to the deeper
difference between junior and senior roles: a junior person’s job is to
find answers to questions; a senior person’s job is to find the right
questions to ask. The number of purely technical questions requiring any
given level of expertise decreases relatively sharply once you pass a
certain threshold, and the increasing prevalence of everything from
reliable compilers to Stack Exchange means that more and more of the
hard technical questions are straightforward to answer.
[Bad management] is a field that was built up out of people who often believed
that they had good soft skills, while actually having atrocious ones.
The simple fact that people feel not respected by their managers should
be a tremendous red flag.
There
always remain various hard ones, of course, which are critical and
which can’t be solved by any number of inexperienced people except by
them getting experience; that’s why we need to continue to build and
grow our technical skills. But if you continue to grow your skillset,
you’ll quickly discover that the amount of time that needs to be spent
on these extremely difficult technical problems tends towards
significantly less than a full-time job; instead, the crucial (and
incredibly hard) problems that affect a system have more to do with how
that system interacts with the outside world — which is, more and more,
people.
Interestingly,
there’s a lot more crossover between hard and soft skills than many
people realize: when you start to see your system as a component of a
larger system which includes humans as elements, and you start to ask
how humans interact with each other and what their behaviors are, then
many of the same “hard skills” systems design approaches not only make
sense, but can provide even better answers to traditionally purely
“soft” questions. Abuse prevention on multi-user systems and result
ranking of all sorts are two classic examples; in both cases, the
ability to convert freely between very “soft” intuitions about what
people want and very “hard” mathematical expressions of those same
intuitions is priceless.
But
beyond the cases where soft and hard skills overlap within the
technical work itself, a lot of the “soft skills” being required now
have a lot more to do with people management. This is a field which
historically has a bad rep among engineers, because it’s historically
been done by people who had no engineering skills, and crucially, who
lacked respect for said skills
or the people who had them. This is because a lot of management came out
of the early 20th-century version of industrial management, the same
field that gave us phrases like “human resources:” the workers are an
annoyance and an expense, something which has to be “managed” to keep
production quotas high.
This
kind of “management” — I use the term loosely — doesn’t constitute good
soft skills, either. It’s a field that was built up out of people who
often believed that they had
good soft skills, while actually having atrocious or even actively
pathological ones. The simple fact that people feel not respected by
their managers should be a tremendous red flag: a manager’s basic job,
after all, is to coordinate people and get them to work as a team, and
if they can’t hack the most basic aspects of mutual respect themselves, there’s no way they’re going to be able to create that for everyone.
The
fact is that the kinds of “soft skills” we’re talking about aren’t the
ones that come for free to anybody; they’re not the things taught in
“manners classes” or in fraternity hazings. They come from studying
people, paying attention to them, and understanding what they need even
when they can’t express it themselves — and as such are as brutally
difficult a set of skills to acquire as any other professional
expertise. Our habit of treating them like they’re not “real” skills, of
trying to deprofessionalize and devalue them, does us no favors; when
we’re called upon to do them ourselves, we quickly find out that they’re
not trivial.
(I’m
reminded of a Certain Engineer I Know who, when moving the team into a
new building, made the fateful statement that interior architecture
should be easy, he’s an engineer, he doesn’t need to get someone else to
do this. The results were certainly interesting.
Engineers, scientists, and executives all seem prone to the disease of
believing that everyone else’s speciality should be easy.)
xkcd/1831: “”We TOLD you it was hard.” “Yeah, but now that I’VE tried, we KNOW it’s hard.”
3. Good news: there’s a way out.
I
think there is one very “simple” thing we can do to improve this
situation: start to treat these skills like serious professional skills,
value them as such, and both train and hire people for having
them — the exact same way we do with every other critical skill.
A
good first step is to make sure we have, and share, a language for it.
It’s very hard to value something you can’t name. Some common tasks
which we often ignore are “make it possible for everyone to see what’s
going on in the project at once,” “create a shared language for the core
technical ideas so that everyone can explain the same thing,” “make
sure that everyone’s voice is heard, and that important warnings don’t
get lost because someone didn’t feel safe saying so,” and “make sure all
the stakeholders feel a sense of personal ownership in the project and
that their success is tied to its success.” (There are many more) Some
common measures which we often ignore are “how often will a
user/customer experience frustration or negative emotions while using
this product, and how does that affect their long-term usage?,” or “when
someone has a negative experience using the product, what is the
following experience on each time scale from 10ms to one week, and how
does that affect their experience of the product?”
None
of the things in that previous paragraph are new: in fact, they’re all
tied to professional specialities, from project management to user
experience research. But if a team as a whole treats these as side
things rather than as core to their success or failure, they can easily
end up in the middle of a disaster: milestones missed, different groups
building subtly different systems which only clash during final
integration, a critical problem being ignored until it’s too late, a
project being subtly sabotaged because one team actually didn’t want it
to succeed, users hitting one “small” bug and revolting in horror
(leading to anything from mass exodus to legal and regulatory action),
slow erosion of user trust. I’ve seen projects fail for every one of
these reasons — even projects where the purely “technical” aspects of
the engineering were beyond reproach.
To
treat such things as core rather than peripheral, we would expect that
everyone on the team have at least basic knowledge of them, enough to
evaluate their significance even if they aren’t the person running it
themselves. These need to be considered parts of roles on the team, just
like front-end engineering, back-end engineering, security, and site
reliability, and the team needs to think about who’s going to be
covering which job.
It
is more than OK for each engineer to not be individually able to do all
of these jobs. In fact, it would be stunning if any one person could
do all of these jobs. But if we treat some of these jobs as “invisible
labor,” unvalued and unaccounted-for, with skills we pretend don’t
exist, all we do is shoot ourselves in the foot.
We
do this in the obvious way by not provisioning for them. But we do it
in a less obvious way, by frightening ourselves unnecessarily. The
anxiety that this story began with is a symptom that we all know that
something is profoundly missing, and that this missing thing is becoming
more and more important. If we treat this missing thing as “not a real
skill,” something which some people (I’ve often heard “women” and “frat
boys” given as examples, typically
not at the same time) just can do automatically while engineers can’t,
then it becomes frightening because it starts to sound like engineers
are going to get thrown out in favor of random people off the street,
who will then have no respect for the engineers at all. But if we
recognize this as being a real skill — something people practice and get
good at (or bad at) over their entire lives — we have a different
language for it. That’s the language of “Crap, our team has nobody who
knows how to do X, and we’ve been faking it really, really, badly:” a
language painfully familiar to anyone who’s worked on a project before.
It is absolutely true that a lot of the people who are best at these
skills don’t come from an engineering world, because the engineering
world has been steadily failing to train people at them for decades; but
that doesn’t mean that these people don’t have any understanding of, or
respect for, engineering.
At
the risk of stating the obvious: Someone who’s supposed to be doing a
job involving coordinating engineers, or connecting engineering systems
to users, or anything else like that who doesn’t respect engineers is
going to be terrible at that job for obvious reasons, and you shouldn’t
hire them. “This person makes the team feel miserable” is a serious red
flag, not a normal side effect of how any of these jobs work.
But
to state the flip side of this: Everyone on a project needs to value,
and to understand at least enough of the basics of to participate in,
every other skill on the project. If there’s a legal issue relevant to
the system, everyone needs to know that bit of law. If there are user
studies showing that people react well or badly to something, everyone
needs to put those into their designs. If there’s a latency constraint
which makes certain classes of product behavior impossible, everyone
needs to understand the issue. And likewise, everyone needs to
understand and value the human skills: after all, you’re building a
system
Hardik Gandhi is Master of Computer science,blogger,developer,SEO provider,Motivator and writes a Gujarati and Programming books and Advicer of career and all type of guidance.
