The brain cannot stop matching patterns, even when there is none. At best, you try with borrowed, not-invented-here patterns and spend your energy translating your experience into someone else’s vocabulary. At worst, you invent your own, name things as you see them and spend a couple of nights dreaming explaining them in a Ted talk, just to discover you are actually an average bright mind. This is the latter.
During my restless navigation through the institutional maze, I came across people, who happened to be tasked working with me. It took me embarrassingly long time to figure out they do not operate like me, and even longer time to classify them and the various messages they deliver. so, here is my attempt to mentally label them, and some quick notes, in the off chance I am right, I can tell my self I wrote you so.
1. Lookout
Every group of people trying to do anything meaningful, will fuck it up at various points. Institutions are notoriously good at inventing ingenious ways to do this, in spectacularly organized ways, repeatedly. Some people take great pride at observing, documenting and even foreseeing these misfortunes, deserved or not, leveraging sometime the their vantage point in the organization. They bring the bad news, as soon as they can. I am sure you can hear them. I suspect they are motivated by recognition they received, but also, the response they conjure from the receiver. Also, maybe to distance themselves from the ‘fires’ they reporting.
I imagine them, imagining my reaction, when they are talking/discovering a fire - something to report.
Note to future self: they never know as much as they claim, never the full picture. The heat and light fascinates them. Do not shoot them down, they always find someone to talk about the fires, if not you. Be generous with your reactions, and questions. Make sure they have your ear, direct connection but never send them to fight the fires.
2. Solver
As fascinating as it is to me, every group has one solver. That is the dude (yeah, it is always a dude), which always has an answer to everything. He hits them problems as they appear, sometimes faster than the poor lookout can bring them up. Problem with the backend, change the language. Issues with hiring, get a recruiter. Strategy missing, write down a vision. Not superficially, sometimes in depth but always as fast as their mind can land on a solution.
These people gave me a lot of problem, (still do?), since I have not realized they are not really thinking about their thinking, and worst I approached them as If they do. Worster, I spent a lot of time, trying to explain/disprove their ideas; something which they have failed themselves. Yeah, I am not getting those heartbeats back.
Note to future self: You love these guys, they help you think by throwing ideas faster they you can think, especially when you don’t make them cling to the first one to survive. Let them survive, let them attack the fire, watch the discussion.
3. Analyser
Oh, the Analyser. These are the people who cannot see a problem without seeing the seventeen other problems it is connected to, which are also connected to twelve more, and before you know it, you are in a meeting where someone is drawing arrows between your CI/CD pipeline and the company’s parental leave policy. They are not wrong (or they are?), mind you. That is the most infuriating part. There IS a connection, somewhere, between every goddamn thing in the organization, if you squint hard enough and have enough time (which they do, annoyingly).
They approach every topic like a retired colonel explaining how the fall of Rome is actually about supply chain management and also your microservices architecture. Everything is connected. Everything has dependencies. They will spend two hours in a doc (with links, always link) explaining why your deployment process is slow, and the answer involves five teams, three reorgs, a budget cut from 2021, and someone’s personal preference for Kubernetes that became institutional dogma.
Note to future self: You became one of these, which is why they exhaust you so much - you recognize the dance (of eternity). The difference is you learned (sort of?) when to stop. They haven’t, won’t, and probably shouldn’t. Here is the thing: they are usually right about “a” connections, even when its too much. Do not let them run the meetings, they will suck all the oxygen. They are trying to understand, make sense, bring some order. Find one, so you don’t become one.
4. Executor
The Executor is the one who starts moving before anyone finishes talking. Either because they are bored or they cannot understand the damn thing, if they are not into it. They just go. Do they have the full picture? No. Do they care? Also no. They trust, deeply and maybe irrationally, that they will figure it out as they go. While the Analyser is still mapping dependencies and the Solver is proposing the third alternative approach, the Executor already shipped version one, discovering things only possible to find if you do the damn thing. It might be wrong, it probably is incomplete, but it EXISTS, which is more than everyone else can say. They learn by doing, fix by iterating, and honestly don’t understand why everyone is still in the meeting.
Note to future self: You WERE one of these, which is why they exhaust y… wait, what? Anyway, you need these people more than they need you. When everyone is stuck in analysis paralysis, when the Slack thread is 50 messages deep about the “right way” to do something, the Executor is NOT your way out, although everything shows the otherway. They learn not to dig deep, by digging too deep, and usually leaving it there. Let them work, talk to them about v3, v4. Remind them about what happened last time they had 412 v1 shipped.
Epilog
What is also become clear to me, while re-writing this, is that most people saw/present themselves as the next/previous one on the list. So, I end up with lookout thinking they are solving things, or a solver thinking they are great at executing…Or maybe and more likely, my labeling needs insert ML joke here.
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PS: The fact that I did not go full D&D on this one, shows something about me.. Yet, I have interviewed one person who described himself, at length, as a Paladin in the Tech team, and another one talked about his one hander and two hander. Life is strange…