House of Eratosthenes

Mrs. Freeberg and I are both regularly called geniuses. We both make our living by making computers do things that other people don’t know how to make those computers do. She’s in Information Technology, I’m a software engineer. Which in some companies is thought-of as Information Technology, so there is some overlap there. In my case, it’s a little bit awkward because I don’t think of my work as smart-guy type work. To me, it’s a matter of persistence over brains. It always has been that. My guiding credo has been “the beer is now stretching the walls of my bladder, but before I can go pee I have to make this goddamn fucking thing do what I want it to do.” In the meantime, in other walks of life, I make just as many mistakes as any other average-to-dumb person.

This causes a certain queasiness when people start talking about how smart I am. One disaster that occurred a couple years ago has intensified this a bit. I had a big failey-fail moment that came about when someone said “Morgan’s a super-smart guy, he can do this,” and at the end of it I had this huge career meltdown thing going on. During the post-mortem I came to realize I’ve always had some soft squishy patch in my career path, just after someone said something about how Morgan’s so smart he can do-anything-or-whatever. In those last two years, my queasiness has crystallized into a genuine phobia. Someone says “Morgan’s so smart” and I immediately think, oh no, what the fuck is it NOW??

What disaster is coming down the pike NOW??

Perhaps because I’m not actually that smart, it has taken me this long to figure out: I am — we are, actually — being tapped for our “knowledge,” quite regularly, particularly in the field of computer-work, by people whose talents should not be falling too far short of fixing the problems themselves. It makes me wonder who’s the smarty-pants in these situations. But it isn’t just computer stuff. You remember the old saw about Tom Sawyer and the picket fence? This is kind of like the opposite.

It’s not all about computers. But, to make the issue more easily illustrated, let’s talk about the computers for just a second. There are, as I’ve observed before a few times, two different and opposite visions for creating some sort of computer software application. Vision One: The application will supply the dogged determination that the human element will not have to supply; if there is any way to get the job done, the app will draw on its rich supply of programmed resourcefulness to get it done. If, for some reason, the situation confronting it is outside of its programmed parameters then that will be an “exception” which, as the code base matures and the execution improves, will happen with decreasing frequency.

Vision Two: Regression mode. The application’s reason for existing is not to complete the task, but to generate the correct error message explaining in useful detail why the task cannot be completed. It is the successful fulfillment of the task that is the “exception.”

I should pause here to let that thought sink in. After all, it took me a great many years to fully form my appreciation for Vision Two, and make my peace with the fact that I like it better than Vision One.

But the paradox is that it is Vision One that commands the dollars. Nobody likes to shell out “real” money for software, install it, run it, and find themselves at the business end of an error message telling them why something can’t be done.

And this post is not about computers, or retail software versus regression-testing utilities. It’s about the persistence. This is about the “feeling overwhelmed” by the task at hand…as the retail-users feel overwhelmed by the endless procession of error messages. It’s about that seemingly unsolvable problem that comes up again and again: Is it time for me to stop slaving away, and go get help? Some of us are to be legitimately faulted for never doing it. Others are to be similarly faulted for doing it at the drop of a hat. After a lifetime of figuring out how to make computers do things, I’ve been forced to learn something about people: On this one-dimensional spectrum of getting help too quickly or two slowly, there is an inverse-bell-curve at work here. The bulk of the anecdotes fall onto the two extreme ends. People, for the most part, pretty much abandon the exercise and “get their help,” all of the time, or not at all.

I’m one of the not-at-all types. My performance reviews at the place where it didn’t work out, say so explicitly.

The all-the-time people are therefore in constant contact with people like me, and yet after decades of constant exposure to them I still can’t figure them out. They feel overwhelmed by tasks that they’ll insist they don’t know how to do, but — they do know how to do them. It isn’t that they’re lazy. There’s something going on here, something that isn’t entirely simple, in fact is quite complex. It’s got to do with the vision. They see the job as being bigger than they are. But they see this before they measure anything. If you were to actually measure the job, in terms of minutes or calories, in prospect or in retrospect, and compare that number against what these people have been known to sink into other jobs without a moment’s hesitation about it, you would find the challenge confronting them to be negligible. And yet, they can’t see themselves winning-out against it because they just haven’t been seeing it that way.

I struggle to relate to this. It’s so hard. I told my wife the very best example of which I could think…the one job in which, were I to be confronted with it, I might be tempted to say “Oh no, that’s not me, you’ll just have to find someone else” even if there was a gun held to my head…it might be scraping barnacles off the hull of a boat. Toward that end, I considered using the name “Barnacle Test” to describe what comes below.

And then I reconsidered, thinking of those signs in the park saying “Please do not throw solid waste down this outhouse, as it is extremely difficult for us to remove” or something. THAT is the job. Ever since I was a little boy, if a job needed doing and I was the only one within line-of-sight who might get it done, I considered it out-of-bounds to say: I can’t do it, we need to find someone else. I guess that’s why I’m a computer guy. Not because I’m smart or anything, but because others took a pass on the challenge. People think I still work at it because I’m always excited about it. I’m thirty years into it, and from all that time…hoo boy, have I got stories to tell. No, it isn’t always exciting. It isn’t always fun. Far from it.

If I were ever tempted to say, no I don’t know how to do this job — when I do — it would be that job. The guy who has to fish the candy wrapper, or the car keys, out of an outhouse.

The Outhouse Test: You are heard to say, or you think about saying, “No this is outside of my ability” — and yet — if someone were to say “Oh yeah, well this other guy managed to get it done no problem”…you would not be genuinely impressed. It is a situation of pretending to profess a limitation to one’s strengths, when in actuality, the limitations of that person’s strengths have nothing to do with the topic at all. When what that person is doing is ducking responsibility.

The point to it is that we are often way too quick to involve the limitations of ability in conversations like this, including conversations about help being “needed.” People feel overwhelmed by the challenges that arise…simply because, the option is open for them to abandon the challenges. On a deserted island with no one around, they’d just have to nut-up. And on some level, they know this.

The Outhouse Test fails if you ‘fess up that you can’t do something…a hero rises, someone who can manage to get ‘er done…and your emotional response is one of something like “Golly! Here I was thinking it is impossible!” Or something like “Shazam! What have I got to do to learn to do that for myself!”

It passes if your response is more like “Yeah, whatever…glad I dodged that bullet.”

Because when push comes to shove, I really do know how to fish car keys out of an outhouse. If it ever becomes necessary for me to do so, and I hope this does not come to pass, I’ll be “able” to do it.

But I might be tempted to feign ignorance if I can dupe someone else into doing it for me. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that department.

[…] Thoughts When You Only Get the Information You Want, it Makes You Stupid The Outhouse Test We Disagree Six Percent Say it’s Working Great Force Isn’t Freedom Can’t Apply […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/03/2014 @ 01:16

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The Outhouse TestSunday, March 2nd, 2014

The Outhouse Test
Sunday, March 2nd, 2014