Socrates in a dim office facing a wall of gilded frames, each holding the faint diagram of a skill, a circuit-brain, a maze, a clockwork mechanism, and all of them dark. One frame alone is lit, and it is empty. The light comes from a small glowing stopwatch hanging on the nail beneath it, and he is reaching toward the stopwatch. Warm editorial illustration style, burnished gold and brown tones.

Are They Trusting You, or Spending You?

engineering-cultureconsultingrolesaccountabilitycognitive-biases

A small ticket drop by: “Remove the white background from the placeholder profile pictures”.

The grey silhouettes the application shows before anyone has uploaded a photo of their own, nine or ten files, twenty minutes in a tool a graphic designer opens every day and a frontend developer opens almost never.

It went to a senior frontend developer, two and a half years into the same engagement. At the time of this request he had built the end-to-end test suite that every release on that project runs through. He had put together the automations the team now uses without thinking about them, including the ones that call a model and hand back something a human can use. He knew which parts of that codebase were load-bearing and which were decoration, which is knowledge that takes years and does not transfer in a handover document.

He read the ticket. Then he opened the tool and removed the backgrounds.

Which of the three was it?

Before that, he did what anyone does with a message that lands wrong. He tried to work out what it meant.

He got three readings, and he said them out loud, roughly like this:

  • Is this company in such bad shape that it hands a senior consultant work like this?
  • Is it so far gone that they want me to leave, and this is the polite way of saying it?
  • Have I run so far ahead that I lapped myself, and I am back in the first week of my first job?

Three explanations, and no way to choose between them. It is the same ticket in all three worlds. Same nine images, same twenty minutes. A verdict, an eviction notice, and a joke about time, all arriving in the same font.

Was the task ever the problem?

Years earlier, when he was a junior at a different company, they asked him to do this exact thing: “Take the backgrounds off some images”.

Designer’s work, and the phrase people reach for, when they reach for one at all, is non-related tasks. The work that belongs to your day without belonging to your job.

He did it. Nobody thought it was strange, and that included him.

The task has not changed since. Same operation, same tool, and the tool has improved, so if anything it is faster now than it was then. Nothing about those nine images knows how long he has been working. So which end of this moved?

In the first company the small work fell downward, the way small work does when a room has a bottom and everybody can see where it is. That room had a bottom, and he was standing on it.

What does “it is what it is” actually do?

He did say something. He did the work in the end, and he also told the person who assigned it that he found it disrespectful.

The answer was: it is what it is.

Four words worth slowing down on. They are not a denial, and they are not an apology. They do not dispute that it was disrespectful, and they do not explain why it happened. What they do is move the whole thing out of the category of decisions, which have authors and can be argued with, and into the category of weather.

Who do you appeal weather to? An objection was raised, received and dissolved, with nothing denied and nothing changed. What was there for him to say next?

And what was he asking for, exactly? The work was going to be done either way. What he wanted was smaller than a reassignment and much harder to put in a sentence: an acknowledgement that a weighing had taken place and had come out wrong. Moving a ticket takes a minute.

What would the other one have cost?

The chain of why stopped at those four words, and not because the next link was unknown to either of them. He does the work or he leaves the engagement. Both of them can see that, and it does not go in a reply.

Who was the ticket about?

Look again at the three explanations, look at what they have in common.

  • The company is incompetent.
  • The company wants him gone.
  • He has gone all the way around the track and come back to the start.

Every one of them is a theory about him. Each one needs somebody, somewhere, to have formed a view of his worth and then to have chosen a work item as the way to deliver it.

There is a fourth reading, and he did not reach for it. Nobody formed a view of anything at all. A project manager had a small ugly problem, needed it gone, and thought of the person who answers.

Is that the kinder version? An insult requires a judge, and it stings precisely because somebody weighed you and published the result. What is it when nobody weighed you at all?

What can a project manager actually see?

Here is where the two and a half years cut the wrong way.

If he had been new, the PM had no idea what he was holding, and the ticket is a misunderstanding that time would eventually fix. Two and a half years is not new. The PM watched the test suite get built. The PM sat in the demos of the automations. So the knowledge is there, and something else is missing.

When something small needs doing before a demo, does anyone run a query over what each person on the project is capable of? Or does a name simply arrive?

Skill has to be inferred, mostly from work that reaches them looking like a merged branch. Judgement is invisible by construction, since the disasters it prevents leave nothing behind to point at. Where would either of those appear in the tool where work gets assigned?

Response time is different. It is a number, everybody on the project has one, and nobody had to go looking for it.

The ticket system records who was assigned. Does it have a field for why?

He is quick. He is the most responsive person on that project. That is why the ticket had his name on it.

And he is quick because he is good. The speed is not a temperament that happened to him. It comes from knowing the codebase well enough to answer without opening it, from caring whether the person on the other end is blocked, from two and a half years of having been right often enough that replying costs him nothing. The trait being sorted on is not a weakness. It is an achievement, and it is the only one of his achievements a project manager can measure without asking anyone.

None of which was ever said out loud. Nobody asked the PM why that name and not another, and there is no particular reason to think an answer was waiting. A selection rule nobody states is not a rule anybody can hand you. It gets reconstructed afterwards, from outside, by the person it landed on.

Is it a compliment, or is it a bill?

Being the person who answers is how you get trusted. It is also how you become the easiest option in the room. Same behaviour, same reward, two roads, and they separate somewhere nobody can see from the inside.

If it is trust, you get more requests. If it is convenience, you get more requests. What test separates them?

There is a second thing happening, quieter than the first. Every answered request makes the next one more likely, because the memory that produced his name gets stronger each time it turns out to have been right. And the work that travels along that path is the small kind. The twenty-minute kind. The kind that leaves nothing behind that anyone could look at later and call difficult.

So the more of it you take, the faster the next one comes, and the smaller the share of your year that goes to the work that would show what you are. Two and a half years of that, and what does the record hold? And when the rate gets discussed, or the renewal, or the next role, what exactly is anyone going to read?

On a Tuesday, with one ticket open, how would you tell?

Where does the track stop being a track?

The lap was his own image, and it is the best thing anyone said about the situation. It also does not survive being looked at.

A race has a lap counter. It is official, and there is a person whose entire job is to hold it up. The leader knows he is the leader, because somebody is counting on his behalf. A runner who has been lapped is genuinely behind, measurably, by one full circuit. That is not his situation. He may be ahead. He may be exactly where he was two and a half years ago. The track may not be a track, and nobody has agreed on a direction.

None of that apparatus exists here. The image explains the feeling and does not describe the situation.

Whose drawer is it in?

His phrase for the thing that was missing was his professionality. Where is my professionality, if this is the work I get asked to do.

The word does not mean what the sentence needs it to mean. To profess comes from profiteri, to declare openly, in public, in front of people standing close enough to hear. A profession was a vow said out loud where there were witnesses, a statement of what you were and what you would not do, and nobody was ever handed one.

So in the version of the sentence he was reaching for, who is holding it? Which drawer, and who keeps the key?

Which is either the comfort in all this or the coldest part of it. If it can only ever be declared, then nobody else can take it. And nobody else can put it down for you either.

Who is the quickest person on your team?

You already know who it is. It took no effort at all to know, which is the point.

When something small comes up before a demo, whose name arrives first? Does it surface on its own, or do you choose it? Have you ever had to defend the choice, to anyone, including yourself?

They have a theory about what it means. They have had it for months, and it has never once come up, because there has never been an occasion where it would.

Has anyone ever told them which one it was?

From the stands, when the leader laps the field, the man in front and the man being lapped stand at the same point on the track, wearing the same expression, moving at the same speed. You cannot tell them apart from up there. Neither of them can tell from down there.

So when their name arrives first, are you trusting them, or are you spending them? And when your own name arrives first, which of the two is happening to you right now, and how would either of you ever find out?