“It’s not that I mind filling out another survey, it’s more that we haven’t heard anything about the other one we just filled out.” The comment had no snarky tone or accusatory subtext. It was meant as a simple matter-of-fact comment on what I had just asked the team to do.
Have you ever filled out a job application only to never hear back from the company? Probably more than once. Probably more than ten times, right? It seems like the cultural norm is to ignore job applicants - unless you’re calling them in for an interview. Well, here at Corgibytes we do things differently.
It’s 3 a.m. You’re wide awake. You’re having a conversation in your mind with a colleague, a boss, a client. Again. The same one. Seemingly on repeat for the past few days, weeks, or months even. Barring some intractable factors, it appears it’s time to transition that hard conversation from inner monologue to outer dialogue.
I thought I understood empathy...until I started writing a book about it. Chances are, empathy doesn't mean what you think it means, either.
When we talk about localizing or internationalizing an application, we often focus on just the wording of labels and other text. However, there is more to it than just “what is the translation of this word”. Take for example this real world story.
A few days ago, Basecamp announced some changes to their organization. Since we've publicly shared that some of Basecamp's books and philosophies have influenced the Corgibytes culture, we feel it is necessary to share our dissent on some of their recent decisions, particularly around their policy of "no more societal and political discussions" at work.
I have been working remotely since 2016, but I have been working from home since March 2020. Those are not the same thing. Sure, they sound the same and they have a lot of common traits... But they are very different.
Empathy is an important technical skill that can drive the decisions developers make when they code. How can we make the practice of applying empathy throughout a codebase concrete? It starts with defining the practice.
Wouldn't it be great if there were a documentation tool that's directly tied to the source code (so that you can always access information that's relevant to the code you're looking at), that doesn't clutter up the code itself, that's carefully and automatically timestamped (so that you know how current its information is), and that's guaranteed to be updated whenever the code is? Oh, wait. There is.
If you want to eliminate your technical debt, communication HAS to be a critical component of your efforts. If you're struggling to break up your monolith and move to a microservices model, the first place to look is how your team is communicating. Command and control silos will result in monoliths. Self-organizing and autonomous teams give rise to microservices.