Tell me I’m wrong

If you’ve been talked down to by someone who thinks they know better than you, then I don’t want to make you uncomfortable by echoing those feelings. This blog post is intended to address that, not make it worse. Still, if you’re feeling uncomfortable, feel free to jump straight to the conclusion.

👉 I’ve written this blog post in the second person because I want it to feel personal. I am telling you, no matter who you are, no matter your experience level, that I want you to disagree with me more often. I hope you’re willing to give that a try. I know that’s not equally easy for everyone, and I’m going to make sure to highlight things that might make it less easy or possible for you to speak up, and what people like me can do to make it easier for you to raise your concerns.

‍

The problem

I want you to tell me when I’m wrong. More than that, I want you to tell me when you think I am wrong, no matter how I feel, or whether I’m actually correct.

If you think I'm wrong about something, and you don't bring it up to me, that can be risky for both of us. Let's dig into why.

‍

I’m wrong, you’re right.

If I’m wrong, and you’re right, then I’m going to keep on thinking I’m right when I’m not, and I’m going to keep making decisions based on faulty ideas. I’m going to try and convince other people that I’m right, and sometimes I’m going to succeed. Then even more people will be wrong like I am. You’re probably going to get to see the results of me being wrong: consequences I could have avoided if I’d have known. Some of those consequences might affect you, and some of them won’t, but either way, I could maybe have avoided them if I’d have known better.

‍

I’m wrong, you’re wrong.

I’m going to keep on thinking I’m right when I’m not, and so are you. Maybe we’ve both half-understood something and together we’d have had all the pieces of the puzzle. Maybe we’re both completely wrong, but in different enough ways that trying to compare notes would have pointed it out to us both. We’re both going to keep acting in line with things that aren’t correct, and it might cause us both problems, whether we know it or not.

‍

I’m right, you’re right.

Normally this happens when I’ve got some nuance available to me that you can’t see, and vice versa. This most commonly happens in debugging a production incident: Sometimes what causes an issue is a perfect storm of factors, and none of them alone will be enough to cause an issue thanks to the system being designed to be stable. If you speak up, then we can join our insights together and get to the bottom of the problem. Without it, we’re both right, but not as right as we could be.

‍

I’m right, you’re wrong.

I’ve seen something you haven’t, and I’ve not explained it to you—or I have, but I’ve done so in a way that hasn’t landed. I’m missing a chance to bring you up to speed and have you working alongside me from the same starting point. Maybe this time you’re going to try and convince people that you’re right, and will sometimes succeed; and then, as when I did it, more people are wrong the way you are. If you’re making decisions based on the information you’re wrong about, there may well be consequences for that that we could have avoided together.

‍

The reasons

So given how important it is that you tell me when I’m wrong, why don’t you? I don’t know how often I’m wrong empirically, but I very rarely get corrected, and I think I’m wrong (or could be more right) fairly often. What reasons might people have for that?

People don’t disagree with me because I’m a confident Staff engineer, on a codebase that’s large and complex, and that I’ve worked on for a long time. I’ve been at the company longer than some of my co-workers have had jobs as software engineers; in fact, for some of them, they’ve never worked anywhere else and they’ve always known me as a more senior engineer. They’ve always assumed I know more than they do, because I’ve taught them both Ruby and Cleo.

People don’t disagree with me because they look to me to learn, to be taught, and to get new information, and human beings have a habit of assuming we’re all supersets or subsets of each other’s knowledge. People who’ve come to me because they want to know the intricacies of how an internal piece of Ruby works, or a quirk of a system I built, might assume I’m just as knowledgeable about any aspect of software. They might incorrectly assume when I speak on other topics that I’m just as much of an expert as I am in Ruby, just because they’ve seen me be knowledgeable up close.

People don’t disagree with me because I’m a well-spoken white man who can speak confidently on many topics. We’re taught to associate confidence with correctness and loquaciousness with intelligence, when any fool can believe they know best, and using longer words normally makes you worse at explaining concepts simply, not better. I am of a demographic that Western society tells us implicitly knows best and deserves your attention. Whether or not you or I mean to, the weight of years of Empire and kyriarchy (aka “my privilege”) weigh on how you hear me talk, and on how confident I can be in my opinions.

‍

So how do we fix it?

There’s a common way that people in power often speak about accountability: People should speak up when they feel someone’s wrong, no matter what their role might be, or how senior that person is. People should be honest about their challenges, and not be afraid of seeming like they don’t know enough, or challenging people who’re more established or confident than they are. Everyone benefits when people speak up and challenge things that they think are wrong, and not doing so has real impact. I think that people who say these things and mean them have forgotten, or never knew, what it was like to be nervous about speaking up, afraid to seem unknowledgeable or foolish, or to face consequence for challenging authority.

‍

The real solution

Suggesting that people just need to be brave and speak up is massively overly simplistic. It’s not easy to speak up when someone who’s been an expert at your company for longer than you’ve been a developer says something that doesn’t sit right with you, particularly when you may not be able to articulate why. There’s a thousand horror stories of people who challenged someone in power and got censured for it, no matter if they were right or not.

The burden for this cannot lie with those who are nervous, those who are uncertain, those who are less able to speak up. The responsibility lies with those who are the most confident, the most privileged, the most able to make their arguments convincing. People like me. We must cultivate and support disagreement. We must reward and encourage people who tell us we’re wrong, and we must do it irrespective of their correctness.

We can’t just encourage disagreement in public, either. Saying “does anyone disagree?” at the end of a long statement of opinion puts such a social weight on agreement that speaking up can be really challenging. Make sure to create private spaces for the people you work with to challenge you; have 1 to 1s, hold office hours, or whatever fits their needs best. There’s a big difference between telling someone they can disagree if they need to, and making it safe for them to do so.

As I’ve explained above, no matter who is wrong and who is right, there are tangible benefits to making sure we all end up on the same page. It is the responsibility of those with power and influence to create safe ways for people to correct them, as part of a healthy working relationship — then, and only then, we can all benefit from the insights and inputs of those who don’t have the confidence of an expert yet.