I follow Dave Plummer on YouTube. He’s one of the OG Windows programmers. A true hacker in the best traditions of the ethos. Turns out, he’s on the spectrum. He wrote about book about being out on “far end,” so to speak.
He’s written enough about his neuro-atypicalness on Twitter to resonate with me, so I bought the book. The whole first part is explaining how things “work” for him, and I got tired of going, “Well, yeah,” and set it down.
I just picked it up again, and skipped ahead to the next part, and he hit me with this:
“Much of my life was spent presuming that, as an intelligent individual, my version of the world was the right one and that all I had to do was sufficiently educate, convince, and cajole the other person until they “got” my version.
Which is exactly what I was referring to in this post, where I was trying to convey how futile trying to persuade people has been for me over my lifetime. I’ll give an example.
One of my earliest memories of this type of conflict happened in the late 90’s. I was working for a bluechip Fortune 250 which no longer exists. It was a special place, and it was destroyed in a textbook corporate raid, but at the time, I had established myself as someone who knew what they were doing with computer systems, and — at least I like to believe — had the respect of the leaders of the various IT subsystems of the company.
The company was pretty big, but the IT staff was relatively small. By comparison, the company that bought and pillaged us was about the same size, but had an IT staff four or five times as large. We were having a big meeting with most the IT people, and the subject of DNS came up. I was frustrated that I couldn’t spin up hostnames in our DNS system, and had to ask and wait for someone to do it for me. Now, the person in charge of the network had had enough foresight to make various sub-domains based on sites. For instance, our technical center was ctc.arvin.com. So hosts could be given names like pdm.ctc.arvin.com.
I made the point that the local site IT admins could be given permissions to be able to create new names in their local subdomains. I was trying to get them to allow my own site’s admin to be able to do this for me, without needing to involve corporate, and wait. I remember pointing out that the system was designed to work this way, implying that it would be easier to let them do this themselves.
One of the big 3 IT bosses said that the local site admins wouldn’t be able to do that. I thought that was silly. After all, the DNS admin tool in Windows NT was really easy to use. My prototype and testing facility’s admin was one of the most talented IT guys I’ve ever met. Still. Thirty years later. So I was imagining that the rest of the site admins were at least competent “computer people,” which wasn’t the case. Like, at all. The other sites — the manufacturing sites — were having their IT needs met by someone who just got picked because they had an inkling of what was going on, and had the bandwidth to setup the box. A couple years later, I would be meeting some of them, and they turned out to be HR people and shipping clerks. I was confused by the disconnect in the moment, but I dropped it. But after I met some of these other people, I finally got it, and was able to fill in the gaps in that story. It was an honest clash of multiple levels of high-flying expectations dashed on the rocks of reality.
It took me a long time to see that my whole approach lead people to think that I thought they were stupid. In this particular case, I’m sure I made the managers in the room feel like I was calling the site admins incompetent. No, I just made bad assumptions, and gave people the benefit of the doubt. This is a very different thing, but people can’t see it that way when they feel they’re being indirectly accused of not being unqualified. If I had understood the proper context of the other sites, instead of extrapolating from the one I was familiar with, I wouldn’t have suggested it in the first place. But despite being a trained mechanical engineer — where every single problem I ever solved started with identifying my assumptions — I still sometimes can’t see that my assumptions are bad. It’s probably because I’m just rushing to get to the place I want to be.