Unreasonable within reason

Over the years I have come to appreciate “unreasonable” coworkers. What a weird sentence to write, right? When it comes to programming, you are usually fairly well advised to be “reasonable.” For example, debugging is much more effective if you have a theory for why things are going wrong and then systematically conduct experiments to falsify what you can – rather than blindly flipping signs and transposing matrices until things maybe sort of work. Maybe.

As I have written just last week, I am (still) on a journey to spend more time on action instead of just thinking. Part of this is because I want to spend more time creating and less time tinkering, for lack of a better word. “Tinkering” is an activity that lends itself nicely to being reasonable (and getting paid, as it happens): there are a lot of places with deep software stacks that need tinkering. You fix nasty bugs here, improve performance there, debug and post-mortem some tricky incidents. You oil the machine, adjust some screws and cogs. This is fun work, but almost entirely deconstructive, and mostly with the goal to take something that is “sort of bad” and make it “a little bit less bad”.

Creating things on the other hand seems like a different beast entirely! It requires you to overlook many flaws that you are well aware of to build the thing that is (at first) worse than “sort of bad.” It requires optimism that what you are doing is “the right thing” and “worth doing.” It requires conviction, because there is no “sort of bad” machine to oil yet, which by itself would give you a gradient to ascend, a compass: let’s just make this thing a little bit less bad. No, that direction needs to come from you, from the inside. I find this at least a little bit scary.

Call me a pessimist, but I do not wake up in the morning with the thought “I am going to change the world.” For one, I’m not exactly a morning person. Beyond that, it seems to require a certain suspension of disbelief to convince yourself that what you are doing is worthwhile. I have found a lot of respect for folks who can do this, and from what I can tell this comes down to being stubborn and at least a little bit unreasonable.

As an example, you can read a story every month or so how some math problem that was open for half a century was solved by one stubborn person who just got obsessed with it (here is a recent one). Absolutely unreasonable. Or all of those people that “have an idea for an app.” Is that still a thing, apps? (It sounds so 2010!) Yes, most of those ideas are bad (mine included), but those people are doing something, with conviction, and possibly learn something and improve. They at least know what impact they want to have on the world, while I am busy getting 1% better at tinkering (on someone else’s stuff, that someone else willed into existence). I envy the people that wake up with the conviction that they are going to build World of Warcraft, except it’s Star Wars¹, without all the obvious problems with that immediately clouding their vision. At least as a temporary mode of existence, being an unreasonable dreamer sounds terribly useful.

This is not to say that I have any delusions that “being unreasonable” is a proxy for success (in the sense of “achieving what you set out to do”). But it’s at least helpful for setting a clear direction and getting going somewhere.

Which brings me back to “unreasonable” coworkers: Someone has to ask “why does this process take 2 minutes? It should be instant.” Or “why can’t this be free?” – Users are afterall certainly not going to listen to your 15 minute explanation for why it takes 2 minutes; users are not reasonable. That’s where it helps to have someone with the business sense to be unreasonable. Setting direction by saying “let’s play it safe and not rock the boat” is terribly ineffective, afterall. Just make sure that everyone knows whether you are currenetly at “we’re implementing things, be reasonable” or at “we’re building a product, be unreasonable.” This is incidentally where I see the role of executives: Their job is to be unreasonable, and that works great as long as everyone is aware and they keep their hands out of the implementation that is better served by being reasonable.

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