> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.
That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.
In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.
Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask.
If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology).
If me asking what the goal is is perceived as patronising, when I’m just trying to do my best, then sure I can work on that. But that requires good faith on the side of the manager. It’s not my decision to shut things down.
I think that this approach limits leadership. Often people are asked to solve both technical and nontechnical problems. People can reasonably ask you both to define "better" and to achieve it. If you expect requirements for everything then you'll place a limit on your influence.
This is what I was going to say but phrased better. The issue isn't autistic vs. allistic, the issue is that you've decided you don't want to devote any brainpower to questions which are not directly technical. Sometimes that's fine, but it also means you are probably at the apex of your professional development. So do it, but also realize it means you're unlikely to get promoted further, and your opinion about technical topics will (rightly!) get ignored because you weren't in the rooms necessary to see any bigger picture.
I thought it was. The alistic manager wanted to plug into the social gravity of React and the autistic employee wanted an explanation for his labor he could understand. All people regardless of autistic or allistic are usually self-interested and not consciously aware of what motivates their desires. For example, I doubt the manager was capable of explaining what attracted him to React any more than the OP could understand why being part of a famous community might benefit them. Only thing that helps in these situations is for one side to know the other side better than they know themselves. It's easier to work with people if you can mentally model what motivates their desires. That's called empathy and whether or not you've got it distinguishes senior from junior engineers. It should also be a hard requirement for managers.
Thank you for commenting. I love working at the intersection of business/product/technology, and as much as I love new frameworks and shiny ideas, the best technology is usually the one that is already there. If you ask me about exactly that intersection, I do need to understand the bigger context.
Otherwise my answer would just be “yes we can rewrite the checkout in React” which doesn’t really help anybody.
As for motivation, it is of course very hard to understand one’s own motivations, and even more so other people’s motivations. It took me (please don’t laugh) 30 years to realize that I could get paid being an engineer (because I just assumed I would never be worth anything seeing how much I didn’t know about software). And only at age 40 did it dawn on me that most people are not motivated by building the best product they can, but instead do care about money, career, social prestige.
It’s ironic that this is then framed as a one-sided “can’t understand other people”, when really many people don’t understand my motivations either. And seeing how carelessly dismissive some of the comments here are, don’t even care to.
It wouldn't matter if a person just cares about status if the environment incentivizes them getting it by building a better product. Also understanding is power. If Person A can peer into the motivations of Person B and predict what they'll do, while Person B thinks Person A is a mysterious and enigmatic black box, then which one would you say is more senior?
Well, if you actually asked what the goals of the manager's proposed evaluation/comparison were, great! If you had probed around the context of the discussion a little bit by asking some open questions like "So why did this article pique your interest in relation to our company?" or "That's interesting, I wonder how their approach compares to ours. What do you think?", then even better.
However, that isn't quite what you say in the article: instead you relay that you appear to have shut down the discussion immediately by getting stuck at "this isn't broken and I don't understand why you're asking me to fix it." That is the part that I perceive as patronising, becuase it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.
Perhaps the developer shouldn't have the entire burden of interpreting everything way more charitably and coming up with far fetched questions. Perhaps some of that "social lubricant" burden should be on the manager as well. I think it was a perfectly acceptable question. The manager could have easily said "well, it's not underperforming per se, I'm just evaluating our current tech stack vs newer tech stacks"
> it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.
This might be the core of article.
Some things are knowable and don't need to be assumptions. In these cases, the author expects to have conversations that probe into what is true and what is false.
But some managers are offended by questions that challenge their assumptions. They feel their position gives them authority to overrule the deductive reasoning of their reports.
"Allistic" people sense this, and "up-manage" the egos and sensibilities of managers, without being aware they do it.
I agree. I am pretty good at being social and suave in the workplace (so well I never would have thought I was autistic until age 40), but of course I can be in a bad mood or phrase something wrong. But even if that is the case, shutting down a business conversation because you think your engineer sounds patronizing is just… not great business/tech crossover, to be honest.
I understand and empathize with your angle. But it is important to know -- nobody likes being patronized. Whether it is actually happening, or only perceived to be happening, this is a universal truth of social interactions. The vast majority of people in all social settings -- professional or otherwise -- will not collaborate with someone who is patronizing unless forced, even if it will be mutually beneficial. This is something you cannot change.
I know quite well. This article is in many ways me trying to figure out how to do just that. I know I can't just say "I know a lot about this, trust me and just answer my question." But if just asking the plain question is perceived as patronizing, how can I move on? Sometimes, getting some maneuvering room and empathy from the other side helps tremendously.
I legitimately do not know what patronizing is. I have an abstract understanding of it, and it baffles me why anybody would do something like that. Yet it is an abstract force with very real consequences I have to deal with.
> I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges
I think you have answered your own conscience.
You say you don't care about the goals. The only thing you care about is whether the tech is interesting to you or not, which is purely subjective.
Your manager probably already knows this. He knows you are asking a question to which you completely don't care about the answer. It's just that you're not interested.
There is a clear difference between asking questions to learn — and trolling. This is easily visible to any human.
I'll be honest: If you are expecting 100% fulfillment, then it most likely means you have an impossibly high opinion of yourself. If you really wish that, become a freelancer, then go ahead and reject everything you hear. At work, nobody needs to convince your heart and soul for every single thing. Deal with it.
I am not sure why you are so aggressive, nor reading my words charitably. I do care about solving the technical challenges to fulfill the goals in the best way possible. I don't care what the goal is "about," if the business wants to target a specific vertical or wants to grow internationally or wants to prioritize backend tooling. I care about knowing the goal and then doing the best work possible. This is the opposite of trolling.
It's disengenuous to say that a manager came one random day, asked a question about react and immediately dismissed you in the first sentence and went away. And all that just by reading an article overnight, as you want to believe.
There is something missing in your story. For example, how long is too long for continuing your questioning, how you deal with rest of your obligations if you don't agree with the answers, how you collaborate with others, whether others in your team agree with you or not, etc.
We programmers are so privileged that we are blind to our privilege.
Also a common trope, playing out the "manager" or "business person" as an idiot when in fact often times there are bigger things at play. Looking down on people who aren't like you is not generally a positive. Understanding them is the source of empathy.
I am sympathetic towards OP's situation and made similar mistakes when I was younger, but telling people what they want to hear is not helping them and isn't actually empathetic. I've spent most of my life around non-neurotypical people, and this does seem pretty self-inflicted. People like this don't need to read any more technical books or learn any more about software engineering.
They would be more effective in every facet of their life if they spent some time reading history, philosophy, and psychology... or just talking to people. No one exists on an island, and the issue is almost always that they don't find things external to the self "interesting" because they are self-centered. Notice that all three subjects I mentioned above are about other people.
OP, if you're still reading, please don't take anything I wrote here as an attack on you. Instead, it was meant to be a reflection on your situation from someone who struggles with many of the same communication issues, in many of the same ways.
Yes. OP is being raked over the coals for this, and people are working hard to assume many things about him, be uncharitable. Once that is done, people circle around and then accuse OP of arrogance/narcissism/know-it-all-ness.
Some people want OP to have proven that he knows how to take criticism in his article - a strange ask, given that many seem to not even have finished reading the article in the first place.
It looks like many people here dont know what makes them tick - the things they accuse the OP of, are things they can see themselves do, and so see it in the OPs behavior.
Maybe it is simply that people cant imagine the world OP inhabits.
> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it
All questions can be reflected easily.
> Is our checkout page not performing well?
> Will a new checkout solve our problem?
Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ?
> Why do they think a technology change is a solution?
Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway?
Do they understand the implications of such a switch?
> What would be the implications if we switch to React?
Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite.
Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"
If the manager has no clue then why are they bringing the ideas? They could spend all day long pitching dog shit that engineering has to bat away, is that the managers job to be the ideas guy?
From what I understood, manager in this context is not technical at all. They read somewhere their competitor using a new technology, and asking if it makes sense if they use that too.
Thank you for reading. Of course, this is a highly edited hypothetical situation, and not what happened. I try very hard to understand how I can phrase differently so that we can answer these questions and work together. I think in other comments it became clear that the intent of the questions are not the problem. In fact, I am asking them because I trust the manager to have good answers.
Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen:
- I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read.
- The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext.
If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.
> it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext
Has it occurred to you that just as it is difficult for you to adapt to the communication styles and thought patterns of allistic people, your manager experiences the same difficulty adapting to those of autistic people?
While I believe organizations and managers should try to accommodate neurodiversity and help all types of people be successful in the workplace, it's not unreasonable to expect you to expend some effort adapting as well.
In all your follow-up comments you seem to have some excuse or clarification for why you don't need to adjust your behavior and the problem is obviously that your manager isn't trying hard enough.
When your manager asks a casual question, he is not asking for a formal document describing pros, cons. He's looking for you to make a judgment call, express an opinion, or for you to say "hmmm, I might spend some time this week looking in to that."
Reacting to a two-sentence exchange by spending a week working on a doc is a communication anti-pattern.
> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.
Then why didn't the manager ask that instead of mentioning some article some other company?
> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently
Yes, this is more likely. But autistics expect communication to be true and relevant. When it is not, it sounds like incompetence and dishonesty to an autistic.
If anything, allistic people allow a certain benefit of doubt in communications before assuming incompetence/dishonesty. And then they generally play along with incompetent/dishonest people if the social context requires it.
That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.
In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.