It happened. I finally made these word-vomits part of the main blog! The old vomits page is still live though in case anyone has linked to it (which I seriously doubt, but you never know).

I gave quite a bit of thought to this but eventually realized that "my blog" was actually "my vomits," as well as everything else I wrote in here. I also realized that it's not healthy to split such similar writing across strong categories.

What actually convinced me to do this was Visa's own blog. If you go there it's a bit of a mess (more than a bit actually), and a lot of that is because the "1000 vomits" are treated as their own special category, even though in the end they're connected with everything else!

So if this is the first "vomit" you read then welcome!

(I'm also sorry if this change caused some spam for you. Here, have some tea 🍵)

...

Another cool thing that happened today is that the Azure folks finally answered my request to re-enable my account (context here). They're still looking into it, but the fact that they answered means that there's someone actively working on the case, which gives me hope.

Today I want to talk about an issue I'm having at work. But first...

In college I always used to be the guy who would be the "best" (or one of the best) in almost every class1. I would often end up writing the assignments mostly by myself, and I didn't really mind. If I have to be honest, I would actually say I quite enjoyed the "admiration" of my classmates!

The same thing happened once I started my professional career. I joined a small local company, and I quickly made my way to "the top." I was involved in pretty much every project the company was working on and often was called in for consulting with other projects, or architecture work, or just doing feasibility studies for new ideas.

I was also lucky that I never really got to work with anyone who abused my helpfulness. I loved mentoring others (it's still one of the things I enjoy the most), and as far as I know (from peer feedback), people usually like working with me exactly because "I'm not patronizing and genuinely enjoy teaching". The fun bit here is that often I learned as much from my coworkers (if not more) as they learned from me. I think it's just a matter of creating a healthy working environment where the concept of "stupid questions" just doesn't exist, where everyone feels comfortable asking things they might usually think obvious.

In my time I've also had to work with some folks who... how do I put it... are not really that capable. This has always been surprising to me and something I've paid a lot of attention to over my professional career. These people really try, but for some reason or other end up taking loads of time to implement even the simplest features or work on a seemingly simple write-up.

Though if you talk to them it's clear that they know their business. Sometimes they might have some issues in their knowledge (more often than not the basics), which makes them reach wrong conclusions now and then, but it's just due to confusion, not because there's anything wrong with them or their intelligence2.

Something I've observed is that the great majority of the time (if not always), the reason for their "underperformance" is that they lack self-esteem. They just don't feel sure enough in their capabilities.

I remember once I had a coworker who would take forever to code simple stuff. Someone at the company had told me this guy was clueless, just hopeless, but if I gave him simple tasks then it should be alright. I didn't like this, of course, so I started sitting with him every now and then to do some pair programming and was actually surprised that he coded the feature in pretty much the same time as I would. But then he would second-guess himself and, thinking his code was broken (it wasn't), he would throw it away and code it again in another way. He used to do this two or three times per feature, and then he would spend whole days testing it with every possible variation of variables to make sure it didn't break. If he could just see what I saw-that he was already quite capable-a lot of his worry would be alleviated, and his work improved3.

In college I also saw this pattern multiple times. I remember a classmate who would never write anything in our shared assignments. Once I was talking to him about such an assignment and he understood perfectly well what we did and why, so I asked him why he didn't help write the paper and he answered that he wasn't sure if what he thought was correct or not. I remember telling him, "Believe in yourself, man!".

Of course, due to luck and general circumstances, I was always on the "positive" side of this exchange. I was always the mentor, but never the mentee.

And that's how we get back to my work issues. I'm the mentee now. Ever since I joined this new company (4 years ago), I've felt more lost than my peers. Sometimes the roles reverse, but more often than not I'm the one scrambling to understand what's going on and how things work. It also doesn't help that I work with REALLY talented people, many of whom are experts in their field4.

We're working on a new paper for an AI benchmark a coworker created, and I have to admit I'm lost. I'm not 100% familiar with the benchmark code, which makes me doubt myself even more. But more than that, I don't feel entitled to write on the paper. It's like I don't have "permission" for it. Sure, I can fill in sections, but I first need someone to tell me what those sections are and more or less what they want me to put in there!

I think this is probably how my ex-coworkers felt. This idea of entitlement has its roots directly in the issue of self-esteem I mentioned above. I don't believe I have the ability to do it, and as such I don't do it.

I'm trying to apply my own suggestions, but it's not as easy, and I find myself procrastinating a lot. So I'm doing what I always do when I have a problem I feel stuck with: I write about it on my blog!

Today I tried a new approach that seems to be more or less working: make an offline copy of the document and then just write a bunch of stuff (pretty much stream of consciousness), as much as I can, and then once I have the content just edit it into a sensible flow. I've done around half of a full section (one of the largest, though), and I have to admit I'm happy with today's progress! Hopefully tomorrow will be similar.

But well, thanks for reading!

Footnotes

  1. The only class I ever got less than a great score on was one that required doing presentations in front of the whole class and debating with other groups over silly matters. You know, social anxiety and all that. ↩

  2. On the contrary. In my experience, people who struggle technically are often the ones who are best at thinking outside the box. ↩

  3. After some months of working with him, he did improve substantially. I'm not sure if it was thanks to me (I don't think so), but he ended up being more confident in his work and even suggested some new (and good) ideas in our meetings. ↩

  4. I work as an embedded engineer on a research team. ↩