Work Life: Sign of a Fake Developer > screenshots vs copy/paste

Developer sends a screenshot of the objects that need to be referenced when it be easily copy/pasted forcing the recipient to type out the entire name. Even after many situations where other users have transcribed incorrectly multiple times particularly with unexpected spaces, 1 vs l vs I, 0 vs O, etc, developer continues to take only screenshots.

Developer sends a screenshot of an excel sheet, html table, etc.

Developer sends a screenshot of text on a notepad of the name of the server name or service account or anything that requires the admin to transcribe into another system.

#FakeDevelopersHaveNoEmpathy

Life: Empathy vs Sympathy

 https://www.6seconds.org/2021/01/20/empathy-vs-sympathy-what-the-difference/

I liked this video. It makes a lot of sense. I am not sure if I totally agree with the definition of empathy and sympathy. I will admit that my definitions may be (probably is most likely) incorrect. But, I understand the point of Brene Brown.

The struggle to help is real. There have been many times where I really just say "I do not know what to say." And I don't feel that it is so easy because while one says it, one still battles the urges to do something. If you say it but don't battle it, then it may come across empty. I feel it is not just words alone but also the expressions that I am also struggling to find an answer... or maybe even to say an answer.

In my mind, there are a lot of questions or "at leasts" but often conclude that it just belittles the feeling or inappropriate for the moment. I think the person who shared the feeling can sense this.

What I like about this video is learning that this feeling is not only normal but the better option.

Work Life: If you need help, pause to listen (also works for normal life)

A close person had asked what sorts of food to make and was clearly asking me for assistance. 

"What food should I make?"

"There isn't much ingredients."

"It is hard to decide."

"Give me a list of things I can make."

And on and on and on...

I even made some attempts to provide some feedback. I tried using handle signal for a pause or a few seconds. Eventually even trying to interrupt. But she just kept on going for 30+ minutes, even repeating questions/statements.

She is definitely not the first person that I interacted with like that. Even at work there are people who just keep on asking, repeating the same question, talking a mile-a-minute, etc. These people at least you can kind of ignore or build a method to get out.

The worst are people who have an open Q&A to a presentation. They use half the time to present, then uses the second half asking for questions, to be open about questions, etc. There would be people with raised hands or try to get attention, but the presenter just keeps on going.

My Advice

1. Be comfortable with very uncomfortable silence

2. Pauses in your speech. 

Why?

1. Some people do not interrupt out of respect. It is more polite to hear the whole thing before responding.

2. Who's helping who? If you are asking for help, it is not my problem that you run out of time.

3. Respect runs both ways. If you do not respect my time, then I am less likely to interrupt you to help you.

(Bonus Skill) Learn to Empathize and Summarize

I understand that most people are unable to understand this so I will give a pass to some people (but know that I will still be irritated inside).

Empathy is your ability to put yourself in someone else's situation and have an interest to help. You do not need to fully understand especially the emotional part. In this case of seeking help, you need to understand who your audience is. Do they know your situation? Do they know the details? Do they know enough to help solve your problem? The counter-balance to this is to also know when too much information is too much information. The easiest is to listen if they have questions. Part of this is also to understand the person is also trying to come up with a solution within a limited period of time that you have spent significantly more time on.

I have no answer how to practice empathy. One of the common tests to see if someone has empathy is by just listening tell you their day. People with low empathy will commonly just jump from story to story with no context. No identifiers to understand that "he" in story 1 is different from "he" in story 2. And when it becomes clearer that story 2 is in place and I speak up, the speaker actually gets more irritated, frustrated, and/or angry.

Maybe I am not a great listener, but an empathetic person should change their speech patterns to their audience. That is essentially what empathy is. I have had little luck in explaining empathy to less-empathetic people. When I explain empathy to highly-empathetic people, I am not really explaining empathy. I am mostly teaching them other points-of-views that they haven't considered, then they go to town with it.

But on the most basic level, if you are asking someone to solve a problem... they need to have all the ingredients to solve the problem. If you lack an ingredient, then they will either say it is unsolvable or they will assume certain values or defaults (whether it is correct or not because maybe it may still help).

On the other hand, do not overwhelm them with information. So learn to summarize. Give as much ingredients as possible that is needed but not too much more than needed.

All this is just to get information from a person one time with little past negative history. To get continued help is another level of empathy. How is this experience going to help or detract some from help you in the future? Some people may help you this time but if the experience is poor, will they help in the future. In summary, empathy is not just a moment but also multi-level. Fortunately if you are starting to understand empathy, some empathetic people will understand and give some leeway. This is probably one of the few things that I believe hard-work and time will help anyone's quest to be more empathetic.

Writing for those who hate writing or are afraid of writing... say it out loud in writing

There are times when I wondered if I was blood related to my family because everyone in my family was art-inclined. They liked music, singing, and can draw with ease (in my opinion). While... I became an engineer and been blamed for being too logical. All the notes seem the same to me, drawing out of the line was blasphemous, and I cannot sing (still can't). Although there are a billion stories, I think we get the gist of my difference in the family.

But I suppose good is relative, like how some of my college classmates felt inadequate compared to the other students in a top tiered university. Yet I would hire any of them in a heartbeat in place of some of the coworkers I have had to deal with in the past.

I do occasionally sketch-draw cards for people. Primarily because it has a greater personal impact in relation to the cost of the card (free versus $5 at a store). Later in life, I found it to be good practice for the artistic side of me. Everyone says that I am good. At first, I thought they were just being nice. But after some time, you can tell when they seem to be saying it genuinely. So like my drawing, I also picked up writing because I wanted to share my ideas. And as I continued to write, I found different ways to write. And now when I read, I can see some of the structure of how other people write.

Although I cannot change your hatred towards writing or fear of writing, I can only suggest that you should start (or continue) writing even if you are the only reader like this blog of mine. Even just learning the difficulties of writing is worth the experience in understanding other people from a different perspective.

What should you start writing about? It does not need to be a book, a short-story, or even a blog. Even writing a review is good enough or even a tweet. Write how your day was, what you think is right or what was wrong. Write why your favorite color is your favorite color. Write that the food at A is better than B, or that it was comparable or it depends on certain factors.

Do not be afraid to write even if there is no reason or have no answer. Like, I do not know why my favorite colors keep shifting between blue, green, and black... yet blue and orange has a special meaning for me (the repressed school pride that I claim that I don't have?). I don't know why I enjoy being sarcastic all the time. They say it is because I am trying to hide something. It could be true, or it may not. I really don't know. And if you don't want to publish it, don't publish it. But try not to delete it, although there is nothing wrong with that either. Write on little scraps of paper. I wrote in a tiny notepad while I was on the plane. I wrote why the flight attendant was not smiling.

Once you have written a few things (this could be days, weeks, months, or even years), you should review what you have written. Try to figure out what you are trying to convey. Write about writing, write why your writing is so random, but pick up tidbits of what worked for you and if you are ambitious, what did not work for you?

Why write? I think we all succumb to our own beliefs and take for granted that others should know exactly how we are thinking or feeling without considering that they really do not. Even if we think that we are open-minded, we may not be as open-minded as we think we are. Even when I thought that I was open-minded, it embarrasses me to admit that positive-reinforcements (especially from my mom) has made my ego greater than it should be... no matter how hard I try to see through it. And the same goes with negative-reinforcements where my self-worth is lower than it should be at.

Writing is the mirror of communication. You can see how your ideas are delivered, how they fit together, how there is always a flaw and room for improvements. And like a mirror, we still need to be careful on our perception of the reflection. The flaw is like the blemish that you think everyone sees, but what everyone really sees is something else.

And to take this one more level, don't be afraid to try something that you are not good at. Although you may never be as good as your circle or even the majority of people, it is a good exercise to empathize, understand others, and really appreciate their talents.

Work Life: Working Remotely

I have worked in the office or at client's site for most my career. The experience is as normal wherever I worked. I have the good chance to work remotely for over a year. Well, I work remotely most of the time because I technically still have an office that I go to once in a while. I just want to state that because it is not exactly the same as working remotely all the time.

I did not have a lot of problems transitioning to the new work-style. Overall, my work quality has improved and my time management probably is a little better. I do miss having some face-to-face conversations. I think one of the easy aspects of the transition is my seriousness to working professionally. Another factor is that the entire team is spread around the country with a handful in the other hemisphere, so we are all used to teleconferencing even when in the office.

In my line of work, I do a lot of teleconferencing with desktop sharing similar to GoToMeeting or WebEx. I work with a lot of people. I become more serious with formality the larger my meeting is. I will be a little more lax as there are fewer people. As a software release manager, my role entails a lot of meetings. I do not have to do a lot of active participation in most of the meetings, but still have my share of meetings where I am the host.

There are some annoyances working with some other remote users. Those with kids and dogs are particularly frustrating at times. Some users just cannot separate their personal lives from the background. When people cringe just by seeing you sign into the meeting before the voice is connected, that is a poor sign that something needs to be done. If their dog cannot stop barking, then the user needs to find another location to work. I am fine with people who had to stay home for an emergency or have some background sound due to other extraneous situations. I'll even let some construction or even just a bad day (or even two). But if you have loud background distractions practically all the time, then you need to find a different place.

Because I'm in meetings a lot, sometimes there is some downtime waiting for people to attend. During these times, I'd use the time to cleanup my work area which also happens to be the same area for personal use. The frees up a lot of time outside of work. Other times, I would just move over to my exercise fitness ball and do a few crunches. Not only healthy for me, but really helps give me energy to focus on my meetings. Because you are not far from other chores, I can also cook and/or do laundry during my lunch breaks. This also saves a lot of time outside of work and healthier. All of these adds up so by the end of the day, I can actually relax and not have to spend my time working on personal chores which are not difficult but time-consuming (like laundry which is two 5 minutes and most of the time is just waiting).

Because I can relax more effectively, I wake up more naturally and rarely have the afternoon burn out. I work more effectively which also helps me make more use of my time. So working home is quite beneficial for my employer.

The part that I miss is the interactions with other people. I do not feel as emotionally invested with coworkers. Interactions are a bit more impersonal which in turn actually helps me run my meetings more effectively. Although beneficial for the employer, there is slightly less personal feel to it.

If I could change something, it would be nice to have video conferencing but the companies bandwidth will unlikely hold up since we could have up to 30+ people in a meeting. Alternatively, maybe just a "white noise" video conference of your immediate team even if no one is talking. It will be virtually like being an office except you can actually mute if you need silence or "peek" over at someone and see what they are working on or just listen into their meetings without having to bug them about their schedule or for an invite.

Also, I think some people will have a little easier time empathizing with others. I've found that some people feel that they are singled out but not realize that the other person is just that way with everyone. They just do not see it because you cannot see that sort of thing from a remote location. There have been several conversations with colleagues where I just say that they don't have to stress on it because the person is like that to everyone.

So there are some new social norms remote users have to be more aware of. Because I have lost the visual aid, I have to be more careful on how I deliver my messages. Too quiet and they think you are not confident in what you are saying. Interrupt too much and they think you do not respect them (there is a very slight lag time that most people do not realize but makes it easier for certain types of people to interrupt others). Talk too much and you will likely lose your audience without even knowing it. Multi-tasking is very common in remote users.

A good sign that your meeting is losing its focus when more and more people respond with "sorry, can you repeat that?" There are all sorts of variations of the question but basically they are saying that they were not paying attention to the meeting and was working on something else.  This is ok if the person is not an integral person to the meeting. Those people should not be a permanent member of the meeting though. But when your crucial participants say that more frequently, the agenda of the meeting is somehow lost and should be restructured.

Another problem with remote users is that it is now so easy to attend meetings that you do not need to be attending. I've been on meetings where there were 50+ people and only 10 people really needed to be on that call. Worst is when those 10 people go even further off-topic or extend the meeting longer than necessary. Personally, I think if only 20% of the people on the call is actively participating then the meeting needs to be restructured. Also on this topic, I always find it ridiculous when meetings have both the team's manager, team members, and both are inactive. If that were the case, the manager should kick off his team and have himself or another member stay on to later summarize key points for the team. There is no reason for the entire team to be wasting time listening to a lot of topics unrelated to them.

Financially, it saves both parties. The company saves on office space and utilities while employees save on gas (and probably eating out for the younger generation). There will less complaints about working extra time here and there because they also save commute time (although employers/bosses should not expect this if they did not expect this in-office). Particularly for IT, this also makes it easier to transition to more flexible hours. Work four hours in the morning, then stay up really late for a late night install.

My opinion on working remotely is that it works for some people but not all people. In general, it works and should be considered as a solution but do not expect that everyone will thrive in such an environment even those you know who have good work ethics in the office.

Life: Designing Graphical Interfaces for Seniors and Understanding Their Obstacles

Although there were few lessons that my parents can teach each year, I still learn many things from them without them tell me their experience. One of those things is technology. I'm in a world where we want things smaller, more portable, sleeker, cheaper, etc., my parents' generation complain more and more after each "upgrade" in their lives.

They eventually adopt but not because they really want to but more that they are forced to. At least with hardware, it is easier for them to see that things have changed. But with software moving more agilely, I am burdened more and more on explaining why certain things are happening. For some reason, it is harder to explain something that has changed in software. They are used to change, but sometimes the way software changes, changes.

For example, my mom just complained about the recent change in Yahoo! mail. To me it looks nice and a smooth interface. But to her, the problem was that she could not read the email as well as she used to. The font is thinner, the background color is a medium blue which made it more difficult for her to read. This was more difficult for me to understand because there was no problems for me to read what she was pointing at.

Surprisingly, I thought it would have been easy to change the colors but it did take me a few minutes that there is no configurations to do that. The way you have to change it is to change the theme. There was also another option which is to return back to basic mode, but there is no way my parents would know to do that. I do not regularly use Yahoo! mail so it was difficult for me to know too since I did not really know what it used to look like.

Because the changes are agile, my mom had an earful from me on trying to figure what she did to make the changes. To my embarrassment, I did not consider that the software made the changes on their own (of course, I wish she could explain problems better than "it is harder to read now" then repeating it as if the tone can explain the problem better).

The hardest part is when they ask why? How do I answer that within five minutes to someone who has practically zero interest in programming except that her son gets paid doing it? Either way, I tried and she will likely forget by the next time we have this conversation but at least the result is better than just saying that she won't understand. Who knows... maybe one day all the conversations will just click together (my hopeful thinking).

While on this topic, this makes it more complex for designers to consider all the demographics. Of course, time to market will dictate that you target your main audience. But certain things like the Affordable Healthcare (Obamacare) website could be geared to be more friendly towards seniors and/or non-English speaking citizens. Although I like to see more things on the screen (which is usually accomplished by having smaller text), I can survive reading bigger fonts and scroll a little more.

Actually if there was an example to provide, the older generation seems to love those chain mails with power points: huge fonts, each slide is very brief, very simple instructions (if it exists), and easy to use. Even my mom understands the jokes (some of them I was surprised that she even understood). They do not even seem to mind that some of the decks are 20 to 50 slides (although I do not recommend the length, but if necessary they prefer more brief messages than a short blurb).

In that in mind, one of the features I really like is the browser's ability to zoom. This seems to solve a lot of problems even with older coworkers. Although when screen-sharing, this becomes a little dicier depending on who and how many people are on the bridge. A presentation changes quite dramatically when you are comparing different options on a single slide as opposed to multiple slides. I think this adds unnecessary stress on the presenter but one that cannot be avoided at this time especially when the higher up the ladder you go, the older they get (usually).

Fortunately, I have not (at least to my knowledge) had a "senior" moment yet. But someday, I will also be in the same boat and hopefully by that point software development would have grown to already consider these factors so that I wouldn't even realize that I am getting older (one dares to dream).