"Maybe it's good. Maybe it's bad. We don't know yet."
— Russian parable
A little background: I work in the computing industry. In my early career, I wrote supercomputer operating-system code, and for many years, administered such systems within production scientific-computing data centers run by large government agencies. These institutions' org charts are dominated at all levels by PhD scientists, regardless of their autistic tendencies, and (in some cases) their megalomaniacal unsuitability for leadership roles.
A year or so before the story I'll recount (whose events took place in the mid-1990s), a 50ish-yr-old PhD physicist, of some notoriety for working on hard computational problems in his application space, had come in from another government lab to become the director of our computing facility. Immediately upon his arrival, with no investigation, he had pronounced to our facility's community of 1,000-plus users that the current computing center staff (that is, my colleagues and I), and prior management were incompetent. Users that we had been collaborating with successfully — for many years, if not decades — believed him, and started insisting on being involved in decision making for day-to-day operations.
My "little brother" Ben and I were two of the three systems programmer-analysts running the facility's flagship machine, an extremely expensive ($20M in 1990 dollars) Cray supercomputer. I specifically was responsible for workload management; he was my technical backup in that function.
As a result of the new director's discrediting of staff, a few of our users formed a subcommittee on workload management. Two of the meddlers on the subcommittee — Fortran application coders — went to Cray headquarters, and took the entire sysadmin curriculum.
Upon their return, for over two years, Ben and I mostly listened to these users argue amongst themselves about the definition of the word "fair." They did, very occasionally, come up with ideas about how they thought the workload should be managed, which they always specified as implementation details (rather than actual requirements), using suggestions of the form, "Why don't you just . . . ?" Management insisted that Ben and I attend these meetings, to entertain and defend against all such bright ideas that the users came up with, lest we end up obligated to create something horrifically ill-conceived and unmaintainable.
Being young(ish), arrogant, and brash, and with both Ben and I having already lost a good deal of sleep stewing (ehhrrr, pretty sure I mean "obsessing") over this presumptuousness on the users' parts, and finding their process a royal waste of time, we just got fed up, and were getting ready to revolt. We made an appointment with our go-to, wise old man, Frank. This sage was all of 5'2", and maybe 110 pounds, fully dressed. He had joined the agency in 1960, with only a bachelor's degree. Despite the fact of his not being a PhD, and while most resembling a leprechaun (the man had a cherubic smile, a countable number of hairs atop his head, and often wore a bright green suit), he had managed to work his way up from mainframe system administrator to associate branch chief. This fact spoke volumes about his competence and clarity of thought. Frank had gravitas.
Ben and I sat down with him, both of us spun up in what we were sure was righteous indignation, and told him the story of the subcommittee's insulting, protracted micro-management abuse.
Frank took a deep breath. "You know Leo?" He was referring to a stoop-shouldered, burned-out relic of a networking guy, who hadn't produced any discernible output in the eight years I'd been there. (No one else on staff of any longer tenure had ever had anything good to report, either.)
"Leo and I started here at about the same time. Back in those days, he was a rock-star sysadmin." Ben and I raised our eyebrows and looked at each other in shock.
"Leo made a mistake, pretty early in his career. A user committee formed, and they wanted him to participate. He was offended that anyone thought that they could tell him how to do his job. He refused to engage with those users. What you see now, is what happened to him after he said, 'No.' He sidelined himself."
Smiling gently, Frank wrapped it up with the admonition that, "They might be jerks, but they're your jerks." He gave us a minute to let that sink in — looking intently at us, still smiling — then whisked us out the door.
(Now long retired, Frank — because of his wisdom, grace, and ruthless management of his own time — is still revered as a giant by all who have ever worked for him. He is among a tiny handful of people in leadership who took it upon themselves to hold the place together — instead of "leading" in a way that places highest value on their cleverness, and demands that things be done their way, or you're just in the way — for the four-plus decades of his career. He has an email list with hundreds of colleagues on it; he keeps in touch with all of us, to this day.)
Thanks to Frank's big red STOP sign, Ben and I did not light our careers on fire. We took a moment to set aside our egos, and then reengaged with the subcommittee with a whole new level of patience and sympathy (and so, I'm fairly certain, less eye rolling). We listened beyond what they said they wanted, and asked questions that allowed us to arrive at a shared understanding of what would be good enough, close enough to their definition of fair, that we could actually implement, and that they could easily observe and verify. Nearly thirty years (and umpteen generations of technology) later, the staff has carried forward that fairness approach; it is still providing benefits to the institution and its users.
So, rats: I didn't throw the jerks under the bus, even though they might deserve it. Why not? With the advantage of hindsight, it's clear to me now that that is neither a constructive mindset, nor a good use of my time on the planet. Why not? Because I don't control them, their values, or their actions. I can only control how I respond. This is another cornerstone practice of Stoicism: identify the very small number of things that you can control, and focus entirely and only on them. Spending my time and energy thinking about anything beyond my control is futile, and more importantly (to me), a betrayal of all other higher uses of the present moment. (This perspective might seem overwrought, but the more time I spend with it, the more I value it.) Caring about my reputation, amongst people who don't really know me or my work, is a potentially infinite distraction away from producing worthwhile outputs and growing my capabilities.
The word "practice" in the above is of paramount importance: I am always practicing this mental discipline, of consciously determining what I do and don't control. I am always practicing to get better at identifying when I'm wrapped up in concerns of ego, and then letting them go.
When someone offends me, any anger I experience is a cost that I alone bear. If they actually are jerks, they couldn't care less about my anger. (In fact, they might enjoy it. I should not give them the satisfaction.) And if they're not jerks — if I misunderstand their meaning, or they're just being oblivious, and I leap to the conclusion that they mean to offend me — then I might end up causing undue harm to the relationship, and have only myself to blame.
As in work, so in the rest of life. Responding in anger is a destructive act.*
We'll look more at how to self-monitor, first to detect, and then to optimize our responses to ego assaults and other life challenges, in the next post, On Managing Jerks.
*I leave open the possibility that responding angrily under certain circumstances — like when someone really is being a disruptive asshole — might be warranted as a persuasive counterforce, but power dynamics would likely dominate the outcome. I'd need to do significant research to understand the nuances of that gambit.