by Serguey Shinder
The meeting was going well, which is part of why it happened. Someone senior asked how we had solved a problem that had been sitting around for two quarters, and I explained it, clearly and at some length, and I answered the follow-up questions, and everyone left satisfied.
Nothing I said was untrue. I had built the thing. I had written most of the code and run the migration and been on the call when it went out. What I did not say, because nobody asked and the flow of the conversation never left a gap for it, was that the idea had not been mine. It had come from a colleague, in a corridor, as an offhand remark she probably did not remember making, and it had reframed a problem I had been stuck on for weeks.
I noticed the omission about an hour later. Not as guilt exactly, more as a small snag, the kind you can smooth over in a second by telling yourself that she would not care, that credit is not a zero sum thing, that the implementation was the hard part anyway. All of which is arguable and none of which was why I stayed quiet.
I stayed quiet because saying it would have cost me something in that room, and the cost was small, and I let a small cost decide.
What I have come to think is that this is how most of it happens. I had imagined that taking credit was an act, something a person does deliberately and knows they are doing. In practice it is almost always an absence. Nobody claims anything. The story simply forms with a shape, and one person is standing in the middle of it, and correcting the shape requires an interruption that feels disproportionate to the point being made.
I did tell her, eventually, though I want to be honest that I told her in a message rather than in front of anyone, which is the easy version. She was, as predicted, entirely unbothered. That is not the part that stayed with me. What stayed with me is that the correction only cost me anything in the moment where it would have mattered, and by the time it was comfortable, it was decorative.
So the habit I try to keep now is narrow and slightly awkward. When I am explaining something that went well, I name where the idea came from in the same breath as the result, at the point where the room can still hear both. Not as generosity, and not as a display of humility, which is its own kind of taking. Just because the true version of what happened almost never forms on its own, and the moment to say it is always the moment it is least convenient.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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