by Serguey Shinder
I had him filed within about three weeks of joining. He was slow to agree to things, he asked questions in meetings that made the meetings longer, and he had a habit of answering a proposal with a single sentence beginning "the problem with that is", which I found insufferable. I did not experience any of this as a judgement. I experienced it as an observation.
Once you have filed somebody, everything they do afterwards becomes evidence. He was difficult, so his questions were obstruction. He was difficult, so his silence was disapproval. I never once caught myself doing this, because it does not feel like interpretation while it is happening. It feels like noticing.
What changed it was an incident, about eight months in, where something we shipped took down a customer's integration for most of a working day. In the review afterwards he brought a document, and the document went back four years. Every previous time we had broken that same integration. The dates, the cause each time, the fix each time, and two lines about what we had said we would do differently.
Nobody had asked him to write it. He had kept it for four years because he had been in the room for the first one and had watched everybody forget.
I had been treating him as a brake, and he was the only person in the building with a memory.
The sentence I hated turned out to be the shape of his thinking rather than the content of it. He was not saying no. He was saying he had watched this exact thing fail before, and he was trying, badly, to compress four years into one sentence, in a room that was never going to give him more than one sentence.
What I took from it was not a resolution to be more generous, which I do not think is a durable thing to resolve. It was a more mechanical question, and I still use it. When I have decided that someone is difficult, I try to work out what they are protecting. There is almost always something. A system that broke on their watch. A promise they made to a customer. An outage nobody else remembers. Behaviour that reads as friction is usually a person defending something at real cost to their own reputation, without ever explaining what it is, because they assume everyone else remembers it too.
Nobody ever does. That is the entire problem. The institution forgets, one person does not, and the person who does not forget looks like an obstacle.
I have been the difficult one somewhere since. It is a lonely job, and nobody tells you that you have it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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