by Serguey Shinder
There were twelve of us on the call and the diagram had one table on it where I was fairly sure there should have been two. Two genuinely different kinds of thing sharing a row, with half the columns empty for whichever kind you happened to be looking at. I noticed inside the first two minutes. I said nothing, and forty minutes later the design was approved with no objections recorded.
What I told myself at the time was not cowardice, or I would have recognised it. It was deference, which is far more comfortable to be feeling. The man presenting had been there nine years and I had been there seven months. More than that, ten other people were on that call, several of whom I rated highly, and not one of them said anything either. Ten experienced people sitting quietly is a persuasive argument. I read their silence as information about the design.
We lived with that table for three years. Every query that touched it filtered by type first. Every new column meant a negotiation about which kind of thing it applied to. Twice we shipped code that wrote a value meaningful for one kind onto rows of the other, and the second time it reached customers.
The part that has stayed with me came at a retrospective long afterwards, when the man who drew the diagram said, without any drama, that he had never been comfortable with that table and had gone ahead because nobody raised anything. Two others said some version of the same thing. The confidence in that room had been manufactured entirely out of mutual silence, and each of us had used everybody else as evidence for a position nobody actually held.
What I was protecting was not the meeting's time and it was not his seniority. I was protecting the possibility that my objection was stupid. Silence has a property no other move in a meeting has, which is that it can never be scored. If I say nothing and the design fails, I was quietly right all along. If I say nothing and it works, I have lost nothing. Speaking is the only option that can later turn out to have been wrong in front of eleven people.
So I say the half-formed version now, and I label it as such. I may be wrong and I do not want to hold anything up, but those empty columns bother me. One sentence, claiming nothing. It costs almost nothing to say, which tells you what the cost had always been made of.
And when I am presenting, I never ask whether anybody has concerns. I ask three people by name about the thing I am least sure of, because a general invitation is an invitation to stay safe.
A quiet room is not a room that agrees.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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