by Serguey Shinder
A colleague left three sentences on my pull request at twenty to six on a Thursday. I read them at ten past eleven that night, on my phone, at the end of a day that had included a cancelled train and a long call about my father's hospital appointment.
What I read was a man telling me, in front of the team, that I did not think about the people who come after me. I got out of bed, opened the laptop and wrote about six hundred words. It was not abusive. It was worse than that, it was reasonable, in the way a thing is reasonable when you have had two hours to arrange it.
I did not send it, and I would like to claim a moment of wisdom, but the truth is I could not find a way to end it and I was tired, so I saved it and went to sleep.
At eight the next morning I read the same three sentences. He had written that the change would be hard to follow for whoever picked it up in a year, and suggested splitting one function and naming the middle step. That is all that was there. Not one word about me. The message had not changed overnight. Nothing about it had changed overnight. I walked over with a coffee, we talked for four minutes, he agreed the split should go the other way round, and I merged it before ten.
What I have thought about since is that at eleven at night I was not reading his sentence at all. I was reading my own state and attributing it to him. I had been in that branch for nine days, which is far longer than it deserved, and I had already privately decided it was fragile, and I was worn out from something that had nothing to do with work. A remark landed on top of all of that and I experienced the whole pile as the remark.
The rule I keep now is mechanical, because I do not trust myself to be wise at eleven at night. Nothing written after ten leaves the machine before morning. Perhaps half of those messages get sent the next day, always shorter, and the rest turn out to have been for me rather than for anybody else.
The distinction I carry is that the intensity of my first reaction is a measurement of me and not of the thing I am reacting to. It tells me how tired I am, how much I had invested, what I already feared about the work. That is genuinely useful information, and it is information about the wrong subject. The message is just the message, and it will still be there in the morning, saying exactly what it said.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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