by Serguey Shinder
In the spring of 2022 one of the strongest engineers on my team asked to move to our platform team. She had been working on order processing for four years, she wanted something new, and she asked me in a one to one in the most reasonable way imaginable. I said I would think about it.
I knew the answer before she had finished the sentence. We were halfway through moving order processing onto a new system and she was the only person who understood both ends of it. Letting her go that quarter would have put the migration back by months. The answer was not yet, probably September. I did not say that. I said I would think about it, because it was a difficult thing to say to someone I liked and rated, and thinking about it sounded kind.
She asked again five weeks later and I said it was still under consideration. In June she handed in her notice. In her leaving conversation she told me, without much heat, that she would have happily waited until September if anybody had told her September existed. What she could not do was plan her life around a maybe.
That stung enough that I went back through my notes from one to ones over the previous six months, looking for the phrase. I found it fourteen times. For eleven of them, reading my own notes, it was clear I already knew the answer when I said it. Mostly the answer was no, or not now. I had not been thinking. I had been postponing the moment of saying it, and during the postponement the other person carried all of the uncertainty while I carried none.
The other three were genuine. Even those I had handled badly, because I had not said what I was unsure about, so nobody could help me become sure.
What I do now is simple to describe and still awkward to practise. If I already know, I say so in the same conversation, with the reason, and with whatever part of it is still open. Not yet, because of the migration, and here is what would need to be true for September to work. If I genuinely do not know, I say exactly what I am unsure about. I am not sure we can cover the on call rota without you. That turns a closed door into a question the other person can often answer better than I can, and they frequently do.
The no is no easier to hear than it was. But people tell me they would rather have it on a Tuesday than discover it in July, and the ones who disagree with it at least get to start arguing.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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