Good things come in pairs
Johnny and Kimberlee
Glad to have you reading. You might want to read these articles in order from the beginning. Just a suggestion.
Next I’d like to tell you about a couple of folks. Kimberlee and Johnny lived in the same dorm house I and most of my college friends did. I didn’t much know Kim then, she was a class year after ours, and tended to run in different circles. Johnny though, from the first day of class (likely our very first class of our first semester actually), Johnny and I were friends. Friends in the sense that when one of us fell asleep in our 8AM Psychology 101 class sitting in the back of the enormous lecture hall, the other would kindly let us sleep, and doodle in the other’s notebook, or on their arm, or face.
Johnny is not someone you can pigeonhole. I’ve compared other folks to specific literary characters, but don’t have one that would do Johnny justice. Raised by strict parents, fully capable of academic brilliance or discipline wherever it’s required (he is outstanding at piano and plays for his own enjoyment to this day, for example), he took a rather different approach than the perfectionists I’ve described before. Johnny is a quintessential “satisficer.” I share that trait (you will detect it in my writing). Johnny is adept at determining what is actually needed, and putting in fully enough effort to achieve it, and not one iota more. More than that would be a waste.
I’ve often, as an IT Manager, said that it is the lazy person I want to hire for systems administration. I want someone who would rather not be woken at 2AM with something failing or down. Would rather not do a manual task repetitively. Would rather not have to rebuild things. Doesn’t relish the awful mess that is a security breach. Johnny is that lazy person.
Johnny can “burst” (in the IT sense applied to a person) up to brilliantly high-capacity, fast processing. When needed to solve a problem, he’s got the thinking power and ability, and could rival almost anyone. The rest of the time he uses what’s needed and leaves the rest quiesced. Or devotes it to something more fun. When perfection is required (he and Kim are avid climbers, and have climbed aggressive routes all over the world) perfection is the necessary standard, and Johnny achieves it with the appearance of ease. When something is a “check the box” activity, he’ll get pen to paper and the box will have some sort of check in it, but that’s it.
That skill, I think, is one of our bundle of competencies. Competent people know with precision how much effort is needed. For all that I strongly favor satisficing, I don’t know that all Competent people are satisficers. But you cannot be a satisficer, or I think, a Competent non-satisficer, without having an outstanding sense for what is “good enough.”
A question I ask in every interview I’ve ever given for a programmer is “how do you know when it’s done and ready to release?” Boy have I heard some poor answers to that, and some good ones. Good programmers tend to the “perfectionist” end of the spectrum. Which is great. But if they haven’t developed the skills to know when it’s ok (or necessary) to stop perfecting, they’ll never be programmers you want to hire.
Sysadmins, on the other hand, tend rarely to be perfectionists. That’s not a question I would ask an administrator. (I mostly want to know if they have that sweet-spot combination of “smart” and “lazy” with evidence of success at it. That is a different form of the same skill.) Those of you reading this and finding yourself not fitting these descriptions while being either programmer or systems admin (yes Doug, I know) understand please that I’m generalizing. I expect you could see these trends in your colleagues.
Someone who succeeds in life as a satisficer is exercising a number of skills. Failing means being a hair (or more) too lazy and producing garbage, or messing things up, or just generally being known as a slacker. Succeeding means meeting every requirement under budget and just in time. Succeeding means being known as reliable, capable, and never wasting a resource. Perhaps having a reputation for pulling off impressive work with apparently little effort.
That’s Johnny. If there’s a way to accomplish three goals with one action, he’ll know it. He also knows a lot of people. (Bear with me, those things are related.) I never really understood this, but it was a running joke with our friends that if you were hanging out in public with Johnny you would run in to someone who knows him. Happened all the time in Madison, which made some amount of sense. Also happened on trips to entirely different parts of the country. Amusement parks. Big cities. We wondered if he was perhaps leading some sort of secret organization.That “six degrees of separation” thing, we estimated drops to maybe three when you know Johnny.
Johnny is well-liked. It’s not just that people know him; as far as I’m aware, everyone also likes him. Being at odds with people is work. Johnny can get along with anyone, can make any relationship into an easygoing minimum of effort for all.
How that “knowing everyone” thing contributes to his hallmark skill is that Johnny won’t figure out anything unless no one on earth has figured it out before. Understand that we came up prior to the Web and Stack Overflow, Reddit, GitHub, and the endless array of shared knowledge now available. When Johnny and I were young, it was a skill to build a friend/professional network you could ask for pre-validated correct answers to things.
Reusing effort is a sign of the best and most accomplished kind of satisficer, and a sign of competence. This is an upper level of efficiency. An “if I want it done right I have to do it myself” type of person may give you a certain kind of efficiency. And there are “users” who just delegate all of the work, and destroy teams in the process. But the optimum (I think) is what Johnny does, he asks what he doesn’t know, in a non-burdensome way, never taking credit for what others contribute, and is equally happy to share what he knows.
No one resents Johnny. But Johnny gets things done with incredible efficiency because he doesn’t waste time. Unless there is truly no prior knowledge available, Johnny reuses. When he has to work out the problem, he does it brilliantly, in a burst, and then he’s done with it and doesn’t waste time doing more or second-guessing.
Johnny was one of my closest college friends. He stood with me at my wedding (I’m not sure what they call that now, but it was a little unusual back then and he caught good-natured grief from the groomsmen). He’s also a godparent to my child. Kind of a perfect one. Not the “sends a card on every major holiday” kind, but the kind who sends a Linux blanket from ThinkGeek for an infant, and hands down his professional-quality electronic keyboard when he finds out the child is trying to teach himself piano. Satisficer, and darned good at it.
In college Johnny was always up for trying things. It’s good to have a friend happy to be distracted from homework and totally willing to try whatever you have in mind at the drop of a hat. As I think through stories, I’m realizing even decades later they might not be good ones to share. There are three close college friends of mine who fall into that “thick-as-thieves” category, and Johnny is one of them.
Johnny is a risk-taker, and it always worried me a bit that he might need looking-after. Looking after of a sort better than his friends managed. There was a time when Johnny fell asleep on a chair in our house Den. So we put him, chair and all, into the elevator and pushed all of the buttons. When it came back, the chair was empty. Thinking we’d lost him, after a bit of a search we found that he’d apparently woken just enough to get off of the elevator on another floor, walk into the identical Den on that floor, and go back to sleep. With friends like these, they say...
Enter, Kimberlee. I didn’t know her well in college. It wasn’t until some time later that I had a chance to know and fully appreciate her. She’s now a dear friend. It took a minute to figure out how Johnny and Kim fit together, though it shouldn’t have, since it’s a variation on the pattern of my own marriage. The “between the two of us we have all of the skillz” pattern.
Today is a bonus day, not one, but two skills I think you’ll find in the Competence bundle. Kimberlee brings us stubborn. I won’t water that down, dress it up, or slap any lipstick on it. You can think of it as “persistence” or “determination” or “goal driven” if you share this skill and like a prettier name for it. But really at it’s core it’s “stubborn.” Every single Competent or near-Competent person I have ever known is stubborn. Kimberlee is the one I’m choosing to demonstrate it.
Kim is “slight of stature,” blonde, smiles a lot, and has a personality that at least at a younger age one might have described (though not, I think, out loud where she could hear you) as “bubbly.” Kimberlee is also ferociously intelligent. That isn’t an easy combination. Not easy to possess in this world. It causes some bias-related mental failures in those around her.
But Kimberlee is stubborn. So out of college with just an undergraduate degree in Physics, she got a job with a national lab. Then she got a graduate degree from Tufts while working at the national lab. Then she got progressively more responsibilities. Then she moved to different projects that interested her. An active career she’s driven herself. Kimberlee commands the respect of older, more male, less bubbly holders of more advanced degrees. Kim will go over or through you if you get between her and her goal. If you don’t hear her, she will make you hear her. Which is good for everyone fortunate enough to know her. Because she is routinely right.
Take Kim’s physical situation. Kim likes to run. A lot. Marathons, hours on a treadmill, she likes to run. She’s had problems with back and joints that would send a normal person to a rocking chair. Not so Kim. She’s spent years rehabbing this and that, and always finding ways to run.
I can hear some of you saying “but Stubbornness isn’t a virtue right?” In most people it’s a nuisance or worse. People who are wrong and stubbornly cling to bad ideas. People who are selfish and stubbornly pursue their own whims at the expense of others. People who decide on a course of action and bulldoze others. People who stubbornly ruin things for everyone. I get it. But think about it in context. When you have someone who has done the analysis, gets things right most of the time, holds the best interests of the group and win-win objectives, stubbornness is what makes that person effective. What makes others a nuisance, a hazard, an obstacle, or a jerk, makes these people win, and when these people win, we all win.
So when I say that Kimberlee is stubborn, I mean Kimberlee is a brilliant, goal-oriented woman in the deepest of deep STEM professions. In a profession that gaslights and deters and condescends to women, she’s a small bubbly woman who can make headway and succeed. Who knows her worth and has the confidence to be stubborn, and has made a career of being right and bringing project stakeholders along with her. Competent people are stubborn.
Johnny and Kim are an excellent pair. Goals and drive paired with a laid-back ease and knowing exactly what’s needed.