ego.istic.org

I've had something of a disheartening week this week. Bad news at work last week left one of our managers rather depressed, not to mention the rest of us, though it seems that we programmers have more professional detachment than he does. I've just spent much of two days trying to find the source of one particularly obscure bug, and although I've found out a lot of information, the end still isn't in sight. So our unhappy manager had a go at me today: in the politest imaginable way, he asked why it's taking so long (which I find myself unable to explain, as he's not a programmer) and suggested that I should do something else while I'm working on that (which I struggle to explain would slow things down, as debugging requires you to keep a lot of state in your head). Beneath the civility, the way he phrased it had a clear implication—that I was either incompetent or slacking off.

I know this isn't just me being sensitive, as I checked my impression with a few colleagues who heard it, and they were mildly shocked (concerned, anyway) that he should take such a tone. That it was possible for me to ask them for a second opinion is bad enough in itself, as one of the important rules of managing a team is that if you do have to criticise someone you do it in private. I'm marginally pleased with myself for managing to keep shtoom when I wanted to say, “If you think you can do it quicker you're welcome to try,” but I'm not convinced that my new-found restraint (a year or two ago I wouldn't have bothered biting my tongue) really helped the situation: this misconception can only hurt my position in the company and I will need to knock it on the head as soon as I can. And now the debugging process has turned into a “situation,” it's a lot harder for me to make progress. If I go in tomorrow, find a crucial piece of information, and give all this information to someone who knows the code better, and he is able to tell me what the best place is to apply the fix, then it will indeed look like I have been slacking off, and any claims of success on my part will sound like, “But I loosened it for you,” after someone else opened the jar.

But apart from feeling that I could have dealt with the situation better yet, I am disappointed that after several late nights, and even spending two Saturdays reading things I have brought home from work, and after all that going out of my way yesterday to say encouraging and reassuring things to the manager in question, this is my reward: being blamed for taking a long time to fix a bug in someone else's code; in fact, in the code of someone who is praised for writing code (this code included) in less time than he estimated it would take. It makes no difference that today I managed to solve a problem for someone else—a problem it could have taken him hours to find—by merely looking at the relevant source code for a few seconds and intuiting the answer: this is clearly not visible enough in the eyes of management. This isn't a complaint about the abilities or carefulness of my fellow programmers—bugs in other people's code are a fact of life, as far as I'm concerned—but about the managerial attitude of looking at half the picture when it comes to praise and blame. It seems like all my attempts at helpfulness are doing me nothing but harm.

The band has not been much better in these terms. Lately we've been rehearsing a piece with a hard drum solo. The first time we played it the conductor was pleased with me for having picked it up well. I practised it specially at home that week, to iron out the harder areas of it, and by the next rehearsal I was more confident of it end-to-end. That rehearsal, the conductor said my playing was “not really competent,” and said that “this piece could be a really good solo for you if you'd just put the effort in.” We haven't played it since, nor have I practised it.

In the gig on Saturday we were playing Christmas carols—at sight in my case, having joined the band well after last Christmas. I missed one p (for non-musicians: an indication to play quietly), and since then one band member in particular has thrice given me the same dubious piece of advice on how to play quietly: twice on that day, and once at last night's rehearsal. It's well-intentioned advice, I'm sure, but it's still completely irrelevant to the error I committed.

I don't intend to single out that one player. Even the tiniest mistake of misreading the part, or fluffing a change of instruments, generates a flurry of advice from different sources on basic playing, advice which generally is obvious or wrong, or sometimes both. It leaves me wondering how much confidence the rest of the band has in me as a performer, of my ability to learn and improve on my own.

And the other area of my life, tai chi, has not been that impressive either. For the whole of this term my teacher has been giving me the same piece of advice, and I've been trying my best, but if I am improving at all, he hasn't told me so. My position in the form (i.e. how much of it I've learned) has regressed since the end of last term. I appreciate that in tai chi, ‘slow is fast and fast is slow,’ but although it feels to me that my grasp is getting stronger, I would appreciate some corroboration. My teacher finds it hard to show me exactly what I should be doing differently: both because it's inherently hard to describe, and because his way of thinking about it is completely opposite to mine. Because I don't know what to do differently, I keep doing the same thing; though all this practise and repetition is good for me, it's still a very ineffective way of learning.

The obvious response to all of this, and one I've heard before, is that I should be doing all this for my enjoyment, my satisfaction, and I shouldn't be concerned with other people's opinions. But it's very hard to do this when my judgement of what I'm doing well and what I'm doing badly seems to be the minority view.

That's enough whining for one night; I'm off to bed, and tomorrow is a new day, a day where I can try less hard and thereby look less bad. Remind me at some point to tell you about my award for helpfulness: an episode of my life that was a huge influence on my cynicism today.