Victor Stone
Microsoft Corporation
December 13, 1999
"Hey, what do you know about the new guy?" Marcus asked.
"Well, whoever he is, I'm sure we could use him. We're totally falling behind in localization and accessibility," Chris started to say.
"Oh, I don't think he's going to be doing any cleanup. In fact, I don't think he's going to be doing any follow-up work at all."
"What are you talking about? Then what's he going to do here?"
"I heard he was hired as a level 83 architect. We just grabbed him from the jaws of the competition. Some big signing bonus, too." Marcus seemed eager to share.
Chris was visibly confused. The company ranked all of its permanent employees on a "ladder level" system, similar to security clearances at government facilities. These levels, however, were strictly for payroll rankings. Each level was associated with a specific range of pay and bonus structure. Most entry-level college graduates came in somewhere in the 30s levels. Chris was a level 64, and he was confident this was the highest level in his group -- by at least 10 levels. Not that it was a competition in any way, but it was sort of a comforting buffer to Chris -- and the rest of the team, he imagined -- to have a consistent outlook and know who the highest-ranking member of the team was. That kind of consistency in vision and decision-making led to a consistent and decisive product line, Chris always thought.
Until now, Chris had never even heard of levels in the 80s. It took him so much by surprise that when he blurted out, "I've never heard of level 83!" he wasn't sure whether he had said it out loud or simply thought it. He quickly glanced at Marcus across the high table next to the latte stand to see whether any of the other teammates were reacting with similar disbelief. He couldn't read anybody's expression.
"When does he start?" Chris asked Marcus directly.
"He's already here, in the office next to Tom," Marcus said.
Tom was the team leader, and the office next to his, besides being the one next to the boss, had a somewhat coveted view of the rolling hills leading down to the lake. Chris had been mentally preparing to move to this office after the next milestone of the product's ship schedule.
After Marcus finished his sip, he could see that Chris was anxious for more information. "I just got him enlisted in the source code server for the project," he volunteered. "In fact, I think he's looking through the router and message queue code right now."
"You mean my message queue code?" Chris asked in a clearly escalating tone of astonishment.
"Yeah. He specifically asked for help getting a debug session so he could step through that code."
Chris reflexively stood up to leave the others at the table. He overlooked the burning sensations of his mocha as he slammed the remainder down his throat and threw the cup into the recycle bin all in one motion. Still trying to shake off the notion of having at least 19 promotions to go before he could reach the level of this new hire, he bounded up the stairs toward Tom's office.
Tom noticed Chris whiz by and tried to get his attention, but Chris was already tap-knocking on the door of the next office, sticking his head in, and powering through introductions.
"Hi! You must be the new guy! I'm ChrisKee, with two Es. Got a sec?" This followed in the tradition of using e-mail aliases, even as conversation handles.
Simon, the new guy, broke his concentrated glare at his screen, looked up directly at Chris, and said, "Ah, yes, of course! ChrisKee with two Es, how are you? Glad to meet you." He said this amiably enough, not willing to show an inkling of being disturbed -- and doing a good job of covering it up, Chris observed. "SimonGar, like the sixties singing duo. Don't stand in the door; come on in."
As he entered and closed the door behind him, Chris tried as stealthily as possible to see what code was currently on Simon's screen. He could tell it was from the project, but the angle from the guest chair was too sharp and the screen resolution too small to make out exactly which module it was.
Chris settled in and paused, hoping that Simon would tender some explanation for who he was, how he came to work in this group, how it was that Chris didn't know anything about it, what his role would be, or at least what Tom told him it would be, how his role would impact the rest of the group, how he would impact Chris specifically, and why, why precisely, he was stepping through Chris' message queue code.
Simon, however, remained frozen in that first amiable expression, and was clearly not going to initiate much. Chris's patience ran out before three seconds -- and he concluded that if the pausing got any more pregnant, it could birth a long, irreparable awkwardness.
"Well," Chris started, "I don't know what Tom told you about the group and the project. I just wanted to come by and let you know that I'm around -- available -- if there's anything you need, if you get stuck with something ... "
With this, he looked directly at the code on the monitor. But he was disappointed to see that Simon's eyes hadn't budged from their direct gaze. The newcomer had simply added a gentle nodding of his head in a kind of mild acknowledgement.
"Like I said, I don't know what Tom told you. You do have to watch out for him, though," Chris confided with his knowing chuckle. Simon chuckled along politely.
"He's got great ideas and knows how to ship product, but sometimes you just have to 'manage up,' if you know what I mean. Let me give you an example.
"The other day, he came to me and said 'I need feature X.' 'That's great,' I told him, 'but we'll have to wait for an upgrade to the OS, and it will never be backward-compatible when we run on older versions of the OS.'
"He said, 'But I just saw that feature in the browser; how come they can do it?' He does this one all the time; it's his not-so-subtle way of letting you know that he expects more from you. He thinks he's 'got you,' if you follow me, because he just looked at some bogus hand-wavy vapor demo from another team.
"Well, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had already looked into it, done the research -- and he had nothing. So I said, 'No, it only looks like the browser is doing that feature; they're actually faking it, because it's not in the OS.'
"He says 'That's okay!'
"Can you believe it? If you fake the code, what's that going to do to future versions? How shortsighted is that? He says 'That's okay! Faking is good as long as the user gets the feature.'
"I had to go into this long explanation about future compatibility, OS upgrades -- stuff I thought for sure he would get. When you've been around the company like some of us, you can foreshadow this kind of thing. Let the browser guys get stuck in a feature they can't undo next year; we're not going down that way. He finally got it and said, 'Okay, good points. I know what you mean.'"
Simon had been nodding, grinning, acknowledging, thinking, absorbing, pondering, grinning, and nodding some more. Meanwhile, Chris was starting to interpret the silence and grins as being aloof. What else could it be? he thought. Doesn't he even care how it all works? Does he really think he's going to figure it all out for himself? Chris had decided to let Simon know 'the deal.'
"Speaking of being around for a long time, I gotta tell you one thing: You want to be careful not to come off, like, too smart. I mean, it is possible to be too smart for your own good. That's when you're most likely to make the big mistakes here."
"Come again?" Simon seemed confused.
"Let me explain it this way: Dumb people, people who have been told their whole lives that they are dumb, tend to question everything about themselves, including their own decision making ..."
"As well we should!" Simon interrupted, laughing.
Chris stopped for a moment to contemplate the remark. It didn't take long him long to register the obvious condescension. Oh drop the fake humility! he thought, but he pushed ahead. Clearly, this was something Simon needed to hear.
"... sometimes questioning themselves to a paralyzing fault. But when the self-doubt can be held in some check, especially in a communal setting, the questioning leads to some pretty solid decision making."
"Well, now I know I must be one of the dumb ones, because I just can't track what you're saying."
"Exactly! Meanwhile, smart people –- especially those have been told and get rewarded and compensated their whole lives for coming off as smart -– think something through and that's it! They're done! They never give the subject another thought. Never a second or third look, which is why they end up making such critically flawed decisions. And they keep making the same flawed decisions as their predecessors because part of that lack of self-aware questioning is a refusal to accept that historical data may apply to their problem."
"Do you want to hear something funny?" Simon asked rhetorically, "Someone once told me they thought the term 'self-aware' is just a polite term for 'neurotic'," he said with his now well-practiced grin.
Chris paused, as if waiting for the punch line, the funny part. He didn't wait long, though, and got up with the obvious intention of leaving. He decided to take one more fishing expedition: "Again, let me know if there's anything at all you think you need. It's ChrisKee with two Es, but then you probably saw my alias in some of the comments in my code."
Simon rose out of his seat just far enough to be civil and simply said, "Will do! See you later."
That evening, bursting with curiosity, Marcus took a break from a long debug session to seek out Chris and ask him about his encounter with the new architect.
"It went fine," Chris said, momentarily holding a card or two to his chest. "He's a smart guy. I just gave him the general rundown. You know, tips and stuff. It will take him a while to get to where he's really contributing and stuff. He didn't come to you for any more help with the enlistment or anything did he? He seemed pretty quiet. Like I said, it will take him a while."
"No, I got him enlisted in the source in the morning, and he was off. I just code reviewed his stuff later."
"Code review? You mean he's already writing code?"
"Oh yeah! Didn't you hear? He's already checked some code in. He got that browser feature that Tom was really hot on. It's hot man! I'm still blown away by how he got that stuff to work on all versions of the OS, but there it was. Not bad for a first day's work, huh? Kid's gonna be great for the project."
"Huh? Yeah, great. Are you ready for some caffeine? I think it's going to be a late-nighter."
The two of them bundled up and braved the cold air on their way down the block to the 24-hour gas station with the all-night instant latte stand. On the way, Marcus commented that this was the first evening of the season where he could clearly see his breath in the air. Chris could feel the chill and didn't have to test it to know that Marcus was right.
Victor Stone is on the Product Design Team in RAD Tools at Microsoft. He says, "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace."