Cat HicksJan 2, 2025

People are not neutral observers of their environments; people + their environments create interactions, and the same environment can be sampled by different people with extremely different OR extremely shared perceptual filters because of our shared (or conflicting) social identities.

This is why it is neither about individuals, nor about "systems without individuals"; it is about multisystems models that understand emergent interactions (sorry! it's way harder)

Show threadCat HicksJan 2, 2025

Some thought leaders in software seem to get a lot out of saying "just ask the engineers!"

Sorry, but this leaves questions: which engineers? Why the engineers? The engineers at what point in time? Ask them what? What is the variance among engineers in how they are reading the question? What if the group of engineers is all entangled in a specific organizational narrative at a certain point of time?

Usually it comes back to "I'm just automagically right and so are my friends, specifically"

Show threadDavid SaffJan 2, 2025

@grimalkina I worry that I'm reading this in a different context than it came from. I am not a thought leader, but I do find myself at work often encouraging managers and infrastructure tools teams to "ask the engineers at least once". (Never "just", that was drilled out of me by an excellent music theory professor)

In my case, it's because I've seen too many technical and organizational systems launched with precisely zero intended users ever having been asked "does it seem plausible that this program would solve this problem in your context?" Or worse, they've been asked, all said "no", and it gets launched anyway.

Certainly, the pendulum can, and does, swing to the other side.

I'm curious if this seems salient, or if we're talking about two different things?

Show threadCat Hicks
@dsaff I think we're aligned? As I say in thread, I obviously constantly gather and value individuals' reports about their experience and perceptions. It sounds like you're talking about an extremely warranted case. What I am generally waving at are people who make proclamations that individuals are neutral observers who can uniformly report their cultures (e.g., any organizational issue is inherently known and reportable by individuals), and specifically the privileging of eng over others
Jan 2, 2025 at 4:47pmWeb
Show threadCat HicksJan 2, 2025
@dsaff In my case, I was thinking more of the "everyone who isn't writing hands on code is just stupid and wrong and if they'd only ask me I'd tell them how to fix everything" attitude that I see from some folks, which doesn't remotely sound like the case you're describing; the secondary thing is just that even when we want to "ask people," asking well and comprehensively is much harder than people act like it is :)
Show threadBynkiiJan 2, 2025

@grimalkina @dsaff one thing I see coders/techies do a LOT is try to solve a problem without trying to understand the problem at all beyond a very shallow definition and/or not understanding the people with the problem’s world at all.

It leads to “solutions” that keep growing and morphing because they are fixing something that doesn’t exist.

Show threadDavid SaffJan 2, 2025
@grimalkina Yeah, I think we're aligned. And definitely recongize the all-too-common coder mindset you describe!