Workplace Telepathy

I mean this in the least toxic way I can: I want my teammates to be mind readers. This is not an expectation. In order to work well together, you shouldn’t have to anticipate something I want without communication, but I have found that there’s been a measure of making my thoughts available that some coworkers leveraged to get their work done. It’s fantastic, and while not ESP, it’s almost magical to have your thoughts laid out in a way for a coworker to just run with.

One of my first encounters with this was the JR engineer that I started mentoring in 2020. He asked me early on if he should be reviewing my pull requests. He was concerned that due to his inexperience that there wouldn’t be anything for him to really review. After all, I have so many more years of experience. With all that in mind, I told him: “yes please! Even if you’re catching typos, I want you closely reviewing the code.” That way he could build skills in reading code. I also encouraged him to raise any questions about things that are hard to understand, because if something seems off, then there’s a good chance that I may have made a mistake to discuss.

A short while later, this mentee asked me an amazing question: “I see that you make small commits as you work. Does that mean that I can look what you’ve done across each commit to see your thought process?” I honestly was floored by the insightfulness of this question. I had been making these small commits for my own benefit of being able to back track if need be, but I had also been recording reflections of my thoughts in a way that could be laid bare for a JR developer. That JR ended up growing quite a bit, and is probably the fastest grower that I’ve seen in my career so far.

More recently, I’ve been working with the QA on my team to cross train on using K6 to do performance testing. I had built an initial script for a new system, and she was adapting that existing script to cover an existing endpoint to make sure that our new feature would lead to a marked improvement in the performance. While on-boarding her onto this process, I also made a runner script in PowerShell that would gather random data from the database in order to create data for K6 to use in payloads. This then became a moving target for her to implement her own runner; especially since I also made some added enhancements to my runner script as she was working on the initial version of her test runner.

She was reaching the point where her script was almost ready to be submitted to me as a PR. We had a meeting to discuss some of her last few hurtles getting the script into a final working state. As we discussed these modifications, I made a mental note of things that I had changed in my script that she should update as well. I didn’t bring it up during the meeting since I wanted her to get her script to a working state, and I thought it would be too distracting to divert to these changes. I was also thinking that these could be good pieces of feedback to put as comments in the PR to give her more practice.

I did not realize that she had already noted down all of the changes that I had made to the original script. By the time she submitted the PR, she had applied bug fixes from my changes, and there wasn’t much to comment on. I still found something to tweak so we could practice getting changes pushed to the branch during code review. It was a delight to see that the QA had kept track of these changes, and took the initiative to apply them.

Finally, the incident that inspired me to write this piece. A while back, I had messaged a more JR DevOps engineer to discuss hobby projects, and since I had done a write up for the project, I linked him to the write up in my blog. Recently, he approached me in the office, and told me that he had kept reading my blog since then. He really appreciated that I as a more senior engineer was taking the time to lay out some of my thought process in an easily digestible fashion. Our quick discussion reminded me of this quote from Carl Sagan that I want to close out on:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

While I’m certainly not writing books, I am trying my best to transmit my thoughts. I hope that those who work with me will take the time to try and read my mind.