This is a common challenge once a company has built enough “stuff”. The burden of maintenance and the difficulties in refactoring makes one cry out for “Simplicity, now!’. A common perception of reducing complexity is to “dumb things down”, this is a reaction to the tension of it being difficult to untangle things. It’s often a good idea not to act on this tension, but look a bit further at the issue at hand.

This post contain learnings from over twenty years working as a programmer and close to half a century living on this planet. I met my partner over a decade ago, not long into our relationship we had a conversation: “why do you say things as if you know them, when you don’t?” I would usually reply “Of course I don’t know these things. I’m obviously guessing, you should know this”. When I first was confronted by this I felt misunderstood and even a little attacked.

The title of this post is a phrase often repeated in the onboarding process at my current company (and probably many others too). It sounds like a pretty straight forward thing doesn’t it? What kind of person would not automatically do this? I am afraid I’m one such person, and there is a reason why. Once in my career I was bullied at work in a very subtle way for a long period of time.

I had read the term many times on the Internet from people who’s been vocal on certain topics which for different reasons turn out to be controversial. Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting I encountered this term for the first time when I was being vocal about an IT conference in Norway which I thoughts had a highly inappropriate name (post in 🇳🇴 Den Norske Dataforening sitt manglende gangsyn) . During this action in trying to get them to change, I was exposed to this behavior for the first time.

Disclaimer: All my “On..” posts are things I write from beginning to end without any editing or thinking about structure (so it’s like all other posts?). They are just dumps of thoughts I’ve had which I deem that maybe they’re useful for something or someone, so I’ll just dump it here where nobody actually sees them. A friend of mine told me his friends reaction when he said he was starting to learn how to play the flute.