I know I complain about my job a lot here, but sometimes I really enjoy being as good at it as I am. That doesn’t exactly fix any of the issues that often come up or that I’ve complained about in other blog posts, but when problems aren’t defying all attempts to reason through them, I’m actually pretty good at figuring out what’s going on. Yesterday, for example, I was able to figure out the likely cause of some unexpected test data we were seeing and then prove out my hypothesis today. We spent all day yesterday trying to make some progress in a bit of procedural testing we were doing and kept running into steadily worsening results. I had some initial ideas about what might be causing it and those definitely contributed, but there was something going on beyond those variables that was giving us increasingly worse results. While my coworkers returned to their offices to pick at the data and try to see what that might show them, I moved to poke at my testing apparatus since my gut was telling me that there was a hidden variable at play that was the reason our results were so dramatically different. It took a bit of work (and a bit of time doing a safety review of the testing equipment to let my mind pick through things without me getting in my own way by actively directing it), but I eventually figured out that a part of the testing set up was warping a little bit with every test we performed. Giving it some time (about 22 hours) to rest and return to its original shape was enough to get us back to the results we expected to see, which proved out my theory that we needed to take a wider look at the system when performing tests.

My coworker, the software developer I’ve been working with a bunch over the last two months, spent some time crunching the data and writing up our results, ceding full credit for figuring out what was happening to me, which felt pretty good even if this ultimately isn’t going to do anything other than let us continue testing without issues in the future. We’ll just have to swap some parts of the testing apparatus out between tests. Which will be a pain in the butt, don’t get me wrong, but it’ll mean we can continue moving forward with the procedural testing we need to do in order to verify the efficacy of one of the system’s safety features. Better than needing to wait a full day between tests, for sure, but in a way that’s going to require more active work and effort from a greater number of people. However, if we restricted ourselves to one test a day, it would take a month to finish this testing and that’s just not acceptable. We need results sooner than that, so people (myself primary among them) are just going to need to put in the work.

As good as it felt to get the credit for uncovering the cause of so much stress and heartache over the past few days, I also found myself a little frustrated that giving credit was something that mattered to the people I was working with. I mean, sure, telling everyone that I’m good at my job is great for me and will hopefully help people remember that I know what I’m talking about when I speak up about something in the future, but I’d prefer if there was less time spent on figuring out who is responsible for what failures and successes and more time spent on actually addressing the problems. I mean, this time is probably a bad example because it took all of five minutes to talk through my theory and only a couple extra lines of text in the write-up for my coworker to acknowledge my theory and expertise (despite my attempts to split the credit amongst us all since I wouldn’t have had the information the hunch was based on without their help), but this was a relatively brief incident in a series of much larger and longer events.

There’s plenty of other times that people have taken a bunch of extra time to not only give me credit but to make sure that it was correct to give me credit. It isn’t much in any one instance, but as someone who has a habit of finding strange software bugs or hardware issues, it happens to me pretty frequently. I mean, I was able to see and test a screen refresh issue one time because, for whatever reason, my eyes were capable of perceiving the flickering of light at a higher rate than literally any of my coworkers. It took a specifically designed electrical signal monitoring device (called an oscilloscope) to confirm what I was seeing and then another two hours of looking through various results before my coworkers could confidently tell me and the other people working on this issue that I’d gotten it correct all those hours earlier. It felt like such a waste to take two more hours once we’ve confirmed the problem to confirm that I could actually see the problem when no one else could. That didn’t matter. What mattered was spending our time actually trying to find the cause and then fixing that.

Personally, as someone who has failed and succeeded plenty, who has no problem admitting when they’re wrong, and who is uninterested in being lauded for doing their job (I mean, I love getting paid more, but I am not interested in an award for doing something that is in my job description, as remarkable as it might be. Just pay me more), I’d rather that we all just moved on once a problem was figured out. We’ve all got more work to do than any of us can get done in a reasonable amount of time (or, in my cause, twenty-five percent more than a reasonable amount of time), so doing something like circling the wagons just to figure out who gets the credit for doing what seems like such a waste. Plus, almost every single time I’ve been right has been the product of what I’ve learned from other people or what information other people have found that I could build on. None of us work in vacuums and the process of development is such a collaborative endeavor that I don’t think any one person can really get all the credit for any specific thing. After all, “Idea Guys” don’t deserve any credit because ideas are free and actually doing the work to bring that idea to fruition is ninety-nine percent of the effort and work involved. Completing one part of the process doesn’t get you credit for what gets done. It belongs to everyone. I just wish my coworkers thought more expansively about our projects than they do…