I want you to exceed me

During my time at IBM I started coaching other teams. It was fun and I liked it. Later I went into full time training and coaching, and my motto was "Developing Quality Software Developers". I knew it was the thing I wanted to do, but I did not know why.

Gamification
I use Gamification as a strategy to improve user engagement. To increase participation in my workshops and to express my feelings about that, I created achievement cards, the Code Cop Achievement Cards. Achievements or trophies are concepts from video games, and describe meta-goals defined outside the game's parameters. Meeting the fulfilment conditions, and receiving recognition of fulfilment by the game, is referred to as unlocking the achievement. There are several cards for first time participants in my deck, for example Shortcut Fu when someone uses a rare keyboard short-cut, Regexer for comprehending a crazy regular expression or Finisher for finishing the coding exercise started during the workshop at home - which I always offer but rarely happens. I award these cards to a participant, if I feel that the person has worked hard or struggled to make it.

Appreciation
I wanted my cards to convey my honest appreciation and used NVC (Non-violent Communication) appreciation statements. For a NVC-style appreciation we share the specific actions that contributed to our well-being, the needs that have been fulfilled, and the feelings engendered by the fulfilment of those needs. The focus is to create a clear understanding of how our life was enriched.. This made me think more about my feelings and which of my needs had been satisfied at the moments when I wanted to appreciate some action. I had thought about needs before in more general, less personal way. My friend and NVC coach Aki Salmi helped me to formulate these statements using different phrases to avoid having the same text on each card again and again: For example: "I value the usage of short-cuts as effective and as sign of ongoing mastery in our craft." "I am touched to see courage in situations of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure." "I am amazed by critical questions based on creativity and independent thought." "I am inspired by the integrity and consistency of sticking to principles in difficult situations." The process of finding the right words alone strengthened my ability to express my feelings dramatically.

Scrutiny
Some of my appreciation cards celebrate learning, including stepping out of one's comfort zone, which is required for learning. One card I of these is titled "Scrutiny", subtitled Correct me when I am wrong. It shows a Whistle icon (by Delapouite CC BY 3.0) and the appreciation is "I am proud when you correct me, showing independence and competence." It does not happen often - still sometimes in a pairing or ensemble session, my focus may slip and I make a mistake or do not call out a mistake on time. And then, sometimes, someone else does.

Growth
There is a common theme in most of my cards: growth. Now that I have seen it, it is obvious to me. Growth is one of my major needs. I want to grow - e.g. learning new languages and other stuff regularly. And I want the people I coach and work with to grow, too. My second motto - surfacing around 2013 - "Developing Quality Software Developers" expresses that clearly. I want them to grow, to learn, to improve - and I am inspired and amazed the most, when they exceed me.

Snatch the Pebble From My Hand
There is nothing more satisfying than when a pupil exceeds his or her master. This is often depicted in movies, where a student must learn a lot, for example in Kung Fu movies: In the television series Kung Fu, Caine is an orphan and is accepted into a Shaolin Monastery. Part of the Shaolin way of life is strengthening the body and the mind. For example, one of Caine's teachers asks him to "snatch the pebble from my hand":


Then, after many years of training, Caine is finally able to beat his master:


What a satisfying moment, and Caine's master smiles. This is one of my favourite TV moments ;-) Like being corrected (see Scrutiny card above), "snatch the pebble from my hand" situations make me proud of my students.

Make Me Look Like a Baby
I want to leave you with a quote from a different and maybe more controversial source of motivation than Caine, ex Navy SEAL member Jocko Willink: Don't try and be like me. Be better than me. Crush me. Make me look like a baby. That's what you do. (Even better when he says it himself.) - OK, maybe there is too much testosterone here ;-)

Strong Opinions

As Code Cop I meet a lot of developers and I have to tell some of them that their code is crap and that they need to drive down their technical debt. Others need to test more, maybe start doing TDD. There are a few who would not listen. Some of them are even proud of stubbornly not listening, they say that they have strong opinions about the topic. They do not seem interested in in another view on their code or design? Why is that? I have some ideas.

Dunning Kruger Effect
The Dunning Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. In other words, beginners believe themselves senior and think that they know better. There is no need to listen to an outsider.

I know this effect myself: When I learnt my first programming language(s), as soon as I could write a few lines of code, I felt invincible. (I thought that) I could do everything. I ruled. I knew how to do it and I knew I was right and that there was no other way to do it properly. Today, after writing code for 20 years in more than 25 languages, I do not feel like that any more. Sometimes I would like to go back to my state of mind of the late nineties and I try to look at new languages like a child - with a beginner's mind - but I know too much details. I know there will be nasty details, even for that newest and hottest languages of today.

Expert Beginner
An expert beginner has quickly reached (what looks like) expert status. He or she voluntarily ceases to improve because of a belief that expert status has been reached and thus further improvement is not possible. (I recommend reading the whole series of Erik Dietrich, How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner and further posts of his series.) Expert beginners make up defending arguments because they are the experts.

I have met some of these. I vividly remember two senior developers who had been with one of my clients for more than 16 years. They were opposing me on everything I said. Sure they had a superior knowledge of the application they had built and maintained for so many years, and they knew the domain they were working in pretty well. I am sure they were adding value to the product. They both were strong influencers. As soon as they would speak their mind, all other team members would just agree. But, but, but... Sigh. They were still using Ant, did not know Maven, did not write unit tests, did not care for clean code and so on - they made me very unhappy.

Quadrants of Knowledge
The quadrants of knowledge seem connected to my previous points. The four quadrants are

1. Known Knowns: What you know that you know
2. Unknown Knowns: What you do not know that you know
3. Known Unknowns: What you know that you do not know
4. Unknown Unknowns: What you do not know that you do not know

When we advance our career in software delivery, we learn: We collect concrete knowledge (quadrant 1), we gain experience which allows us to have gut feelings about some things (maybe quadrant 2) and we hear about things that we have no idea about (quadrant 3). There are gazillion things in software that I have no idea of: ANTLR, APL, AWS, Category Theory, Distributed Computing, Elm, Gradle, Guava, Haskell, HBase, J2EE, Kubernetes, Mongo DB, Networking, Node.JS, Prolog, Security - these are just the first few that come to my mind. It is easier to list things which I do not know in areas that I do know. I have been Java developer for 15 years and there are so many things in the Java ecosystem which I have no clue about. On the other hand there are not many things I can say about C#, because I only know it little.

So the more we learn, the more we know that we do not know, increasing our Known Unknowns (quadrant 3). The philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC) even said, Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. Like the Dunning Kruger Effect, beginners have no idea about the vast size of Known Unknowns quadrant and do not expect surprises or potential improvements.

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
The ideas of the Dunning Kruger Effect, Expert Beginners and Known Unknowns offer some explanation why some junior developers are not open for discussions. I have also met senior and expert level developers who are the same. When attending Software Crafting unconferences, e.g. SoCraTes, attendees are eager to learn and open for discussion. After all, that is the idea of unconferences, right? Still, many of them have strong opinions about almost everything, e.g. Spring Boot is cool. No, Spring Boot is hell. ;-) Different from beginners, all of them know the problems of strong opinions and claim that they only hold onto them weakly.

Weakly Held, what is that supposed to mean? Isaac Morehouse explains in These Four Words Will Help You ‘Hold Strong Opinions Weakly': You act as if they [your opinions] are true unless and until it is proven they are not. Maybe people like strong opinions because they give them the power of definiteness. Choices are much easier and life is more predictable with definiteness and absolutes. Holding opinions weakly also gives the power of openness. This sounds hard: Basing one's actions on some definite "truths" and re-evaluating these truths whenever they are challenged. Seems like a difficult balancing act, if not a contradiction. For sure that state of mind is not easy to get into. I still need to see someone with strong opinion - weakly held or not - to change his or her mind,

Rant
When I started this article, it was supposed to be a rant. As usual, writing down my thoughts helped me to structure the material in a better way. (I consider writing an act of learning.) So where is the rant? Here it is:

Person with strong opinion == arsehole who does not want to listen.

That is a bit harsh, I agree. Obviously beginners need to listen more and due to Known Unknowns I expect experienced and expert developers to be open to discussion on any topic at any time. The strong opinion itself is not the problem, but the resulting behaviour, especially if strong opinion is used as warning or justification of some sort. I witness strong opinion mainly as excuse to not discuss or challenge existing views.

What about me?
Of course I had strong opinions during my professional life. I did not earn the nick name of Code Cop for nothing. Someone even called me Code Nazi. And my opinions were definitely not weakly held. I like absolutes. (Now I see - as I just learned above - the power of definiteness.) I guess I still have some strong opinions, and they are not just opinions, they are dogma: a system of principles proclaimed as unquestionable.

I have changed and it seems that the Code Cop is getting soft. ;-) The extended experience and discussions have weakened my definiteness. There is always some special case, the almighty it depends. And since I am working with people, and try to help them, I am more compassionate. I understand their problems, the difficulty to get time for quality and the pain of legacy code. Sometimes I catch myself not recommending what I believe the technically best course of action because it will be a lot of unpleasant, hard work for the team. No, that is too soft. If they made a mess, they have to fix it. Time to fall back on dogma. (Sound of firing cannons in the background ;-) All the time these balancing acts...

Three Rules of Coaching Engagement

Last year software crafter and Kotlin enthusiast Oleksii Fedorov asked me about technical coaching. He was going to work with a small team and focus on technical enablement. He would do so by pair and mob programming with them for some time and later support them remotely if needed. During that time there would be no pressure or deadline to deliver new features so they could focus on improving.

Oleksii is a like-minded peer. I met him on several occasions in the past. He is fun to work with and considers teaching an integral part of pair programming. I did not expect any problems. He kept pushing me and made me think about my principles. In the end I came up with three points I like to make clear right from the beginning, i.e. set the ground rules of the engagement.

1. Manage expectations
Managing expectations is crucial. I learnt that the hard way during my Pair Programming Tour. Whenever I run a session, e.g. pair or mob programming and often also prepared workshops, I start with a discussion to collect expectations. For longer contracts I recommend to start with a dedicated meeting to do so. Usually expectations are fuzzy, like "I want to learn something", so keep pushing with questions like "How will you know it was worth it? How will you measure that you learned something?" and so on. In the end I want the team to come up with ways to measure their learning and define their own success metrics.

2. Learning is their responsibility
Oleksii planned for two weeks. In two weeks people will not change (much). Such a coaching engagement does not last long enough for much impact, rather it is a start of a (maybe even life long) journey of learning and improving. This is true from day one and during the initial meeting I make it clear that I am not a teacher. I will not push knowledge onto them to be forgotten the next day. To get something from working together, people have to participate, to engage, to invest time and effort into the topic. They will only get so much from it what they have put into it themselves. Learning is their responsibility.

3. Treat them as strangers
After removing the responsibility to teach anything - because learning is their responsibility - I feel less stressed. As coach I am still responsible for creating a safe space, providing content, managing exercises and a lot of other things. If someone does not want to participate or feels like doing something else, I have to be OK with that. Even being paid for "teaching" should not change that. My advice here is to treat the team members as "strangers", like we treat new visitors of a Coding Dojo. As a facilitator I try to help, but I will not oppose or coerce.

Feedback
Oleksii started the job soon afterwards. I was sure everything would work out fine. When we met again he told me that my three rules had helped him. 1. He collected expectations in the beginning and managed them while moving forward. 2. People understood that they had to invest and some participants even showed up for sessions during their free time. 3. People where entering and leaving sessions all the time, still he stayed relaxed.