It's an embarrassing list that I cannot fully share, but here's a few:

• When a single key on my keyboard is slowly failing.
• When you chew with your mouth open (and I can hear it).
• When I lose my wallet in my own house, in my own room.

I told you they were trivial, but I didn't tell you the depth of the rage I experience because it completes my embarrassment. If I sit here carefully and clearly explaining that when you chew with your mouth open (and I can hear it) that I sincerely want to lean across the table and punch you in the mouth, I realize this is batshit insane. You can be assured that I've never actually slugged a single human, but this doesn't change my internal reaction or my point.

Every human has a handful of triggers.

It's beyond my ability to explain how these triggers are built, but if you can't yet relate, remember the last time you accidentally hit your head on a kitchen cabinet while your significant other watched. You noticed two things: first, it hurt -- bad. Second, when your significant other asked, "Oh no, are you ok?" your instinct was to scream, "NO, I AM NOT OK, I JUST HIT MY HEAD AND IT HURT." You want to lash out at the person who is caring about your well being.

After years of professional self-reflection, I am sure of three things regarding triggers:

1. For non-kitchen cabinet pain-based triggers, their origin is non-obvious. The key on my keyboard not working is not disproportionately enraging me not just because of the hindered productivity. The root cause of my fury is far more complicated, sinister, and deeply buried in the back of my head.
2. Our mental wiring is far from perfect.
3. I would likely benefit from professional therapy.

You have triggers. They are delightfully, privately, and weirdly yours. I don't need to know them, but as a person who hangs with other people I need you to feel and remember the sensitivity you feel in the middle of a trigger -- the instant mindlessness. The blind rage. The lack of rational faculties.

Can you feel it?

Good. Let's talk about how to communicate with your team.

The Big Three

There are three situations that can easily trigger members of your team.They involve: title, compensation, and location. That's right. The title on a business card, the amount of money someone receives, and where they sit. In my career as a leader of humans, I have spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning up where a lead has underestimated the trigger impact of a seemingly unimportant discussion regarding title, compensation, and location.

I call these the Big Three and the Big Three are part of a handful of objective measures and goals a person can achieve that are well known, easy to compare, and understood by the whole team. The Big Three, right or wrong, have accreted unexpected status; they've become disproportionately highly valued. They've become a yardstick by which a person measures success. This is why something seemingly as simple as office relocations become a multiple meeting clusterfuck. It's not just that they care where they sit; it's that they believe there is measurable status applied to where they sit.

There is a single universal realization that occurs in conversations about the Big Three, and it's a doozy: In a moment, I understand that the world values me drastically differently than I expected.

Drastically Different Than Expected

"Frank, we had a really good quarter. We shipped the update, we're solidly into the next major release and I'd like to give you a $5k raise."

"I quit."

Wait, what?

First, before you try to untangle anything, before you try to handle the situation, before you screw this up further, repeat after me: trigger. Frank just metaphorically hit his head on the corner of the kitchen cabinet and just about any proactive action on your part will result in him lashing out further. While we sit here waiting for Frank's next move, some advice:

Understand that judgment is temporarily impaired by triggers. Just like The Disaster, judgement is way off not just at the moment of the trigger, but for some time. Unlike the kitchen cabinet scenario, chances are, as we'll talk about more in a moment, Frank saw part of this coming. This doesn't decrease the intensity of the trigger, but it does increase the duration, because he's been chewing on this trigger for a while. When I know someone has been triggered, I don't trust their judgment regarding much of anything: they've been triggered.

Understand that while facts, data, and conversation will eventually be helpful, in a trigger situation time is the only initial cure. There's value in talking through the situation in the moment, but, again, faulty wiring. They're furious -- perhaps for valid reasons -- and until the fury passes, it's less a conversation than a very important vent.

Wait for Frank. It's not always the best advice, but when I stumble on a trigger, I usually wait -- sometimes a long time -- for Frank to say something. In my mind, I'm watching him standing there, rubbing where he hit his head, shouting, "YOU KNOW THAT FUCKING HURT." Too often I have jumped in with some helpful advice only to have it twisted and thrown back in my face because Frank was triggered.

Right, it's been 37 seconds and Frank has just said something disarming that acknowledges the magnitude of his reaction. Now, you can start mentally triaging. How in the world is a $5k raise a reason for quitting? Here's the cheat sheet. Do you remember when Frank was hired two years ago and you brought him in on the high side of the salary recommendations? You forgot that, right? Yeah, you also didn't notice his subtle disappointment to the $5k raise last year. You didn't expect him to talk to several members of the team regarding their raises, which were $10k. Of course, he didn't ask about base salary, which is much lower than his. Frank's trigger is based on over a year of build-up where he believed he's being under-compensated, when the reality is that he's the highest paid engineer on the team.

Reflecting on the many triggers I've encountered in my professional career, the situation is always that the story the person was telling themselves was drastically different than the one I, their lead, was suddenly telling them. It's never a complete surprise because they've been picking up on subtle clues about the story leading up to the conversation, but hearing me say it makes it real, and having it involve quantifiable status-based topics like a title, an office, and a raise makes it that much more real.

You Can't Be Too Paranoid

The Big Three are certainly not the only trigger scenarios out there, but they are a knowable set. I approach all conversations regarding the Big Three as if I were walking through a minefield where there is only one map and it was drawn by me -- when I was drunk. It's certainly useful to have this map, but I remain suspect.

You cannot be too paranoid going into these conversations. You can't reflect too much. How has every conversation regarding compensation gone with this person? What were their reactions? What questions did they ask? Have they ever said anything about title? What? When? How often? You're about to alter the story they've been telling themselves, so as best you can you need to understand their story -- not yours.

Is it a fair change? There are far too many local variables to make this advice that useful, but in considering the change that you are describing to this person, do you fully believe that it's reasonable, fair, consistent, and understandable? Can you completely tell the story with no niggling concerns in the back of your head? Would everyone on the team agree that this person has earned this title? Does this seating layout acknowledge how this team feels about offices? Does this compensation change reflect your company's compensation philosophy?

Remember, it's a minefield because we, as an industry, have fucked up these conversations -- a lot. Crap managers who award titles because they like someone, offices because of title rather than ability or need, compensation based on following the broadest guidelines provided by HR rather than taking the time to understand the complete compensation picture. It's a minefield because they're expecting us to screw it up because that's what we usually do.

A First Line of Defense

Healthy paranoia and prior experience in delivering these types of messages will improve your ability to deliver level-setting information. However, even with all this preparation, you're still going to stumble on triggers. It's unavoidable.

To talk about triggers, I had to reduce the trigger scenarios down to the knowable Big Three because we'll likely never know why someone talking with their mouth full causes me unbridled rage. It's also not your problem that I have this trigger. It's mine and it's up to me to stand up when you're mash-mash-mashing your food and telling me about your trip to Guatemala and say, "Excuse me for a moment, I must rage elsewhere".

In order to handle triggers in the workplace, you must first own your trigger weirdness. Acknowledging your faulty mental wiring can serve as a best first line of defense - it gives you solid trigger appreciation. Humans are messy and will blow up, but your job is suspend judgement, keep quiet, and give them time to cool down. It's not your job to fix the trigger, it's your job to first get them through the trigger weirdness and then to figure out how to close the kitchen cabinet door so they don't hit their head again.

Capping the number of tickets is a classic Apple move: we're going to create a sense of exclusivity by creating an artificial constraint. Moscone Center is huge. Apple could blink and triple the size of the event, but I can't think of the last time the ticket ceiling at WWDC went up. 5000 attendees - that's it.

WWDC is a great event. I've been going for years without a ticket and I still have amazing nights spending time with dear friends debating the state of Apple. Logic would dictate that increasing the number of tickets would increase the "product": the army of foaming-at-the-mouth fanboys'n'girls who, I believe, are one of the best (and cheapest?) organic marketing assets in the industry.

Nope. 5000. That's it.

This type of constraint reeks of Steve Jobs. The rumor at Apple was that Steve capped many of the teams in Cupertino. Mac OS X and Marketing Communications being two successful teams that had their headcount capped. During the 2000s, while Apple was gaining traction across the planet, the team responsible for getting the word out, Marketing Communications ("MarCom"), was allegedly capped at 100 heads. The reasoning I heard was that Steve wanted to keep the teams feeling small, but, more importantly, I think he wanted to keep them knowable.

Of course, with the amount of work they had to produce supporting WWDCs, MacWorlds, product launches, and all the other advertising, they relied on expensive external vendors to do the bulk of the heavy lifting. While back in Cupertino, the 100 represented a small, well-understood group where I believe Steve could not only easily understand every single story being told by Apple, but, more importantly, the 100 could know each other.

When you talk about change or optimum team sizes, Dunbar's number is usually thrown down as scientific evidence of something you already know in your bones. Shit gets weird somewhere between 100 and 200 people. You can no longer keep the individual state of each of the other people in your team or company in your head. Which means communication becomes more taxing. Rather than walking up to Fred and saying, "What's up?" you cautiously walk up to a person you don't know and sheepishly ask, "Yeah... who are you?"

What was easy becomes hard. What used to be maintained in your head now involves an extra email or an additional meeting. What was familiar becomes unfamiliar and frustrating. Culture is diluted, communication becomes taxed, and people start saying, "I remember when..."

Capping the headcount of a team necessary to shaping the story of an increasingly successful company seems counter-intuitive. We're doing well, we should invest more. This type of thinking puts a big discount on the taxes associated with rapid team growth with, in my opinion, being able to easily discern what is going on in a team of people being number one.

Apple's MarCom department being capped at 100 achieved two very different objectives. First, it made the work the team was doing knowable - you could discern who was doing what because there just weren't that many full-time people. This allowed for dictatorial control that has given Apple clear and consistently messaging. Second, the constraint meant that every single person counted. While I never worked on the team, I'm certain they were much quicker in dealing with low performers because you could still discern the difference one additional high performing person would make. While this could certainly be viewed as a constant threat of being fired, it could also make for a high performing team.

The effects of capping WWDC tickets are different because you're talking about a larger population, but some of the effects are the same. Each year, WWDC is held in Moscone West. You know that the big Apple logo will be emblazoned on the side of the building. You know the names of the conference rooms, you know where the snacks will be. But, for me, I know who will be there. I end up in the same bars with the same dear friends and we get foamy at the mouth about Apple because we feel like we know it.

The cap on WWDC tickets means it won't go the way of SXSW - a wildly successful conference that has grown consistently since its inception. I used to go every year until one late night we looked around a huge sea of strangers and decided that we no longer knew this conference. The experience had become diluted. It had become unfamiliar, full of strangers, and unknowable.

When I say disproportionate love, I mean manic crazy love. My sister took a tape recorder into Superman II, recorded the whole damned thing, and then transcribed the entire movie via a typewriter. Why? So she could read the transcript of the movie she just saw.

I followed her madness by clipping Superman II ads out of any newspaper I could find and placing them carefully into a photo album. Black and white, low resolution ads. All the same, carefully curated in a photo album so I could remember what it felt like to watch those movies.

Clearly we both had too much time on our hands.

Superman has suffered since those first two movies. The latter movies were awful. We had high hopes for Superman Returns, but the essential story was left on the editing room floor. Meanwhile there were the critiques of Superman the character, that he's boringly one dimensional. An invulnerable and totally moral character. He's perfect; he can do no wrong. He's not a realistic reflection of us mortal humans and therefore an unattainable idea.

Meanwhile, Batman. Yes, pathos and dysfunction. That's a hero. Look at him - he's that close to killing The Joker. He thinks about it because even though he's a strategic fictional genius, he's kinda fucked up. AND WAIT DID HE JUST KISS CATWOMAN? See, Batman has good days and bad days... just like you and I. I love Batman. While he remains a hyperbolic exaggeration of our ability, if you shoot him, it hurts, and we can relate to hurting. Does Superman ever feel pain?

I better understood what Superman meant when I watched the most recent and final trailer for Man of Steel. When Lois Lane asks him what the S stands for, he says, "It's not an S. On my world, it means hope."

When a twisted someone believes that they are delivering an important message by blowing up innocents in a city that is a cradle of our liberty, I choose hope. I choose unrealistic and unbounded hope. I choose Superman.

Superman is a story. It's a great story. It's an unrealistic story full of fantastic elements that appeal to our desire to be intensely good humans, to perform amazing feats of strength, and to live forever. These stories, while unrealistic, give us direction, they temporarily relieve our burdens, and they give us an ambitious plan forward.

Perhaps the biggest critique you can make of Superman is that because he makes it look so easy with the flying and the invulnerability that doing the impossible is somehow easy or even achievable. It's big. It's over the top. It's unrealistic and no one human can ever complete the feats of a single Superman. But it's not the individual feats of Superman we care about, it's that we, as a group of humans, working together, can do anything, even though it's never easy.

My family loves Superman because he is an unrealistic and impossible creature. We know that. We know he sets an impossible bar, but we need that bar because that is how we dream big, that is how we aspire to something great, and that is why we choose hope.

You'll make mistakes. That's cool, you're in the Bright and Shiny phase of our relationship where you can do no wrong. I mean it, you can't be blamed for screwing up because you're the New Person and you don't know any better. It's our fault, really, because we probably didn't give you the right context or point you at the right wiki page. In fact, it's cool that you made that mistake because failure is how you learn, and boy oh boy, you're sure learning a lot.

. . .

Hello Not-So-New Person. Well, it's been a month and, well, we're really disappointed in you. We think we may have made a mistake.

You remember those expectations we had of you? The impossibly high ones that we never told you about, but mostly just felt? Yeah, they were way off. In fact, our opinions of your ability appear to be way off. You appear to be just a regular old disappointing human. Those mistakes you keep making? We don't know if you're not getting it or what. Most folks have figured it out by now. Figured what out, you ask? You know, the undefinable but very important 'it' that everyone else knows, but can't explain it. You not getting 'it' is worrying us.

This is the Fall from Grace phase, Not-So-New Person. We're disappointed, and the degree of our disappointment is proportionate to our previous impossible and unspoken expectations. We're sad. We're talking to others about your massive failure because we're pretty sure we're going to need to let you go, and talking to others whose unreasonable unspoken expectations were not being met either makes us feel better about the horrible mistake that is you.  

Don't worry. We're going to stick with our longstanding policy of not telling you this because you've still got a little Bright and Shiny, but mostly because we're incapable of articulating our disappointment. We're also a little worried that some of your hyperbolic and unmeasurable failure might rub off on us.

. . .

Hello Person. It's been three months and you're just fine. You've arrived at the final phase of Steady State.

Whew.

We're not sure what we were thinking just a few weeks ago when we were whispering about firing you. You're solid. We've seen you fail and we've seen you succeed. We better understand where your superpower lies. We've stopped thinking of you as a tentative work in progress and now we're just working.

We're sorry.

We're sorry because of everything we didn't say in those first three months of highs and lows. In our enthusiasm, we forget that humans are slow to trust. We forget that we build respect by watching both successes and failures for weeks... for months.

We are in an incredible hurry building important things and have no time for nuance. We're impatient. We're busy. We want everything to move faster, so we make huge, comforting assumptions and slap easy to understand labels on complex concepts.

You are a complex concept. No matter how hard we try to bucket you, there you are, being something we've never seen before.

We're sorry mostly because we always forget these aspects of human nature and each time a New Person, a New Team, or a New Idea arrives, we humans repeat this painful three-month cycle of highly energetic exaggerated expectations, a confusing fall from grace, and a final discovery of comfortable understanding of that which is uniquely you.

Thanks for staying.

You can, but there are vastly better headphones out there.

For this piece, I'm going to compare three different types of headphones at three different price points. This makes an apples-to-apples comparison tricky to make, but the point of this piece is not to fully explore the world of headphones, but rather to begin to understand how the headphones world is built.

I deliberately did not research all of the attributes that make or break a good set of headphones. There are legions of audiophiles who will angrily shake their fingers at my lack of due diligence, and I'm eagerly waiting to hear their feedback and criticism. But my requirements for a good set of headphones have little to do with whether the headphones are based on a moving coil or electrostatic driver. My requirements are simple: I want to listen to my music as it was intended to be heard with a minimum of fuss anywhere on the planet.

You may not know much about the state of the art in headphones, but you are intimately familiar with hearing. This is an article for folks who like to hear.

The Hardware, The Tests, and a Great Song

For my selection of headphones, I wanted to test the Apple-supplied earbuds against both a high-end in-ear selection as as well as a set of full-sized headphones. For the full-sized headphones, I asked Marco for his recommendation, since he's obsessed a lot more about headphones. He suggested the Sennheiser HD 380 Pro (~$170.00). For in-ear, I went to Twitter for recommendations, and the good people at Klipsch provided me with a pair of their X10i model, which retail for around $349.00.

For the song, I chose Titanium by David Guetta and featuring Sia, which is, first, a great song, but also features thumping bass accompanied by Sia's bold and raging vocals that test the high end of the sound spectrum. I listened to the song on each of the three headphones in two different locations. The first location was a half-full bar at an airport. There was light to medium ambient noise from nearby conversations, as well as soul crushing techno-elevator music descending from the ceiling. The second location was at 32k feet over Greenland in the bubble of a 747 - heavy continuous white noise.

I chose these two test locations because they are where I need my headphones the most: when I'm traveling and when there is a lot of noise. Any headphones I use need to contend with the noise of traveling. Yes, I use my headphones at home, but not a lot. See, there is a wife and kids in the house, and while they're cool with my playing of video games, they are not cool with the way that any good headphones completely remove me from the Planet Earth.

For each set of headphones, I listened to Titanium a few times in each location. For different parts of the song, I'd often swap back and forth between the different headphones to hear precise differences. What I've captured are my thoughts about each set of headphones relative to sound and noise reduction as well as comfort, convenience, and quirks.

Apple EarPods, in-ear ($29.00, but included with iPhone, iPads, and iPods)

The sound quality of the Apple EarPods is fine, and by fine I mean until you spend any sort of money on your headphones. Both of the headphones below have instantly recognizable superior sound quality. Both in the bar and especially on the airplane, I found myself turning the volume up on my MacBook to ~ 75% of the maximum to get what I consider full sound with the EarPods. The same volume level for both the Klipsch and the Sennheiser was blaring; I had to turn it down.

Apple claims there is noise reduction in this latest generation of the headphones, and I believe them, but for my test cases -- the bar and the airplane -- all of the external sound was dulling the sound of the song, and again, giving me the impression that I needed to keep turning the sound up.

Apple's headphones are well designed. One of my favorite features is that because of their distinct shape and molding, you can tell left from right purely by feel. Each time I put on my other headphones, I'm compulsively checking the earbud, looking for that L or R. With the Apple headphones, it's an effortless process. For me, the EarPods are tied with the Klipsch for comfort. They fit snugly and firmly in my ears and I just forget about them for hours. No issues.

One of the quirks of the Apple in-ear headphones is one of its more useful features - I can hear what's going on around me. Both the Klipsch and the Sennheiser almost completely remove all external sound, which means when Frank the bartender looks me straight in the eye and asks me if I want another round, I give him a blank stare - I can't hear a thing. Apple headphones are my go-to headphones when I'm on the go and need to maintain situational awareness.

Klipsch, X10i, in-ear ($349.00)

The first indication of the vastly superior sound of the X10is is the fact that when I swap from EarPods, I have to turn the sound down - way down. This is a function of the seal the headphones make with your ear, which I'll talk about in a moment, but once you've got the right volume, you're in for a treat. The sound of the X10is is transcendent and complete. Your music will completely and wholly fill your head. Big huge bass, crisp highs, and simple, complete sound, but it comes with a cost.

The beauty of the Klipsch is the seal that it makes with the inside of your ear. It's at that point that the crystal clear sound comes pouring into your ear, but this seal is problematic. First, the seal between the plastic ear buds and the skin of your ears not only seals sound in, it also creates a perfect medium for sound to travel through any part of the headphone assembly. Sitting here right now in the back of a car heading to the airport, all I need to do to remember what type of headphones I'm wearing is shake my head. As the cables hanging from my ears drag across the wool coat I'm wearing, the scratching sound races up the cords with perfect, annoying fidelity. If I happen to be eating peanuts while wearing these headphones, I hear the death cry of each and every peanut I consume.

Additionally, the Klipsch earbuds make you intimately aware of a part of your body that you, perhaps, would prefer to take for granted: your inner ear. I'm certain that it is for very good evolutionary reasons that my body produces ear wax. I would thank billions of years of evolution that have given me this strategic waxy advantage, but I would prefer to take ear wax for granted. I've been using my Klipsch headphones steadily for several weeks, and in the last week I've noticed the sound in my right ear degrading. The issue? Yeah, ear wax. A quick cleaning with a Klipsch-provided cleaning tool and we're hunky dory, but for roughly 18.5 seconds I'm sitting there contending with... ear wax. This unavoidable ear wax tax is an annoying price to pay for both the sound quality and convenience of the Klipsch headphones.

Lastly, with the by far best sound quality of the three headphones, one of the more frustrating minor quirks of the the X10is is the cord quality - I constantly have to untangle them. I carefully wrap up the cord each time I'm done, but upon removal from my pouch, it's tangled. Apple allegedly partially solved for the tangle problem, but my impression is all the science involved is - wait for it - making the cords thicker, and therefore stiffer, which is harder to tangle. As I've been constantly pulling both of the headphones out of my travel pouch, I can confirm that Apple's headphones tangle less and the acoustically superior Klipsch headphones feel cheaper because they're tangled.

Sennheiser HD 380 Pro, over-ear ($199.95)

Like the Klipsches, the Sennheisers are a huge step above the Apple headphones in terms of sound quality. It's a shocking comparison that you should try at least once to understand how much sound you're missing. Compared to the X10is, the sound quality of the Sennheisers is slightly inferior. Audiophiles likely have dictionaries full of sound-specific words to describe the quality, but all I have is crispness. After jumping back and forth between each headphone on the same part of the song a half-dozen times, the Sennheisers are really good, but lack the crispness of the X10is - I feel like I'm hearing more of the song with the x10is. The same goes for the bass; the Klipsch bass is rounder and deeper than the Sennheiser.

In terms of noise reduction, there's a world of difference between the Apple and Sennheiser headphones, but again, the Klipsch has superior noise reduction. It's not clear to me whether this is a function of the electronics or the design the headphones. I have the same thought about the Klipsch seal. Are they better simply because of the complete seal they make? How much of the noise reduction is actual electronics? I can give the Sennheisers a noise-reducing boost simply by pressing the headphones harder against my head.

One of my favorite conveniences of the Sennheisers is really a quirk. The 1.5 inches that each headphone provides is a surprisingly convenient headrest on long haul flights.

I'm serious.

Many airlines provide head support in the form of fold-out head supports on both sides of your headrest, but the problem is that even with the pads folded completely forward, your head has a lot of room to bounce around. While I'm certain this wasn't a design goal for Sennheiser, their headphones do a splendid job of filling that space. They hold my head at a comfortable angle and allow me to sleep better. Combined with the simple muffling provided by the headphones, I often sleep with headphones on but with no music at all.

While they are an unexpected sleep aid, the Sennheisers are not at all convenient. They're a huge travel accessory only made larger by their traveling case, which I recommend using on trips. Here's why: I'm on my third set of Sennheisers because I tossed the first two in a fit of rage. I'd been lugging them around the world without the case, because they do fold flat, and once you've wrapped the cord around them, they're compact-ish. Problem is, the plug is exposed, and if that plug is bent, sound on one of your headphones gets spotty. You have to twist the plug just right to get everything to work. And another tip: attempting to re-bend the plug does not work. There are easier ways to protect the plug, but after having spent three hours on a transcontinental flight holding the plug just right I'm protecting the headphones in the supplied case, which makes the headphones the size of a late 80s mobile CD player.

Apples to Apples

I am a regular audio human. I've have no significant demands of my headphones. This article takes a very high level approach to looking at headphones, and I know there is much more to learn. While the lessons above might be broad, I'm eager to learn more. Again, it's tricky to compare the three sets of headphones listed above, but I can finish by answering a few questions:

Can I just get by with the Apple EarPods? Yes, even with the blaring white noise of an airplane, the Apple headphones are just fine. They work. You can hear your music. You could also learn to write in dirt using just your fingers on paper you found on the street. My point: if you're obsessing about your pens, backpacks, and notebooks, why wouldn't you obsess about your headphones? A single comparison to any other headphones will show you what you're missing.

Are the ginormous Sennheisers ever worth it? It seems to be fashionable to be walking around with huge headphones hanging around your neck. I think this is a fashion statement, not an auditory statement. I'm sure these headphones are good, but each time I see someone walking through the airport with their massive headphones, I think of every single moment that they have to contend with their bulk. The Sennheisers' long cord and high degree of comfort do make them my go-to home setup, but that's only when the kids and wife aren't home. I've had Sennheisers for a while, and in a world where they were the only higher end headphones I knew about, I would've been very happy.

Would I ever pay $350 for headphones? If you asked this before I started this article, I would have laughed in your face. $100? Maybe. $200? Probably not. $350. Never. It wasn't until I did the headphones to headphones comparison on the same song at the same time that I realized the stunning sound quality of the x10is. I sat at the bar listening to Titanium for the 18th time. I just finished with the Sennheisers, placed the Klipsches on for the first time, started the song and said, "Holy shit." I might've yelled it, but I didn't know because I couldn't hear a thing.

Chances are, you also have a title. It was given to you when you first arrived at your fine company and you probably didn't think about it. You argued for more salary or more stock, but the title was just there -- Sr. Software Engineer 2. You didn't think about where the title came from or the fact that it defined your compensation and promotion path for the duration of your stay with the company.

You didn't think a lot about title because you didn't really have a choice. The decision to create titles happened long before you were there, but you still need to understand why titles are toxic.

On the Origin of Titles

When a company is small, everyone does a little bit of everything, so titles make no sense. My first title at Netscape was "Bitsifter". Sure, there were some titles, but they were titles of convenience so external parties could apply their antiquated title frameworks to folks on our team during meetings. "Oh, I see, you're the VP of Product... how very impressive."

The unspoken agreement was that these titles were necessary to map to a dimwitted external reality where someone would look at a business card and apply an immediate judgement on ability based on title. It's absurd when you think about it - the fact that I'd hand you a business card that read "VP" and you'd leap to the immediate assumption: "Since his title is VP, he must be important. I should be talking to him". I understand this is how a lot of the world works, but it's precisely this type of reasoning that makes titles toxic. They didn't start out toxic. They started out as a means to give folks a path towards growth.

The Leadership Path

When your company gets a little larger, when the team has been on board for more than a few years, you need to give folks a growth path. There are two paths that need definition. I'm going to define these relative to software engineering, but my gut feeling is that these paths are similar for many types of jobs.

The first track created is the lead or management track, and this shows up first organically out of necessity because there are too many of you. At 25 people you could keep everyone on the same page because each person was able to maintain state with each other person. The leadership track shows up so that communication and decisions can be sensibly organized.

This is a major development for a growing company because this might be the first title arriving. Lead or manager, whatever you call it, the question is the same: is it a job or a title? A job is a well-defined thing that has a clear and easy to understand set of responsibilities. A title often has neither.

A good way to explain this is to imagine the poor use of titles in Toxic Title Douchebag World. In this imaginary world, the first five hires after the founders have given themselves impressive sounding titles. VP of Business Development or Director of Advanced Technology. If you're employee #34 and someone is walking around the building calling themselves the SVP of Platform Engineering, you might be in Toxic Title Douchebag World.

I'm not suggesting that this is not an accomplished person. I'm not saying that they don't have a wealth of experience or fantastic ideas, but never in my life have I ever stared at a fancy title and immediately understood the person's value. It took time. I spent time with those people -- we debated, we discussed, we disagreed -- and only then did I decide: "This guy... he really knows his stuff. I have much to learn." In Toxic Title Douchebag World, titles are designed to document the value of an individual sans proof. They are designed to create an unnecessary social hierarchy based on ego.

When that first title shows up for your first leader, ask yourself: does this title reflect a job I consider to be real and of obvious value? If the answer is anything other than a resounding yes, your titles might be toxic.

The People Path

Let's say you've avoided Toxic Title Douchebag World when the leadership titles landed. Let's make the big assumption that everyone sees leadership jobs as equivalent to any other jobs. Congratulations. There's more opportunity for toxicity forthcoming.

The second growth path that needs to be defined is harder than the leadership path because of the inherent difficulty in defining the jobs. The forcing function for leadership was driven by a need to improve efficiency, communication, and accountability. The forcing function for the People Path is growth.

You likely didn't define the Leadership Path out of a need to grow your people; you did it to scale your company. The fact that this new job is seen as a promotion is a happy byproduct of the job's existence. Problem is, the majority of your company is never going to be managers, but they want to grow, too.

This is where a critical mistake is usually made. The folks who successfully landed the lead title think, "Well, when we needed leaders we called them leads, so why don't we create new titles for folks to give them the same sense of promotion and advancement."

No no no no and no. To understand how this breaks down, let's head back to Toxic Title Douchebag World.

In this world, our SVP of Talent looks at his 119 employes and 17 leads and thinks, "Well, the folks who are the most cranky are the engineers who have been here the longest, so I'll do what I did at my former company -- I'll create titles: Associate Engineer, Engineer, Senior Engineer, Staff Engineer, and Architect."

By themselves, these titles are not completely toxic. It's the process by which the SVP of Talent assigns these titles. Here are a few samples of his increasingly flawed reasoning:

• He creates a stack ranking of employees based on years of tenure and last year's performance rating.
• He draws lines on this list to create groups. Where does he draws these lines? Well, it's based on his mood.
• With this group done, he passes it on to the leads who he thinks will have good opinions about the groups, but in reality will mostly share his opinion without question.

If you don't have blinding teeth-grinding rage after reading those three bullets, I'll put you over the edge. This isn't really Toxic Title Douchebag World: this is your world. This grim, poorly defined decision process has heralded the arrival of a lot of title systems that you're living with right now.

Now, those who designed and deployed titles don't intend to do harm. They are, hopefully, intending to build a rational system for growth, but what they don't account for is that...

You are a Beautiful Snowflake

How do you compare two engineers with equivalent years of experience? Comparing their years on the job is an easy empirical comparison and it's not a crazy assumption that someone with more years on the job has more refined skills. But can you quantitatively measure those skills? No.

Phil and Felix both have four years of experience. Both have worked on the same team and the same project, but Phil works so much better with people, whereas Felix is happier hiding in the shadows and working on well sequestered projects. Felix is world-class at measuring performance, whereas it appears Phil doesn't really know how to add. However, Phil is a steady, leveling voice during times of crisis where your impression is that Felix wouldn't mind if it all burned to the ground.

You need both of these guys, but there is no one title which describes both of them. Phil's title should be Humble Math-Addled Keeper of the Peace whereas Felix would be The Dark Lord of Performance and Snark. Their jobs are clearly as engineers, but defining a single title is a slippery exercise in comparing two things that are incomparable.

The main problem with systems of titles is that people are erratic, chaotic messes who learn at different paces and in different ways. They can be good at or terrible at completely different things, even while doing more or less the same job. A title has no business attempting to capture the seemingly infinite ways by which individuals evolve. They are imprecise frameworks used to measure the masses. To allow leadership to bucket individuals into convenient chunks so they can award compensation and measure seniority while also serving as labels that are somehow expected to give us an idea about expected ability. This is an impossibly tall order and at the root of title toxicity.

When Felix learns that he's a Senior Engineer and Phil is a Staff Engineer, he loses his shit. Why? Because he perceives his value as performance engineer extraordinaire as significantly more valuable than Phil's value as a guy who just gets along with people. Titles place an absolute professional value on individuals, where the reality is that you are a collection of skills of varying ability. Some are your super power, some are your Achilles heels, and none are clearly defined by a title.

R.I.P. Business Cards, Resumes, and Titles

Business cards are dead. Yes, I feel bad when I'm at a conference and someone hands me their gorgeous business card and looks expectantly for mine. Sorry, I don't have one. Well, I do. You're looking at it right now. It doesn't fit in your wallet, but it saves a little bit of a tree and has vastly more information than a business card.

Resumes, in their current form, I hope, are not far behind. It's convenient to have a brief overview of someone's career when we sit down to interview, but more often than not, when I'm interviewing you, I'm searching Google for more substance. Do you have any sort of digital footprint? A weblog? A GitHub repository? It's these types of artifacts that give me the beginning of insight into who you are. It's by no means a complete picture, but it's far more revealing than a bunch of tweets stitched together in a resume.

Titles, I believe, are an artifact of the same age that gave us business cards and resumes. They came from a time when information was scarce. When there was no other way to discover who you were other than what you shared via a resume. Where the title of Senior Software Engineer was intended to define your entire career to date.

This is one of those frustrating articles where I gnash my teeth furiously about a problem, but don't offer a concrete solution because I haven't solved for this problem and I'm wondering if anyone else has. I believe there is a glimmer of a good idea regarding gauging and annoucing ability in ideas like Open Badges but the burden of progress is a two-way street.

For a leader of humans, it's your responsibility to push your folks into uncomfortable situations where they'll learn, document, and recognize their accomplishments, and help them recover from the failures as quickly as possible.

For the individual, it's about continually finding new jobs. In my career, I've been a student, a QA engineer, an engineer, a manager, and a writer. Each job is a path I've chosen. I've had much support along the way, but, more importantly, I've never been content to be complacent, nor ever believed there weren't more jobs to be discovered, and always knowing that I'm more than a title.

For me, the joy arrives when I successfully distill a complex thought down to fit the 140-character restraint of Twitter. These blurbs can easily come off as platitudes, but my hope is that there is wisdom packed among the words. The sadness comes from the words that are missing and the fact that tweets aren't really designed to become conversations.

When I observe how I consume information, I've become increasingly aware of how little actual deep information I'm consuming. Each morning, I launch a series of tab groups (News, Nerds, Apple, Games, Hockey) in my browser, and as I read each of the front pages in these groups, I'm basically reading tweets -- the short headlines that describe what occurred. Sometimes I'll drill down on an article, but again, if I carefully consider my reading of them, my eyes dart from headline to headline without truly consuming and digesting the words.

I am learning something. The article I'm lightly consuming has become bookmarked in my head, and if it comes up in casual conversation later in the day, I can vigorously nod and say, "Yes, yes, I read that". But I haven't really. I noted the shortest version of it; I can quote the simplest version of it. I have a facade of the story and the illusion of knowledge.

I miss long thoughts.

Everyone

When my friend Jeff Atwood contacted me last year after he departed StackOverflow, and told me he was going to reinvent forum software, my reaction was likely similar to yours. Forum software... what a fucking mess. Thing is, I remember what forum software was supposed to be because I am willing to date myself and declare that I remember when forum software was high signal. I remember BBSes.

A bajillion years ago, pre-mainstream Internet, forum software was the primary means of communication on BBS systems. You dialed up on a modem, logged into a BBS, and you read message boards, which were the primitive precursor to forum software. Initially, there were no likes, avatars, conversation threads, or reputation. In fact, we believed we were innovating when we got the cursor to spin.

I shit you not.

The discourse on these message boards was not complex. I vaguely remember writing a three-paragraph review of the most recent Journey album and my hazy assumption is that there were more exclamation points than words. We hid behind fake names, but were defining the simple rules of communication among a digital population. Add something to the conversation. Stay on topic. Don't be a jerk.

More importantly, we were having a discussion. You logged in each time to see what someone else had said about what you said. Yes, there were early versions of griefers and trolls, but there were also healthy discussions about that particular message board's subject, accompanied by a distinct sense of smallness.

And then everyone showed up.

It was a good thing -- the everyone -- but message boards, which were now becoming known as forums, were not built for Everyone.

Everyone is a lot. It's the people who care about what they say and those who don't give a shit. It's the ones who carefully choose every word and people who find joy only in finding flaws. There are those who can't punctuate and those who don't care to spell. ALL CAPS showed up then and we learned how to abuse signatures, typefaces, and color.

Forums didn't keep up. Forums didn't evolve. They were built on the concept that a handful of system operators maintained the peace and kept the discussion focused, but there were just too many people with too many conflicting agendas. No one was interested in moving to the state of the art of forum software because the signal had degraded to noise. No one wants a platform to deliver more noise.

Forum software receded to the dark edges of the Internet where, mostly hidden, the conversation could continue... quietly. Dedicated users would carefully police these dark corners where a conversation could occur. Meanwhile, the core ideas of forum software evolved as the construct of comment systems, but the software that represented groups of conversational threads languished.

Rebuilding the Fabric of the Internet

Our current communication constructs make us intellectually lazy. It's too easy to blurt out what you're thinking on Twitter and Facebook and then forget you said anything at all. It serves a specific purpose -- sharing status or fortune cookie wisdom -- but what if your thought is bigger than that? What if your thought is half-baked and in need of additional eyeballs? Where do you go to have an actual productive debate on the Internet? Start a blog... great... add some friends, write some content, and have it out in the comments.

The problem with comments is that they've evolved alongside the social constructs of Twitter and Facebook where a comment is little more than a sometimes lengthy status update. See, I have an idea and it's long and it's half-done. I need you to comment on paragraphs 3, 4, and 8. I'm also curious what everyone else has to say so I'll keep coming back for days as new conversations arrive and I continue to evolve my core idea. Maybe I'll branch a juicy part of it and that'll be a whole new thread.

A discussion is a living, breathing thing, like code, and we need a sophisticated set of tools that both manage the conversation and also stay the hell out of the way. Simple works if your thought is short. What we need is a tool that works with the long thought.

The Long Thought

The lesson I learned building product at Borland, Netscape, Apple, and Palantir is that ideas improve with eyeballs. I understand that what makes a team strong is its ability to communicate, share, and iterate on its ideas. Inside of companies, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on software that enables us to share and iterate on ideas. Outside of that firewall, it's a chaotic fucking mess where it often appears that the state of the art for discussion is... wait for it... email lists.

Elsewhere, social software has evolved. We've learned about the powerful feedback mechanisms of a Like, a +1, and a new follower. We understand that a well-defined digital reputation is a task an individual will work hard to build and maintain. We know the complexity of the interface will greatly affect the likelihood of whether a human will choose to participate in that community. All of these lessons need to be considered relative to forum software, which is my favorite part of Discourse's mission: "We're on a five-year mission to improve the Internet..."

I think the current state of Discourse is quite good, but it's going to take years -- years of discourse -- to make the software world-class. Discourse will use Discourse and discourse to improve Discourse. Say that five times fast.

Discourse (and now is a good time to say that I happily serve on the board at the company) is a total reboot of forum software, which I believe is an essential unit of communication on the Internet, and, I hope, a worthy home for long thoughts.

Folks, in order to make sure that we hit our ship date, we have a new bug triage... process.

You've heard the groans and you've seen the rolling eyeballs and made the fair assumption that engineers are genetically predisposed to hate process. It's an incorrect assumption that doesn't add up. Engineers are creatures who appreciate structure, order and predictability, and the goal of a healthy process is to define structure so order is  maintained and predictability is increased. The job of a software engineer is writing code, which is codified process.

So, what gives? Why the groaning?

Engineers don't hate process. They hate process that can't defend itself.

Don't Answer the Question

At Apple, there is a creature called an Engineering Program Manager ("EPM"). Their job is process enforcement. They are the folks who sat in meetings like bug reviews and made sure that every part of the process was being followed. As a person who prefers to spend mental cycles on the people and product rather than the process, I appreciated the role of the EPM.

A good EPM's job is to keep the trains on time by all reasonable means. However, my experience with program managers over the past two decades is that 70% of them are crap because while they are capable of keeping the trains running on time, they don't know why they're doing what they're doing. When someone on the team asked them to explain the reasoning behind the process, they'd say something to the effect of, "Well, this is how we've always done it..."

If you want to piss me off, if you want me to hugely discount your value, do this: when I ask you a clarifying question that affects how I will spend my time, my most valuable asset, don't answer the question. This non-answer is the root cause of an engineer's hatred of process. A tool that should help bring order to the universe is a blunt instrument that incites rage in the hands of the ignorant.

Healthy Process is Awesome

It pains me to type that heading because of the 70% out there who are giving process a bad reputation with their blind enforcement. But if we explore where process might come from, you'll understand three things: the circumstances that lead to the necessity of process, how it could be awesome, and most importantly, your role in maintaining the awesome.

With a small team, mostly you don't need process because everyone knows everything and everyone. You don't have to document how things occur because folks know how to get it done, and if they don't they know exactly the right person to ask. If something looks broken, you don't hesitate to stand up and say, "That's broken. Let's fix it." You do this because, as a small team, you feel equally responsible for the company because everyone is doing everything.

Hidden among all this work are essential parts of your company that everyone knows, but no one sees: your values and your culture. If you're a small team, you likely don't have a mission statement, you have the daily impossible amount of work you must do to survive and the way you do that work is an embodiment of your culture and your values.

Now, if you stopped someone in the hallway of this hypothetical company and asked them to explain the values, they'd look at you like a crazy person and give you exactly the same damning answer as the program manager above: "Well, this is how we've always done it." Double standard? No. The difference here is that if you could actually get the attention of the hallway person, if you pressed them, they'd be able to explain themselves. When you asked them, "Why must we debate every decision?" they'd say, "We encourage debate because we want to make the most informed possible decision."

Then, at some magical Dunbar number, you pass two interrelated inflection points. First, the number of new hires arriving exceeds your population's ability to organically infect culture and values. Second, because of the vast swath of preexisting people, the arriving individual erroneously believes that they as a single person can no longer influence the cultural course of the company. The team is fractured into two different groups that want exactly the same thing:

#1 The Old Guard. These are the folks who have been there for what seems like forever. They understand the culture and the values because they've been living and breathing them. They have a well-defined internal map of the different parts of the company that consist of the rest of the Old Guard. Whether they like it or not, they are the exemplars of what the company values.

#2 The New Guard. These folks have arrived in the last year and while they understand that there is culture and there are values out there, they spend a lot of time confused about these topics because no one has taken the time to sit them down and explain them and the folks who are qualified to do so are busy keeping the ship pointed in the right direction. This situation is exacerbated by the fact they don't have an internal map of the company in their head and they don't know who to ask what, so once their honeymoon period is over, they get angry because they don't know why they're doing what they're doing.

Problem is, the Old Guard can't conceive of a universe where everyone doesn't know everything, and they have difficulty explaining what they find obvious. The Old Guard begins to hear the New Guard's crankiness, but their suggestion is, "Duh, fix it. It's your company. That's what I did." This useless platitude only enrages the New Guard because while they desperately want to fix it - they don't know how - and having the Old Guard with their informed confidence and flippancy imply it's simple is maddening.

Eventually, meetings are convened, whiteboards are filled with suggestions, and while different companies give the end result different names, it's the same outcome: someone volunteers to document the means by which we get stuff done. They document the process.

When you think of process, I want you to think of this moment because it could be a noble moment. Process is being created not as means of control; it's being built as documentation of culture and values. It's likely you can't imagine this moment because you've been clubbed into submission understanding process as the dry documentation of how rather than the essential explanation of why.

The Dry Documentation of How

Here's some really boring process for you. It's an internal transfer process. Leads refer to it when someone wants to move from one group to the next. Chances are, you may even be aware this thing exists. Lucky bastard. Here's the breakdown:

• Employees must have been in their current job for one year before applying for a new job.
• Employees must have a performance rating of solid or higher in order to apply for a transfer.
• An employee may have one conversation with a new job's hiring manager before discussing the internal transfer with their current hiring manager.
• And it goes on, but you get the idea.

Who wrote this? HR prescriptive bullshit, right?  Yeah, it probably was someone in HR that wrote this years before you arrived, but they were trying to help. When it was 42 of us, how did this internal transfer happen? Well, Frank wanted to try out design, so he talked with the design lead, Luke, who then talked with Frank's lead, Alex, over a beer and it was done in a week.

This informal conversational process doesn't work at 420 people for a lot of reasons: Frank doesn't know if there are opportunities in design because he doesn't know Luke. If he does figure out that there is a gig and has a chat, Larry doesn't even think to talk with Alex because they don't know each other. This leads to all sorts of misunderstandings and crankiness about who knows what, which leads to trust issues, crap communication, and politics that could have been all avoided if we simply agreed to document how our company felt about internal transfers.

I want you to look at this boring process from the perspective of someone who cares about preserving culture. What values are they attempting to capture? Look again.

• Employees must be in their current job for one year before applying for a new job. We meet our commitments to our teams.
• Employees must have a performance rating of solid or higher in order to apply for a transfer. If someone is failing at their job, we work to improve them rather than shuffling the problem elsewhere in the company. We fix problems, we don't ignore them.
• An employee may have one conversation with a new job's hiring manager before discussing the internal transfer with their current hiring manager. We understand that situations change. We want people to grow, but we are adamantly transparent in our communications because we know that poor communications results in painful misunderstandings.

The unfortunate fact is that when an internal transfer policy does need to be defined, it often falls to an HR person who is good at defining process, but is shitty at explaining the culture. This means that as they diligently and capably do their job, they're also merrily eroding your communicated culture and values. Process should be written by those who are not only intimately experiencing the pain of a lack of process, but who are also experts in the culture.

Imagine all process as a means of capturing and documenting culture and values. Unfortunately, in a larger company, it doesn't work that way. Even if qualified cultural bellwethers took the time to document their pain and to write a process, these folks eventually leave. When they leave so does their cultural context, and the root pain that defined the process leaves with them. The company forgets the stories of how we ended up with all these bulleted lists, and when someone asks why, no one knows the story.

Defend Itself

An engineer instinctively asks why. When someone or something doesn't make sense to them, they raise their hand and say, "This feels inefficient. Explain this to me." Now, they don't usually ask that way. They usually ask in a snarky or rude fashion that gives the process enforcers rage, but snarkiness aside, the engineer is attempting to discover the truth behind the bulleted list.

Anyone who interacts with process has a choice. You can either blindly follow the bulleted lists or you can ask why. They're going to ignore you the first time you ask, the second time, too. The seventh time you will be labeled a troublemaker and you will run the risk of being uninvited to meetings, but I say keep asking why. Ask in a way that illuminates and doesn't accuse. Listen hard when they attempt to explain and bumble it a bit because maybe they only know a bit of the origin story.

It's a myth, but healthy process is awesome if it not only documents what we care about, but is willing to defend itself. It is required to stand up to scrutiny and when a process fails to do so, it must change.

Insist on understanding because a healthy process that can't defend itself is a sign that you've forgotten what you believe.

With the quiet of the holiday season, I wanted to take a step back and analyze a question I've had for years: should I be writing less... more? I'm averaging around two articles a month and the trend is that the articles are getting longer and slightly less frequent. My question was: how was this trend affecting my traffic? Thanks to years of analytics and my obsessive nerd tendancies, I can start to consider these questions:

The following is a graph with two Y-axis: the left axis includes total page views, visits, and uniques. While I've obscured the detailed totals, for context, in 2012 I did ~ 1.2M page views. The right axis and the red bars represent the number of articles published in that year. Again, for context, this is the 20th piece published in 2012.

To my surprise, for the first four years I was keeping regular stats, my traffic was shrinking. I had no idea. At a glance, it looks like the trend downward is related to the number of articles, but in 2011, the traffic picked up even though I was still writing less. This trend continued in 2012 when I wrote the least amount in terms of number of articles, but had the best year in terms of traffic. Further investigation is warranted.

2007 was the debut of The Nerd Handbook and if there was ever an article that defined this site, it was this piece that explained to the significant others of nerds what the situation was with all the nerdery. A Glimpse and a Hook was in the sidebar for years (and only recently replaced by Bored People Quit) and stood out as practical and usable advice for your resume. (For the record, resumes are dead, we're just in denial) N.A.D.D., a piece I wrote in 2003, took the #3 spot in 2007 and is testimony to how much ongoing traffic you can garner with a single popular article. #4 was the debut of The Button continuing my "Looking for a new Gig" series. Finally, The Gel Dilemma, my obsessing about gel pens, took the #5 spot.

In 2008, a year I now see was a traffic down year, the top 3 pieces were articles I'd written the past year: The Nerd Handbook, Glimpse, and NADD represented 20% of page views in 2008. Two new articles broke the top 5: Out Loud was my first piece on developing presentations (and my love of Keynote). Horrible was my explanation of the futility of improving yourself where you were legitimately impaired.

In what will be a recurring theme, The Nerd Handbook returned in the #1 spot in 2009. It was a year where traffic losses appeared to stabilize. Glimpse returned in #2, but The Words You Wear was a new piece that continued my war against managementese. Gaming the System was my first foray into applying ideas of gamification into shipping software. The Maker of Things - a love note to the Brooklyn Bridge - was #5 on the year and remains one of my favorite pieces that I've written.

2010 was a down year. I haven't looked at the detail traffic stats as I type this, but based on history, I'd guess that the top 5 was dominated by existing pieces. Odd, I'm wrong. The Nerd Handbook remains in #1, but #2 was the arrival of a popular piece - How to Write a Book - which explained the final days writing Being Geek. At #3, The Update, the Vent, and Disaster documented my experiences with running 1:1s. Glimpse dropped to #4 and #5 was my treatise on How to Run a Meeting. What is unique about 2010 is the number of articles I wrote was down and you'd think that was why traffic was down, but, as you'll learn, you're wrong.

2011 was the first year since 2007 that the #1 spot was replaced. Bored People Quit garnered Nerd Handbook-type traffic. Nerd Handbook remained steady in the #2 spot followed by How to Write Book. You are Underestimating the Future was my goodbye note to Steve Jobs and grabbed the #4 spot which is impressive since it was written late in the year. Managing Nerds which I thought would be Nerd Handbook like, landed in the #5 - less impressive since it had all year to gather traffic.

Traffic wise, 2012 was my best year ever. Like 2010, I wrote 19 pieces (this is the 20th), but unlike 2010, the top 5 were dominated by new content. #1 - Someone is Coming to Eat You was a post-Steve Jobs piece regarding innovation followed by an exploration of hacking in Hacking is Important. #3 continued my innovation exploration in Innovation is a Fight with an analysis of the departure of Scott Forstall from Apple whereas #4 was a plea for folks to Please Learn To Write. #5 was A Design Primer for Engineers, again, the first piece of the year that I expected to fare better.

If you look at total traffic for the past six years, the articles you'd expect are the leaders. They're the ones in the right bar because they're the ones that continue to resonate and therein lies the answer to my question. The interesting aspect of traffic to me is to understand: was what I wrote valuable?

I scratch my link blog itch with Twitter, I share my travels with Instagram, but here - I continue to learn how to write.

Thank you for reading and Happy New Year.

And I eagerly take photos with my iPhone every single day.

It is with equal irony that the app I need the most to post my photos is the one I use the least - Instagram. Now, I love Instagram and there is no denying that the team hit on a pitch perfect combination of the right, minimal feature set during a critical rise of mobile phone operating systems. But the majority of my learning about how to take and edit photographs with my iPhone has occurred outside of Instagram where I figured out how to be a better storyteller.

Here's what I've learned and how I've learned it:

Find your edit. The initial attraction of Instagram is one-stop shopping. The application does represent a complete solution for capturing, editing, and posting a photo. Instagram found a sweet spot for the core set of essential tools, and much of my early photography with it was spent exploring what I could capture in a square photograph and how that capture might interact with Instagram's clever spectrum of filters.

There is a special pride that comes from taking and posting a photograph that you feel needs no editing - when you've found that perfect combination of composition and color. But in my experience, the majority of photographs will benefit from some type of editing. I came to this realization with my beloved Gotham filter in Instagram, which did something absolutely magical with blue skies and clouds. Gotham instantly transformed a bland horizon shot into something that appeared to be from another planet.

For reasons I still don't understand, Instagram removed Gotham from the 2.0 release. Infuriated, I took to the Internet to understand how this filter I loved was constructed. Turns out, it's a non-trivial process outside of Instagram, which originally involved three different applications. The Gotham reconstruction process not only returned an approximation of my favorite filter, it showed me what decent amount of work Instagram did in order to find a set of compelling filters. More importantly, though, I learned that with equal work, I could build any filter I wanted.

You can hang out exclusively in Instagram, but my advice is to figure out how to recreate your favorite filter in other applications, such as Camera+ or Snapseed, because in doing so, you'll discover there are infinite filters at your disposal.

Light is only useful if you can see it. Or its absence. My next discovery has to do with lighting. In flying back and forth between the west and east I discovered I had a cloud problem. I couldn't stop taking pictures of clouds, but I also discovered there were optimal times to capture their shape and texture: sunrise and sunset.

What's going on the during these two distinct times of day? First, there are more yellows, oranges, and reds in the sky as the sun refracts out more of the light spectrum, but more importantly, there are shadows. You're going to read more about my fascination with contrast in a bit, but what is magical about sunrise and sunset is the strange black shapes that slowly stretch across the landscape. Objects you stare at every day are framed by oddly twisted and stretched shadows of themselves and it's these mutated mirror images that capture my eye.

It's instinct for me now. When the sun is either rising or setting, I look where it is in the sky and and I look in two directions: directly at the sun to see what it's playing with:

And then I look around to see what other shadows it's created:

I prefer contrast and drama. My standard editing process starts in Snapseed. I use "Tune Image" to adjust brightness, ambiance, contrast, and saturation. I rarely touch white balance. As you can see, I have a fascination with high contrast and deeply saturated photos. My wife does not and I wonder if that makes her a better casual photographer than I, but then I stop wondering because such mental excursions are a waste of energy.

While feedback from likes or comments are one of my favorite ways to get a sense of how folks feel about a photo, and while I love to see what other folks are building on Instagram, the joy of a great photograph is that it speaks to you. I love finding circles, deep perspective, vibrant colors, and contrast everywhere. This is why my last move in Snapseed is to try the Drama filter. This unique filter performs some crazy HDR transformation that finds unexpected depth in clouds, carves out deep shadows, and adds texture everywhere. Drama often takes my breath away.

Black and white strips away color and reveals unexpected stories. I'm just back from a family vacation in Costa Rica and if Costa Rica were to nominate a national color that color would be green. In the areas we traveled, the average rainfall ranged from 80 to 200 inches a year and that means green everywhere. Given my preference for deeply saturated colors, you'd expect lots of jungle, and Costa Rica didn't disappoint, but my favorite jungle shot didn't have a smidge of green.

A lesson I learned in my reverse engineering of the Gotham filter was the strange power of black and white filters. The removal of color allows other elements of the photo to emerge. The haziness of the rainy sky. The pleasing geometry of buildings. The perspective afforded by fog. The original image is a blast of greens and reds and would've shown little of what I just described. The lesson of black and white photos is similar to the lesson of Instagram: what you remove, how you reduce, may allow previously hidden simplicity to appear.

My process for black and white varies, but the approximation of Gotham starts in Snapseed, where I perform the same image tuning as I described above. I follow that up with applying the red, black and white filter before I jump over to Camera+. In this app, I do the following:

• Select the Darken filter.
• Apply the Silver Gelatin filter at 50%. Apply changes.
• Apply the Vibrant filter at 25%. Apply changes.
• Lastly, apply the Cyanotype filter at ~10%. Apply changes.

Instant gorgeous Gotham. R.I.P.

People lose their shit for fog. Or, maybe, there is nothing negative about negative space. My last learning has to do with disproportionate value. There are a couple of semi-guaranteed moves that generate good photos and I think they relate to this article's theme.

First, if you want a reaction from your audience, I recommend fog. Like... any fog. I can rarely predict the audience reaction to my photos, but I know that fog is a crowd pleaser. I know this because one of my first well-received photographs, I believe, is only magical because of the fog that provided an otherwise unattainable Middle Earth quality.

Second, and similarly, I want to note the power of negative space. My gut instinct is to fill the photographic frame up with stuff, and that's precisely the opposite of what your eye wants to see. If you go back and look at my photo history, you'll notice I have a real problem with horizons and clouds - I can't stop taking pictures of them. However, you might also notice that the amount of horizon I capture is slowly decreasing. Negative space is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image, and what I've discovered after several thousand Instagrams is that the more negative space I place in a photo, the more story it tells.

Find a Story

A good picture tells a complete story. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. Unlike an actual written story, the words are captured in objects, color, light and arrangement. But the combination of each of these aspects is only half the story. The other half is provided by the viewer. It's the story they tell themselves as they process the image in a way that is entirely unique to them.

My belief is that good photography involves the same process as good application and hardware design. You find the essence of what you are photographing, writing, or building and that means you need to be willing to strip away the unnecessary over and over again. In a world where we love to preserve our options, reduction feels limiting, but sensible reduction allows the consumers of the work to better tell their own story.

Stephen, a guy we hired as a temporary contractor to tidy up our database layer, grabbed the greenest of engineers, moved into the ping-pong room, and told the engineer, "We are not leaving this room until we can see the application actually work."

The engineer asked, "What does 'work' mean?"

Stephen, "I don't know, we'll figure it out when we get there."

Ten days later, a reeking ping-pong room contained three-quarters of the engineering team, none of whom had slept in the last 48 hours. The green engineer stood up and demoed the application. For the first time in the company's history, the team could see and touch the idea. Three months later, we released 1.0.

It reads like an inspirational story. The whole team mobilizing for one last push to get the product out the door. Except Stephen didn't mobilize the whole team, he marshaled three-quarters of it.  While the folks who weren't sleeping in the ping-pong room clapped just as loudly when they saw the product, they knew the corners Stephen had cut to get it done because they'd seen the code. They knew many features were smoke-and-mirrors placeholders, they had big questions about scale, and most of all, they knew it'd be their job to clean up the mess because they'd seen Stephen's ilk before. They knew he was a Volatile.

The Factions

The reward for shipping 1.0 is a deep breath. Whew, we did it. In the days, weeks, and months that follow shipping 1.0, the work is equally important to your success. But you never forget the moment when you consider the product done, because you are intimately aware of the blood, sweat, and tears it took to get it there.

I've written a lot about shipping 1.0, but it's only recently that I've been thinking about what happens after a successful 1.0. First, yes, there is someone coming to eat you, but the act of shipping 1.0 creates an internal threat as well. The birth of 1.0 initiates a split of the development team into two groups: Stables and Volatiles. Before I explain why this rift occurs, let's understand the two groups.

Stables are engineers who:

• Happily work with direction and appreciate that there appears to be a plan, as well as the calm predictability of a well-defined schedule.
• Play nice with others because they value an efficiently-run team.
• Calmly assess risk and carefully work to mitigate failure, however distant or improbable it might be.
• Tend to generate a lot of process because they know process creates predictably and measurability.
• Are known for their calm reliability.

Volatiles are the engineers who:

• Prefer to define strategy rather than follow it.
• Have issues with authority and often have legitimate arguments for anarchy.
• Can't conceive of failing, and seek a thrill in risk.
• See working with others as time-consuming and onerous tasks, prefer to work in small, autonomous groups, and don't give a shit how you feel.
• Often don't build particularly beautiful or stable things, but they sure do build a lot.
• Are only reliable if it's in their best interest.
• Leave a trail of disruption in their wake.

Lastly and most importantly, these guys and gals hate -- hate -- each other. Volatiles believe Stables are fat, lazy, and bureaucratic. They believe Stables have become "The Man." Meanwhile, Stables believe Volatiles hold nothing sacred and are doing whatever they please, company or product be damned. Bad news: everyone is right.

Because of this hate, there's a good chance that these two factions are somehow at war in your company, and while all your leadership instincts are going to tell you to negotiate a peace treaty, you might want to encourage the war. Hold that thought while I explain where the war started.

A Stable Evolution

I'm of the opinion that many successful Stables used to be Volatiles who are recovering from the last war. Think about it like this. Go back to your successful 1.0. You're taking your deep breath because you appear to be past the state of imminent failure, enough money is showing up, and the team is no longer working every single weekend just to keep the lights on. My question: "How'd you get there?"

Someone bled.

The birth of a successful 1.0 is a war with convention and common sense. It is built around a handful of Volatiles who believe that "We can bring this new thing into the world," and no one believes them. It's excruciating, and the majority of Volatiles who embark on this quest will fail, but if and when success arrives, those who survive are scarred and weary. More importantly, they are intimately aware of what it cost to get here and they want to protect it.

This is how a perfectly respectable and disruptive Volatile transforms into a Stable. They are eager to make sure the team does not return to a war-like state because, well, war sucks. These emerging Stables build process and carefully describe how things should be done because they have the scars and experience to do so. They hire more people and they become a moderate-sized, well-run engineering team. They hire people who are familiar, who have traits that remind them of themselves. Yes, they hire engineers who are predisposed to be Volatile.

Unintentionally, they plant the seeds for the next war.

See, these new Volatiles arrive and they look around and they are told, "This is a well-run machine built on the success of the first war. Shiny, isn't it?" The Volatiles nod cautiously, but in their heads they're thinking, "Shiny. Polished. This isn't very exciting. I mean, it's certainly pretty, but where is the threat? Who is coming to eat us?" The irony is that the Volatiles want exactly what created this company in the first place. The thrill of 1.0, but when they make their intentions known, the recently minted Stables show up and start yelling, _YOU THINK YOU WANT 1.0 BUT LOOK AT THESE SCARS - YOU DON'T WANT A PIECE OF THIS. IT'S WAR. WAR SUCKS._

The Volatiles nod and acquiesce, but this does not scratch their disruptive itch. They continue to believe the right thing is something risky and something new. We need to make a big bet.

This transformation of first generation Volatiles to Stables among the arrival of the second generation Volatiles is the source of an amazing amount of organizational discontent. It's how a team that used to cohesively sit on the same floor stratifies and fractures into multiple teams on many floors where there is an emerging, unfamiliar sense of us and them. It's the beginning of the worst kind of politics and gossip, and it's often the source of the vile reputation managers receive for being out of touch.

The arrival and organization of the new Volatiles actively disrupts the organization. While it is dangerous work and well-intentioned people will yell at me, your job as a leader is to nurture this disruption.

Wait, What?

Once you're successfully past 1.0, you have a choice: coast and die, or disrupt. No one in history has ever actually chosen coast and die; everyone thinks they're choosing the path of continued disruption, but it's a very different choice when it's made by a Stable than by a Volatile. A Stable's choice of disruption is within the context of the last war. They can certainly innovate, but they will attempt to do so within the box they bled to build. A second-generation Volatile will grin mischievously and remind you, "There is no box."

Many incredibly successfully multi-billion-dollar companies fall under my definition of coast and die. They are sitting there, impressively monetizing their original excellent 1.0 for years -- for decades -- but there's a smell about them. Sure, the money is still pouring in, but what have they built that is actually new? They have huge sales forces, impressive glossy ad campaigns, and legions of lawyers, but you can't point at anything that they've built in the last five years where you thought, "Holy shit." That distinct musty smell is the lack of Holy Shit, and its presence sends Volatiles running, because that's the smell of stagnation. Volatiles want nothing to do with a group of people who no longer take risks because they believe the stagnation is death.

As a leader, you need to figure out how to invest in disruption, and this is counter-intuitive because disruption, by definition, is destructive. It breaks things that others covet.

While Apple is a good example of a company that doesn't give a shit about wars of the past, I think Amazon is an equally solid example of a company that has chosen to invest in their Volatiles. In 2002, they introduced Amazon Web Services and we all collectively scratched our heads: A company that sells books online is getting into online services for web sites? Whatever.

Present day, and I just returned from Ireland's amazing FunConf where I stood in a room full of developers who are intensely dependent on Amazon's vast array of web services. My belief is that years ago, some Volatile thought, We are not a seller of books, we are builders of technology. It's this type of Volatile thinking that has Amazon going toe to toe with Apple in an entirely different space. Who thinks it'd be crazy if Amazon did a phone? Not me.

I don't know the inner workings of Amazon, but when I see strategies that diverge wildly from conventional wisdom, I smell Volatiles at work.

Take Crazy Risks

I believe a healthy company that wants to continue to grow and invent needs to equally invest in both their Stables and their Volatiles.

Your Stables are there to remind you about reality and to define process whereby large groups of people can be coordinated to actually get work done. Your Stables bring predictability, repeatability, credibility to your execution, and you need to build a world where they can thrive.

Your Volatiles are there to remind you that nothing lasts, and that the world is full of Volatiles who consider it their mission in life to replace the inefficient, boring, and uninspired. You can't actually build them a world because they'll think you're up to something Stable, so you need to create a corner of the building where they can disrupt.

These factions will war because of their vastly different perspectives. Stables will feel like they're endlessly babysitting and cleaning up Volatiles' messes, while Volatiles will feel like the Stables' lack of creativity and risk acceptance is holding back the company and innovation as a whole. Their perspectives, while divergent, are essential to a healthy business. Your exhausting and hopefully never-ending job as a leader of engineers is the constant negotiation of a temporary peace treaty between the factions.

We were cleaning up the results of Stephen's Volatile engineering coup for years, but during that clean-up we went from zero customers to 30. We went from a handful of volatile engineers to a stable company of 200, and this was partly because Stephen gave us a chance to see our platform. But our platform was never done. The boost from Stephen got us out the door, but we were forever in a state of functional incompleteness and architectural inconsistency. The second-generation Volatiles pointed this out, but the Stables assured us that better is the enemy of done.

Eventually, the second platform began. It started as a side project in a silent fit of Volatile rage. It developed over weeks into the beginnings of an actual strategy, but the rebellion started too late. One big enterprise customer dropped us loudly when it was clear we never built for the scale we were selling. Credibility crumbled, the Volatiles bolted, and we sat there in the middle of the dot-com implosion consoling ourselves that "there were macroeconomic forces outside of our control", which is exactly what a Stable says when they've surrendered.

Apple's doom will start quietly and I doubt anyone can predict how it will actually begin. It will be historians who, decades from now, will easily pin its demise to a single event that will appear obvious given years of quantifiable insight. And it will only be "obvious" because the real details will have been twisted, clouded, or forgotten entirely, so it will all seem clearer, faster, and simpler. Their explanation will start with the passing of Steve Jobs, and they will draw a clear line to a subsequent event of significance and will say, "Here. This is it. This is when it began."

Executive rearrangements have been going on at Apple for years. Remember Mark Papermaster? Avie Tevanian? Jon Rubinstein? Steve Sakoman? Tony Fadell? Sina Tamaddon? Bertrand Serlet? Fred Anderson? Nancy Heinen? There's likely a compelling departure backstory for all of these key players, but the sheer length of this incomplete list gives some perspective to the recent announcement regarding Scott Forstall and John Browett - no big deal. Happens all the time.

Maybe.

Like Papermaster before him, all the signals point to the fact that Browett was not a cultural fit, which is Apple-speak for the organism having an intense allergic reaction to his arrival. Forstall, however, was old school. In my years at Apple, the Caffe Macs chatter about Forstall was that he was the only legit successor to Jobs because he displayed a variety of Jobsian characteristics. Namely:

• He was an asshole, but...
• Success seemed to surround him, and...
• No one was quite sure about the secret recipe to achieve this success.

While I'd continued to hear about the disdain amongst the executive ranks about Forstall after I left Apple, I was still shocked about his departure, because while he was in no way Steve Jobs, he was the best approximation of Steve Jobs that Apple had left. You came to expect a certain amount of disruption around him because that's how business was done at Apple - it was well-managed internal warfare. Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight. It's messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.

With Forstall's departure, I believe his former lieutenants have been distributed to Bob Mansfield, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, and Craig Federighi. While there is no doubt in my mind that these are talented and qualified leaders, are they disruptive? Are they incentivized as such? Because from where I'm standing, the guy in charge is possibly the most talented operational leader on the planet. And an operational leader's job is ferret out and exterminate all things that make their world less predictable and measured.

The word that worried me the most in the press release was in the first sentence. The word was "collaboration". Close your eyes and imagine a meeting with Steve Jobs. Imagine how it proceeds and how decisions are made. Does the word collaboration ever enter your mind? Not mine. I'm just sitting there on pins and needles waiting for the guy to explode and rip us to shreds because we phoned it in on a seemingly unimportant icon.

As someone who spends much of his time figuring out how to get teams to work together, the premium I'm placing on volatility might seem odd. I believe Apple benefits greatly from having a large, stable operational team that consistently and steadily gets shit done,  but I also believe that in order to maintain its edge Apple needs a group of disruptors.

Love him or hate him, Scott Forstall's departure makes Apple a more stable company, and I wonder if that is how it begins.

To this end, I would like to come to an agreement with you. Let's agree to small set of rules that we'll follow when we mail each other, ok?

An Email Contract

Before we start, there are two kinds of email: original content and follow-on content. Original content, an email that is the first mail in a potential thread, is the focus of this piece unless otherwise noted. Follow-on mails, the ones where everyone else jumps into the conversation willy-nilly, are an entirely other article.

Let's begin...

Say something of substance with your subject. (Perhaps with poetry.) The first line of defense against the absurd number of unread messages is the subject line. For a new topic, my expectation is that the subject line gives me an inkling of what I'm about to read. "Question" is not a subject. "Question regarding the impending disaster in engineering" is a better subject. The best, "Calamity is a man's true touchstone."

As I'm considering a subject line, I work under the erroneous, paranoid assumption that the someone I'm sending an email to is not going to read it. Chances are that they will, but when I fret about them not reading the mail, I get amazingly creative about making the subject line descriptive, relevant, and poetic.

Yes, poetry.

In the world of databases, there is a concept called an index. Simply put, an index makes finding the location of a single row of data much faster. A substantial portion of the field of computer science is devoted to the design and analysis of these data structures because computer scientists know what you know: finding what you're looking for quickly is awesome.

When you take a moment to add a bit of art to your subject line, you are indexing the mail in the minds of those who read it. You are making an impression, and that means not only are they more likely to read it, but also to remember it.

A three (or four) paragraph limit. I believe email is not a long form communication medium, and my rule of thumb is that an email should be no longer than three (or four) paragraphs. You might hate this stipulation.

Here's the deal. I'm not suggesting the three-paragraph limit because I'm in a hurry. What I'm asking you to do is think. I've made it past your subject line - super. Now, I'm staring at 14 paragraphs regarding whether we should or should not open a new office in Berlin. My unfortunate knee-jerk reaction to 14 paragraphs is to flag the message for later reading. Flagging a message for later reading creates the same fake sense of accomplishment as putting an item on a to-do list - you give yourself permission to never think about it again.

Our Berlin office is a big decision and every single one of your 14 paragraphs demonstrates this importance, but are we really going to make a decision of this magnitude via email? No. There's great content in your Berlin office opus, but I'm going to have lots of questions for which you are going to ask for clarification, and suddenly we're in the middle of a lengthy email thread and my question is, Wouldn't this have been easier if we had just sat down and had it out face to face?

One of the many joys of email revolves around instant gratification. There is a topic that is suddenly bugging you in the middle of the night, and you're not going to sleep until action, any action, has been taken, so you write an email. I get it.

Think. Yes, you want the problem solved, but is email the right medium for solving the problem? If the answer is yes, then start writing. When you get to that fourth paragraph, ask yourself again: is email the right medium? Are you writing this because you want to get it out of your system RIGHT NOW or because email is the correct place to start this conversation?

As a person who spends a good portion of his life figuring out what he thinks by writing it down, I have learned to recognize when an email is therapy is for me and only me. I still write that 17-paragraph opus about the horrifying mess that is our interview process, but halfway through the rant I realize this mail is just for me.

The amount of editing time doubles for each paragraph. Your instinct is to hit "Send". It's so satisfying to get to the end of your thought and just fire it off into the ether, but my request is that you reread it. I am particularly bad at this.

What makes an idea interesting to me is partially that I'm thinking it. In fact, it's so interesting that I'm going to write you an email on this interesting topic because by doing so I'm infecting you with its exciting and obvious interestingness. For me, the problem is that in my rabid fury of interestingness, my typing suffers. I drop words, I don't tie up logic, and often what starts as a well-intentioned email turns into a confusing, multi-paragraph mess.

With each paragraph you write, double the amount of time you spend editing. It's not just grammar and spelling errors that might be hurting your credibility. Is your point clear, literate, and concise? Have you pruned aggressively to find the core of what you're saying? With each additional paragraph, the higher the chance becomes that you've made an egregious mistake that might make your email confusing and forgettable.

If your instinct is to hit "Send" without any editing, my thought is that you're more interested in therapy than progress. This thing you are writing is important or we wouldn't be here, but by choosing to send this thing to others, the burden of clarity and coherence is on you.

A Sense of Doneness and Humanity

It takes practice, but after I've written three (or four) paragraphs, after I've reread them three (or four) times, after I've written my alliterative subject line, I am looking for a calming sense of doneness. This email... is done. It clearly, intelligently, and briefly describes my thought. I've exposed a truth. I've constructed a call to action. Now I finish with a smidge of humanity - I sign it.

I look at every signature in every single email and I assign a humanity value to it. Sincerely? Cordially? Best? Thoughts? No signature at all? You've taken the time to write these paragraphs, to transcribe your thoughts, and you've left me hanging?

At the gig, we're writing a lot of mail because we're very busy. I've noticed that we've taken to blasting through our paragraphs and either using a default signature or no signature at all and I'm of the opinion that an unsigned email is a lost opportunity to say something small and important.

Email is imprecise. It is easy to misinterpret. Email is a digital force of nature. It's not going anywhere, but email, while convenient and sometimes efficient, is dehumanizing. An original signature tailored to the email, no matter how brief, is a small reminder there is a human behind these three (or four) paragraphs who is worth your attention.

With hope,
Rands

These books have not aged well, or perhaps I've aged too much. When I recently picked up The Source of Magic, I appreciated the trip down memory lane, but it's a lane firmly entrenched in my youth. Other books of the time, Ender's Game and Asimov's Robot and Foundations series, have stood the test of time as evidenced by my ability to endlessly reread them.

Anthony wrote a mostly forgettable series called The Bio of a Space Tyrant. The series describes the rise of the Tyrant of Jupiter, hilariously named "Hope Hubris". Don't read it, but know that the main character's talents has stuck with me through the years because it relates to why you think engineers don't like you.

Show Me Your Power

Whether you're an engineer or not, if you're reading this there is a good chance that there are engineers in your life. And that means there is an equal chance that at some point an engineer appeared to not like you and you weren't quite sure why. Engineers are not a rare breed these days, but they are an odd breed. I've documented a lot of their, uh, attributes over the years. I've explained why they're system thinkers, where they like to work, and why they hate meetings, but I haven't explained why they hate you.

Ok, hate is a strong word. How about distrust? How about the sense that when you're sitting in the room that they're looking at you like you're an alien when all you're thinking is you're the alien.

There is a variety of nerd quirks that can lead to this social impedance. Yes, we are generally low on emotional intelligence. Yes, our preference is that we could resolve whatever called for this crap meeting via email. Yes, we don't like like talking to, you know, people, but a lot of that social awkwardness goes away when you've passed the Second Test.

Back to Piers Anthony's forgettable Tyrant series. Hope Hubris (seriously, that was his name) had the ability to look at someone and immediately understand their character. As the series progressed, characters in the book would ask him to "show me your power" and he'd immediately respond with a complete analysis of their character. I'd dig up a specific example, but I can't bear to read these books again.

Piers Anthony is a perfect read for the nerd teenager. He taps into the unabashed imagination of youth combined with the complex insecurities of the teen years. He also empowers. His Xanth books describe a land where magic exists everywhere and each person has a unique magical talent. In Tyrant, Hope's character assessment talent is the same type of empowering, impossible magical talent that appeals to the awkward nerd teen.

I've never forgotten Hope's talent because it's a test I employ on every new person in my professional world. It is the Second Test.

The Second Test

In your company, there are three kinds of people. There are those you are aware of, but who don't immediately affect your world. There are those who mildly affect  your world and upon whom you have a lightweight dependency. And there are those who are an active part of your world. You depend on them.

I don't want to depend on you. It's nothing personal, it's just that as an engineer I irrationally believe that anything I don't build with my own hands is going to get fucked up by someone else. I believe this because I've spent a good portion of my life watching other well-meaning people sit down at a computer and simply... make things harder for themselves.

It's an irrational, unfair, and annoying perspective, but when you're sitting there across from an engineer who has been forced to depend on you, he or she is wondering, "How are they are going fuck up my shit?"

The good news is that you already passed the First Test - you were hired. The folks sitting around the table hired you and that means they believe you should be there. Hopefully, it was a nontrivial process to get hired. Hopefully, they put you through a professional wringer and now that you're hired you're basking in a sense of accomplishment. Bad news, the Second Test is harder.

The Second Test is: you must build something of value as perceived by the organism.

It's a deceptively slippery test, so let me explain each part:

You must build something. You're thinking that I'm talking about coding or designing, but I'm not. I'm talking about a thing that you built by yourself, or for which you led development with others. You have mad skills of some sort and you have used those skills to build something that has previously not existed for the team.

Of value. This thing that you've built, this process that you've defined, this story that you told, it must be clear what value it's adding to the company. You rebuilt the front page of the website - terrific - does it tell the story of the company better? Does it feel like the company? You optimized our bug tracking system - splendid - did you actually make it better or are you just trying to show you can do useful stuff? This leads us to our final clause.

As perceived by the organism. This is the hard part. I see that you've built this thing and I attended the meeting where you eloquently explained the value of this thing, but the test isn't passed without independent confirmation. Even if I sat there nodding the entire time as you pitched me on the value, I'm not signed off until Arthur walks by, sticks his head in my office, and says, "Did you see the thing? That is going to save me hours each week. Awesome."

Engineers are meritocratic, which means we don't really care about your resume or your title. While your resume might be an interesting story that eventually led to your hiring, we want to see what you can build. Right now, that alien sitting across the table is wondering about your power. You passed the First Test, so the question now is, what power do you have and how are you going to use it for good? What you see in their eyes is not hate, it's a deep skepticism.

I'm Skeptical of Experts

An unwatched successful business gets fat. The money pouring in means there's far too much work, which means you go on a hiring spree. What was 15 folks rapidly becomes 50, and the experts start to show up. Experts are the folks who are allegedly really qualified to do a job. See, at 15 people everyone did a little bit of everything, but there is no time for that now because of the success. You think you need HR, Marketing, Sales, and Business Development.

Incorrect. What you need is people who get shit done.

I am not suggesting that the hardworking people in these other disciplines don't have amazingly complex and difficult jobs, but I do think they should be able to clearly describe the work they do and the value they provide... to anyone. They need to pass the Second Test, and that means being able to fully and clearly explain your job to the rest of your team not with words, but with action.

Most folks believe that if they can describe a job that they can do it. Most folks are wrong. I've been spun and burned by too many fast-talking, charismatic experts in my career to trust anything but results. The Second Test is not the exclusive domain of engineers. In most groups of people, there is a means by which you earn your stripes. The difference with engineers is a combination of their low tolerance for spin and their deep desire for measurability.

Passing the Second Test when engineers are involved means that you've built something that fully and clearly explains your power.

The problem starts with the word: listen. Of course you know how to listen. You sit there and let the words into your head. Perhaps your definition is more refined. Maybe your definition of listening involves hearing because you're aware of that switch in your head that you must flip to really hear what a person is saying. It's work, right? Pulling in all the words, sorting them in your head, and mapping them against the person who is speaking. That is listening, that is hearing, but if that's all you're doing and you're a leader of people, then you're still only halfway there.

Let's start with the most basic rule of listening: If they don't trust you, they aren't going to say shit.

A Listening Structure

First, context. The type of listening I'm going to describe is not the listening you're going to use all the time. This is the aggressive listening I employ with co-workers and friends, but once you understand the different parts of this seemingly laborious listening protocol, you'll start using them elsewhere. Another thing: there's armchair psychology going on below. I'm going to say "I feel" a lot and your inner systems nerd may rage, but my experience, after years of listening to all types of people, is that these are useful moves.

Second, it would be easy to flip this article and make it a piece about healthy and useful conversations. Some of my advice has to do with building these conversations, but my belief is that a good conversation starts with the ability to listen. A good conversation is a bunch of words elegantly connected with listening.

Let's start...

Open with innocuous preamble. In most discussions or 1:1s, you have an agenda. There is a question that you really want to ask. Don't start with this question. In fact, start with something small and innocuous. Crap openers like, "How are you?" or "What's up?" are actually better than blindsiding someone with, "Hey, I hear Oliver lost his shit in the design review. Weren't you running that? What happened there?"

Your preamble defines a quiet, safe place where you and your whomever can transition from wherever you were before you sat down together to this new, calm place where intelligent and reasonable conversation occurs. Your preamble states your intent: "Outside of this door it is professionally noisy. Inside of this room, we are going to talk and listen."

Look them straight in the eye and don't look at the clock. Once you're past your opener, it becomes a real challenge. See, Oliver losing his shit is actually a really big deal with lots of implications, and that's one of three disasters in progress today. Your preamble set the stage, but with all the disasters in progress, you need to focus.

It's simple, it's trivial, but attention is defined by eye contact. Think about the last time you sat in the audience in a huge presentation. Remember when the presenter walked to your side of the room and looked you straight in the eye? WHAM She's... looking at me. What I am going to do? For reasons I do not understand but completely feel, we are more mentally engaged when we're staring at each other's eyes. Eye contact is the easiest way to demonstrate your full attention and it's also the easiest way to destroy it.

23 minutes into your 1:1, you remember an essential part of one of the other disasters going on today and you glance at the clock... and they notice. Listening is built on a evolving attention contract that initially reads: "He is really busy and has no time for me". Each time that you successfully sit down and give someone else your full attention, the attention contract gradually evolves. After a time, it reads: "He and I meet each week and we honestly talk about what matters".

A single glance at your clock is not going to void the attention contract, but early on in a relationship it can certainly set the tone.

Be a curious fool. This is a restatement of advice I gave in the 1:1 article: "Assume they have something to teach you". As a lead, manager, or director, early on in establishing the attention contract, they're going to be nervous. They're going to assume that you'll be talking and not listening and the exact opposite is what you're looking to negotiate.

It's a game. Keep asking stupid questions based on whatever topics arrive until you find an answer where they light up. She sat straight up when we started talking automation. The first time he didn't seem nervous was when he talked about traveling. Being a curious fool means talking about things that appear to have no substantive value to the conversation or the business - that's ok. Over time, your foolishness will allow you to build connective tissue, to further develop your mental profile of this person. When you understand what they really care about, you'll be better equipped to have bigger conversations, and that is where trust is built.

Validate ambiguity, map their words to yours, and build gentle segues. There will be bumps while you listen. There will be strange sentences and awkward pauses, statements that make no sense, and unanswerable questions. And your job during all of this confusion is to maintain the conversational flow.

In my head, a good conversation has a steady, healthy tempo. This. Is How. We Speak. Listen. And Learn. When a bump in the conversation arrives, I ask myself: do I need to understand what just happened or is it in our interest to move along? If further understanding is the move, I repeat their last sentence, "What I hear you saying is..." and then I repeat my version of their thought.

It feels redundant, repeating what was just said. It feels inefficient because the words were just out there, but trust me when I say that a decent amount of your professional misery is based on the simple act of one person misinterpreting the intent of another and misinterpretation avoidance isn't even the goal of this move. The goal is to make it clear to the other person: "I know you just said something complicated and I am directing my full attention at understanding what you said and what it means".

There are two possible reactions to this restatement: the nod or the stare. The nod means, "You heard me correctly and let's move along". The stare means, "I don't know what you just said". I counter the stare with another restatement, except this time I use more of the words and language that were in the original idea - I make it sound like they said it, but it's me talking.

The last tempo maintenance move I have is the segue. Similar to your preamble, part of your job is to discover how to move from one topic to the next. The validation and repetition moves I suggest above are one way to pull this off, but a segue can be even simpler. It can be, "Ok, next thought?" or "And then what happened?" A conversation without clarification and segues is an exhausting circular exercise where two people are working increasingly hard at not understanding what the other is saying and failing to get to the point.

Pause. Like, shut up. There will be times when you're listening and it's clear they want to say something else. They're dying to say it, but you cannot find the question, the segue, or the words to pull it out of them. In what is one of the more advanced listening moves, my advice is: shut up.

Yes, I just told you to gently guide a conversation by listening and finding segues from one thought to the next, but that's not working. It's time to be quiet for as long as it takes. When I'm pulling this move, I sit there maintaining eye contact and repeating to myself: I will not be the next person to speak. I will not be the next person to speak. It's maddening... for both of you, but that's the point. The conversation is not headed where it needs to go, so you're going to disrupt with silence.

You are not in their head. No matter how empathic or smart you believe yourself to be, the story they're telling themselves is vastly different than the story you're telling yourself. In these awkward silences, I find people volunteer the part of the story they really want to tell.

If They Don't Trust You, They Aren't Going to Say Shit

Everything I just described can be faked. Anyone who has been pressured into buying something they did not need has been on the receiving end of faked listening skills, but there's a reason why, when you leave the car dealership, that you feel used. You slowly become aware that you were manipulated with a false sense of familiarity and connection. You realize that while they showed interest in you, they didn't really listen. They have no clue who you are. It was an empty conversation facilitated by manipulation cloaked as listening skills.

Listening is work, and the difference between listening well and making them feel like you're selling them a car has to do with intent. Each time I sit down to listen, my goal is the same: continue to build trust with the people I depend upon and who, in turn, depend upon me. It takes months of listening, but I want a professional relationship where my team willingly tells me the smallest concern or their craziest idea. Think of healthy listening as preventative relationship maintenance.

The longer you're a bad listener, the smaller your world gets and the narrower your mind becomes, because you're not exposing yourself to different ideas and perspective. The better you become at listening, the more of the world you'll see, and the world knows a lot more than you.