Have you experienced what good feels like?

Hey 👋,

I had a conversation with a colleague the other day. We were reminiscing about the times when we worked together and the state of things.

There were many worthy titbits from the conversation that made me reflect, but, at the end, I left the conversation with a strong idea, which I’ve been rummaging for a while: “many people haven’t experienced what good feels like”. I’m not only talking about developers, but also about product managers and designers, managers and execs.

Experiencing something is not a prerequisite for action. As long as we have self-awareness, self-reflection and are willing to experiment and improve, stumbling purposely, we can change our destination. But it’s also true that we’ve been conditioned and are rewarded to act a certain way, and carry preconceptions within us.

A developer who has never experienced what a good pair programming session looks like, in an environment that encourages it, might hate it or reject it. An exec might still use command and control, even after acknowledging that there are better ways to do things. What it’s seen, experienced and rewarded influences what we do. Maybe the exec doesn’t know any better, they never had anybody who treated them differently than with command and control, and they’re successful anyway replicating that, so why change?

If this idea has some truth to it, it means that by creating the environments we want to see in the world, we can show people what good feels and looks like. These experiences can be a seed in the industry. It also means that empathy is important when dealing with change, since those execs that we might blame are not necessarily evil.

At the same time, turning the idea upside down, I realize how critical it can be to find and seek early on the right experiences.

Being in a great team and engineering culture in my first years of software development shaped my understanding of the field and what could be possible. There are developers that won’t get the opportunity and many that will have years of experience, but not many experiences in those years. It makes me think that it’s worth it at the beginning of a career to seek changes, new jobs, challenges, and ways of doing things. A la Monty Hall problem, when they ask you if you want to change the door or keep the one you picked, you should change the door.