SWEs are all types of people, but one characteristic that tends to benefit us is a capacity to think about problems. With it comes the burden of overthinking problems. This can spill into overthinking our own personal relationships with the job we have, and even become a source of anxiety.
We're not being paid to be anxious at work, but I personally feel that accepting that this is common is a reasonable basis for having relationships with team members and trying to find a productive manner in which to solve problems together.
One aspect of working on a team with many brilliant, anxious people is that we can become hyper-competitive about the small technical areas we have been a reputation of success around. We start to defend our areas with an overabundance of technical details - a firewall of jargon that can keep others healthily out of our spaces.
Pulling others IN to these spaces is still a traversal of that firewall; there's no playbook for getting the anxious to be less anxious, but I find that treating SWEs as people, and not engineers, has helped me build stronger relationships and earn a little trust. Trust that I spend on helping me get my work done. And hopefully, theirs, too.
One particularly divisive technique I continue to tinker with, is the "zoom out", or the "level set". When I have to broach a new topic, or body of work, with my fellow SWEs, I find it useful to address what the problem is as though we don't even work at the company solving it. This divides everyone into two camps: those annoyed by hearing the obvious, but then those who, in good faith, have no idea how to get involved with the work but would otherwise like to.
I try not to dwell too long during a "level set" because if it's not becoming obvious how to contribute with a little back story, then perhaps the fit isn't very good anyways and I let people scatter. And, to my own point of mental health, I have stopped insisting that anyone can do anything if they put their minds to it.
No one else communicates the way that I do. It's absurd to expect them to. So, to borrow from Postel's Law, I put far more effort into trying to understand how my coworkers perceive the requirements, than I do telling them what the requirements are to me. The time 'wasted' on this extra preparation has time and again saved me from countless hours of meaningless effort. I have saved entire quarters of the year by asking a few extra questions that were not obvious, by not needing to embark at all. Listening, it can be far more productive than speaking.
We're not being paid to be anxious at work, but I personally feel that accepting that this is common is a reasonable basis for having relationships with team members and trying to find a productive manner in which to solve problems together.
One aspect of working on a team with many brilliant, anxious people is that we can become hyper-competitive about the small technical areas we have been a reputation of success around. We start to defend our areas with an overabundance of technical details - a firewall of jargon that can keep others healthily out of our spaces.
Pulling others IN to these spaces is still a traversal of that firewall; there's no playbook for getting the anxious to be less anxious, but I find that treating SWEs as people, and not engineers, has helped me build stronger relationships and earn a little trust. Trust that I spend on helping me get my work done. And hopefully, theirs, too.
One particularly divisive technique I continue to tinker with, is the "zoom out", or the "level set". When I have to broach a new topic, or body of work, with my fellow SWEs, I find it useful to address what the problem is as though we don't even work at the company solving it. This divides everyone into two camps: those annoyed by hearing the obvious, but then those who, in good faith, have no idea how to get involved with the work but would otherwise like to.
I try not to dwell too long during a "level set" because if it's not becoming obvious how to contribute with a little back story, then perhaps the fit isn't very good anyways and I let people scatter. And, to my own point of mental health, I have stopped insisting that anyone can do anything if they put their minds to it.
No one else communicates the way that I do. It's absurd to expect them to. So, to borrow from Postel's Law, I put far more effort into trying to understand how my coworkers perceive the requirements, than I do telling them what the requirements are to me. The time 'wasted' on this extra preparation has time and again saved me from countless hours of meaningless effort. I have saved entire quarters of the year by asking a few extra questions that were not obvious, by not needing to embark at all. Listening, it can be far more productive than speaking.