Yup, this post is about the start of a journey that is still ongoing for me. It still takes work and I still lose focus and do poorly and tried to call that out at the end.
To your specific point, I probably was even worse in 2008 than what you experienced in 2010. That's probably true at every point since. I'm getting better, but I am sure you can find people even in the last year who would say this post doesn't reflect the Boz they met. I believe those people are getting fewer and their experiences less bad, but I am definitely not great at this yet so the post should be taken as a belief I hold and a behavior I aspire to.
I assume you already know this but it's not an easy journey and it will take time.
I am on the same journey as you and my conclusion is that I am essentially a creature driven by emotions. My emotions get the better of me and I revert back to my old state where I will bluntly tell someone how I feel about them and their work.
Just last week I had to bring appology chocolates to work. Self improvement was never easy.
Really, the main change I see now is that I almost immediately regret my words or actions, but I still have to work on the immediate apology that should follow that regret.
Thanks for the honesty and careful articulation! I find myself to be a bit of bulldog myself, and it's hard to change ingrained habits. Thanks for the reminder!
Don't beat yourself up too much. Diversity means having an honest full-spectrum cohort of people to grow with, not a curated one. If I removed people like you [us] (typically genius+passionate+outspoken+intellectually-arrogant) I would miss you. People might avoid you because they are weak, but you probably help tow the bottom line at fb more than you know.
I've struggled with similar in my career (eng@uber) to a lesser degree and these are some of my findings:
- in terms of long-term survival; friendship, connection and investing in humans brings much more satisfaction than any technical part of my work and will outlast the business every time.
- when I'm arguing a solution or iteration that I've designed, the harder I hold onto that solution the tougher it is to sell.
- every time I instruct an engineer rather than let them figure something out on their own it seems to not go in my favor.
- the best designs and implementations [at scale] in engineering [sadly, for my ego] always seem to require multi-faceted perspectives (a team) to simulate adequately and vet impact (business+social+tech).
- promotion and progression in an organization is a subjective mess, all biased, and largely driven by non-technical markers namely social proof, liking and perception.
> Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you.
> the start of a journey that is still ongoing
Then you still have a long way to go on that journey, because you apparently have no idea the damage you've done to the world with Facebook. You have help lead people into undermining their own privacy, straight into the hands of a surveillance state.
So keep on that journey. Maybe in a few decades, when it is far too late, you'll realize how much you have hurt humanity. For the time being, I expect you'll just dismiss this entire post.
/sigh/ I don't have many regrets in life, but you, "Boz", are one of them. I wish I never ran those 4-H programming projects, and never worked to get you interested in computers. It probably wouldn't have changed much, but maybe the problem we call "Facebook" would be just a little bit easier to fight.
To your specific point, I probably was even worse in 2008 than what you experienced in 2010. That's probably true at every point since. I'm getting better, but I am sure you can find people even in the last year who would say this post doesn't reflect the Boz they met. I believe those people are getting fewer and their experiences less bad, but I am definitely not great at this yet so the post should be taken as a belief I hold and a behavior I aspire to.