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I have a friend who is all into the whole evolutionary psychology fad. It’s useful when you want to rationalize bad behaviour. I once told him that evolutionary psychology was pseudoscience to which he replied saying that I was just trying to negate the world as-is.

But apparently I’m not alone, as Jonathan Marks writes (emphasis is mine) —

I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.  For a notable example, it is apparently a revelation to evolutionary psychology that one cannot readily generalize about the human condition from a sample of humans that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Perhaps this was news in psychology – creationist, evolutionary, or otherwise – but, sad to say, everybody else who works with cultural diversity knew that a really long time ago.

I am currently trying a new approach to deal with my social phobia. Basically it involves avoiding avoidance behaviours. You see, people with social anxiety tend to avoid problematic situations and run to metaphorical safe places. After a while, the avoidance behaviours become almost automatic, almost imperceptible.

Almost but not quite.

We behave so without thinking but we recognize the behaviour while we’re doing it. And that’s exactly when we have to force ourselves to avoid avoidance. It is very difficult and the temptation of avoidance is almost irresistible. The problem, of course, is the more we avoid things, the harder it is to stop doing it later in life.

Last night I posted something to Facebook —

https://www.facebook.com/robteix/posts/10153208453849048

The voices of social anxiety immediately started working in my head. “FriendA will mock at you,” they shout. “FriendB will think you’re pathetic.” And so they went. I came this close to deleting the post before stopping and forcing myself to ignore the voices.

It is not easy. It is so not easy that I am writing a blog post about it. Social phobia makes my mind work against me: it constantly attacks me, my self-esteem, and my confidence. It would be so much easier to just delete the post.

Dealing with social anxiety involves many counter-intuitive measures: it forces socially anxious people to go against what our own brains tell us is not the safest route.

I need to keep working on it. I’ll need to continue to force myself into doing more of what I desperately want to avoid. Let’s see how it goes.

File this one under techies complaining about non-techies. Over the years, I have noticed a pattern with salespeople, they have a firm belief in wishful thinking. They honestly believe that wishing something to be true will magically make it so.

The specific pattern I noticed many a time goes something like this.

The customer wants something done and goes through their account manager to request that. The account manager — a fancy name for salesperson — commits to a date without talking to the developer first. They then go to the developer and tell her something to the effect of “yeah, I’m going to need that by Friday morning.” The exasperated developer explains that this is not feasible and the account manager responds by simply repeating that they will need it by Friday. They usually leave at this point satisfied that everything is fine.

Come Friday, the account manager is then horrified to discover that the feature is not ready. “But we made a commitment with the customer,” they’ll say, emphasizing the “we” that never was.

This has happened some many times in my career that I should no longer be surprise and yet I still do. Every time.

Of course, what they are really doing is trying to put pressure on the developers so that they will hurry up and deliver on the desired timeframe. And to be fair, it can sometimes work, but if the developer tells them in no uncertain terms that the deadline is not feasible, then the salesperson is taking the risk by herself.

By committing to a date with the customer before talking to the developer, the salesperson has already taken a big risk. They will then try to spread that risk by sharing it with the developer. Since the developer never had a chance to agree with that in the first place, it is only fair that she should be able to refuse to take the risk if she doesn’t believe it is worth it. Why should she?

And yet, we developers often accept the risk by being passive and simply accepting it. This problem can be exacerbated by managers who are also passive. Many years ago I worked at a company where the engineering power that be were submissive to the sales department, which led to some of the worst experiences in my life as a developer, including the Project From Hell.

At the time, I led the engineering services group, so whenever a new project came about that required software development, it had to go through me for analysis. Another group leader analysed the infrastructure projects. Then one day this large project showed up on my desk. I looked over it along with the infrastructure guy and we agreed that it was a monster of a project, including developing a huge distributed nationwide (Brazil) infrastructure, a huge system developed from scratch, and a lot of technology transfer and end-user training.

The project had some timeframes attached to it and although they were tight, they were not what immediately caught out eyes. We saw the pricing they were offering the customer and it was clear to us that it was low. We raised the issue but were told not to worry about it. There are valid business reasons to do projects at a loss sometimes, so it was okay, except the exact wording to us was, “please limit yourselves to your little expertise sphere.” Ok then.

We talked to our teams and we committed to the dates defined in the project documentation. Again, it was a little tight but feasible: we would have many months to get things ready for initial deployment.

About a week after we approved the statement of work, I received a call from the customer. At this point, I had not yet engaged the customer at all, so they had gotten my phone number from their sales rep. The customer was possessed. This person I had never talked to before was shouting at me on the phone that we were late. It took me a while to call him down and understand what the issue was.

As it turns out, the sales team, in an effort to get the customer’s signatures before the end of the quarter, changed the statement of work after we had gone through it, moving the dates to right that very moment. We had not even started working on the project yet and the customer was expecting it to be ready right then. We were late before we even started.

Many stressful meetings later we managed to agree on some new dates, but they were much tighter than the ones originally in the statement of work and would required us to outsource parts of the project to a contractor to help speed up things. Incidentally, what we paid the contractor for only a part of the project was more than what our company made on the project. All because the sales team wanted to make sure they got their commission in that quarter.

The people responsible would eventually be let go of the company, in great part due to this, but that did not prevent the company from losing at least an order of magnitude more than what it made from that project.

And still, I continue to see salespeople ignoring the developers and then trying to share the fallout. Developers need to stand firmly by their professional evaluations of deadlines and technical feasibilities.

Of course, if you turn out to be wrong, all of this is moot.

I am sad. The New York Times —

Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.

I am actually sad. As much as Star Trek was a part of my life, I had not felt this way when other cast members passed away in the past.

I suppose Nimoy was different somehow. My theory is that as Spock, he would (almost) never smile and that made his rare smile that much more important. When I think of Nimoy/Spock, it is his smile that I picture in my mind. When out of character, he was always smiling. This contrast forces an emotional connection or something. I don’t know.

What I do know is I am sad. For whatever’s worth, Nimoy was a part of my life.

You’ll be missed, Mr. Nimoy. I have been, and always shall be, your fan.

A few years ago I wrote about how social anxiety makes me use fake accounts on the web.

I love coding. I have done it since I was a kid and it’s the best thing I know how to do. And then there is open source. Open source projects should be the perfect venue for me to have f un. Except I am scared stiff by the idea that someone might laugh at the code. It came to a point where it is impossible for me to contribute. Then I’ve come up with a solution: an alias. For the past several years I’ve lived two different lives online: one as myself and another as an alias. I keep them strictly separate.

Actually I today use more than one single separate life. Looking at my Chrome identities menu I count four (including the real me), but I actually have more around that I have abandoned.

It has allowed me to do what I like to do. I don’t have to be afraid because I know all I have to do is abandon one account and start over with another. It’s a good solution but it has some issues.

I have been offered this great job in the past by the manager of someone I’ve worked together. It was one of the Big Tech Companies, a place I really would love to work. All great, right? Except the offer was not addresses to Roberto Teixeira, but to one of my aliases. Tough luck. I’ve soon abandoned that alias for good.

So yes, it sucks. But not as much as it has sucked this week.

I—under an alias—have been working with a developer of a big open source project out there to try to solve a problem we were having at work. And I found a solution that was pretty clever. That developer checked it out and thought it was great and then we both wrote a proposal and submitted it. And it was accepted and our change will be part of their next major release.

I’m not saying it was something revolutionary or anything. Still, it was something I am very proud of. And there will be a name there in the changelog/release notes/whatever but it will not be my name.

This happened the same week I learned that someone I–the real me; real name and everything–interviewed with a few months ago had dismissed me for not having open source contributions.

In short, I am sad and angry. Fuck social anxiety. 🙁

(photo: Christopher Walker (Sadness) / CC BY-SA 2.0 / via Wikimedia Commons)