Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Where I work, I’m considered fairly senior. I’ve got a good deal of experience, and people generally respect my opinion.

This has had an important consequence which I didn’t expect. I have the power to make people feel good about themselves professionally. For example, when someone comes to me with a design – especially if they’re feeling insecure about it, especially if they’re fairly new or junior and are nervous about coming forward with it – by getting excited about their work and encouraging them, I can lead them in turn to be excited about their own work.

One of the wonderful things about this is that it doesn’t require that their design be excellent in order to work. Even if the design is deeply flawed, the conversation that results will reveal the ideas which led to it, and will encourage them to think more about it, and by the end of it they wil have something that they’re excited about.

Another one is that oddly enough, this seems to work for good but not for evil. Having a senior person – one you respect but don’t necessarily know personally – praise your work has a much more positive impact, overall, than having the same person deride it would have a negative impact. Not that I would want to do that, but it’s very pleasing to me to think that there is a benefit which can come in life from a form of power which isn’t immediately translatable into its opposite.

There wasn’t any particular recent event that inspired this post. It just occurred to me that at various times in the past, I’ve spoken with people who were unsure about their work, and when they left they clearly felt really good about it; and those have been some of my favorite moments.

Working with people is neat.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years reading resumés and interviewing people. A really surprising fraction of those resumés have been really lousy; either uninformative, or full of meaningless junk, or just plain illegible. I tend to throw those out. On the other hand, good interviews with competent people leave me in a better mood all day… so in the interest of getting more of those in the future, I’m going to post a couple of notes on good versus bad resumés. (OK, to be honest: In the interest of not having to slog through any more piles of really bad resumés. It makes me feel like my brains are going to leak out of my ears.)

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I think I just found one of the upsides of being in charge of things. We had a group meeting just now. I asked one question, it got answered. Then I asked if anyone had some issues they wanted to raise with the group, and one person did. And nobody else did, so I asked “Does anyone feel like having more meeting right now? [pause] No? Good! Let’s get out of here.”

I feel like I just used my powers for good.

You know it’s going to be a long day when you get in and get pulled off an emergency project to work on another emergency.