Emotional intelligence and why it's important in a tech job.

Emotional intelligence and why it's important in tech job

Background: 5-4 years ago I was doing a lot of pro bono (free) consulting to help startups to develop ML-based technologies just because I was obsessed with helping people. At the same time, I was a volunteer chaplain to help people in jails and prisons - it's another special memory, especially, about help in special security parts of the prison etc. I was obsessed with helping etc That's how I happened to see this case

Story:

So I was advising a startup which I was helping with the machine learning/applied science part of their product. There was another adviser (X) who was helping with the architecture and system design, X is a very experienced person who built several high-performance, high load systems.

X came with a certain design for a meeting with the team of that startup. The same meeting was attended by a fresh graduate developer Y with a big ego, who declined in very arrogant terms a design of X claiming that there is an open-source system Z that does similar work better than the system designed by X would do, and he Y knows Z design very well and it's clear for Y that X does not understand how to design such systems. Y did not know that X was one of primary contributors to Y (it was obvious from source code headers, but perhaps Y did not look into such details)

X could say "I know Z better than you, I am the author"

Instead, he started asking polite questions to Y about how Z works, what this function for, what function this function call, how these two parts interact, why this function takes these data in this format, and what does it return etc. In the end, Y came to the design with was a copy of the initial design of X with some minor differences. But Y came to a new design on his own terms and was very happy with the new 'his' design of the system and he felt very happy that he proved his intelligence and importance.

So at the same meeting the final design of the system was agreed upon, approved and the team built the system based on it very fast and the system was successful

Think what would happen if X would start arguing, "I am the author of Z, I know better than you" etc. Most probably there would not be an agreed design by the end of this meeting, or the next one, or in several weeks. There would be a lot of arguing about which design is better and which design is wrong. Everybody saw 'code review wars' when two egos meet

Instead, the final design was approved, everybody was happy and satisfied, the team and the company were successful in the execution of their plans

PS in several weeks, Y found the name of X through all headers of the system Z and sent an email asking for an excuse