How to work with the best people

When I was at the University of Michigan speaking recently, students would ask me about various aspects of this writing. One thing that came up a few times is the idea of trying to work with the best people you can. I was asked how to make that happen.

First of all, why should you make it happen at all? Well, we often “don’t know what we don’t know”. This manifests in many ways - sometimes plain ignorance, sometimes the more confident form that gets labelled as “Dunning-Kruger” syndrome, where the less competent people are actually more confident, because they aren’t aware they lack the skills to evaluate themselves accurately. Being around people higher on skill and performance spectrum can give you that context, which is needed to improve.

So how do you do this? Good people also want to work with the best people possible, so you’re pulling in the wrong direction. This happens in music jams too - everyone wants to play with the best jam, but those people also want to have a great time, and they don’t want someone “busting the jam”.

This is a variant of “users are lazy”, I think. Going to someone who has a better skill set and expecting them to let you work with them, without getting anything in return, is akin to building a not very useful app and expecting users to make some effort to use it, just because…I don’t know…you’re a nice person?

In apps, you have to find a way to come to the user and deliver value to them without them having to exert much effort. The same is true of apprenticeship. In the jam, you have to bring something good musically, and you have to show up front that you know how to add, not subtract, to the experience, somehow. In apprenticeships, you have to think hard about what the person you want to work for needs, and try to show up with that value obviously in hand. It can be small things - usually it’s tasks that are less effective for the person to do themselves, but it can be other things - energy, new ideas (careful not to be overly confident or forward at first!), even just that they want to give back and you present as someone receptive and easy to work with.

It’s always worth spending time understanding what the other party needs, and then putting it into terms they can easily consume - whether that’s a break in a bluegrass jam, a bit of code in an OSS project, or an article on the internet. ??