People Problems

I’m sitting in the sun, on holiday in Portugal, and I realise I’m having the same kinds of problems to deal with that I do when I’m at work: people. Whilst I work for a software company, the software isn’t usually the most challenging aspect of a project. Technology is usually the easy bit – let’s face it, writing big enterprise applications isn’t exactly rocket science. (If it were rocket science, we’d still have people problems – Nasa’s software might only contain one defect per million lines of code, but if two people get confused between feet and metres it’ll still slam a probe into the surface of Mars at 30,000 miles per hour…) There are plenty of instrinsically-hard technical problems being solved, but these are being worked on by research teams and academics. I found out at uni that this really wasn’t going to be my thing – I seem to be much more of a “technical people person”.

Tech is easier than people. This holiday I’ve been driving around perfectly happily on the wrong side of the road in an unfamiliar hire car, figuring out the lights, where the wipers and gearstick are, how to fill it with diesel, and it’s all been plain sailing. The people, however, are a different matter. I’m mainly trying to relate to the person I’m on holiday with, and it’s fraught with difficulties. We misunderstand each other, have different ideas about how to deal with each situation (mostly getting lost!) and generally have a bunch of problems to deal with. Software is the same – despite what we might like the rest of the world to think, writing an application to add up a bunch of numbers isn’t hard. We just need to know which numbers, and how we should carry our multiplications.