Yes, One, I don't know - three tales about understanding people

As application developers, it's crucial that we understand what other people are saying, and we're often in a position where misunderstanding is an easy trap to fall into, specially when we speak with people with no computer science background. Yes that happens. Scary hu? The key point when this happens is to forget about everything you know about basic understanding, even in your native language. So here are three tales about how even the most simple language elements can lead to misunderstanding, and what to do about it.




Yes

I started working for (very little) money  as a bio-informatics consultant. My main duty was to write and use software to produce - in a few hours of number crunching - enough hypothetical results that would take molecular biologists decades and millions of investors hard earned Euros to validate in the wet lab. At this time, my brain was fresh from university and I was formatted to think about the world in terms of 1's and 0's. And there were only 10 categories under which my mind was ultimately classifying things. True and false. So the word "Yes" for me had only one meaning. It meant something was true in the past, now and in the future, independently of circumstances. So as you can guess, there were not many questions you could answer with a plain "Yes" to me. For instance to the question "Do you like hummus", if you answered me "Yes", then I would have served you hummus for the rest of your life. Well only until you've finally decided by yourself to tell me that "actually yes I like hummus most of the time, but not always". Which is actually closer to the reality. If it just about culinary tastes, it's OK, but when it's about work then the misunderstanding is annoying at best. And I've made this mistake quite a few times: Taking a biologist "yes" for a computer science "yes" and mis-design something as a consequence. Now I try to remember, I don't take "yes" as an answer. When I hear "yes", I try to question it further, think twice and make sure I deal with the case where this "yes" is not true. Because in the real world, it will happen.

One

I bet that like me you've noticed the following fact about software development:

"Given enough time and business analysis, any unique relationship will eventually have to turn multiple."

It works for almost everything. Your users can set their preferences? One day you'll want to manage multiple set of preferences. You display the hottest deal of the day on your homepage? Quite soon you'll want multiple. A document has got a language property? What about mixed language documents? multiple. A user has got a postal address? No, they've got multiple addresses - work/home/mum/dad. OK so now they have multiple addresses, but they choose a favourite one. Humm, what if they want a different favourite depending on the context. Think "Deliver to work, but send the bill to home". Multiple again. Programming language has got single inheritance? The next one will have multiple. And you can go on and on about it. There's no end to multiplying. I wonder sometimes why unique relationships are included in UML. I think it's to trick developers into believing people saying "One". But don't be fooled. There's no such thing as "One". If you don't believe me, read this multiple times.

I don't know

This one is not strictly speaking about computer science, but about science in general. I think that people with a scientific background of any kind are used to deal instantly with equivalence and equations. For instance, given the speed and the mass of a moving object, we instantly know its kinetic energy because we know that E = 1/2mv^2. It also works transitively. I don't want to go into too complex examples, but let's say you have a,b,c, d=f(b,c) , e=f(d,a), and let's say I give you a,b,c and ask you if you know 'e'. Someone with science background will tell you "yep, because you know a and d, and you know d because you know b and c".  I did the test with my wife - who's got a biology background - yesterday, so my statistics are pretty solid. To me this is a perfectly natural way of thinking. Until I took a class in finance.

In an attempt to avoid spending my elderly years begging in the streets of London, I took this class in finance on coursera to understand how the wheels turn. And the lecturer looks to me like a brilliant man, full of common sense with very good pedagogy. I highly recommend this class. Anyway. One thing that stroke me is that sometimes I was kind of lost into the teacher's thinking. He was presenting a example, where a,b and c were known and was asking the question: "Do you know e". And the right answer was not "Yes of course, because e=f(f(b,c),a)". The correct answer to him was "I don't know". And I understood why I sometimes didn't understand him. Because for him , "I don't know" doesn't mean the same as my "I don't know". To me "I don't know" means "It cannot be reached within a reasonable computing time". To a mathematician or a physicist, or a biologist,  it will probably mean more or less the same. But to him it means something different. It means "I don't know it yet because I haven't calculated it yet". Once I understood that, the rest of the class was suddenly crystal clear, because I had understood that the meaning of this simple sentence "I don't know" meant something different between him and me.


The fact that we cannot assume that everybody shares the meaning of such simple concepts like "Yes", "One" , "I don't know" and probably lot of other ones is quite fascinating and tells us that effective communication between human beings of different backgrounds is probably one of the most difficult things to achieve at work and in life in general.

I don't know if there's a solution to this, but until people more clever than me find one, I'll try to stick to this rule: Don't speak to non IT people Try to understand what meaning others attach to basic phrases.