Minding Your Manners

I recently went to a book sale where shoppers could browse countless bins of completely disorganized books and buy as many as could fit in a box for $30. I quickly learned that the only way to navigate a sale like this was to disregard my traditional short list of topics and authors that I follow, grab anything remotely interesting, and sort it out later. One of my finds was New Rules @ Work, by Barbara Pachter and Ellen Coleman.

book cover

The book's subtitle sums up its contents: “79 Etiquette Tips, Tools, and Techniques to Get Ahead and Stay Ahead.” It covers topics such as greeting people, navigating social gatherings, corporate attire, and communications skills (whether face-to-face or by phone or email). For me, at least, the tips presented are an odd mix of the very obvious (stand up when shaking a guest's hand), the rather irrelevant (how to sample wine at restaurants fancier than my humble software developer's expense account would cover), and the desperately needed (how to mingle at a social gathering). Even though many of the suggestions fell in the first category for me, the book is a quick read and is interspersed with plenty of amusing anecdotes about various etiquette blunders to keep it interesting.

All of this has little to do with coding, but there's a lot more to software development than just coding:

And there's a lot more to a career in software development than just software development:

And, of course, workplace etiquette. New Rules @ Work emphasizes the effects that etiquette (or the lack thereof) can have on your career, and it seems to present etiquette primarily as a tool for advancing your career. Considering the book's focus, this is probably okay, but it seems a bit utilitarian to me. I've always preferred Brendan Frasier's character's explanation in the movie Blast from the Past:

Good manners are just a way of showing other people we have respect for them… A lady or a gentleman is someone who always tries to make sure the people around him or her are as comfortable as possible.

Etiquette is a way to serve others.

As software developers, it can be our tendency to focus too much on the technology. We want to try out the latest development tools or techniques even if they're not best for the job; we pursue certain standards or ideals even if they don't make business sense; we see a technical challenge and try to solve it even if it's not the right problem to solve. As a remedy to this, we're told to focus on delivering business value. This is good advice, but it raises the question, why pursue business value? The standard answer is "profits," but as Max De Pree says, "Profits are like breathing. Breathing is not the goal of life, but it is pretty good evidence of whether or not you are alive." The goal of business - the reason that business can exist, the way that business makes profits - is service: meeting people's needs by offering goods or services.

There's a story that, during the initial development of the Apple Macintosh, Steve Jobs complained that it booted too slowly. He argued that shaving ten seconds off of the boot time, multiplied by millions of users, would save several lifetimes. My software may never save a lifetime, but every feature that I add, every bug that I fix, every UI interaction that I streamline means that users can do their jobs a bit faster, a bit easier, with a bit less stress.

Software development is about serving users. Etiquette is just a way to do in the small what our businesses and our careers do in the large.