When we were in an office, I could walk by a developer’s desk, see them struggling and ask them what is happening in their code. We might go through some back and forth trying a few things, or I would suggest some code to write that they might not get or some approaches they might be aware of.
At some point in the discussion, it would get to the point where I would say — “know what I mean?” — and although it might be accompanied with a deep breath, or a sigh of relief the answer would come — “No, I don’t know”.
These are not easy words to say when your job is to know and to crank out code that does what it is supposed to do, but when they leave your mouth, they offer the freedom to start moving forward, tossing the shackles of our keyboard and googling to the aside.
I can’t count the number of times I have said — “I don’t know” — to a colleague when the roles were reversed as I waded into some code, process, or project that I knew absolutely nothing about. Even though I knew I should have said it much earlier in the discussion I held out hope for that one sliver of light that it would figuratively and literally dawn on me and I’d be able to move forward with whatever it is that I was struggling on.
