Vox

Leitura de 12 min

3x3 - Uncovering Hidden Information

Summary

In this episode of Developer Tea, host Jonathan Cottrell explores the concept of hidden information—entire categories of knowledge we don’t even know exist. He argues that while we can’t know everything, uncovering specific hidden information can be profoundly helpful, especially for driven developers seeking clarity and purpose in their careers.

The first technique is to ‘entertain the opposite.’ This involves consciously adopting the opposite of your initial belief about a situation, such as assuming a database query you thought was fast is actually slow. This counteracts our natural bias to defend our existing beliefs and helps us seek truth rather than consistency or the appearance of being right.

The second method is to combine things you haven’t yet combined. By intersecting different skills or applying mental models from one domain (like essay writing) to another (like code organization), you can generate new, emergent information. This practice of synthesis can reveal solutions that aren’t apparent when skills are kept in isolation.

The third technique is to ‘act like an outsider.’ Approach a problem by imagining you have no prior knowledge of the domain, or by deliberately adopting a different persona, such as thinking like an artist instead of an engineer. Changing your perspective can access information that is present in your mind but not readily available to conscious thought. Cottrell adds a bonus fourth technique: collaborate with others, as information hidden from you may be obvious to someone else.

Recommendations

Tools

  • GitPrime — A sponsor of the episode, presented as a tool to help engineering managers grow their teams from within by establishing growth plans and building effective career ladders for developers.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to the universe of hidden knowledge — Jonathan Cottrell introduces the episode’s theme: the existence of entire categories of information we don’t even know exist. He acknowledges this can cause anxiety but states that uncovering specific hidden information can be helpful. He announces the return of the ‘three by three’ format, promising three practical takeaways for uncovering hidden information in this episode.
  • 00:01:28 — First technique: Entertain the opposite — Cottrell explains the first technique: to entertain the opposite of your belief. Using the example of a database query believed to be fast, he advises intentionally simulating the opposite belief. He discusses the difficulty due to our bias towards consistency and defending prior beliefs, emphasizing that the goal is to seek truth, not to look right or remain consistent.
  • 00:04:07 — Sponsor message from GitPrime — A sponsored segment for GitPrime, focusing on growing engineering teams from within. It promotes a webinar featuring experts who discuss building effective career ladders and cultivating talent in existing development teams, as an alternative to the volatile process of external hiring.
  • 00:05:10 — Second technique: Combine uncombined things — Cottrell presents the second technique: combine things you haven’t yet combined. He explains that skills are abstractions of underlying facts, and combining them can create new, emergent information at their intersection. He relates this to applying mental models across domains, using the example of applying essay-writing principles to code organization to solve a problem through a new lens.
  • 00:07:12 — Third technique: Act like an outsider — The third technique is to act like an outsider by approaching a problem without your existing domain knowledge. A variation is to ‘put on a different hat,’ such as thinking like an artist instead of an engineer. Cottrell notes that hidden information is often in our minds but inaccessible; changing perspective can reveal it. He adds a bonus fourth technique: collaborate with others to address blind spots.
  • 00:08:58 — Outro and thanks to sponsor — Cottrell thanks the listener and encourages subscription. He thanks sponsor GitPrime again, reiterating that the show relies on sponsors and that GitPrime helps grow engineering teams from within. He directs listeners to gitprime.com/webinar to sign up.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2019-07-29T09:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:09:34

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] If you’re like me, then you’re probably painfully aware that there is a whole

[00:00:08] universe of knowledge that you’ve never encountered. It’s not simply that there are

[00:00:16] some facts that you don’t know or techniques that you haven’t practiced. There are entire

[00:00:22] categories of information that you and I and your peers don’t even know exist. And for the most

[00:00:32] part, even though that might cause some anxiety, it certainly does for me, this is true for the

[00:00:38] vast majority of people and it’s also probably okay. You don’t have to know everything to be

[00:00:45] able to function well, but there are some things that if you were to uncover them, perhaps they

[00:00:51] would help you.

[00:00:52] Now, how do you go about figuring out what those hidden areas of knowledge are? This week, we

[00:01:02] return to our old format, the three by three. We’re going to give you three practical takeaways in

[00:01:08] each of this week’s episodes. And in today’s episode, we’re giving you three ways that you

[00:01:14] can uncover hidden information. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You’re listening to Developer

[00:01:20] Team. My goal on this show is to help driven developers.

[00:01:22] Developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in your careers. The first technique

[00:01:28] to uncovering hidden information is to entertain the opposite. What does it mean to entertain the

[00:01:36] opposite? Well, if you have, for example, some code that you think is doing one thing, then

[00:01:43] imagine for a moment that the code is doing exactly the opposite thing. Let’s say that you have a

[00:01:51] query that you believe is doing one thing. If you have a query that you believe is doing one thing,

[00:01:52] then you have a query that you believe is running fast, a database query that you think is running

[00:01:56] quickly. But you have some evidence that shows that maybe it’s not as fast as you thought. Instead of

[00:02:04] entrenching yourself in your original belief that the query is fast, entertain the opposite. Take a

[00:02:11] moment and imagine that the thing that you believe is not only wrong, but the opposite of what you

[00:02:19] believe is true.

[00:02:21] Now, this takes the idea of the code that you believe is doing one thing, and it takes the idea of

[00:02:22] kind of negating your own statement, your own belief, one step further. When you entertain the

[00:02:30] opposite, you not only negate that belief, but you intentionally simulate or artificially adopt

[00:02:41] the opposite belief. Of course, this is hard to do because entertaining the opposite belief

[00:02:48] or entertaining something that we don’t already have in our minds,

[00:02:52] can cause us to kind of defend our initial belief. We have a bias towards defending something that we

[00:03:00] previously believed, partially because we want to remain consistent. But with this kind of thinking

[00:03:06] and the other two takeaways that we’re going to talk about today, it’s important to remind

[00:03:11] yourself throughout the process that you’re seeking truth. You’re seeking to learn information

[00:03:19] that you previously didn’t even know existed. You’re not seeking truth. You’re seeking to learn

[00:03:22] to remain consistent with whatever your previous beliefs were. And you’re also not seeking to look

[00:03:30] right. In the long run, looking right and being right often diverge, but eventually they become

[00:03:38] the same thing. In other words, if you can find something that is true, then even if along the way

[00:03:46] you looked like you were taking a wild detour, in the end, if you find that true,

[00:03:52] that’s more valuable than whatever you looked like along the way, most likely.

[00:03:57] We’re going to talk about the other two techniques to finding hidden information or uncovering

[00:04:03] hidden information right after we talk about today’s sponsor, GetPrime.

[00:04:07] If you are an engineering manager, then you know that growing your team is difficult. Hiring new

[00:04:15] developers in particular can take a lot of time and it can be really expensive and pretty volatile.

[00:04:21] So another strong point is that you can’t just take a lot of time and do nothing. You can’t

[00:04:22] take a lot of time and do nothing. You can’t take a lot of time and do nothing. You can’t take a lot

[00:04:22] of time and do nothing. You can’t take a lot of time and do nothing. You can’t take a lot of time and

[00:04:22] strategy is to grow your team from within. This means establishing a growth plan for your existing

[00:04:31] developers, cultivating talent and making the most of the team that you already have. So how do you

[00:04:39] actually do this? That’s what GetPrime is going to help you learn. GetPrime has assembled a panel

[00:04:46] of experts who have done exactly this. And you can watch the webinar by going to the link in the

[00:04:52] description to getprime.com slash webinar. This panel is going to answer questions like how do you

[00:04:58] build an effective career ladder for your developers? Go and check it out. Head over to

[00:05:03] getprime.com slash webinar. Thanks again to GetPrime for sponsoring today’s episode.

[00:05:10] We’re talking about uncovering hidden information. This is information that you didn’t even know

[00:05:15] existed. It’s not just that you didn’t know the particulars. It’s that you didn’t even know that

[00:05:20] there was something to get you started. So if you’re a developer and you’re looking to get

[00:05:22] no. And most of the information that we have is actually some abstraction of a set of facts.

[00:05:30] In other words, the skills that you develop as an engineer rely on underlying facts.

[00:05:38] And combining those facts together can actually help create new information.

[00:05:46] So for example, if you combine two skills together, then you might have a unique new

[00:05:52] skill that emerges and kind of the intersection of those two skills. So that’s takeaway number two,

[00:06:00] a way that you can uncover hidden information is to combine things that you haven’t yet combined.

[00:06:06] This falls right in line with discussions that we’ve had on the show about mental models,

[00:06:10] where you can take principles from one area of your life or one set of knowledge that you have

[00:06:16] and apply them in other areas. So this starts by

[00:06:21] looking at the skills that you have and applying them to the things that you haven’t yet combined.

[00:06:22] a given problem through a new lens. For example, let’s say that you have a problem with

[00:06:29] organizing your code in a way that makes sense. You may take on a lens of organizing things

[00:06:37] alphabetically, but that doesn’t really work out well. And so you might take on a lens of

[00:06:43] organizing your code the way that you would write a story. You learned how to write an essay in

[00:06:50] college, and you can apply some of the same principles to your code. So you can apply some of

[00:06:51] the same principles of essay writing to writing code. So that is takeaway number two. If you’re

[00:06:59] trying to uncover hidden information, then try combining things, information that you already

[00:07:05] have, and producing new information. The third and final technique for uncovering hidden information

[00:07:12] that we’re going to share on this show, and there’s certainly more than these three, but

[00:07:17] these are the ones that we wanted to bring into the conversation today. The third,

[00:07:21] technique is to act like an outsider. Imagine that you are approaching the situation,

[00:07:29] the problem, the information, whatever your domain is that you’re trying to uncover hidden

[00:07:33] information about, as an outsider, not as a person who has spent a bunch of time

[00:07:40] working with that information, not with the existing knowledge that you have.

[00:07:45] Imagine that you’re coming to it somewhat blind. A kind of twist on this is to put on

[00:07:51] a different hat. Imagine you are coming to it as an engineer, and then imagine that you’re

[00:07:56] coming to it as an artist. What are the different kind of takes that you could have on this subject?

[00:08:04] The amazing thing is that sometimes this hidden information isn’t actually hidden like we think

[00:08:11] it is. It’s somewhere in our minds, but it’s not necessarily accessible to our conscious thinking,

[00:08:19] and we have to change our lens,

[00:08:21] by changing our perspective. We can do this by forcing ourselves into a different persona,

[00:08:28] a different way of thinking, putting on a different hat, playing a different role,

[00:08:33] and approaching the information from a different place. Of course, the most obvious technique,

[00:08:39] and this will be kind of a bonus number four, is to bring other people in. Information that’s

[00:08:46] hidden from you may be very plainly obvious to another person, and so the more collaboration

[00:08:51] that you can have, most likely, the more you will be able to address your blind spots.

[00:08:58] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea. If you enjoyed this episode,

[00:09:03] go ahead and subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use. Thank you again to GitPrime for

[00:09:08] sponsoring Developer Tea. This show wouldn’t be able to exist without our sponsors. GitPrime is

[00:09:13] going to help you grow your engineering team from the inside out. Go and check it out,

[00:09:18] gitprime.com. That’s g-i-t-prime.com.

[00:09:21] Slash webinar and sign up today. Thank you so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.

Visão de gráfico