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You’ll Never Have All of the Information

Summary

The episode explores the role of information gathering in software development and engineering management. Jonathan Cottrell explains that while gathering and processing information is a core part of a developer’s job—translating requirements, filtering data into usable insights—it can sometimes become misguided when driven by anxiety rather than practical needs.

He introduces two key questions to examine motivations for seeking information: “How will this information change the way that I act?” and “How will this information change the way that I feel?” This helps distinguish between gathering information for actionable clarity versus seeking it as an emotional coping mechanism to reduce anxiety through the illusion of certainty.

Cottrell argues that developers often operate under the false belief that more information leads to clarity, which then creates certainty and reduces anxiety. However, he emphasizes that certainty about the future is fundamentally unattainable due to the vast amount of unknown information and unpredictable random events. The real goal should be clarity—understanding what you know and what you don’t—without expecting certainty.

The episode concludes by distinguishing between problems that require information gathering for tactical solutions and those rooted in fear, which need different approaches. Cottrell encourages developers to focus on using information to create clarity for actionable decisions, rather than seeking impossible certainty.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to information gathering in development — Jonathan Cottrell introduces the topic of information gathering as a fundamental part of software engineering and engineering management. He explains that developers process data into usable information, translate between technical and non-technical requirements, and use information to solve problems and empower others.
  • 00:03:36 — Two questions to examine information-seeking motivations — Cottrell presents two critical questions to ask when seeking information: “How will this information change the way that I act?” and “How will this information change the way that I feel?” These questions help identify whether you’re gathering information for actionable clarity or to manage emotions like anxiety and pressure.
  • 00:05:04 — The illusion that information creates certainty — The discussion explores the common belief that gathering information reduces ambiguity, increases clarity, and leads to certainty, which then lowers anxiety. Cottrell notes that anxiety arises from uncertainty about the future, and people often seek information to feel more certain, even when certainty is impossible.
  • 00:08:19 — Accepting that complete certainty is impossible — Cottrell states the hard truth: you will never have complete certainty. He explains that the unknown information vastly outweighs what you know, and many events are fundamentally random and unpredictable. Certainty about the future—or even the past—is philosophically unattainable.
  • 00:10:03 — Separating clarity from certainty for better decisions — The episode emphasizes that clarity and certainty are distinct. You can have clarity about what you know and don’t know without having certainty. Information gathering should aim for clarity to inform actions, not for the illusion of certainty. When fear is the root issue, information is only a temporary solution.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2020-01-16T10:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:11:59

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] One of the things I love about being a software engineer is that I get to make information

[00:00:12] gathering a fundamental core part of my job.

[00:00:17] As an engineering manager, the same is true.

[00:00:21] Information gathering, presenting that information, distilling it, finding ways that the information

[00:00:27] is important to be used, and ultimately taking all of the information that I have and solving

[00:00:34] problems with it and empowering other people to solve problems with that information as

[00:00:38] well.

[00:00:40] And talking about information is almost as fun as actually using that information and

[00:00:45] gathering it because this information theory is so important to what we do as developers.

[00:00:52] But sometimes our desire to gather information.

[00:00:57] Is misguided and at worst, it can hurt us.

[00:01:01] It can harm our efforts.

[00:01:05] That’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode.

[00:01:07] My name is Jonathan Cottrell and you’re listening to Developer Tea.

[00:01:09] My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose

[00:01:14] in their careers.

[00:01:16] We don’t have a sponsor for today’s episode.

[00:01:18] In lieu of a sponsor, I’d love for you to go and subscribe in whatever podcasting app

[00:01:23] you’re currently using.

[00:01:24] If you find something valuable in today’s episode, I’d love for you to go and subscribe

[00:01:27] I would never ask you to waste your time.

[00:01:30] And so if you think that this podcast is valuable today, then there’s a pretty good chance that

[00:01:36] it’s going to be valuable to you in the future.

[00:01:38] It’s not for everybody because we ask for people to sometimes do hard stuff.

[00:01:44] We ask for you to take a difficult road or accept a different, a difficult reality to

[00:01:51] accept the fact that sometimes things don’t go your way.

[00:01:54] For example, sometimes unexpected.

[00:01:57] And so if you think that listening to a show that’s willing to accept difficult realities

[00:02:04] and still stays optimistic, that’s what the show really is about.

[00:02:08] It’s about staying optimistic in the face of uncertainty.

[00:02:11] And to that point, let’s talk about our job as developers and gathering information as

[00:02:18] a part of the job.

[00:02:19] Many times we operate in this mode as developers.

[00:02:22] We have the mode of thinking that our job is to find out.

[00:02:27] What other people are unable to find out.

[00:02:30] Keep in mind that information is not simply the data, the raw kind of fact.

[00:02:36] It’s filtering those raw pieces of data that are incoming into something usable, something

[00:02:43] that we can actually act on or that we can build upon, right?

[00:02:48] So as developers, part of our job is to have previous knowledge in order to convert that

[00:02:54] data into usable information.

[00:02:57] On whatever the efforts are that we’re working on in our jobs.

[00:03:00] Sometimes this means translating, for example, from a non-technical language into technical

[00:03:07] requirements and vice versa.

[00:03:09] Sometimes we have technical requirements that we need to translate and communicate in non-technical

[00:03:15] language.

[00:03:17] So a lot of our information gathering is about understanding the inputs and outputs of that

[00:03:22] needed information.

[00:03:26] And ensuring.

[00:03:27] That we’re converting the right data to the right information points, but we can seek

[00:03:32] information sometimes in vain or for the wrong reasons.

[00:03:36] We can get so addicted to seeking information that we act in a mode by default.

[00:03:44] We’ve talked about modes recently on the show.

[00:03:45] We can act in the wrong mode.

[00:03:48] Sometimes our job is not necessarily to gather more information and this can really come

[00:03:56] to light.

[00:03:56] Right?

[00:03:57] If you ask yourself two specific questions, when you find yourself trying to gain clarity,

[00:04:02] trying to get more information, trying to uncover something that seems to be obscured,

[00:04:07] ask yourself these two questions.

[00:04:09] Number one, how will this information change the way that I act?

[00:04:14] Right?

[00:04:14] How will this information change my actions?

[00:04:17] And then the second question is, how will this information change the way that I feel?

[00:04:24] If you ask these two questions by combining.

[00:04:26] Combining them, you can probably figure out what your motivation is for gathering this

[00:04:32] information.

[00:04:33] For example, if you don’t really know how it’s going to change your actions, but you

[00:04:37] do know how it might change your feeling, then it might make sense to ask yourself whether

[00:04:42] your feelings are the thing that needs attention.

[00:04:46] If you are feeling nervous or perhaps you’re feeling pressured, but gathering information,

[00:04:53] you think that gathering the information is going to help you feel less nervous or

[00:04:56] less pressured, you should ask yourself why.

[00:04:59] What is the function that this information is going to provide to you?

[00:05:04] Very often, we live under the illusion that information creates clarity and clarity creates

[00:05:11] certainty.

[00:05:13] Certainty allows us to kind of reduce our anxiety because we can act more confidently.

[00:05:20] Right?

[00:05:20] There’s lots of words ending in L-Y here, but hopefully this theory makes sense.

[00:05:25] The idea that we can gather information.

[00:05:26] Gather information to reduce our ambiguity.

[00:05:30] In other words, increase our clarity and that increased clarity can give us a better

[00:05:36] handle on certainty.

[00:05:39] And when we have certainty, our anxiety goes down.

[00:05:43] Anxiety being the feeling that you’re not sure what’s going to happen.

[00:05:48] And so your brain kind of goes into overdrive trying to predict what might happen.

[00:05:53] And sometimes those predictions are scary.

[00:05:55] Sometimes.

[00:05:56] Those predictions are so scary that we respond in ways that are more akin to survival instinct

[00:06:04] than they are to whatever’s actually getting ready to happen.

[00:06:08] Our responses to anxiety are often way out of proportion to the real consequence of this

[00:06:15] thing, even in its worst case scenario.

[00:06:18] And most often, worst case scenarios are fairly rare.

[00:06:22] And so we try to seek information.

[00:06:26] Sometimes, not all the time.

[00:06:27] Certainly, as we’ve already mentioned, information gathering is a core function of most developers’

[00:06:33] roles.

[00:06:34] But sometimes we seek information because we’re scared.

[00:06:38] We want to reduce our anxiety and we live under the illusion that we can do that by

[00:06:45] finding information and therefore somehow gathering certainty.

[00:06:51] And if you’ve listened to this episode this far, you’re probably nodding your head because

[00:06:55] you’ve probably heard this before.

[00:06:55] You’ve probably heard this before.

[00:06:55] You’ve probably heard this before.

[00:06:56] You’ve probably heard this before.

[00:06:56] You’ve probably heard this before.

[00:06:56] You’ve probably heard this before.

[00:06:56] experienced this exact thing. This happens on teams, it happens to individuals, and it happens

[00:07:04] even in large groups of people, entire cultures. Our brains seek binary solutions. We want things

[00:07:13] to be completely solved, and solving something completely is much more valuable to us than

[00:07:19] solving it to a 99% level. And so if you’ve ever experienced this feeling on a team, you know it

[00:07:27] goes something like this. You’re not really sure how long something is going to take,

[00:07:32] and your manager may be pressuring you to figure out, hey, you need to figure out how to do this

[00:07:38] thing, and you need to tell me how long it’s going to take. And so you get together, and you try

[00:07:44] together to figure out how long it’s going to take. You break it down into its smallest

[00:07:49] pieces, you try to account for the unknowns, and in the end, you make some best guess estimation

[00:07:57] about how long something is going to take. Very often, even these best guess estimations are way

[00:08:05] off. Now, that doesn’t mean necessarily that trying to gather that information is in vain,

[00:08:10] but we need to understand our motivations and a realistic picture of this simple reality. And this

[00:08:18] is kind of the difficult thing to do. We need to understand our motivations and a realistic picture

[00:08:19] of this simple reality. And this is kind of the difficult thing to do. And this is kind of the

[00:08:19] hard truth for today’s episode. The reality is that you will never, unfortunately, have complete

[00:08:30] certainty. This is really kind of a philosophy question at its core, because it’s difficult to

[00:08:38] know what it means to be certain, but certainty is the ability to know what’s going to happen in

[00:08:45] the future. And that’s really kind of the specific thing that you can have certainty about, is what’s

[00:08:49] going to happen in the future. And philosophically speaking, you may even be able to extend this to

[00:08:55] say you don’t really even have certainty about what’s happened in the past. Part of this is

[00:09:00] simply because of the vast amount of information that you don’t have about your existence, about

[00:09:07] the world around you, about the universe, about even the small details about what you’re working

[00:09:14] on. The amount of information that you don’t have exponentially

[00:09:19] outpaces the amount of information that you do have. And so if you want to have certainty,

[00:09:28] then you need to understand how all of that information works together. And on top of that,

[00:09:34] you have to be able to predict what is fundamentally random. So many events are

[00:09:39] unpredictable in our lives. Very often, those random moments, those random events in our lives

[00:09:47] that are unpredictable,

[00:09:49] shape so much of the other events in our lives. And so we have to make good guesses sometimes

[00:09:57] in the face of uncertainty. The important thing here is to recognize that there’s a break between

[00:10:03] clarity and certainty. These two things are not the same. You can have clarity without having

[00:10:12] certainty. You can have clarity, for example, about the fact that you will not have 100%

[00:10:19] certainty, right? So it’s important to recognize that these two concepts are separate and that as

[00:10:25] you gather information, that your information gathering should be pointed at creating clarity

[00:10:31] without seeking the illusion of certainty. And by asking yourself what you will do with your

[00:10:40] newfound clarity, that’s a more tactical response. And that’s how you can actually

[00:10:46] use that time and that energy in finding that information.

[00:10:49] If the problem at a fundamental level is based on fear, then gathering information

[00:10:57] is only a stopgap. It’s a temporary solution. Fear is something that has to be dealt with

[00:11:04] in a different way entirely. Of course, that’s outside of the scope of this episode of Developer

[00:11:09] Tea, but it’s something that we may talk about in the future. So if you’d like to hear us talking

[00:11:14] about fear, then a couple of things. Number one, don’t miss out on those conversations.

[00:11:19] Go ahead and subscribe, as we already mentioned earlier in the show. But secondly,

[00:11:24] reach out to me. You can find me on Twitter at at Developer Tea. My personal Twitter is

[00:11:28] at Jay Cottrell. That’s the letter J-C-U-T-R-E-L-L. And you can also email me at

[00:11:34] developertea at gmail.com. Today’s episode is a part of the Spec Network. Head over to

[00:11:40] spec.fm to find other shows and episodes from Developer Tea. Thank you so much for listening

[00:11:45] to today’s episode. Today’s episode was produced by Sarah Jackson.

[00:11:49] My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and until next time, enjoy your tea.

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