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Portraying Confidence in the Face of the Unknown

Summary

The episode examines the common misrepresentation of confidence in professional settings, especially in software engineering. The host argues that confidence is often mistakenly equated with knowing the future, but since no one can predict the future with certainty, this is a flawed substitution. Instead, true confidence comes from clearly understanding and communicating both what is known and what is unknown.

The discussion centers on practical techniques for portraying confidence honestly. One key method is using confidence intervals—for example, stating an 80% confidence level for completing a task within a timeframe. This approach allows for nuanced conversations about uncertainties and prevents binary interpretations of estimates. It transforms the unknown into a measurable factor that can be discussed and managed.

Another technique is identifying when you are not the best person to answer a question and delegating appropriately. By acknowledging your areas of non-expertise, you build trust in your areas of expertise. This selective focus increases both your actual confidence and others’ perception of your confidence, as it demonstrates self-awareness and effective team collaboration.

The overarching theme is investing in understanding reality—knowing your capabilities, risks, and uncertainties. Confidence emerges from clearly articulating these boundaries and using them as a foundation for decision-making. This honest confrontation with the unknown not only improves how others perceive you but also enhances your own effectiveness and time management.

Recommendations

Tools

  • Unblocked — A tool that surfaces historical context from tools like GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence next to code, helping engineering teams get answers without interrupting teammates. The sponsor segment highlights that developers often waste time searching for context, and Unblocked addresses this by providing accurate information.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to confidence misrepresentation in careers — The episode opens by framing confidence as a common misrepresentation in professional life, especially regarding estimating work. The host explains that asking “when will this be done?” forces individuals to make assertions about uncertainty, making it a perfect testing ground for discussing confidence principles.
  • 00:01:41 — Focus on confidence versus knowing — The host narrows in on the core idea: in our culture, we often substitute confidence for knowing, assuming the most knowledgeable person is the most confident. This is problematic because jobs involve dealing with the unknown. The host poses the central question: how can we project confidence when everyone has the same information about the future?
  • 00:06:11 — Shifting focus from pretending to know to clarifying the unknown — The host distinguishes between two approaches: pretending to know something you don’t versus portraying confidence despite not knowing. The key to genuine confidence is not explaining the future but clearly articulating what you do know and how you’ll handle what you don’t know. This honest confrontation with uncertainty builds trust.
  • 00:08:56 — Technique: Using confidence intervals — A practical technique is introduced: expressing estimates with confidence intervals (e.g., 80% confidence in a four-month timeline). This method allows for nuanced discussions about uncertainties and acknowledges that 100% confidence is impossible until work is complete. It helps size uncertainty and provides a basis for further planning.
  • 00:12:24 — Technique: Identifying and delegating based on expertise — Another confidence-building technique is recognizing when you are not the best person to answer a question and asking who might be. By acknowledging your areas of non-expertise, you increase trust in your areas of expertise. This selective delegation improves perception, actual confidence, and time management.
  • 00:14:55 — Central theme: Investing in understanding reality — The episode concludes by emphasizing that confidence stems from understanding reality—knowing your capabilities, risks, and uncertainties. By investing in figuring out and clearly communicating these boundaries, you can point to the unknown and explain why confidence is limited. This approach benefits both personal effectiveness and how others perceive you.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2024-07-24T07:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:16:54

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] One of the biggest misrepresentations that you’ll face in your career is about confidence.

[00:00:18] One of the things we talk about a lot on this show, we keep on coming back to the theme

[00:00:23] of producing some kind of reliable estimate for your work.

[00:00:28] The reason for this is because it is kind of the perfect encapsulation of the typical

[00:00:36] problems that a software engineer has to face in their role.

[00:00:42] Because if you think about the fundamental nature of the question, when is this going

[00:00:47] to be done?

[00:00:49] It requires for the engineer or for the manager, for whoever is being asked this question,

[00:00:57] to gather some kind of information and make an assertion about uncertainty.

[00:01:03] This is why it’s such a good kind of testing ground, a proving ground for so many of the

[00:01:09] principles that we care about on this show.

[00:01:12] Because if you could tell the future, then this podcast would not need to exist.

[00:01:19] The entire goal of our working lives is to try to imagine, try to predict, try to get

[00:01:30] ahead of the future, try to wrangle uncertainty.

[00:01:36] So this is such a good basis to talk about some of the principles.

[00:01:41] But in today’s episode, I want to focus in on this specific idea of confidence.

[00:01:49] In our kind of cultural situation, we substitute confidence for knowing.

[00:01:59] The person who knows the most is de facto the most confident.

[00:02:07] And this is a poor substitution, because our jobs are about wrangling the unknown.

[00:02:17] And so, if you were to have two different people and compare their levels of confidence,

[00:02:23] they would theoretically have a linear relationship with knowledge available to those two people.

[00:02:30] But in practice, what we see with confidence is that people tend to project that they know

[00:02:37] something.

[00:02:38] They tend to sell that they know something.

[00:02:42] And this is actually what we are defining our perception of confidence by.

[00:02:49] But here’s what I want you to pay attention to.

[00:02:52] There is no one person who knows more about the actual future than any other person, at

[00:03:00] least not in any direct sense.

[00:03:03] We learn about the future by paying attention to the past.

[00:03:07] We may try to shape the future by gaining, for example, commitments from other people

[00:03:13] and setting intentions.

[00:03:16] Setting intentions with other people, setting intentions for ourselves, imagining the future

[00:03:22] and simulating it through whatever means we have available.

[00:03:26] But it is still a level playing field.

[00:03:30] Assuming all of that information, all of that influence is available to two people, neither

[00:03:35] necessarily has a leg up on telling the future.

[00:03:40] So how can we as engineers or as managers in any kind of growing leadership position

[00:03:47] in our careers, project confidence when everyone has the same information?

[00:03:54] That’s what we’re going to talk about right after we talk about today’s sponsor.

[00:04:00] How long should it take to write seven lines of code?

[00:04:11] A couple of minutes?

[00:04:12] An hour?

[00:04:13] What if it takes five days?

[00:04:17] You might be tempted to think that developers on your team need help writing the code, but

[00:04:22] that’s almost never the case.

[00:04:24] The biggest drag in software development isn’t writing code.

[00:04:28] It’s having enough context to know what code to write in the first place.

[00:04:33] In a perfect world, your engineering team wouldn’t waste time, days or sometimes weeks,

[00:04:39] searching for the context to understand your application.

[00:04:42] But on average, most developers work more than two hours a week trying to find information

[00:04:47] about how a code base works.

[00:04:50] And that’s why there’s Unblocked, to give your engineering team the answers they need

[00:04:54] to get their jobs done at the speed they and you both want.

[00:04:59] Your code base is a compilation of thousands of past decisions and discussions that live

[00:05:03] across tools like GitHub, Slack, Jira, Confluence and more.

[00:05:07] There’s so much value in this history and Unblocked surfaces that history next to your

[00:05:12] code.

[00:05:13] So everyone on your team has the context they need.

[00:05:15] And when someone has a question, Unblocked answers with the accuracy of your most experienced

[00:05:21] engineers.

[00:05:22] Get started today at getunblocked.com.

[00:05:25] That’s G-E-T-unblocked.com.

[00:05:29] Thanks again to Unblocked for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer Team.

[00:05:43] How can you portray confidence when the same amount of information is available to everyone

[00:05:49] about the future?

[00:05:51] Now I know there’s somebody who is about to close the podcasting app that you’re using

[00:05:56] right now because you’re afraid that we’re going to start dipping into body language

[00:06:00] discussions or some other kind of psychological concept.

[00:06:04] And that is not the goal of this episode.

[00:06:06] Instead, I want to help you focus on the right things.

[00:06:11] Because focusing on portraying as if you know something you don’t know will fall apart.

[00:06:20] And it’ll either fall apart now when you’re trying to portray this information or later

[00:06:27] whenever you’re wrong and everybody knows it.

[00:06:30] And that’s not to say that you can’t guess correctly.

[00:06:34] But it is to say that that’s not the goal of portraying confidently.

[00:06:41] The important factor for portraying confidence is not necessarily that you explain how things

[00:06:49] will happen in the future.

[00:06:52] Instead, it’s about the clarity of what you do know as well as your ability to deal with

[00:07:00] what you don’t know.

[00:07:03] There’s a subtle difference here.

[00:07:05] And the difference is simple.

[00:07:07] Let’s imagine we have two approaches.

[00:07:09] The first approach is to try to convince everyone to trust you that you know what’s going to

[00:07:14] happen even though you don’t necessarily know.

[00:07:17] And the second approach is to portray confidently despite the fact that you don’t know what’s

[00:07:22] going to happen.

[00:07:23] We’re going to talk about how you actually accomplish that.

[00:07:28] In the first case, you may try to make statements that you don’t necessarily have full confidence

[00:07:34] in, but you’re going to act as if you do have confidence in them.

[00:07:38] This is ultimately not true.

[00:07:42] Some people are not necessarily intentionally lying when they do this, just for clarity.

[00:07:47] I don’t want to cause a bunch of undue strife with you and your teammates if they have a

[00:07:53] habit of doing this.

[00:07:55] Some people are thinking wishfully.

[00:07:58] Or perhaps they imagine that they know more than they actually do.

[00:08:02] They’re optimistic about the future, and that optimism is what they use as proof for projecting

[00:08:10] what the future will be.

[00:08:12] But if you are on the other side, if you want to portray confidently and honestly at the

[00:08:18] same time reckoning with the reality of the unknown, the important thing to do is to be

[00:08:25] able to explain the unknown clearly.

[00:08:29] This is the thing that the first example, the first person, person A, did not do.

[00:08:37] They didn’t investigate the unknown and explain it and put clear boundaries around it.

[00:08:44] There are a couple of simple techniques that you might use to do this, although we’re not

[00:08:48] going to be able to talk about every technique, of course, but some very well established

[00:08:54] techniques for this.

[00:08:56] One is to express things with a confidence interval.

[00:09:01] What does this mean?

[00:09:02] In most cases, this means having some kind of percentage confidence.

[00:09:06] In other words, you could say we believe that we’re going to accomplish this work, this

[00:09:12] body of work that we’ve been talking about, whatever it is, in the next, say, four months.

[00:09:19] And we have about 80% confidence and we could do it in the next four months.

[00:09:24] Now this allows you to have a more nuanced discussion about what is keeping you from

[00:09:31] having a higher confidence level, maybe 90%.

[00:09:35] It’s allowing you to have a more nuanced discussion around the fact that you’ll never

[00:09:39] get to 100% confidence until the thing is actually done.

[00:09:43] And this is simply because of the nature of the unknown.

[00:09:47] There are any number of factors that may keep you from actually accomplishing this work

[00:09:52] within a given period of time.

[00:09:54] Now this technique extends beyond just estimates.

[00:09:58] What you’re doing is you’re explaining your uncertainty with some kind of magnitude measure.

[00:10:06] You’re giving a confidence interval because humans naturally parse confidence in a more

[00:10:13] binary fashion.

[00:10:15] In other words, you could say we believe we’re going to get this done in about four months.

[00:10:21] And someone may take that to mean we know that we’re going to accomplish this in four

[00:10:26] months.

[00:10:27] And therefore, anything more than four months is a problem may have fallen outside of it.

[00:10:35] But again, we can apply this in multiple other scenarios.

[00:10:39] The underlying technique here is that you are explaining with clarity and honesty what

[00:10:47] you don’t know about something.

[00:10:49] And therefore, you are drawing conclusions that provide you with something you do know.

[00:10:55] In other words, you’re converting this unknown quantity.

[00:11:02] You’re using that as a starting point for learning something.

[00:11:08] Instead of ignoring it or imagining that it doesn’t exist or not dealing with it in some

[00:11:12] way, you’re using this as a basis for another part of the discussion.

[00:11:17] In other words, you’re sizing this uncertainty by about 20%.

[00:11:21] This gives you some measure of what are we going to do about this or how big of a problem

[00:11:27] is this?

[00:11:29] This kind of confrontation that you’re producing, right, that you’re confronting the unknown,

[00:11:35] this provides the people who are listening to you a much higher sense of confidence in

[00:11:42] what you are saying.

[00:11:43] They are perceiving you as more confident as a result.

[00:11:47] Now, interestingly, this still happens even if your confidence intervals that you’re assigning

[00:11:52] are lower.

[00:11:53] So, if you said, for example, my confidence for this is less than 80%, maybe 50% or 60%,

[00:12:01] then what you’re saying is I’ve done the work to try to gain confidence in this, but unfortunately,

[00:12:08] there’s too many unknowns.

[00:12:09] I can’t get past those unknowns to increase my confidence level or there’s work yet to

[00:12:15] be done to get past those unknowns.

[00:12:19] Another good technique for this is to identify when you are not the best person to answer

[00:12:24] a question and to ask who might be.

[00:12:28] This is ultimately the point of having a team of people, specifically a team of multifaceted

[00:12:36] talented individuals who each may have areas of expertise or specialty that not everyone

[00:12:42] necessarily shares.

[00:12:44] What this means is that if you can identify your own areas of expertise and also you’re

[00:12:51] able to understand what areas are not in your expertise, counterintuitively, this is another

[00:12:58] way to improve other people’s confidence in you and you’re projecting better confidence

[00:13:03] in yourself.

[00:13:05] Why is that?

[00:13:06] What is the mechanism there?

[00:13:08] It’s most likely because when we know ourselves well enough to identify areas that we should

[00:13:14] not be participating, then what that means is when we are on the flip side of that, when

[00:13:21] we are identifying areas where we should be participating, people are more likely to trust

[00:13:25] our judgment about that because everyone kind of intuitively understands that not any one

[00:13:32] person can do everything.

[00:13:35] If someone is portraying that they are capable of doing everything, then we’re less likely

[00:13:40] to trust them on any given thing.

[00:13:42] If instead the person is portraying that they have a smaller set of skills, then we’re

[00:13:48] more likely to trust them about that smaller set of skills.

[00:13:52] This just so happens to work out well for people who do this because it’s actually true.

[00:13:58] They actually are able to work using the skills that they are competent and capable in and

[00:14:05] they’re not having to operate in things that they’re more kind of middle of the road capability

[00:14:11] in.

[00:14:12] This is ultimately the effect of proper delegation.

[00:14:16] If you’re delegating everything, then people will pick up on the fact that you’re not actually

[00:14:21] contributing in any particular way yourself.

[00:14:25] If you’re delegating some things and you’re being explicit about why, then folks are more

[00:14:31] likely to trust that your why is dependable.

[00:14:35] Not only does this increase the perception and the reality of confidence, you are more

[00:14:41] confident in the work that you’re doing because you’re selecting work that you are actually

[00:14:45] capable of doing, but it also means that you have more time to do those tasks that you

[00:14:52] are more capable of doing in the first place.

[00:14:55] The theme here is centralizing around the idea of knowing reality or investing in figuring

[00:15:04] out reality.

[00:15:06] The reality of the unknown, you’re investing in figuring out and kind of putting boundaries

[00:15:12] around that so that you can point to it and you can clearly say, we can’t have confidence

[00:15:17] about this because it is unknown.

[00:15:20] If you’re able to invest in knowing the risks, knowing your own shortcomings, knowing your

[00:15:25] own capabilities, being able to communicate about those, this is going to go a long way

[00:15:31] for both how you actually spend your time and confronting reality yourself and how others

[00:15:37] perceive you confronting reality.

[00:15:40] Ultimately, confidence is about understanding what you know very clearly and taking advantage

[00:15:48] of what you know very clearly.

[00:15:51] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea.

[00:15:53] Thank you again to today’s sponsor, Unblocked.

[00:15:56] Your developers already know how to write code.

[00:15:59] That’s why you hired them.

[00:16:01] What they’re actually missing is the context to know what code to write in the first place.

[00:16:05] Unblocked gives engineering teams the answers they need to get their jobs done without having

[00:16:10] to wait on or interrupt their teammates.

[00:16:13] Get started for free at getunblocked.com.

[00:16:16] That’s G-E-T, unblocked.com.

[00:16:20] If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone else that you think might enjoy

[00:16:24] it as well.

[00:16:25] You can share directly through your podcasting app of choice, most likely.

[00:16:31] This episode and every other episode of Developer Tea can also be found at developertea.com.

[00:16:36] And you can come and talk to me and other listeners of this show on the Developer Tea

[00:16:39] Discord.

[00:16:40] Head over to developertea.com slash Discord to join for free.

[00:16:44] Thanks so much for listening.

[00:16:45] And until next time, enjoy your tea.

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