There’s a really weird communication pattern that I keep seeing all the time in big companies and small companies.
Picture this: You’re hiring an employee, consultant, contractor, whatever you want to call them. You think this person has good experience and you’re paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once you hire them, you tell them, “Hey, I want you to do this.”
This is super weird. You’re not explaining the problem. You’re just trying to use this person as a human tool.
The Problem
What you should do is say, “Hey, I have a problem. What solution do you think is correct?”
That’s not something I hear often. You’re hiring this person because of their experience, but you’re still trying to force them to do what you think is correct. When you hire this person as a contractor, consultant, or employee, you’re asking them to do what you think is correct. But that wasn’t the reason you hired them in the first place.
This communication pattern keeps popping up. I’ve experienced it, I know people who’ve experienced it, I’ve seen people experience it, and it just doesn’t make sense.
What you should do is say, “I have this problem and I want this result. What is the solution you recommend?”
Since I have a technical background, I’m thinking about this from a technical perspective. But this isn’t happening only in tech teams. This comes from both technical people and non-technical people.
There are technical people/technical leaders who think they know the answers very well. So they want you to be a tool instead of using your brain. It’s not always wrong, but it’s not always correct.
If you hired a junior developer, I understand the approach because they don’t have the experience you expect. So you just explain what to do. But if they’re an experienced person, something is off here.
The same pattern also exists in the words coming from non-tech people, and when it comes from non-technical people, it’s worse. Now they’re asking you to do tasks that don’t make sense. They have some kind of solution in their mind, which isn’t grounded in anything.
It becomes even worse when a non-tech person is assigning a task to a tech person by telling them what to do instead of picking their brain and asking for solutions.
This pattern isn’t only visible in these situations. For example, a business team may ask a data team to build a dashboard or a model. But they think this is the solution without really understanding the business problem.
I will be honest, there are business people who really don’t understand the problem because they’re not grounded in the data. They don’t know the data as well as the data people who are dealing with the data day-to-day.
What these business people should do is say, “We want to figure out how to measure our revenue, etc. What is the solution? How should we do it?”
Instead, they’re trying to bring their own solutions and asking you to implement them.
You’re paying a data team around a million per year and you’re not even using their brain-power. You’re just asking them, “Just do it.” You’re trying to use them as a tool instead of leveraging their brain-power.
That is a pattern that I keep seeing. I’ve experienced it, teams I was in experienced it, and I’ve seen people experience these kinds of weird situations.
The Solution
If you’re an employer hiring people because you have a problem, don’t tell them what to do. Explain your problem.
And if you’re someone listening as an experienced developer, engineer, or data person, basically someone who is hands-on, what you should do is understand the business. Zoom out and understand the bigger picture instead of just trying to fix that function.
If you’re not understanding the business, the business requirements; if you’re not even thinking about the context, you probably have 20-30 years of experience but you’re still not senior enough.
Seniority is not measured only by having years in your pocket. If you’re just doing one thing and you’re fixing the same function, or running the same SQL query all the time, you’re still junior.
What I’m trying to say is: you’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to individuals who you think are experienced, but you’re using them as a tool. Don’t do this. Pick their brain.
This is how you can look at problems from different perspectives. Not only that, but you’ll probably solve that problem way faster.
Watch the Video
I also shared this perspective in video format. You can watch it here: