In programming, as in life, the goal for many is the seeking of easiness. This document describes why that goal almost universally ends in failure and an alternate methodology to achieve superior quality output with far less effort.
Easiness describes the quality of easy, which relates to avoidance of discomfort and/or perceived increased effort of a thing or action. The state of easy is challenging to describe and measure because it is both transitive and subjective. That means a person may experience easiness of a thing in one circumstance and not in another as circumstances change. Furthermore, that state of easiness is defined by the combination of perspectives, prior knowledge, and familiarity of a specific person and so wildly differs from person to person.
Perhaps programmers most typically express easiness in programming through use of memorized patterns. Memorized patterns allow convenient solutions for both business processes and application code under the perception of minimized risk. Counter-intuitively that almost certainly increases risk as easiness is almost impossible to objectify and therefore challenging to remediate as abstractly as necessary to solve for things in states of change or inconsideration for a plurality of variables.
While many people clearly and actively seek easiness as a self-stated goal or primary criteria of admitted decisions it is less clear why this behavior occurs. The behavior occurs not for attainment of comfort, safety, or effort reduction as those reasons suggest deliberate reasoning or planning. The attainment of easiness occurs most frequently in a non-deliberate manner and frequently non-cognitively, therefore suggesting avoidance of negative emotion as opposed to deliberately seeking the converse.
Psychology describes the presence of negative emotion as neuroticism, which is one of the Big 5 personality index. High measures of neuroticism directly correlate with a variety of mental health disorders, including anxiety. Exceptionally low measures of neuroticism directly correlate with both risk seeking behavior and more fluid risk analysis.
Levels of neuroticism are shaped by environmental, genetic, and physiological factors. A person that injures easily will exercise greater restraint to avoid injury. Likewise, a person seemingly incapable of breaking bones and healing at exceptional speeds has greater liberty to determine risk acceptance. A person that grows up in an environment with horses and livestock is less inclined to fear large animals.
People with exceptionally low neuroticism exhibit acute differences in brain chemistry regarding a healthy dopamine cycle and adrenaline. These people are able to deliberately accept high risk scenarios without the minor physiological stimulation most people experience. That natural physiological stimulation is the minor non-cognitive fear response that increases mental focus and elevates pulse. For example search for talks and videos by Brad "Ice Man" Colbert who is a person with neuroticism low enough to alter their behavior and fear response both in moments of danger and at rest.
As a person, myself, with exceptionally low neuroticism here are examples of behaviors other people might find abnormal:
- I joined the military at the youngest age allowed by my nation and deployed to foreign nations 5 times, including almost 2 years of time in Afghanistan during a war.
- As a soldier in Afghanistan a rocket landed in my housing neighborhood, Dragon, of Bagram Air Base within extremely close proximity to my housing. No one in my house, which they called B-huts, was injured so I went back to sleep because it was cold outside.
- As a teenager I was detained by police for driving 135mph in a 45mph speed zone, State Highway 114 in Southlake TX before it became a freeway, with my younger brother as a passenger. My brother was admittedly nervous about my forth-coming arrest, but I remained calm and displayed my military ID like nothing happened. I was released at the scene.
- As a teenager I, and some friends, broke into an abandoned grain silo in my hometown to repel using ropes and climbing equipment. I rigged my climbing harness incorrectly and fell more than 50 feet onto concrete where I suffered minor first degree burns on my hands through leather gloves grabbing a nylon rope. I was rather excited and actually thought about doing that again before being whisked away by my co-offenders.
- Early in my Army Reserve career my unit received a two week annual training in the south German town of Kaiserslautern. A dance club, Riverside, opened just months before our arrival. On the night immediately preceding our departure back to the US I chose to continue consuming alcohol and remain at the dance club until their closing time of 0400 knowing I had an early morning show time at 0600 for movement ot the airport. Upon leaving the club on foot I became disoriented and knowing that I was running out of time I chose to abandon the roadway as it felt unfamiliar. Instead I chose to turn in the direction of a 300m heavily forested hill that I believed was the linear direction to the military compound. After a light job through forest and climbing 3 layers of barded wire fence I returned to the military compound just minutes before 0600.
Many people might find these behaviors challenging to understand. For people with exceptionally low neuroticism fear and emotional discomfort are processed differently resulting in these people not fearing things that would likely invoke extreme panic in others. It is challenging to say exactly why unusual behavior occurs. One answer points to impaired processing of the Amygdala, which is one of the oldest structures common to most animal brains. A person with impaired fear response will likely also demonstrate impaired processing of other reflexive emotional responses as well. This does not mean these people lack emotion, but only that these people are slower to display emotion in the specific context of immediate stimulus reflex.
It also does not mean these people are without avoidance behaviors, but that their avoid behaviors are triggered by different things many other people would likely not bother avoiding. For people with typical reflexive fear responses they may avoid things or situations known to trigger an unpleasant response, even without direct realization of such avoidance. Consider the list of behaviors mentioned above. For persons with a normal fear response those behaviors might look like thrill seeking behaviors, or activities of a high risk nature taken to provoke a fear or adventurous condition. For persons with without a normal fear response those behaviors are actually just learning activities, such as learning to drive or taking a test in school. I had to remind people many times that I was an order of magnitude more likely to die driving to work in safe conditions within the speed limit on the freeway in the US than in a military combat zone like Afghanistan. When you look at the seemingly crazy behaviors of a low neurotic person in context of measures compared to everyday behaviors of the population at large they suddenly become boring and pedestrian.
Avoidance also occurs as a cultural phenomenon measured as uncertainty avoidance, which is one of the Geert Hofstede cross-cultural indexes. Cultures with high measures of avoidance are more inclined to set rigid rules to enforce behaviors and minimize disruptions to planned outcomes. They may even set rules they do not use. High avoidance cultures demonstrate higher levels of anxiety and higher resistance to change. Cultures with low measures of avoidance tend to exercise informality and openness, which is the Big 5 index most directly correlated with high intelligence. These low uncertainty avoidance cultures also show less influence from rules imposed upon them.
It should be noted that uncertainty avoidance is not at all correlated with risk avoidance. Risk avoidance deals only with deliberate planning while uncertainty avoidance only deals with practiced rituals and norms of a culture and the resulting behaviors and emotions of such. For example the US military is a culture of both exceptionally low risk avoidance and extremely high uncertainty avoidance.
Another primary cause for seeking easiness rests in conquests of merit not earned. This typically means demonstrations of expertise without the qualifying education or experience. There are two unrelated behaviors that produce this desire:
Self-affirmation is the process of increasing a person's own confidence through beliefs and activities. Under normal conditions a person will naturally increase their own confidence through continued practice when precise details of success and failure crystalize in their mind. Under irregular conditions a person will intentionally seek to reaffirm a personal belief solely for emotional gratification and that which challenges strongly fortified belief systems introduces discomfort.
Reciprocity is the process of emotional gratification achieved through social acts that immediately benefit other people. For example helping up a fallen or injured person makes many people feel positive emotions to know they assisted and comforted someone else in their time of need.
Poorly framed reciprocity occurs when a person seeks sympathy or praise without a qualifying context. One example occurs when a person interjects into a conversation with their personal achievement or expert opinion where that interjection is either unwanted, unfounded, or not qualified by the conversed subject. The goal in that case is to earn intellectual praise but typically results in failure due to poor social awareness. The same scenario may occur when the goal is sympathy instead of intellectual praise because both seek self-affirmation and positive emotional reciprocity.
According to John Gottman's work on marriage relationships defensiveness forms one of the four horsemen of toxic communication. Defensiveness comprises any behaviors and communications with a goal of retaining either assets or reputation in order to deflect feelings of discomfort, which is a more precise way of describing the perception of easiness. In short: retain something and deflect from that retaining behavior.
Most often defensiveness occurs as a result of bias more than anything intentional or nefarious. For example anchoring bias is the preference for a first learning over subsequent learnings irrespective of evidence in the later or invalidation of the former. Anchoring bias applies to both learned information and processes. In regards to programming if a person is first taught to program using object-oriented paradigms in the flavor of C++ they will likely continue to preference that approach even in areas where it requires far greater effort or does not apply. Persons anchored to a preferred programming style will generally prefer to perform extra effort to continuing practicing in that style even at great risk of delay and failure. When an outside observer sees that behavior they may ask the programmer about it and if the programmer's response is any form of qualifier not formed from ethical compliance, prior practice, or measures the programmer might be practicing a form of deflection and that deflection is the behavior of defensiveness.
The problem with defensiveness is that it is self-oriented as opposed to product-oriented or goal-oriented. Self-oriented means to prioritize the concerns of the decision maker over those of the work on which their decision concerns. Goal-oriented means to prioritize product goals from either compliance or measures over goals vested in people performing the work.
Often expressed interchangeably with the term stonewalling Gottman defines these as separate and unrelated behaviors. Stonewalling is the behavior of shutting down and not responding whether for cognitive reasons or merely to prevent the display of an emotional response. Defensiveness is a deflection based behavior, which requires providing a response.
It should be noted that avoidance, defensiveness, and unearned merit are both primary behaviors associated with autism. Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, is a broad spectrum neurological disorder impacting social conditioning, decision making capacity, and self-identity. Like conscientiousness autism is poorly correlated with intelligence, which means both autism and high conscientiousness may occur in both highly intelligent and low intelligent people. Unlike conscientiousness autism inversely impacts degree of critical reasoning necessary to qualify decisions formed from complex criteria. Some examples of decisions formed from complex criteria benefitted by higher conscientiousness and lower autism include empathy, listening, contingency planning, task prioritization, and so forth.
Since easiness comes from the perspective of a person in a given moment measuring easiness objectively produces several challenges. The greatest and most well known of these challenges is the difference in authoring time and cumulative maintenance time for a given work product. For example code easily written at first because it comes from a memorized pattern or repetitious use of a tool accounts for effort and familiarity in that authoring moment but cannot account for second and third order consequences of other intersecting concerns without additional effort. Additional effort introduces discomfort. A common result of easily authored software without consideration for the necessary additional planning effort then is increased complexity. Complexity is a fancy word that means many. Many pieces interacting in many different ways of which many such interactions may be unexpected, unplanned, or unrealized defeats the goals of easiness.
The solution for easiness is a clear purpose and durability. When practice upon a work fixates around those two qualities a state of comfort is achieved without risk of immediate defeat from discomfort. More importantly is that output achieves a superior quality with a lower effort.
The ethical goal when performing any work is to achieve the most superior result with the least effort and maximum learning. The ancient Greeks referred to this ethic as Eudaimonia, the highest virtue, as opposed to euphoria or hedonia.
Euphoria describes a sensation of pleasure, whether physical or emotional, often as an unintended result. Experiences of euphoria are frequently linked to the natural instances of overwhelming exchange of hormones or neurotransmitters in the brain, most commonly: dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, and endorphins.
Hedonism describes the behavior of seeking instant pleasure or instant gratification. Hedonism is frequently associated with selfishness, and possibly narcissism, where pleasure seeking behaviors often seek immediacy at expense to more careful considerations of cost/benefit analysis. As a result hedonism is commonly viewed as short-sighted, harmful, and toxic to other people.
Constantly striving for the highest quality of output alters the perceptions, details, and definitions of that output. For example people may choose to abandon maximal quality in the delivery of a given product because the perception of production or delivery costs as present exceed those of lower quality products. This is a form of selection bias.
First of all this perception of greatly increased production cost might be valid, but that validation cannot be known without comparing measures of both variations under otherwise equivalent conditions. In most cases superior quality output incurs little or no additional cost so long as differences of physical materials are absent. This indicates increased cost perceptions are, at least, greatly inflated due to biases and defensiveness.
Secondly, production costs tend to decrease significantly over time as a result of process consolidation and precision refinement. So even if superior quality products cost more to produce at a given moment that cost difference will approach parity into the future. Reduction of costs towards parity is provable by comparing differences of measures at different points in time.
Finally, and most importantly, striving for maximal quality output presents a learning opportunity, and thus a competitive advantage in the marketplace otherwise sacrificed. Such learning presents two opportunities: awareness of new capabilities and process improvements, both of which are forms of compounding interests. Awareness of new capabilities unlocks means of production and quality control that did not exist prior and both reduce operating costs at present and allow awareness of still new capabilities from future efforts. Process improvements occur as a result of practice upon current processes and from consolidation of disparate labors into single lines of effort. Process improvements improve production speed which further fuels discovery of new capabilities and other process consolidation.
Durability is satisfied by three conditions:
- evidence - comprised by factual findings or credible citations
- transparency/reproducibility - the publication of approach and the immediacy for others to practice such approach
- goal-orientation - Goal orientation is the behavior of transparently stating a purpose and the directness with which that purpose is sought.
The goal of durability is to reduce risk of failure whether that failure occurs from an effort at present, is the result of a regression from future efforts, or is the result of a collision of competing factors. More durable output allows more time for future development and less time spent repairing defects at potential harm to reputation.
Evidence is necessary to objectively qualify a decision, which eliminates bias from practice and ensures accuracy of learning. Evidence generally comes in two flavors: measurements and prior research.
Transparency solves two problems. First, it eliminates secrecy which unintentionally exists to hide failure from embarrassment. Secondly, it forces honesty of work product which expands reputation by demonstrating integrity. Reproducibility validates proof of learning, and possibly product superiority, by allowing others to independently qualify and validate your advances.
Goal-orientation sets direction and motivation by defining a positional target whether terminal or intermediary. Stephen Covey's book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People states as the second habit to begin with the end in mind. Formulation of a plan starting from the end point to the starting point allows for a clear path to accomplish any given work effort.