Earlier this week I wrote a piece, The exceptions are more interesting. Tl;dr - unless you're extremely careful at work, ideas/advice/theories become platitudes, and therefore less useful.
My brain isn't finished with the idea, I think the point I want to make is:
It is tempting to prefer talking in generalisations. It feels more useful, because you can think-once-run-anywhere. It's easy to dismiss a criticism of an "in general" with the details of "just one" specific. But for any one given problem or situation, it's probably more useful to give specific advice - and then try to make it general.
We've got a couple of new-ish projects going on at work. They are taking a lot of my time. Because they're new, there's a lot of ground-work to do as a software engineer. You've got to understand the way the current system works, how we want the future system to work, and where we can/not take shortcuts to get things done quicker.
This means that a lot of the conversations at the moment have to be really specific. For example you might have to say "If you had to wait six weeks for two of these features, what's most acceptable" or "can we do a manual conversion of data here, instead of spending a week automating it?".
I think some people see this level of specificity as a bad thing.
There's an idea that generalisations or meta-level work is always more useful than talking about the specifics of an issue. Taking the examples above, they might respond "we need a rigorous, opportunity-cost approach to prioritising" or "we need a clean set of code tools for data input automation".
Sometimes I'll try to bring conversations closer to the specifics and detail of a specific problem, and the response is to try to find generalities, or meta-conversations.
Those things feel and sound useful, but they take every problem one step above where it is. Sometimes you really do just have to do the thing™️.
There's a middle ground between the engineer who has to spend days-weeks in the weeds, and the product-person who spends time thinking about processes. But I think that meta conversations and grand theories-of-everythings can take the air out of the room for conversations of specific problems.
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