A senior colleague who mentors me gave me two pieces of advice recently:
Always keep your passion, and stay positive.
Whatever you’re working on, have your own concluded opinion.
On paper, the first reads like a poster in a dentist’s waiting room and the second like a line from a performance review. I agreed with both anyway.
Back in March I wrote about losing my curiosity for a decade without noticing. Passion can go the same way. No burnout, no dramatic exit. Once you’ve seen enough projects stall, you can list the reasons the next one will stall too, and after a while that list starts to feel like wisdom.
The list is useful. I just don’t think reciting it counts as solving the problem. Plenty of new things fail, so predicting failure is a cheap way to be right often enough to feel smart.
Staying positive takes more effort. You still see the reasons it might fail, but now you have to look for a way it could work.
Also, look at the verb. Keep. You already care about it, but experience can slowly turn into a reason not to bother.
The second piece of advice is more concrete: bring your answer along with the problem. Say a release is blocked on a flaky test. You could send this:
The release is blocked on a flaky test. We could roll back, wait for the fix, or ship behind a flag. Thoughts?
Or:
The release is blocked on a flaky test. I think we ship behind a flag: the fix is two days out, and a rollback costs more than it saves. Doing that tomorrow morning unless someone objects.
The first message lays out the options. But it leaves the hardest part, deciding what to do, to whoever reads it. In the second, somebody has made a call that the others can agree with or argue against.
My mentor’s point was to go in assuming you’re the one who has to solve it. Without a conclusion, you’re a router: the problem passes through you to whoever eventually has to make the call.
The first version is tempting because a menu can’t be wrong. If the flag goes badly, it wasn’t your call.
The second one can be wrong, of course. Maybe the flaky test was hiding a real bug. But then someone can point at your reasoning and say which part doesn’t hold, and you’re arguing about something concrete. “Thoughts?” doesn’t give anyone anything to push against. It just sits in the channel until someone else picks it up.
So “concluded” doesn’t mean certain. It means you’ve done the work and have an answer to offer. You can still be talked out of it.
I think you need both. With only enthusiasm, you can end up cheerleading while somebody else figures out what to do. And the cynic on the sidelines can have a clear opinion that it won’t work, and no real interest in whether it could.
If I care how it turns out, I’m more willing to stay with a problem until I have an answer. And once I’ve put that answer out there, I want to see if it works.
That’s my concluded opinion, anyway. If it’s wrong, someone will tell me. That’s sort of the point.
最近，一位比我 senior 的同事，也是我的 mentor，给了我两条建议：
永远要保持 passion，保持积极的心态。
工作也好，处理事情也好，要有自己的 concluded opinion。
单看字面，第一条像牙科诊所里的励志海报，第二条像绩效评语。可我两条都认。
三月那篇《重拾好奇心》里，我写过自己怎么不知不觉把好奇心丢了十年。热情大概也一样。未必有什么 burnout，人只是越来越有经验了。
项目见得多，下一个刚开头，哪儿可能卡住、为什么做不成，很快就能列一串。这些经验当然有用。可如果到这里就停了，就容易觉得自己已经看明白了，没什么好试的。
问题是，新东西本来就容易失败。光说它不行，总有说中的时候，也很容易觉得自己还挺聪明。保持积极反而要多费点劲：不行的理由都摆在这儿了，还得继续想有没有办法。
还有，注意那个动词：保持。热情原本是有的，只是有了经验之后，还得留点心，别不知不觉把它弄丢了。
第二条我理解就是带着答案来。假设发布被 flaky test 卡住了，可以这么发消息：
发布卡在一个 flaky test 上。可以回滚，可以等修复，也可以先用 feature flag 关着上线。大家怎么看？
也可以这么写：
发布卡在一个 flaky test 上。我建议先用 flag 关着上线：修复还要两天，回滚的代价比收益大。没意见的话，明早就这么办。
第一条把选项列齐了，当然有用。可到底选哪个，还在等别人拿主意。第二条好讨论多了：有个具体建议，别人可以直接说哪儿不合适，不用再从头琢磨。
mentor 的理由我很认同：来聊这件事，就先当自己是要解决它的人。找人讨论没问题，把答案也一起带上。不然光转问题、不拿主意，自己也就成了个转发器。
第一种其实也更安全。菜单是不会错的，flag 出问题了，又不是自己拍的板嘛。
第二种当然也可能错。说不定那个 flaky test 底下真藏着 bug 呢。可就算错了，别人也能指着你给的理由，说哪一条站不住，讨论一下子就落到实处了。光问一句“大家怎么看？”，谁也没法反驳，消息就在群里挂着，等别人来接。
concluded 不等于“确定”。功课做了，就把判断说清楚。有人发现问题，当然可以改。
不过，光有结论也不够。站在旁边说“这事成不了”，也是一个很明确的 opinion 啊。可要是不关心能不能做成，说得再准，也只是个看客。曾国藩那句话，我四月引过：在局外呐喊议论，总是无益。
反过来，热情再足，主意一直拿不出来，也容易变成啦啦队。大家一起加油挺好，问题最后还是得有人想办法。
真在乎这件事，才愿意费劲把它想清楚。等自己拿了个主意，又会更惦记最后到底做成了没有。
这就是我的 concluded opinion。错了的话，会有人告诉我的。本来要的就是这个嘛。
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