Keep Your Thoughts to Yourself

When, and when not, to share your ideas

It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Does being an engineer make a man low-status or do low-status men tend to pursue careers in engineering? Or is there no causal relationship at all, is it simply a parallel correlation?

However, one thing I have noticed is that the technical individual’s focus on detail and improvement can be directly linked to their relative unpopularity. While one could write whole treatises on the unique engineering approach to personal hygiene and style, those are things that can be very easily fixed by either an interested woman or a simple resort to the relevant publications.

What is less easily fixed is the air of constant negativity that most technical men radiate, combined with their complete lack of empathy. Whether it is Delta narcissism or solipsistic Gamma delusion is irrelevant insofar as other people are concerned, all they know is that the technical individual has absolutely no capacity to anticipate how another individual is going to feel about his words.

I swear, if he suggests one more “improvement” I’m going to stab him in the eye.

First, technical people love to be critical. It feeds their sense of superiority and allows them to play Smart Boy in front of an audience. The fact that they might not know anything at all about the subject at hand, or the complications and conflicting factors that need to be balanced seldom slows them down. I’ve gotten to the point that I very seldom discuss my plans or objectives with technical people because their desire to criticize on the basis of prioritizing their area of expertise over everything else renders them both inept and annoying, and their advice reliably irrelevant. I more often find myself wasting time explaining what should have been immediately obvious to them than getting any useful technical advice that will improve my approach.

Example: Why are you using X instead of Y? With Y, the performance will be 5 percent greater! Because Y costs ten times as much, is only available from a single supplier in Myanmar in one specific phase of the Moon, and we would lose money on every item sold. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess it’s okay what you’re doing then. So glad to hear you approve of what we were already doing without your help.

What works much better, from the non-technical side, is to present the technical gentlemen with a very specific problem which they can happily address and solve without needing to know anything about the larger plan. This allows them to exercise their strengths without similarly demonstrating their weaknesses.

Second, and more seriously, the technical gentleman’s lack of empathy often prompts him to offer criticism, not only when it isn’t requested, but when it is too late for it to be useful.

I published my first solo novel back in 2000. About a month later, I got a call from my father, an MIT engineer. He told me that he’d read the book, and asked me if I wanted to know what was wrong with it. I said, no, I did not, and pointed out that as he clearly knew, the book had already been published, in print, and was in its final form. This did not stop him from spending the next 30 minutes in an impromptu lecture on his list of what he felt were the book’s various flaws.

Even so, it sold out its 35k print run.

I was neither offended nor upset, as it was far from my first experience with this sort of thing and I’m about as concerned with an engineer’s opinion on fantasy literature as I am in a comedian’s thoughts about theology. And he did raise a point or two that I successfully implemented in my next novel a few years later. But for those who have not been raised by an engineer and whose egos are less impervious to the negative opinions of others, this sort of response to an accomplishment or an achievement can be extremely painful, and will tend to cause them to avoid those they see as cruel and pointless critics who get off on raining on the parades of others.

“No, I do not want you to read it and tell me what is wrong with it. Go away!”

Here, then, is my advice to the technical gentlemen, be they Delta, Gamma, or Omega:

• Do not offer any criticism to anyone unless it is specifically requested. If they want it, they will ask. If they don’t ask, they don’t want it. Keep your thoughts to yourself.

• Even if your instinctive take on something you have been presented is entirely negative, find something positive to say about it. If the book is mediocre, congratulate them on completing such an arduous task. If the composition of the song is suboptimal or the mix is bad, tell them it sounds like they had a lot of fun playing it. You can always find something that isn’t going to bring them down and make them hate you.

• When presented with a new idea, resist the temptation to immediately provide some sort of improvement upon it. They came up with it and they’ve been thinking about it for a while, and have likely been considering all sorts of angles that you haven’t considered or don’t even know exist. If you happen to think of a genuine improvement, you can always contact them later and ask them if they would be interested in hearing your thoughts on what MIGHT be an improvement. In most cases, they’ll be delighted to hear it… then. And it’s much more likely that your idea will actually be an improvement, rather than an irrelevance born of ignorance.

• When criticism is requested, leave the other person out of it entirely. Never say “you should have done X”. Don’t even use the word “you”. Instead, say neutral things like “I think X might work better here.”

• The critic is not superior to the creator. That’s entirely backwards. The creator is always superior to the critic, because the creator is the man in the arena.

• Never forget that it is much harder to produce an original thought, however flawed, than it is to come up with a permutation on it. Even if the permutation eventually proves to be more valuable or significant, it would not exist without the original source.

• Stop helping! Or rather, “helping".