You debug programs, I debug people

Every day at work, a few colleagues and I will chat over the lunch table.  Usually it's just small talk, but sometimes the conversations get rather deep.  (BTW, I love it because it gives me ideas to blog about!)

The topic that came up today was "solving engineering problems vs. solving people problems".  My colleagues were defending that people are very much harder to deal with.  However, I had a rather different view.  I argued that people are not much different than programs, in that people's actions are also consistent with their belief systems, much like a program does what it's designed to do.  Yes, people will carry some variability (or volatility!), but usually if you can grasp the "root cause" of what makes a person tick, debugging people should be no different than debugging programs.

And of course, this sparked a healthy debate.  I find this fascinating!  Looking back at my own education and career, I also believed that engineering problems were easier to solve than people problems.  After all, that's why I became an engineer, and not a politician.  But as my career progressed and I was exposed to more people and customers, I realized that there was a pattern to people, not unlike engineering systems and programs.  Yet this realization, this ... sense of confidence that people can be managed ... I don't recall any course in college being able to address this, at least at the undergraduate level.

Imagine what world we would be in, if fresh graduates were college were equipped and armed with a solid base of people management?  (Yes I agree that people management skills improve with maturity and age, but I'm only referring to basic knowledge such as "if-this-then-that" logic and skills.)  Entry level jobs, such as front-line customer support reps (which was also my first job) would be so much more effective in handling customer complaints and objections.  Businesses would gain customer satisfaction, and skilled engineering graduates wouldn't have to retreat to a reclusive role, as in, "Oh I think dealing with people is just too hard for me, I think I'll join R&D and code all day and not talk to people."  It's a win-win, both for the employee and for the business.

Academically, engineers are well trained in problem solving.  Transferring these problem solving skills over to people management isn't hard.  You just have to see the similarities.  I hope to share more case studies in the blog post to come.