"Blink" by Malcom Gladwell
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:54:00 GMT
Back in 1986 when I was working for InsMark, we set out to hire a programmer. We interviewed many candidates, several were very good, but one stood out above the rest. This candidate had a problem though—she was a girl.
We got in a room to discuss the candidates and although everyone recognized that her qualifications and background were superior to the rest, they just couldn’t get around her gender. So I told everyone to close their eyes and imagine that this candidate was a man. I then reviewed “his” qualifications: learned programming on his own before taking any classes, did great in all his programming classes, has worked on some very advanced projects, and loved to program in his spare time. I then asked if they would hire this person, and they replied they would hire that guy but … were still uneasy because the candidate was actually a girl. I then said, “Listen guys, this girl is a nerd, just like us” and that did the trick. They were able to replace one stereotype, being female, with another, being a nerd, and that made all the difference. We hired her and she turned out to be a great programmer and fit in well with the team.
This unconscious prejudgment is one of the topics that Malcom Gladwell talks about in Blink.
Reading this book reminded me of another experience that happened in 2003 while I was working for Xythos. Two programmers from our Czech development team came over and one of our goals was to finalize the programming guidelines. One of the guidelines was to make procedures as short as possible, but they disagreed with this. One programmer in particular kept arguing that this was wrong and it was better to write long procedures. Now even though this programmer had only been programming for a couple of years, and I had been programming for almost 20 years, I couldn’t articulate why I knew that shorter procedures were better. The reason had something to do with debugging and maintaining a program over years-and-years—but I didn’t have a concrete example that I could point to, it just felt right.
This is another topic of Blink—how experts can can know that something is right or wrong, without really knowing why they know.
This was a very interesting book, and one that I am sure I will continue to think about and make references to years from now. The lessons here are important and they can be summarized by saying that experts can know things without knowing why they know it, but also that snap judgments can work against us if we are not careful.