There are no hidden rules

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Have you ever experienced the feeling that the people around you all know a bunch of secret rules? Moreover, they expect that you know them too and will punish you for not following them, but still won’t ever actually tell you what the rules are? Or sometimes they do tell you what the rules are but it later turns out that they were lying or they forgot to tell you a huge list of exceptions and just assumed that you understood those.

Yeah, me too.

(If you haven’t experienced this feeling, this post is probably not for you. You’re of course welcome to keep reading it anyway if you wish, but you might find it a bit obvious).

A friend was asking about how to figure out what these rules are the other day, specifically in the context of the workplace. I gave an answer, but the more I thought about my answer the more I realised that I hadn’t ever really internalised it or thought through the broader implications.

The answer is this: There are no hidden rules. This entire feeling is an illusion.

The feeling of confusion is real, and is caused by a real problem, but the problem can not be accurately described as there being “hidden rules”.

Why? First, we’ll need a brief digression on the nature of rules.

Rules mostly come in two forms: prescriptive and descriptive. A prescriptive rule is explicit and enforced. A descriptive rule just describes what is observed to happen.

Or to put it another way, when people are observed to violate a prescriptive rule, the people violating it are at fault. When people violate a descriptive rule, the rule is at fault.

When we’re worried about hidden rules, we’re worrying about prescriptive ones – we think that there is some secret rule book that we are bad for not following. It is more or less impossible that this could be the case.

In order for such a rule book to exist, people would have to be getting together behind our backs and conspiring to come up with and enforce these rules, and then not telling us about them. I am reasonably sure that this is not happening.

If they’re not doing that, then they must have individually all come up with exactly the same rules or acquired them through some sort of secret social whisper net. Coming to consensus is almost impossible when people try to do it explicitly. Coming to consensus through such a decentralised system is essentially impossible. The “rules” mutate and change as they pass from person to person, or people just individually figured out the rules for themselves based on observation and decided that’s how things work.

The result is that everyone is operating with a different – sometimes subtly different, sometimes wildly different – set of rules, and the resulting mess does not resemble any sort of unified prescriptive set of rules that people follow. Instead of a single rule book, there’s a vague amorphous mass of roughly acceptable behaviours that contains a mix of vague consensus and massive individual divergence.

So if we want some rules that tell us how to behave, we’re left with descriptive rules – we need to somehow take all of the complex and varied space of human behaviour and boil down aspects of it to a simple set of formulae.

I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this before, but it turns out that “solving literally the entire domain of social science” is a hard problem.

So there is no rule book. How do people even function?

Well, they mostly just get on with things. They do some complex mix of what they want, what they feel they should, and what they think they can get away with. They reward behaviours that they like, they punish behaviours that they don’t like.

The result is a system where the range of permitted behaviour is more a function of the people you’re interacting with, how they interact with each other, their individual wants and preferences, and a massive amount of context.

Is something permitted? Well, it depends. Who doesn’t want you to do it, who does want you to do it, and what are the relevant balances of power between those people? Or are you individually powerful enough that you just don’t really have to care in this instance and can do it anyway?

And this mostly works. People generally want to get along, so the group roughly stabilises itself into a functioning pattern that is more or less compatible with everyone’s behaviour, and self-corrects when someone goes too far out of line.

There will probably end up being some broad areas of acceptable and unacceptable ranges of behaviour – interactions that have been done often enough that they’re largely understood and people know how to act in them – but if you ask people what they are, they’re still going to have to figure out “the rule” based on observation: It is still a task of description.

Note that this is true even when people think they already know the rule. They just did it earlier.

People are good at not noticing the special cases to the things they think are true, so if you ask someone for the rule and they tell you, you’ll often spot exceptions. If you ask about those exceptions you’ll usually hear “Oh but that was a special case/justified because of this reason”. Often that reason also has exceptions. It is very unlikely that the person you are asking consciously “knew” all these exceptions before you asked, they just took them in stride as they happened and didn’t notice that they contradicted what they thought was true.

And yet, it sure seems like they have some sort of special insight that we lack, doesn’t it?

Well, they do, but that insight isn’t a rule book, it’s more awareness of the social context and better intuition about how other people are going to behave, usually based on the idea that others are going to behave in a broadly similar manner to how they would.

But social science is still hard, and better data and intuition aren’t enough to change that, so that doesn’t actually mean they’re going to be right, they just might be a bit more accurate than we are.

Or they might be less accurate. Often when people try to make the implicit explicit they end up whitewashing reality – they give the nice version of the rule that they want to be true, which ignores a lot of the messy special cases they feel bad about. e.g. people will tend to tell you that lying is bad and of course you should be honest. Except for those little white lies and special cases that are required for social niceties. And naturally you exaggerate your performance to look good because everyone else is. Oh and when people say this what they really mean is… etc.

Even if they believe the rule is that you should always tell the truth, the practice does not follow and the more you tease them out on it the more they admit that the “real” rule has endless special cases and caveats and exceptions and actually once you consider all of the things that “don’t count”, people are lying to each other all the time.

The point is that “hidden rules that everybody knows” is not a useful mental model of what people are doing, because they don’t have access to any hidden rules either. They don’t have any sort of general theory or specific knowledge of what’s going on, and as a result any attempt to get them to tell you what the rule is will be futile.

Does this all sounds very bleak and unhelpful to you? It does to me, but I don’t actually think it is.

I think instead it’s bleak and helpful.

The most helpful thing about it is that you can just stop looking for the true hidden rules. It’s a waste of time. There aren’t any.

You can try to get the group to agree on explicit, prescriptive, rules. This is often helpful, but it can run into a number of problems – it’s actually quite hard to design rules, and the first ten attempts at coming up with a good set often make the problem worse. Also, whatever rules you come up with have to be compatible with the existing social structures and power dynamics or you’ll get huge push back on them, and explicit rules tend to accrue implicit exceptions over time.

You can think in terms of rules for you if that helps – things that make it easier for you to navigate the social situation if you follow them. As long as you understand that these are yours and under your control, and don’t expect other people to follow them, this can be very helpful.

You can try to come up with descriptive rules for how people will behave, but don’t sink too much time into making them accurate – it’s better to have an easy rule that you understand isn’t perfect than a slightly more accurate complex one that is much harder to work with and still isn’t perfect.

But ultimately, the thing to look at when you want to understand how to navigate a group isn’t rules, it’s people. What they want, how they interact, and how those desires reinforce and conflict with each other.

This is unfortunate, in that people are much harder to understand than rules, but it does have the advantage that it might actually work.

New Fiction

Shutting down my Patreon

A time and a place for work

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For an Inclusive Culture, Try Working Less is currently doing the rounds. It makes the argument that having a rigid 8:30-5:00 working day creates a more diverse environment by including people who a so called “more flexible” set of working hours would not.

I think he’s probably right. Certainly I’ve seen a lot of implicit judgement towards people who had leave early to e.g. pick up the kids from school (or just because they wanted to have an evening to themselves), even when they arrived at work early (which was of course invisible to the people who rocked in at 11).

But at the same time I will never work at a company which enforces those hours. It’s simply not going to happen, even though I fully support the right of other people to work those hours if that’s what works best for them.

I have a low grade sleeping disorder. Many people have far worse experiences than me, but mine are still bad enough that I’m going to take a hard line that if you’re going to make my sleeping experience worse then I’m not going to work for you. Forcing me to conform to your schedule in the mornings definitely counts as making my sleeping experience worse.

What’s interesting here is that I don’t think I’m unusual in this.

I’ve been noticing for a while that tech seems to have a disproportionately high number of people with sleeping disorders in it – I definitely know people with sleep apnea at a higher rate than the background rate would suggest likely, and it often seems like most of the people I know in tech have some sort of problem with sleep.

Some of this is probably caused by tech – high caffeine consumption, sitting all day, lots of blue light, and a cultural encouragement for obsession are all things that can cause sleep problems. But enough of it (including mine) has a physical root cause that it’s definitely not all caused by tech.

My working theory is simply that flexible hours mean that a job works a lot better for people with sleeping disorders, so people with sleeping disorders will tend to gravitate towards jobs with flexible hours. For better or for worse, that currently includes tech.

I don’t have data to prove that sleep disorders are atypically common in tech. It sure looks like they are, but that could just be selection bias at work.

But regardless of whether it’s more common than usual, it’s certainly common enough that I and a lot of people I know are in this situation, and any work environment which demands we turn up to work at 8:30 is going to be throwing us under a bus.

It’s not just people with sleeping disorders either, there’s a broader ableism issue. Have you ever tried taking a wheelchair on public transport in rush hour? I haven’t, but I’ve helped take someone on the London underground not at rush hour and even that wasn’t much fun. Demanding people all arrive at the same time is a great way to seriously disadvantage people who need a wheelchair (I imagine it’s not great for people with any other sort of mobility issue either).

Sure, you could make exceptions for all of us who have sufficiently convincing reasons. That would be better, but it means we now need to be singled out as special cases, which inevitably makes other people annoyed about our special treatment – I have seen a huge amount of ill will towards developers from coworkers whose jobs require them to be in the office during a particular time range, and I can only imagine it would be worse from people you work more closely with.

And what about those for whom it doesn’t really stretch as far as a disorder or a disability, but is merely a really strong preference? e.g. even if I didn’t have sleep problems (here’s hoping for that future) I really hate crowds and as a result I would very strongly prefer not to travel during rush hour even if I’m awake. I’m not saying I can’t take a rush hour tube, but I’m still going to preferentially select for companies that give me the ability to come in an hour later, and I’m going to really unhappy if I don’t have that option.

People like me in this regard are sufficiently common in tech now that it’s really unlikely that you’ll ever get a situation where an early start is the norm – we’ll just avoid those companies in preference for ones that don’t require us to do something really unpleasant and harmful to our mental and physical well-being, and the result will be a tech industry divided into two distinct groups of companies with a relatively small intersection moving between them. That’s not a great situation.

Fundamentally the problem is that there is no one-size fits all solution. No single set of office hours is going to work for everyone, so what we need is a diversity of options where people can work whichever hours they want or need.

But that’s what we have now and it doesn’t actually work. Everything I’ve seen suggests that flexible working hours doesn’t really mean flexible, you just converge on a new cultural norm of working later – people tend to gradually conform to a later (and longer) schedule, because when you leave work too early you feel subtly or not-so-subtly judged by your coworkers (whether or not you are being judged, but you usually are), which creates a strong pressure to conform or leave.

Even if the original article about the diversity implications is wrong (I do not think it is, but would like to see data before I believe it wholeheartedly) and this isn’t excluding women, it still means we’re creating an environment that is just as bad for early birds as an 8:30 start would be for night owls and others with sleep problems.

So what’s the solution?

Well, I think it’s probably remote work. By separating out the need to physically be there, and allowing a lot of work to be asynchronous, you remove a lot of the implied social pressure to conform to a particular set of hours.

And as a bonus, by opening yourself up to remote work you potentially open up a whole bunch of other opportunities for diversity – even without rush hour, commuting in a wheel chair is hard, and for other disabilities (e.g. people who are immunocompromised) it might not be safe for them to come into the office at all, but they might still be perfectly able to work.

A lot of diversity problems (I’d guess most diversity problems that don’t stem from up front flat out bigotry? I don’t know) come from trying to pretend we can fit everyone into a single mould, and thus silently excluding all the people who can’t fit into that mould. Rigid working hours don’t fix that, they just choose a different shaped mould. I’d rather break that mould altogether instead.

Of course, remote work is itself another mould to try to fit everyone into. It doesn’t work for everyone (though some people who think it doesn’t work for them can learn to love it – I did), but you can fix that to a large extent by e.g. renting them desks in a co-working space or having an office people can come into if they want. You can also probably get a lot of the benefits by allowing partial remote work – e.g. I personally would be mostly happy if I could do a couple of hours of work in the morning and then come in. Other peoples’ needs will differ, and that definitely won’t be enough for everyone, but even small accommodations help to include more people.

So it’s not perfect, and it certainly won’t fix everything, but nothing is and nothing will. I still suspect that starting from the principle that presence isn’t required and then fixing the problems that causes is going to be a much easier path to diversity than trying to force everyone to be in the same place at the same time and then trying to fix all the problems that causes.

Talking to people at conferences

I’m currently at the Halmstad Summer School on Testing, where I know literally nobody. This means that I’m having to exercise one of my most useful and hardest won conference skills: Going up to new people and talking to them.

I can’t claim any special ability at doing this. If anything, I’m bad at it. But I started out terrible at it, so I thought I’d offer some advice for other people who are terrible at it and want to become less terrible (which, based on observational evidence at conferences and talking to friends, is a lot of us).

The big thing to know is that it’s not complicated (which is not the same as saying it’s easy). The following procedure works for me basically 100% of the time:

Go up to somebody who isn’t currently talking to someone and doesn’t look like they’re busy.
Say “Hi, I’m David” (you may wish to substitute your own name here if it is not also David).
Make conference appropriate small talk.
Part ways at a suitable juncture (e.g. beginning of next talk), and if you enjoyed each other’s company you can naturally say hi again later, and if not you won’t.

If you’re like me, that probably sounds impossible, but it’s actually surprisingly doable once you manage to suppress the associated feeling of mortal dread.

The thing that helped me the most was understanding what caused me stress (going up to groups where I didn’t know anyone) and just not doing that, which is why it’s about finding single people to go up and talk to. I generally don’t approach groups unless I already know some of the people in the group.

The second thing that helps is understanding that this behaviour is appropriate, socially acceptable, and often outright welcome.

You are at an event where a large part of the purpose is to meet people. Therefore introducing yourself to strangers is a thing that is part of the event and does not need an excuse. Also, the people around you are probably also struggling to do the same. By picking someone else who is also not talking to people, there’s a good chance you’ve found someone who is struggling the same way you are and have done them a massive favour by removing that struggle.

Is it sometimes a bit awkward? Yeah. Is it the perfect approach? No. But it works reliably, I am able to do it, and it does not rely on flawless execution to go smoothly. It is very unlikely to go terribly, and it will probably go well.

It’s still anxiety inducing, but for me the knowledge that this is acceptable behaviour and nothing bad is going to happen is enough to take it from terrifying to merely intimidating, at which point it’s fairly feasible to just force myself to do it.

Specific tips:

Picking who to talk to is tricky, but the nice thing about this just being a brief introductory conversation is that you don’t have to do it well. I don’t have a particularly good algorithm, but vaguely use the following guidelines:

People you’ve met in passing but not really properly talked to are an easy place to start.
If I see a speaker or someone I vaguely know something about, I’ll tend to default to them (as someone who regularly speaks at conferences, I can confirm speakers are just as socially awkward about doing this as the rest of us and will appreciate you talking to them).
I often preferentially try to talk to women or other people who are in a minority for the conference (obviously at some conferences women won’t be a minority, but I work in tech where sadly they usually are). This advice works better if you are yourself in a minority at the conference, but I figure that if people are feeling isolated it’s still better to have someone to talk to who isn’t going to be a jerk (which I’m told I’m mostly not), and they’re at least as likely (probably more) to be interesting people to talk to as anyone else.
Other than that, I just pick a random person nearby.

Once you’ve picked a person and introduced yourself, it’s time for the dread small talk. Fortunately, although small talk in general is hard, conference small talk is much easier. There are two reasons for this:

When you ask “What do you do?” the chances are good that it’s something relevant to the conference, and thus you have common ground to talk about.
You can always talk about the talks at the conference – which they have enjoyed, if there are any they are particularly looking forward to, etc.

The parting ways aspect is important largely to avoid the problem of finding one person to talk to and then latching on to them. It’s doubly important for me because of a moderate amount of insecurity about seeming to do that even when I’m probably not. Fortunately conferences come with a natural rhythm, so it’s fairly easy to do.

Another reason why it helps is that it keeps the entire interaction fairly low cost – you’re not committing to a new best friend for the entire conference, you’re just meeting someone new and having a brief chat with them.

So that’s how I introduce myself to new people. After that, I try to “pay it forward” in a couple of ways:

I try to introduce people I’ve talked to to each other. e.g. if I’m talking to someone and someone I’ve previously interacted with wanders past I say hi to them and ask “Have you two met?”
If I’m in a group (or even just talking to one other person) and see someone awkwardly standing around, I try to bring them into it (a “Hi, I’m David. Come join us” is usually sufficient).

Other people are also struggling with this, and helping them out is a good deed, which is the main way I do it, but conveniently it’s also a good way to meet people. It’s much easier to meet someone by bringing them into a group than it is to approach them on your own, and by forming a group you’ll tend to get other people members of the group know agglomerating on. Even if you don’t talk to them now, talking to them later becomes easier.