if you've been doing this job for very long at all you know that intelligent people disagree this isn't true just in politics it's not true just at the holiday meal table table.
It's true in our professional lives.
And it's even true when we have loads of data, loads of information to inform us where we could reconstruct all of the relevant information out of that data.
We still can have strong disagreements.
And some of this is because of one of the fundamental kind of assertions that we make on this podcast, podcast that the vast majority of our work is about trying to predict some future.
If any of us had the ability to predict the future, we probably wouldn't really need to work very much at all, or at least a lot of our work would be diminished.
But of course, we can't predict the future.
So much of our work is about trying to shape the future.
Shape the future and shape it in a way that is in alignment with the way that the future is already shaping itself.
In other words, we have external and internal influence.
The external influences are the ones we can't really control and the internal influences are the ones that we can.
And today we're going to talk about a little bit of kind of light armchair philosophy to to help you navigate conversations about what should happen next.
What should we do as a team, as a company, as a family, or even just yourself?
What should my next decision be?
And the critical term here that I want you to focus on is the word should.
You've probably mentioned this on the show before, but should has an implication.
should implies that there is some value to your decision.
That is, there is a decision that you could make, or there's some number of decisions, perhaps an infinite number of decisions that you could make that would lean towards you shouldn't.
They would lean towards undesirable.
And then there are another infinite number of decisions.
You know, obviously, not practically infinite infinite number, but there's a large number of decisions that you can make that would lean towards desirable, that would lean towards something that whoever is defining desirable would choose.
And so today's episode is entirely about the philosophy of defining that should criteria.
How do we determine where we land on should?
it's important to note that all of these frameworks all this philosophy we're going to talk about today only exists because of the uncertainty of the future right and so uh the dealing with that reality is what these philosophies aim to accomplish and before we go any deeper i do want to mention that we are going to tie this back to practical advice as we go.
So don't tune out. This is not going to be all heads in the clouds kind of stuff.
We're going to tie this back to how it might actually play out.
Let's say if you're an engineering manager on your team, this kind of mental model is practically relevant to you.
So this isn't a philosophy podcast. We talk about philosophy in light of how it can impact your are engineering either your engineering career, your engineering leadership career.
I want to make these kind of bigger concepts that otherwise maybe you wouldn't be engaging very often.
I want to bring those into a more practical perspective.
As kind of a warm up before we talk about today's sponsor, I want you to think about how you determine what you should do.
For example, how did you determine that you should listen to this podcast?
That this is how you should spend your time?
Many people are probably going to answer that.
Well, it's not necessarily what I should be doing, but it's what I wanted to do.
I want to encourage you to recognize that your brain does not really differentiate between should and want.
Right, you're, you know, what you determine as what you should do is, as far as your brain is concerned, incorporating what you want to do.
All right, you never are going to do something that you have calculated you shouldn't do.
Right, that's kind of a special definition of should in In this case, there are things that we do that we know we shouldn't do by some particular decision -making algorithm, but our decision -making algorithm had more information.
It had more inputs.
Maybe our impulses and some other bits of information or emotion were brought into that should that our brains ultimately made the decision on.
So understanding that we're not going to talk through all of those complexities.
We're going to talk about a really specific narrow type of should in today's episode, a narrow set of philosophies that can help inform more of those intentional decision -making is what we'll call it, rather than trying to describe behavior.
That's not really what we're trying to do in this episode.
Instead, I want to give you tools for decision making.
These philosophies or philosophical frameworks will help you understand how to make those intentional decisions less intuitively or less impulsively.
And instead, you'll be a bit more equipped for those decisions.
We're going to talk about a sponsor and then we're going to come back and talk about these three different decision philosophies.
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How do we decide what we should do?
Should is a word that many times comes up in moral discussions.
How should we behave?
If you are a parent, then you have this conversation with your child, you shouldn't do that.
that or you should go and apologize to that other to your friend, right?
And if you're like me, you may have experienced your child, you know, coming back to you and saying, well, why?
Why should I do that?
And the answer to that question is dependent on your philosophy.
So that's what we're talking about is how do you determine these shoulds?
And we're going to shy shy away a little bit from moralism or moral discussions here, because in most of the cases that you're going to face, you know, especially if it's in, you know, within a project or something like that, and you're probably not going to be facing those.
But that certainly is not out of bounds for discussion when it comes to your career.
You know, should I join this company or not is going to depend on your framework for how you determine what you should or shouldn't do.
But largely speaking, and this is going to dumb down a lot of our decision making concerns, but there are some kind of practical positions that you can take when you're looking at what you should or shouldn't do.
And more specifically, when you're thinking about the future of a given entity.
entity. An entity in this case might be you and your career.
An entity might be a team, a company, maybe a report of yours, or maybe it's a project.
Maybe it's a service that you build.
It could be any particular thing.
You're trying to decide what is the future of this thing?
What should we do with this thing?
Or what should we do with this person or this group of people?
to think about it as kind of a noun.
What is the ultimate timeline for this?
So we're going to talk about these three philosophies.
Philosophy number one is called ontology.
Philosophy number two is teleology or sometimes teleology.
We're going to use teleology.
And philosophy number three is dynamism.
Dynamism, right? Ontology is concerned with what a thing intrinsically is, the characteristics of that thing, if you were to look at it on its own in isolation, what is it?
What is it composed of?
Teleology is concerned with what is the purpose of the thing or what is the outcome that the thing produces, right?
Teleology is in some ways kind of the balance to ontology, you can arrive at or find out about ontology through teleology.
Right, because if you're looking at how something is used and in what ways is it used most functionally, this might become your definition for what the thing is.
But generally speaking, someone who leans heavily on ontology would likely say the intent of that thing, right?
The creator's intent for that particular item, that service, right?
So hopefully you can already start to see that there might be insights gained when you look at a particular thing, a particular team through this lens or through one of the other lenses.
Maybe you've been looking through the lens of ontology at a team.
And you could be looking, you know, you could gain some insight by looking through a teleological lens at the team.
And the third is dynamism.
The third is dynamism.
Dynamism essentially identifies the changing environment, right, the changing intent.
You could say, for example, that this team, the intent of this team, so that would be a teleological argument, the goal of this team is to provide feedback on, let's say, grammar, okay, the goal of the team was to take in and provide this as a service to other teams. Maybe you send your writings to this team and they give you feedback on your grammar. Dynamism would be able to identify that the role of this team may be necessary to change the role of the team because of some external factor.
Or in this case, the factor that grammar is fairly easily outsourced to something like an AI assistant or even something as simple as autocorrect.
Ontology and teleology wouldn't necessarily provide that kind of change or intent of change where the ontological argument might say this is a team of grammar specialists.
specialists. Thus, we can draw our own conclusions and they should be acting like a team of grammar specialists, right?
The teleological argument would say the intent, the purpose of this team is X, is to provide grammar as a service to other teams, grammar insights as a service to other teams. That dynamism would look at both of these arguments and take into account the changing landscape or the context, right?
Dynamism is going to look at contextually what is true about where this, you know, this particular, where this team is located or what's going on around it.
Now, it might seem like, you know, based on what I'm saying here that one or the other of these three philosophies is better.
In fact, I imagine that you probably think that I'm pushing you to only imagine that uh dynamism is the is the right choice but the truth is they are all in balance they all can be considered important and useful for your situation for example if you were to use ontology to describe the characteristics of your own skill set right it may be that you have accepted labels or incorrect ontology from from past roles that you identified yourself by the title that you had rather than looking at what you actually are and if you were to look at the ontology of your skill set right the the ontological definition definition of what you
are what you're capable of maybe then you might be able to change and this is the critical factor change the purpose of your next role change the purpose of your job such that the teleological definition maybe you had previously determined that the goal or the purpose of your career is to become you know a senior or a staff engineer right and maybe you've determined that you actually have some other strengths maybe you want to shift your role into product well now your teleological argument you previously made for your career has been being challenged right so now what what you're doing is you're
recognizing a couple of things one dynamically right so bringing in some dynamism here your situation may have changed maybe you you lost your role.
And so your previous ontological argument is now being challenged by the dynamic nature of reality, shifting reality around you.
And this is where a lot of people actually struggle.
They struggle to understand how that could be the case.
Yesterday I was defined defined as this, right?
That's ontological language.
Yesterday I was a senior engineer and today I am not.
So what am I? Right?
This is a dynamic situation.
You're going to be faced with dynamic situations in your career over and over and over and over.
So what am I? This is, again, using an ontological lens to help you reestablish the next steps for your career.
Or you could do the same thing from a teleological lens.
Instead of looking at your skills and looking at your past role definitions to try to define what you are.
Maybe you instead determine, okay, I don't really care what the skills are.
I could acquire new skills, right?
I don't really care, you know, where I live.
I could move. I could change the definition, you know, the ontological side of things.
I want to set, you know, a very clear purpose or outcome for my career this would be using the teleological lens for your should now it's important that you understand this this doesn't necessarily uh you know you could you can use these frameworks in making decisions about business right so let's say you own a startup and maybe your startup's original goal was to help people understand the benefits of let's say installing solar on their roof panels.
And you realize that, and here's the dynamic side, the dynamism is going to come into play.
You realize that the business is failing.
You can't get people to convert and they don't really care too much. But you recognize there's a pattern, there's some trend in your data and you sit down and you ask yourself, okay, what are are we good at?
This is an ontological question.
What are we good at?
What can we do well?
Well, we're good at surfacing this data.
We're good at finding and surfacing reliable data about solar in the transition to solar power.
So what could we do?
Maybe we could uh use this thing that we are good at this ontological understanding of our identity we could use that to our advantage and instead change our purpose we're going to change our intent our purpose our outcome is no longer going to be you know let's try to convert uh people to solar but instead we're going to provide let's say an api a data service to all of the solar or companies out there to allow them to use it in whatever way they deem appropriate, right?
And the specifics of the idea doesn't really matter here, but what we're looking at is ways that you could pivot, right?
And startups do this all the time.
And this might seem confusing because so often in our careers or our personal lives, we have been used to, more used to the teleological argument.
What is it that you want to accomplish with your career?
We're even taught as software engineers to focus on the outcomes and all of the solutions can be changed, interchangeable.
We can shift the solutions underneath.
We could buy versus build decisions are all about a teleological alignment.
You're trying to accomplish something.
How you get there is less important important than the outcome.
But this is not the only way to make these intentional decisions.
It's possible to change what you're trying to accomplish to take advantage of what you already have. And that is the ontological lens.
And all of this is empowered by your ability to square with a changing reality around you.
You don't want to just stick with a preconceived notion notion of who or what you are, who or what your team is.
If you have a charter that doesn't really serve your company's current goals, then you're putting your team at risk by continuing on the same charter.
So using dynamism can help you understand, okay, what do we need to figure out?
What kind of outcome should we shoot for?
Or what are we already good at that we can redefine our charter around.
Ultimately, making good decisions, you're probably not going to end up making a better decision by knowing about ontology versus teleology.
Instead, what I'm hoping to do with these frameworks for you is help you understand that there's probably more flexibility in your decision -making than you realize.
Not only is there more flexibility, but you're probably making more assumptions about what a good decision is than you realize.
If you can start to put some understanding, some framework of thinking around some of those assumptions, it will help you understand how to remove or change the assumptions themselves and ultimately find a better pathway to your should.
Thank you so much for listening to To today's episode of Developer Tea, thank you again to today's sponsor, Wix Studio.
If you think website builders mean limited control, then you probably have a stuck ontological definition of website builders.
Think again. With Wix Studio's developer -first ecosystem, you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more on the functionality that matters the most to you and your customers.
You will develop online in a VS Code -based IDE or locally via GitHub.
hub you can extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship faster with with wix studios ai code assistant all of that is wrapped up in an automatically maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind you can work in a developer first ecosystem by heading over to wixstudio .com thanks again to wix studio for sponsoring today's episode of developer team if you enjoyed this episode and you haven't done this yet okay i'm not asking you to leave a second and review.
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