How long do cows live?

How long do cows live? The best communication lesson I’ve learned makes me a better human every day, told as an ancient Greek tragedy. 🐄 🎭

👋🏻 Hi, I’m Natalie. I currently work as a solutions engineer, a job that goes by many other names¹. It’s a lot of fun to be both customer-facing and technical! I didn’t have a pre-paved path to do this. If we’re being uncomfortably honest, it wasn’t at all my intended job out of college. Not so secretly, I wanted to be a civil engineer. I liked it so much I went back for seconds, earning both a Bachelor and Master of Science in it. 👷🏻‍♀️

Problem is that college is expensive - even a state school, paying in-state tuition, is a lot to figure out. One of the ways I paid for my graduate degree was teaching non-traditional students at a career college². My first job throughout high school was doing “help desk / sysadmin” things - wiring up ethernet networks, running around with floppy disks of Norton Ghost, and general shenanigans.

Apparently that qualified me to teach the entire information technology and cybersecurity undergraduate programs at ITT Tech. 🫠

We’re going to skip right over the moral quandaries and some existential crises … nonetheless, learning anything is difficult late at night and everyone’s already had a full day of work too. Late into a lab session, a student yelled out a question out of nowhere and I gave an equally rapid answer.

"How long does a cow live?"

"Beef or dairy?"

She stared at me, mouth agape in horror. 😱

I stared back, very confused and with a growing feeling that I’d said something terribly wrong. I went beyond completely missing the point of her question.

Peripeteia

🐄 It had never occurred to me prior to that moment that a cow has a natural lifespan.

Aristotle wrote prolifically about the nature of art and how we tell stories about our experiences to each other in his work Poetics . This would be my moment of peripeteia - that instant of total reversal in my comfort and security in my role as communicator of things.

The context of my knowledge is based on attending a land grant university, on my neighbors growing up that farmed beef, and on going to school with some kids on dairy farms. My middle/high school has agriculture classes with curriculum sourced from Philip Morris, Tyson’s, and Smithfield³ - complete with animal processing videos with ZERO editorial discretion between live critter and cold-cuts in the grocery store.

Had I been able to hear and follow every conversation in the classroom, I’d have known she was talking about a calf that her family was newly looking after as a pet and she was completely smitten with it. She didn’t have the same background. In my lack of understanding, the suddenly spoken acknowledgement that cows are food made her and a good portion of others uncomfortable.

Anagnorisis

This story doesn’t have a happy ending. Even though I apologized profusely about the situation to her both in the moment publicly and later on privately, she dropped the class and never took any other classes I taught. However, I’d like to think of this as the accompanying moment of anagnorisis - in finally understanding the situation, I learned a lesson that’s stuck with me years later.

I’ve told this story a couple times, each while in a different career but still equally true. Your effectiveness in:

• sales
• consulting
• teaching
• writing
• engineering
• … literally anything that involves collaborating in any way (read: everything)

Depends on your ability to understand the different contexts of others and having the emotional intelligence to be able to communicate anyways.

Also, taking a moment to pause before firing off an answer rarely hurts and often helps … still working on that one myself. 🫣

Bias

As professionals, we tend to talk about bias in justifiably moralistic terms about unquestionably bad things - like judging another human by race or gender, etc. I’m not talking about the “call HR” biases here, but the ones we all have and bring with us to our technical chats. Here’s one of mine:

All applications that create/read/update/delete data shall start with PostgreSQL exclusively. No exceptions. You may consider adding more services to handle specialist tasks (such event streaming, message brokers, search, caching, etc) to your application if and only if PostgreSQL (and extensions) cannot do the thing needed well-enough for the task at hand.

There are well-paved paths out of PostgreSQL and into most major services for everything outlined above too. This allows for expansion when it’s needed. More importantly, it’s a simple and well-understood database that can most any task reasonably well.

It’s a bias that’s served me well for all the exploratory work and proof-of-concept projects I’ve led for customers as a consultant. It also doesn’t help at all when working with teams that have already outgrown this approach - and there are so many of them. Being aware of your biases and how they affect your work is a critical part of professional communication. 🙊

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Footnotes

1. I’m the tech person that rides shotgun with a sales person and talks about the problem space, answers questions, and helps implement stuff prior to production/sale. It’s a ton of fun if you like to be both customer-facing and technical. This job has a ton of names, but they all come down to picking one word from each of the following buckets: [[ solutions, sales, pre-sales, client / customer ]] + [[ engineer, architect, specialist, consultant ]] ↩

2. Yo … I have a lot of feelings about this industry. It sucked knowing I paid far less for a full-time semester at a top-tier state research college (Virginia Tech) than these folks paid for just a quarter of a year for a degree hardly worth what it was printed on. Yet it also allowed me to remain a full-time student and was one of my best-paid options … ↩

3. Philip Morris, the big tobacco company. Tyson’s, owns basically the whole lifecycle of the chicken you eat. Smithfield, mostly pork still, I think? ↩