The system I work on now is big enough that nobody holds all of it. Eighteen months in, I’ve stopped expecting anyone to.
Most of it you can learn alone. The codebase follows patterns, and once you’ve read enough of them, the next file mostly makes sense before you open it. The hard parts are the ones the patterns don’t explain. How a particular calculation actually arrives at its number. How a piece of data gets updated overnight, and from where.
When I ask about those, I don’t get an answer. I get a direction. “Check how the nightly batch handles it.” Then I’m on my own again, reading a job I didn’t know existed and building the picture myself.
The first few times, that annoyed me. Someone clearly knew. A paragraph would have saved me an afternoon, and I got a sentence.
It took me a while to figure out what was actually bothering me. I was missing a person I used to be.
The Person Everyone Asks
At more than one job, I was the documentation.
Not the wiki. Not the README nobody updated. Me. Why a field allowed nulls, why a job ran when it ran, why one client had a special case nobody else got: you asked me. Eventually people stopped looking first. Asking me was faster than searching, and I was usually right.
I told myself this was service, and some of it was. People were blocked, I knew the answer, and handing it over cost me two minutes. Refusing would have been ridiculous.
But that wasn’t all of it. It felt good to be the one. Every ping was a small piece of evidence that I mattered there, that the place would notice if I left. I never said that out loud. I’m not sure I said it to myself. I just kept answering, and kept not writing things down, and never asked why the second part was so easy to put off.
What Being Needed Actually Is
The Stoics had a category for this. Preferred indifferents: things it’s reasonable to want, things that make life easier, that aren’t good in themselves. Health, money, reputation. Being needed belongs on that list. It’s pleasant. It isn’t virtue, and it isn’t evidence of virtue.
The trouble is that being needed looks almost exactly like being useful. Both involve people coming to you. Both involve you helping. The difference only shows up afterward. Useful leaves the other person able to do it themselves next time. Needed leaves them coming back.
I was optimizing for the second and calling it the first.
The Stepmother and the Mother
Marcus Aurelius ran an empire, which means his days were mostly other people’s questions. He wrote this to himself:
“If you had a stepmother and a real mother, you would pay your respects to your stepmother, yes... but it’s your real mother you’d go home to.
The court... and philosophy: Keep returning to it, to rest in its embrace. It’s all that makes the court—and you—endurable.”
Meditations 6.12, translated by Gregory Hays
Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t tell himself to leave the court, or resent it, or wall himself off from it. He pays it its respects. The court gets its due.
That’s a correction to something I’ve argued before. I wrote about other people’s urgency colonizing your attention, and I still think most pings are exactly that. But the questions that come to you because you know the system aren’t someone else’s urgency. They’re part of the job. They’re the stepmother, and you owe them.
What Marcus warns against is quieter. It’s forgetting which one is home. Spend enough years answering questions and you start living in the court. Your standing comes from the pings. The duty becomes who you are, and you’ll protect that without noticing you’re doing it, including by leaving the important things undocumented, because documented knowledge doesn’t need you.
What Pointing Does
“Check how the nightly batch handles it” is seven words. I used to think that was the stingy version of help. Now I think it might be the generous one.
It pays what’s owed to the person asking. They’re unblocked, and they know where to look. But it doesn’t hand them my model. It makes them build their own, which means next time they don’t need me, and the time after that, someone asks them.
The full answer feels generous, and it keeps you in the middle of things. Every answer I gave that could have been a direction was a small loan to myself, paid for out of someone else’s formation.
Pointing also gives something back to the person doing it. Seven words and you’re back in your own work. That’s the return Marcus means, or as close as a developer gets to it: the attention that belongs to whatever you were doing before the question arrived, and the version of you that exists when nobody is asking you anything.
Return Often
Being the documentation never feels like a problem while it’s happening. It feels like being trusted. That’s what makes it hard to see.
So point when you can. Answer in full when pointing would just be cruelty with extra steps, because production being down is not a teaching moment. Write down what only you know, especially the parts you keep putting off. That’s usually where the pride is hiding.
And go back to your own work between the questions, without apologizing for it.
The court will always have questions. Answer them. Just don’t move in.
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