Attentional Blindness [Storytime Saturdays]
This is one of the concepts you must know as a developer. Don't overlook it.
Happy Saturday my fantastico,
By the time you receive this, I will be gone? Gone where you ask? I’m going to be exploring an abandoned mine in Alaska. It’s supposed to be haunted, so I will be spending the night there. Super excited about that. Since it is such a dark place, I figured it would be thematically appropriate to talk about (in)attentional blindness. This is an extremely important concept in psychology that you should know about.
Highlights
When it comes to cognitive biases that will hamper your software development career, there are few that match this. In this post, we will cover the following concepts-
What is inattentional blindness- Your mind will filter out certain stimuli to focus on what it deems important.
Why it exists- Saving your mental resources. And it benefits you a lot for focusing. Think about how you’re focusing on these words right now, instead of how your clothes feel against your skin.
Where it can cause problems- Biases are a double-edged sword.They can help you quickly filter through large amounts of information. However, they will also cause you to miss important connections and ideas.
How to counter the blindness- diverse set of experiences, taking a step back, and pausing. More details in the article
This post will contain a personal story of how this attentional blindness led to me messing up my first-ever ‘senior’ interview. I focused too much on one avenue and not enough on everything else. To know more about that, and how you can avoid it, keep reading.
Inattentional Blindness
Before we get into the whole concept, I want to train your focus by watching this video. It’s only 1.5 minutes long, but it’s amazing for sharpening your focus. And it will be relevant for the ideas we will be discussing.
Did you watch it? No cheating now. It’s super-duper important.
I want to trust you. Can I trust you?
Okay, I trust you. We’ve been best friends for a while. You were always diligent at following instructions, even all the way back in Middle School.
So did you catch the Gorilla? I didn’t the first time I saw this video. I wasn’t alone in missing the gorilla. This, my amazing reader, is inattentional blindness in a nutshell. Your mind filtered out the players in black and everything else to focus on the white players. So you probably missed that gorilla.
Your mind does this all the time. For example, I’m sitting on a chair as I’m typing this out. My mind doesn’t really pay attention to how the chair feels against my butt, or how my feet feel on the ground. I’m focused on the laptop in front of me, which allows to type this out much faster. And save more energy as I do. Remember, focusing is tiring.
Where this will trip you up
We evolved in the savannahs of Africa. Over there we had to keep our eyes out, for prey and to avoid predators. We couldn’t afford to waste time and energy focusing on the wrong thing. We evolved to quickly classify things as important or unimportant, and focus on what was important.
In most cases, this skill transfers over pretty well to the modern world. However, our world is different from the savannahs in one crucial way- What is important might not necessarily be in front of us.
We will live in a very abstract world. This is extremely true for you, my exceptional software engineer best friend. Thus when it comes to your precious attention, it might not always work in your favor.
This is made doubly true since most of us will only ever specialize in narrow domains. This means that our minds will continue to reinforce certain thought patterns. This is great to solve you efficiently solve problems similar to the ones you come across. It is terrible when confronted with problems that require multiple perspectives.
For a real-life example of this, let me share my HelloFresh interview for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer position. This was my first time interviewing for a senior position. I was pretty nervous.
Over the whole interview, I was determined in demonstrating my knowledge to the interviewer. I went into edge cases, interesting research, nuances, some pretty technically difficult challenges I’d solved etc etc. By the end, I had demonstrated why I had ML knowledge. Since I spend most of my time on engineering effective solutions, that’s what I talked about.
However, I got rejected. In my bid to highlight my technical competence, I barely touched upon my ability to evaluate the business needs. I didn’t spend any time talking about how I explored stakeholder needs, created solutions that added value to the business. My statements about value generated resembled this-
I built a Genetic Algorithm that improved our forecast accuracies by 30%Instead of
I conceived and implemented a simple inference featured that improved customer retention by 7%Both these statements are true and important. However, I had too many of the former and not enough like the latter. In a senior position, your work often involves telling others what to do. To determine the highest value-adding solutions, you will have to look at the product from multiple lenses (end-user, customer, engineering, compliance, etc. ). Inattentional blindness caused by looking at things only one way will stop you from doing this.
Fighting this problem
There are several ways you can limit the downsides of inattentional blindness. They are-
Understanding Multiple Perspectives
This is the reason that Coding Interviews Made Simple has days dedicated to discussing the economics and specific stories of the industry (Finance Fridays and Storytime Saturdays). Both these days are aimed at helping you learn from the experiences of other developers, develop a more holistic appreciation for the field, and ultimately make better decisions as you ascend up the Senior Engineering/Management positions.
Pausing and Reevaluating processes
This is one of the best things you can do to counter your biases. Remember your biases are a result of your mind trying to zoom through a decision. Slowing down and thinking of your reasons is a great way to avoid this trap.
Occasionally during the engineering process, it can be prudent to evaluate the following questions-
What tasks are left?
Which of these tasks are important? Why? What is the relative ordering of their ordering?
As I’m handling these tasks, what assumptions am I implicitly making?
Which of my stakeholders is impacted by solving which task? Who is the most critical to appease? Which incentives are at odds with each other?
These questions will allow you to always have a clear top-down picture of the system and the tasks at hand. This will help you make connections, and not miss important details hiding in plain sight.
Take a Step Back
Lastly, one of the best steps you can take to fight inattentional blindness is simply to take a step back. As developers, there is a very strong temptation to go down the rabbit hole with whatever problem we are engaged with. However, it is valuable to occasionally take a step back and evaluate how the problem we’re solving fits into the bigger picture.
This once again requires a more complete view of your organization and how it fits into the industry as a whole. This is why I stress that every developer at least have a foundational understanding of economics. Three great YouTube channels you can use to understand the field are Money and Macro, How Money Works, and Economics Explained. They make educational economics content in an interesting way. Check them out. You will not be disappointed.
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