---
title: The Meta is More Appealing
date: 2023-02-19T19:33:01.450Z
slug: 2023-02-19-the-meta-is-more-appealing
author: Thomas Wilson

---
Earlier this week I wrote a piece, [The exceptions are more interesting](/blog/2023-02-13-the-exceptions-are-more-interesting).  Tl;dr - unless you're extremely careful at work,  ideas/advice/theories become platitudes, and therefore less useful.

My brain isn't finished with the idea, I think the point I want to make is: 

> It is tempting to prefer talking in generalisations.  It feels more useful, because you can think-once-run-anywhere.  It's easy to dismiss a criticism of an "in general" with the details of "just one" specific.  But for any one given problem or situation, it's probably more useful to give specific advice - and *then* try to make it general.

We've got a couple of new-ish projects going on at work.  They   are taking a lot of my time.  Because they're new, there's a lot of ground-work to do as a software engineer.  You've got to understand the way the current system works, how we want the future system to work, and where we can/not take shortcuts to get things done quicker.

This means that a lot of the conversations at the moment have to be *really* specific.  For example you might have to say "If you had to wait six weeks for two of these features, what's most acceptable" or "can we do a manual conversion of data here, instead of spending a week automating it?".  

I think some people see this level of specificity as a bad thing.

There's an idea that generalisations or meta-level work is always more useful than talking about the specifics of an issue.  Taking the examples above, they might respond "we need a rigorous, opportunity-cost approach to prioritising" or "we need a clean set of code tools for data input automation".

Sometimes I'll try to bring conversations closer to the specifics and detail of a specific problem, and the response is to try to find generalities, or meta-conversations.

Those things feel and sound useful, but they take every problem one step above where it is.  Sometimes you really do just have to *do the thing*™️.  

There's a middle ground between the engineer who has to spend days-weeks in the weeds, and the product-person who spends time thinking about processes.  But I think that meta conversations and grand theories-of-everythings can take the air out of the room for conversations of specific problems.