My nerd-brain is always looking for the case against whatever you’re saying. Or whatever I’m saying. It’s nothing personal. It’s not you, it’s me. I consider it a weakness on my part, much of the time.
It’s not a weakness when I’m solving technical problems. Then it’s part of what you pay me for. We want our software to be correct, to work as expected, reliably. That vigilance, compulsively looking for points of failure or better ways to solve the problem, is very useful.
The nerd-brain turns into a weakness when I deal with people. People don’t take kindly to the nerd-brain’s brand of criticism. If you and I worked together and I watched you like a hawk for what you were doing wrong and pointed out every little thing, you probably wouldn’t want to work with me for very long.
At my best, I can turn the nerd-brain off when dealing with people, then flip it back on when I context-switch into some technical work. This isn’t always easy, though. I slip, a lot. Over time, my behavior ends up looking like I have a decent filter on the nerd-brain when dealing with people, but not a foolproof one. But, looking back over time, it also looks like the filter is improving.
