A few jobs ago, I worked with an engineer named Mike. Mike is one of those quietly brilliant engineers who has no online presence and nothing to prove. He didn’t go to college for computer science or anything at all related to it (if my recollection is correct, he majored in Philosophy). Mike wrote some of the best code I’ve ever seen: Wonderfully boring, straightforward, and devoid of any cleverness. It was like code from an academic textbook. Unexciting though it was, his code was very easy to follow and worked well. Mike’s coding style has greatly influenced my own and I strive to write code that is as boring as his.

But it wasn’t Mike’s excellent code that influenced me the most. It was actually a very simple rhetorical construct that I don’t think he even used consciously in engineering debates. Two simple words: “It seems.” Now, “it seems” might not strike you as very compelling at first. But it’s what it’s used as an alternative for that makes it powerful.

Engineers tend to be an opinionated bunch. We have a point of view and part of our job is to sell that perspective and design systems around it. We also tend to be extremely emotional and get attached to our ideas. Right now you might be thinking “That’s nonsense. I’m not emotional! I’m logical! I exclusively make logical analyses and decisions!” If you’re thinking this, you are the most emotional type of engineer. You have a concept of who you are and what you do, and you are very attached to it. But don’t feel bad! Humans are emotional beings no matter how much we’d like to tell ourselves otherwise. We can’t will our emotions away. At best, we can manage them. At worst (as engineers), they manage us.

Typically in engineering debates, participants try to make their case by saying that they “feel,” “think,” or “believe” something. For example:

• “I feel that using a state management system will make this code more maintainable.”
• “I think Postgres is the way to go for this project.”
• “I believe that our test coverage should be at least 90%.”

These are all valid points of view, but they’re presented in an inherently subjective way. Engineering, when done well, is not a subjective discipline. Real engineering is fully objective, and good engineers know how to remain objective when determining a solution to a problem. How you feel or think about something is a subjective reflection, but how something seems is a more objective baseline to work with. Let’s apply this to the arguments above:

• “It seems that using a state management system will make this code more maintainable.”
• “It seems Postgres is the way to go for this project.”
• “It seems that our test coverage should be at least 90%.”

Now, these arguments are actually a bit weaker than they were before because they lack any rationale. But now it’s much more obvious that they lack rationale and that’s a trigger for the team to acknowledge and discuss it. With “feel,” “think,” and “believe,” the implicit rationale is “because I say so.” That’s a pretty poor way to sell an engineering solution and it doesn’t invite collaboration. By using “it seems” to recast the argument in a less emotional light, it opens the door to different perspectives and potentially better alternatives. And this is what good engineers do: Get to the root of a problem and identify the best-fit solution. A major component of that is willing to not be the loudest or most opinionated person in the room.

“It seems” has helped me navigate many engineering debates better than if I used my emotions to make a point. It seems that many engineers would benefit from doing it as well!