I’ve been programming, as a full-time job, for more than ten years. I started doing Ruby, and Rails, nearly ten years ago. I’ve been at LivingSocial for a two and a half years now. If you add these numbers up you will find that I am, improbably, an old hand.

As I try to explain and contextualize our organization, technology, and culture inside LivingSocial, I often catch myself delicately dancing around saying “it’s always been this way”. It sucks to hear this. It’s easy for this to sound like a deflection. “Don’t worry yourself, just accept it and let me get back to whatever I was doing before you asked that foolish question.” Crawl back to your desk and grind away.

Beginner’s mind is crucial and fleeting, so every person new to our communities and teams are invaluable. I want to extract as much information about how we’re confusing or mired in our legacy of stupidity. A beginner’s mind can help us improve our organizations, but only when it’s open and the experts aren’t marked as institutional damage to route around instead of engage with.

So I’m explaining organizational history and I find myself hand waving around “it’s always been this way, bask in despair!” At this point I (try to) profusely apologize and restart my explanation or answer. I need to get at that beginner’s mind before it becomes jaded in foregone conclusions.

But sometimes I don’t stop. I forget. I get wrapped up in accurately and concisely explaining how it got this way and why it’s this way. I forget to actually answer the question or suggest how it might be made better.

Allow me apologize to everyone out there on the internet. Sometimes it might seem like I’m saying “it’s always been this way”, but really I got so wrapped up in giving a vigorous history lesson that I lost my train of thought. It might help to restate the question. I’m an old hand, after all, with a frail brain.