Bad Data Makes for Wrong Assumptions

It always starts innocently enough. A joke over lunch, hushed conversations over a beer or after work tacos. Someone slips in a story — maybe just relaying an experience, maybe a subtle warning.

“Be careful around Jim, he’s got a thing for secretaries.”
“I heard his team doesn’t like him.”
“She’s a great person but watch yourself.”

I lean in, eager to absorb it all. This is a big company and I’m new. After a few days in the office, my mind is building patterns. It doesn’t hurt to have a few more data points.

My brain likes order and it does its best to systematize the world around me. I can’t say if that’s what drew me into software engineering, but I can say this: the job makes perfect sense. In code, I strive for determinism. Given a set of instructions and data, the output should be predictable. Despite life not conforming to such rules, I still attempt to codify it all the same.

A history of depression and trauma has left me guarded. When you grow up with neglect or unpredictability, you learn to map danger early. It’s less about understanding the world and more about understanding how it can hurt you. You analyze tone, word choice, body language — or the lack of reactions to a Slack message. You could say I’ve been training my own risk-management model.

So understanding people becomes a safety mechanism. It works, until it doesn’t.

Some offices reward this type of behavior. It’s treated like a political skill. Reading people is seen as savvy, even emotionally intelligent. But what if I’ve read them wrong? What if the gossip is noise more than signal and through constant repetition, we believe it true? Psychologists have a name for this: the common-knowledge effect, when everyone keeps repeating the same story until it appears as truth. Where it really starts to be a problem: when it starts to shape how we act.

For a long while, I believed this one manager was a villain. An unsympathetic, highly political Machiavellian that should not be trusted. It meant I avoided him. I remember ducking out of rooms when he entered because I disliked him so, and knew it would be apparent. It wasn’t just the gossip anymore. I read between the lines, reading Slack messages one way and body language another.

My analysis shaped my experience. I started behaving toward this colleague based on my model, not his reality. And maybe he noticed? Ignore someone long enough and they’ll ignore you back, which only proves your theory.

My perception built the behavior that confirmed it and my thoughts turned evidence.

Depression taught me to expect the worst; anxiety trained me to look for it. Useful traits in engineering, terrible ones in people. I eventually found a method through therapy that felt appropriate.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) taught me to separate my feelings from reality — what happened from what I feel happened. When I do that, the patterns loosen their grip and I reconsider the data. The goal isn’t to stop analyzing but know when you’ve drifted from observation into narrative.

I don’t always get it right. I still over-read tone and under-trust kindness. I’m still working on it, still rehashing conversations in my journal. But most importantly, I’m aware of it. When I feel the urge to protect myself with my flawed model, I try to ask a question instead. Sometimes it’s as small as: “Hey, just checking if you’re ok. Haven’t heard from you in a while.” The answers are rarely dramatic and often mundane.

It’s a small kind of peace, knowing instead of assuming.

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I’ve been thinking about my incorrect thinking, as you can tell. I know I have more to say but not today. I’m tired of writing and I want to go back to binging Adventure Time (again).

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