Role and psychology of a supporter

Our role

A Research Software engineer can be a normal researcher, but focused on outputting code and data rather than academic articles. We aren’t just this.

We are helpers of others, perhaps people we don’t know and who don’t know us. This brings some special considerations and we need to have the right kind of relationship. Think of an ambulance coming to help some injured people: being friendly and building the trust of their patients is just as important as their medical skills.

  • We need to be approachable and friendly

  • People need to trust us

  • People who we help need to be happy with the interaction so that they will come back next time (do you know of anyone so upset with a doctor’s treatment that they don’t want to go back?)

Approaching a request

It can be stressful to approach a customer’s new problem. It requires not only listening to what they say but digging deeper to figure out what they need, sometimes even if they don’t want to dig deeper. It requires being in the right mindset and to have the right touch on things.

Technology is hard

Read over the list of How to help someone use a computer. There are some very good points in there, like:

  • User interfaces are universally bad and should always be blamed for anything that is difficult.

  • Be concrete enough for them; speak in a language they can understand.

  • Things are usually not obvious - just think how many abstraction layers are needed to understand what one sees.

  • However, some things don’t fully apply to us. For example, there are times that we will fully take over a project and the customer doesn’t need to know how to do it . In these cases, we do take over, but we need to make sure the customer is empowered enough to be a part of the project and meaningfully understand and control it.

We can’t do everything, but need to satisfy everyone

We get all kinds of questions - without a doubt, we have very demanding jobs. We aren’t magic and we can’t do everything… so how far can we reach?

  • Help who we can

  • Be honest if we don’t have time or are not the right people

  • If someone else can help them better, send them there. This may include telling the customer “here is how you can ask your question to the next person to get the best answer.”

  • Don’t leave anyone with no help at all. If we can’t do everything they ask, some other options include:

    • Helping them simplify the problem so that they (or we) can do it easier

    • Helping them to do it themselves (or hire someone who can)

    • Directing them to a better service team (with advice and framing)

    • Realizing the problem and involving higher authority (ask your supervisor for help).

Offer paid services but not to the exclusion of better options

We need to support ourselves with paid projects, but we shouldn’t become only salespeople. We should try to make ourselves sustainable, but not to the exclusion of other, simpler options. When there are difficult decisions, we can be open about them.

Funding decisions usually requires higher authority, so call it when needed.

Analyze and improve our performance

After helping someone, we should think about how we did. We are usually not perfect, but we shouldn’t feel bad about that as long as we are constantly learning how to do better. By the same token, we should always be learning from each other.

Sometimes, we can do the wrong thing and really feel bad about it. We need to make sure this doesn’t affect our ability to function in the future.