You Don’t Know That, Do You?

It’s a small scene, easy to overlook. Picture the school kitchen in The Holdovers—steam rising off battered metal pots, the kind of light that makes everything look both warmer and a little tired. The teacher, all pinched lines and unbending posture, stands beside the cook while students pass through for lunch. Something sets him off—a complaint, a frustration with the kids, probably. He stiffens and says, “Go easy on them?” His tone is clipped, half mocking.

It’s only mid-January, but it feels like the year’s already been endless. He’s thinking about fairness, or maybe discipline, or maybe just the long slog of trying and failing to reach someone who acts like they don’t care. Avoid snap judgments in tech in moments like this: you see a slumped kid, a failing grade, a missed deadline, and you fill in the blanks with your own assumptions. You probably know a version of this scene. I do. It’s everything we’re trained to notice about outcomes, while missing the invisible undertow that drags a person through their worst day.

The teacher doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, please. They’ve had it easy their whole lives.” He means it. He sees himself as standing in for the real world. The snap comparison lands hard, just as it does every day in the tech world, when someone looks at another engineer’s title or repo history and decides that must have been luck.

The cook pauses, voice even, and says the thing that cuts through all of it: “You don’t know that. Do you?” She’s not debating, just refusing the shortcut. You could tell she’s seen too much to buy into someone else’s story of what’s fair or earned or easy. Her words hit like cold water to the face. How could you possibly know?

Her response struck me. Not just because she was right, but because I saw myself in the teacher—caught in the comfort of my own story, forgetting how much context shapes what we see. I thought of all the times I’d looked at a colleague’s job change or perfect commit and guessed at their path, oblivious to the stuff they never posted: late nights, tradeoffs, constraints that would never show up in a performance review. Six months ago, I realized I’d been doing this on autopilot, hardly noticing when envy snuck in and rewrote the story.

It’s unsettling to admit, but you seldom know the full context behind outcomes—and when you start believing you do, curiosity dies. If you’re leading, favor evidence over instinct in management. That’s the habit I’m working to change, and the only thing that seems to dissolve resentment and bias for me is asking, “What’s their story?”

The truth? We don’t know their story.

The Curiosity-First Check: Avoid Snap Judgments in Tech—Fairness Starts Here

I keep catching myself doing it—reading someone’s résumé, Slack update, or even their LinkedIn and instantly sizing up where they must’ve had advantage. “Oh, they went to Stanford, they had connections,” I’ll think. In engineering teams, avoid snap judgments in tech—it’s the only way to stop the snap comparison that’s everywhere. We look for patterns, see visible success, and fill in the blanks based on our own experience. The trouble is, those guesses almost always miss context. When we judge quickly, we build stories that feed envy and close us off to what’s actually underneath. And if those stories get baked into hiring, reviews, or daily working relationships, fairness takes a hit. Teams fracture, trust erodes, and good decisions get replaced by easy ones.

Here’s the shift I’m trying to practice more deliberately: pause before certifying my gut feel and ask—What’s their story? I mean that literally. Just that small question is enough to redirect my automatic judgments. Instead of deciding someone had a smooth run, I stop and wonder what was going on beyond the headline. Sometimes just asking reshapes the way you see someone’s outcome; when we genuinely try to take another’s perspective, our explicit judgments often shift—even if deeper biases persist. It’s not about giving everyone a free pass or pretending all paths are equally hard.

It’s about acknowledging that almost every outcome has hidden variables we can’t guess. The simple act of pausing and getting curious before you land your verdict makes every review, every interview, and every daily interaction a little more accurate. A lot more human. I keep coming back to that moment in The Holdovers, because it’s exactly what I’ve missed: a willingness to ask before assigning value, especially when things look too easy from the outside.

Think of it like a model that predicts someone’s performance or potential. If you judge without context, it’s like trying to forecast with zero features. Every bit of constraint, effort, or trade-off you uncover adds a signal, making your decision sharper.

Performance reviews are no different. I see my own sacrifices—handling late-night on-call rotations, betting on risky projects, taking on mentorship—but I forget others have unseen headwinds too. When I stop to surface those trade-offs, my view shifts: maybe the person who wasn’t shipping code was guiding a new hire, or carrying the burden of bad infrastructure quietly in the background. Reframing my attention from surface-level output to the mix of constraints and effort isn’t just fair. It’s humbling, and it makes every conversation feel less like a scorecard.

And it applies in ordinary moments. Code reviews, stand-ups, the little tensions of cross-team handoffs—these are moments to question assumptions at work. Every question asked before judging—What’s their story?—improves how we work together. The context almost always matters more than we think.

Setting Boundaries for Curiosity (Without Losing Speed or Standards)

Maybe your first worry is that all this curiosity stuff slows things down. Honestly, that used to be my objection too. Most days, I want to move, not add another five-minute ritual to every decision. Even in incidents, it’s wiser to slow down to lead well than to rush past context. But here’s the surprising thing. A curiosity check doesn’t need to be deep or time-consuming. You can pause for just a literal five seconds—enough to ask “What’s their story?” and let your assumptions surface for inspection. In fact, small shifts in how we structure evaluation—like examining hypotheses separately—consistently cut down on confirmation bias and wasted effort. It’s a small investment up front that prevents bigger messes later, like decisions built on resentment or chasing the wrong fix.

I get the fear that being curious turns into making excuses for poor work. Admitting there’s a backstory doesn’t mean erasing standards. If anything, it sharpens them. You can understand someone’s context and still expect good results.

Let’s get concrete. Maybe you’re reviewing a peer’s low output—avoid peer comparison bias from the start. Instead of filling in the blanks (“They’re coasting”), try asking about constraints—are they buried alive in legacy systems, juggling health issues, or running point as the default team mentor? Understand the situation, then set clear expectations for what’s next and spell out what support you’re able to provide. That’s not about lowering the bar. It’s about making a fair call with real data, not guesswork. If someone still underperforms after you’ve addressed what’s in the way, then it’s time for a tough conversation, but now it’s anchored in fairness, not snap judgment. I keep coming back to how much more decisive and trusted this feels, both for the person being evaluated and for the team watching how you handle it.

So these are the guardrails. Curiosity over judgment means a quick curiosity check isn’t a detour. It’s a shortcut to better context. Standards don’t drop—they just get aimed in the right direction. And the trust you build by getting the story first? That pays off every single time.

How to Embed Curiosity into Your Team: Questions and Everyday Routines

You know how it goes—reviews pile up, hiring calls blur together, team retros fly by. It’s tempting to move fast and let your gut do the judging. But try swapping in a basic micro-ritual today: pause for a breath before making a call, ask for context (“Can you tell me what was going on behind the scenes?” or “What limits did you hit?”), jot down the actual constraints, and note any trade-offs that shaped the outcome. Even five minutes of this—written, not just thought—is enough to change how you weigh someone’s effort or potential, and helps you decide when to step in vs. step back. It’s not about paperwork or building new bureaucracy; it’s a circuit-breaker for assumptions, grounding your assessment in what really happened, not just what’s visible in the dashboard or report.

Managers, here are scripts I use and encourage others to adopt: “Before I decide, help me understand constraints,” “What trade-offs did you consider?” or even just, “Where did effort go?” Say these out loud or drop them in your next review doc. You’ll see people open up, and you’ll catch details that change your verdict.

For engineers and anyone working close to the technical details, lean into direct, practical questions: “What input data or dependencies changed?” “What were the failure modes?” and “What context am I missing?” These aren’t just ways to debug work—they’re habits that surface hidden effort and complication, making teamwork less about blame and more about understanding what’s underneath.

Stick with this ritual and you’ll see changes fast. You get fairer engineering decisions as choices get sharper, evaluations get fairer, and trust grows in all directions. That’s the lesson from The Holdovers scene—the real equity starts with #PerspectiveShift, moving from easy stories to asking what’s behind them. When you build this into your daily loop, what you get is a team that’s more accurate, more collaborative, and a little more humane.

Your Move: Build Curiosity Into Judgment

Here’s your move. Pick someone you’ve secretly envied—or found yourself quietly judging—and, before settling on your own story, ask about theirs. Even one direct question can disrupt the reflex to assume.

Plan to spend just five minutes today. Learn one constraint they faced, one effort you hadn’t seen, and one tough trade-off they made. That’s it—less than a coffee break.

This tiny curiosity-first check doesn’t just make you nicer. It sharpens your calls and builds teams where people trust that being understood matters as much as being right. Outcomes get fairer and resentment drops.

Like or comment if this resonated with you. Let’s lead with empathy—one question at a time. #PerspectiveShift

And maybe someday, when a scene like The Holdovers comes back to mind, I’ll stop pretending I’ve solved my own snap judgments once and for all. I know the impulse still creeps in. For now, curiosity is the best habit I’ve found—even if I haven’t fully shaken the comfort of easy answers.