The Famous Janitor
It was 2004, in Tucson, Arizona. I was sitting in my office room staring at the computer screen—it was my first job out of college, at a company called Mentor Graphics, and yes, I had my own room—it’s been downhill since, with cubicles and shared tables nowadays. A guy randomly walked into my office room. He was dressed ordinarily, and from the way he appeared, I figured he was the office cleaner. I smiled at him (half-heartedly) but didn’t say hello or make any effort to have a conversation. He walked up to me to shake hands. Stephen Mellor, he said his name was. I was confused. Why does the cleaner want to shake hands with me? He asked how my day was going and how I liked working at Mentor Graphics. He said he popped in to welcome me after hearing that I was a new hire. He wished me a nice afternoon and left.
The office cleaner welcoming me to the team? I began to wonder if he might be somebody else. Later that evening, I asked my manager who he was, and he said, “what, you don’t know? He’s the founder of our company (recently acquired by Mentor Graphics). He’s visiting us.”
I felt like an idiot. I went back to my desk and googled “Stephen Mellor.” Not only is this guy the founder of the company I was working at, but he’s also one of the leading pioneers in computer science. He co-invented executable UML (if you are a computer scientist, you know what UML is unless you were sleeping in your classes), and he was a signatory to the Agile Manifesto. “Agile” is a way of working effectively as a team. The methodology was new back then, and several companies were experimenting with this new format, but today it is the de-facto way of working and is adopted by almost every software team in the world.
What a wasted opportunity. Instead of getting to know this great personality, I wasted my time being lost in judgment. I learned two lessons that day. Never judge anybody by their appearance (especially computer science people).
And the more important lesson: so what if he was the cleaner? Why not say hello, give a whole-hearted smile, and have a meaningful conversation with whoever comes your way?
We make unconscious judgments about people all the time—from their ethnicity, gender, social status, whatnot. The decisions we make from these judgments aren’t usually great—they can hurt them and us. And here’s the thing—others are doing it to us all the time. Even if you’re blissfully unaware, your life is being shaped by everyone’s unconscious judgments on you. I recommend listening to this 30min podcast episode from Seth Godin, whose insights around this topic are thought-provoking and possibly life-changing.
I never saw Stephen Mellor again. It was a rare opportunity to have crossed paths with a computer science great that early in my career. But I could have gotten much more value from it had I kept an open mind.