Pints, Cars, and Pull Requests: How They Relate?

Before I wrote a single line of production code, I worked with people face to face. I poured pints at an Irish pub in Tel Aviv, and I sold cars as a test-drive representative at Toyota. I did not know it at the time, but those two jobs were teaching me the most important thing I use as an engineer today.

At Toyota I was given two customers who were foreign ambassadors to Israel, one from Japan and one from Kenya. Both landed with me for the same reason: my English. I took them out on their test drives, answered every question without hurry, and made sure they left feeling looked after. Both of them bought the cars they had driven. It was the first time I saw the thing plainly. The car mattered, of course. But what decided the sale was the hour spent beside it.

The pub was Molly Bloom's, close to the sea in Tel Aviv, and it drew foreigners the way pubs by the water do. English mattered there too. One night I looked after an American, and something in the evening must have gone right, because when the bill came he told me to put a hundred-percent tip on the card. Around a hundred dollars. I actually stopped and asked him whether he was sure, since ten percent was the custom and no one would blink at it. He insisted. What stayed with me was not the money. It was how plainly he had felt looked after, and how much he wanted to answer it in kind.

That is what I carry into a call with a customer, or work on a feature or bug, now. I bring the same patience, the same care to be genuinely useful, the same habit of catching a problem before it has the chance to become one. Behind every ticket there is a person, waiting, hoping the thing will simply work.

And it does not stop at customers. The same pull is there with the people I work beside, on my team or on someone else's. Not long ago a teammate came to me needing a working environment to reproduce a bug, and I happened to have one running. The feature belonged to another team entirely, and it was something I had never touched. I could have handed over the environment and gone back to my own work. Instead I stayed, and together with that whole other team we sat with it for five hours, turning it over until we understood what had actually gone wrong. Not my code, not my feature, but people who needed help, and I had the thing that could help.

For me this is not merely a good professional instinct. It is what I am called to. Jesus described His own life in exactly these terms:

For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Mark 10:45

If service was the shape of the highest life, it is hardly beneath mine. Paul says the same to the Galatians in plainer terms, that the freedom we are given is not for ourselves but is spent on one another:

[...] rather, serve one another humbly in love.
Galatians 5:13

A servant's heart never asks whose ticket it is, or whose feature broke. It asks who needs help. A framework you can learn in a fortnight; learning to care for the person in front of you takes longer, and mine began behind a bar, and behind the wheel of a car that was never mine to keep.