I once ardently fought for web standards in the war. I vigilantly coded my CSS to the highest standard of the W3C; I ensured every <br /> was closed with a slash, there were no inline styles except for my emails, and every tag was lowercase, dammit.
Then, we won. More or less.
Along the way I got a new job too. I’m still loving deeply the craft of writing CSS by hand, but I’m not following any righteous path from on high. As the war had gone on I learned the hard way how pointless it was because everything kept changing. The browsers, the standards, the possibilities. Nothing that mattered before mattered anymore.
It wasn’t a deliberate transition at first, I often caught myself fantasizing about following an ideal yet having no ambition at all about actually fighting for it. The bitterness of the futility of fighting had settled within me.
What ended my naivety was the gradual death of IE 6. As fewer and fewer people cared about it, I too stopped caring about it. I stopped wasting hours getting things to line up right and eventually settling upon a simple yet solid rule that makes me giddy to this day — zoom:1; or display:none; and done. Through that I learned that I didn’t care about fighting for anything anymore, I cared about not fighting with things.
I’m so very glad for having been so jaded.
While I had heard of Merlin Mann and 43 folders before he wrote Better, I never really gave a shit. Then he kicked me in the balls with this, and I felt a lump in my throat, and I liked it.
To be honest, I don’t have a specific agenda for what I want to do all that differently, apart from what I’m already trying to do every day:
- identify and destroy small-return bullshit;
- shut off anything that’s noisier than it is useful;
- make brutally fast decisions about what I don’t need to be doing;
- avoid anything that feels like fake sincerity (esp. where it may touch money);
- demand personal focus on making good things;
- put a handful of real people near the center of everything.
All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.
How you live your life is entirely up to you. I wouldn’t expect my way of living to fit you, and I’m sure your way won’t fit me. We’re different people. That’s cool.
When you mix two things into which people invest deeply — their work and their life — you’re bound to find some strong opinions. It’s also easy to get bogged down in those opinions and have arguments quickly devolve into religious debates. I’d like to avoid that.
Whatever choices you’ve made about how to live your life and do your work are fine with me. You were free to make the choices you did, and you’re free to change them now. Learn to love the choices you’ve made, or change them and shut the fuck up.
A job is just a job.
Sure, I write code for money (one of several skills) and what I do is just a job to me, but that’s because I’ve learned the hard way. I used to put a lot more passion into my job and found that believing the job is anything more than just a job is a great way lose my sanity and wreck my health.
So, I gave all my fucks up. Since then I’ve become a better developer because I’m not obsessed with my work. I can be objective about it and what makes it successful. I’m OK with being wrong. I learned to let go more, which helps me learn more new things. It’s alright to be reasonable.
Life isn’t.
A problem with branding a person as a 501 Developer is that it undermines the fact that just because they’re not in the office it doesn’t mean they’re not working. It’s the simple matter of having a lot to care about in life and the complex matter of balancing it all.
For me, even though I arrive at 9 and leave at 5 every day (rare exceptions, and the odd weekend for a crazy deadline notwithstanding) I’m working the entire rest of the day. I have a wife and a family that deserve my love and attention because there’s no fucking way I’m going to be one of those people who regrets on their deathbed how little time they spent with their family. Even with all that I give them it’s never enough. I’m usually up before everyone else in the house, and I’m always the last to go to bed. Coming in at 9 and leaving at 5 is not a matter of laziness, it’s a matter of having several responsibilities, of which my day job is only one.
Demeaning someone with the accusation of a lack of dedication because they’re responsible is insane and abusive. If you willingly work 50, 60, or even 90 fucking hours a week and then proceed to flaunt that I would immediately be suspicious. Why are you overcompensating? Are you really happy? I’d also question your ability to value your time and the time of others. Can you balance priorities? Honestly?
Working long and hard is not sustainable, nor healthy. You have to learn to work smart and apply yourself effectively. That’s called wisdom.
More is never better. Smarter is better. Better is better.
We are software developers who take pride in our work but choose not to be wholly defined by it. To us it is just a job, but we still do it well.
What the fuck is this shit? “Unforgivable Heresy”?! Working sane hours, being glad you can, talking about it, and hoping others do the same, is heresy?
Fuck you.
Even as you read this, thousands of tech workers at Facebook, Google, Zynga and elsewhere are playing the Sandberg card! And when I say “thousands,” I mean none. Because no one who’s putting in 50 or 60+ hours because they’re afraid not to is going to stick out their neck and demand their lives back from the tech jobs that consume them or the venture capitalists who get wealthy on the backs of overworked and stressed-out technology employees. Not in this shaky economy.
This shaky economy? Tech is fucking booming. The people who willingly submit themselves to such unreasonable work hours are willingly accepting a legalized form of slavery upon themselves.
While I think Chris Nerney is trying to sound cute about it all, the entire article feels like an attack against Sheryl and people who work smart and try to be parents. Regardless, nobody will even read beyond the headline and the article is going to do more harm than good, validating the very fears and greeds that he barely points out.
For all the talk of ideas and inspiration in the technology world, those are just sparks. The real engines driving Silicon Valley are fear and greed: The fear of workers who are afraid to be seen as less than psychotically loyal to the company, and the greed of top executives and venture capitalists who see workers as replaceable cogs in a vast money-making machine.
I’m not disagreeing with that point, but it’s buried under a ton of hubris against a success woman and mother, whom I’m guessing he’s jealous of.
Chris, rethink your take.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
…
Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
I love this line of thinking.
More solid business writing from Amy Hoy, with a excellent quote from General Sherman that neatly summed up the whole piece for me.
I’ve always felt guilty for not swallowing the bullshit at places I work. Even where I am now, if it wasn’t a genuinely rewarding place to work I’d want to vomit every time I go in, like I did at my last job.
Death & Glory is a curious metaphor for startups, though it’s apt. I’m not yet 30 but I’ve already have regrets for spending too much effort on work, and not enough on cultivating the relationships I have in my life, because of the guilt I’ve felt at “not doing enough”. That’s changing, and has been over many, many months.
The truth is that work is but a small subset of what matters in life. It’s essential in the sense that you have to eat somehow, but it’s small in that the mechanical repetition of incremental efforts doesn’t reciprocate directly. I write code, the code works, I get paid. Wait, what? The code didn’t pay me. My boss didn’t even pay me. The people who bought the thing I built pay me, though even they do so indirectly. In business, relationships can become diluted through a plinko-like chain of people and machinations until finally, I get a lump sum automatically deposited into my account. It’s hollow, at best, unless I work hard to have a relationship with as many people along that chain as possible.
I’m fine with the arrangement because I’ve been under the boot heel of the alternative, poverty, and it’s a different sort of soul crushing than even the worst jobs I’ve had. It also turns out to be deeply rewarding helping those relationships mature.
However, working purely for money, for glory, for ego, is insane.
Michael Posner:
The regular weekend is like a speed bump. It slows you down, but doesn’t last long enough to change your basic habits. Three days, on the other hand, is a legitimate rest. It allows you to reset the psychic thermostat.
So here’s the real question du jour: Why aren’t there more of them? What’s so sacred about the five-day workweek, a regimen set in place in North America seven decades ago that has been virtually immoveable since (unlike in many European countries)? In an age of high-tech efficiency and higher productivity, why isn’t the working world organized to provide us with more leisure time?
The theory, from Ben Hunnicutt, a sociologist who teaches at the University of Iowa:
“The problem is that work has taken the place of religion in our lives.”
Jason Fried:
When you really want to do something right, which is usually what you should be striving for, you tend to slow down.
Contrary to what your fears and superiors may be telling you, sometimes the best course of action to take when you’re stressed is to slow down.
