Who Me? Yes.

See "How To Live Like A Cynic" by Ansgar Allen, December 6, 2023 at psyche.co ( https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms OR https://web.archive.org/web/20231207101328/https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms )

For a while I thought this was it. Not quite, but it's close. It's inspiration.

I keep thinking that if I had my life to do over again, everything would be different. True. True of me an everyone else, but how? Definitely more along these lines:

• Improvise your life.
• Live shamelessly.
• Push against all boundaries.
• Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
• Give up everything you can live without.

I also recommend "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough, an amazing and thorough book-length biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He lived somewhat along the lines of the principles listed above, better than I have, though much more conventionally than Diogenes. Everyone has lived much more conventionally than Diogenes, but it's the core ideas. Very similar in both cases. Both fearless beings.

Particularly, in my case, I come from people who try to fade into the background, and had almost no education in how to get through life from my parents. They were both clueless, both the youngest of large families, my mother being a good little girl and my father being a spoiled brat who never worked. Both incapable of actually dealing with what life threw at them.

Being shy, and bookish, and having no clue about anything, and seeing my relatives wander aimlessly through their own lives, I grew up making lots of mistakes. Mostly mistakes. All the way through. My whole life so far has been one continuous mistake.

I have missed nearly every opportunity, played by the rules, deferred to authority, hoped for the best, and continued getting it all wrong.

Now I'm revamping myself, reinventing, reforming, redoing. Though I no longer have to work for money, I am working, working at making myself the person I should have been all the way through. My one practical talent is that I know how to live within my means and with that have always been good at saving money, so I've got enough of that anyway, and its freedom.

I read Allen's "How To Live Like A Cynic" piece, and then got his book and a couple others on cynic philosophy and started reading them. And quickly gave up on all. Three academic works, going into endless detail about everything except the subject that I was interested in. The bullet points above do a better job, and Allen's piece is stellar. He hits the relevant points and covers them in enough detail to get the core ideas across. That's enough right there. You don't need more.

I'm thinking a lot here of software development, but I'm actually more interested in process than in programming, though in my so-called "professional" life, producing software was supposedly the goal. In line with this, I'm also working my way through Andy Hunt's "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware", which is all about thinking. Also great. Ground-breaking, earth-shaking. More than reformative. Revolutionary.

For me it's all about the principles. I'm abstract, more interested in "what" and "why" than in "how". Cynicism and pragmatic thinking have been key parts of me since the beginning, and I'm only now, late in life, realizing that, and identifying who I could have been and what I could have done. I'm an inventor, a designer, a creative, iconoclastic dirty-fingernail philosopher. For me, what works is what works, and I keep trying to figure that out, no matter how anyone else does it. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it," and "We've never done it that way" have always enraged me, and will forever.)

OK-fine and too bad. My life has been a waste, but here we are.

At least I do recognize the truth of things and am working on it. I like clarity and direction, unencumbered by the clutter of life, so once again:

• Improvise your life.
• Live shamelessly.
• Push against all boundaries.
• Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
• Give up everything you can live without.

These are things that I've been doing all along, but accidentally, too quietly, in private, internally, without a real plan.

I'm not now headed for the street to run up and down, howling, and knocking the hats off people to get my point across. No. I plan on asserting myself when necessary, standing my intellectual ground, never being intimidated, living bullshit-free, and just getting on with it. Anyone else wants to do it a different way, fine, go ahead. Not me. I won't get in your face unless you force it.

It's December, the Xmas season, again. When I was five years old I badgered my parents until they finally gave in and admitted that Santa Claus was a fake, didn't exist. That's me. I'm proud.

And that was about five years before we had television. Before we had television, so I wasn't seeing programs every night with plots about guys dressing up in funny red suits to lie to children. How I figured it out I don't remember, but I did. Santa Claus is the first deep societal evil perpetrated on children.

I got past that and want to live the remainder of my life getting past the rest. End of story.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? As above.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

What Is Pay, Really? This.

So here I am, about four months late, writing something I thought I'd be knocking off last October. Well I'm like that and I hope you are too, because then I get to feel just as smart and conscientious as you, and that way we can call it a draw.

What is pay? Sounds so obvious, so boring, like one of those things that everyone knows without thinking about it. One of those ideas you have bouncing around in your head every day and take as a thoroughly vetted, completely settled aspect of the universe that always was, always will be, and is therefore right and just.

Pay is complex but simple. Obvious but obscure. Definite but tenuous. Or the inverse.

Pay is not money.

Money enters into the world of pay but it is only part of the story, and a relatively minor part, even if you work only for the money. Because you don't. Even if you do.

And even if you are desperate for it, you aren't.

How arrogant am I? How stupid could I be if I only tried harder?

Hold on -- it's true.

What you need and what I need are those things that the terminally dense recite without thought. Because they are cliches: food, shelter, clothing. That's what money gets us, and a little more. Without a minimum to exist on things are ugly, but it takes very little to get by. More money, more food, your own house, more clothes, maybe a car or two, splashy vacation trips. Then more junk, bigger TV sets, golf lessons, a second story on the house. More stuff in the closet. And then more of the same. And then again more of the same. And then you're dead, but not happier, even just before you died.

"Our profits were above the average for our industry, and our financial statements showed every sign of health. We were growing at a rate of about 20% annually with sales that were strong in our home state. Our quality was high. We were respected in the community I was making a lot of money. And I had a knot in my stomach that wouldn't go away."

Those are the words of Ralph Stayer. They open his article in the Harvard Business Review of November 1990.

"What worried me more than the competition, however, was the gap between potential and performance. Our people didn't seem to care. Every day I came to work and saw people so bored by their jobs that they made thoughtless, dumb mistakes. They showed up in the morning, did halfheartedly what they were told to do, and then went home."

I've been there. Maybe you have too. Maybe you are now.

Mr. Stayer did something drastic. He raised everyone's pay, but not their paychecks.

"The image that best captured the organizational end state I had in mind for Johnsonville was a flock of geese on the wing. I didn't want an organizational chart with traditional lines and boxes, but a "V" of individuals who knew the common goal, took turns leading, and adjusted their structure to the task at hand. Each individual bird is responsible for its own performance."

OK, it's a metaphor. Whatever. Pay attention though. Somehow this business owner was able to realize that both he and his company had a problem, and that no obvious or traditional solution would be a solution.

Instead of cracking the whip or scraping off the lowest-performing 10% of staff every year, or just firing everyone and starting over, he did something else.

He turned the company over to the people who knew how to run it, who were the people who already worked there. They were the ones with the greatest stake in the company's success, because the company was the support for them and their families. Once they were in full charge they were truly responsible for their own destiny.

Years later Mr. Stayer was able evaluate his experiences.

"Everyone at Johnsonville discovered they could do considerably better and earn considerably more than they had imagined. Since they had little trouble meeting the accelerated production goals that they themselves had set, members raised the minimum acceptable performance criteria and began routinely to expect more of themselves and others. The cause of excitement at Johnsonville Sausage is not change itself but the process used in producing change. Learning and responsibility are invigorating, and aspirations make our hearts beat. For the last five years, my own aspiration has been to eliminate my job by creating such a crowd of self-starting, problem-solving, responsibility-grabbing, independent thinkers that Johnsonville would run itself."

That is a good description of pay.

Another person who followed approximately the same path was Ricardo Semler. His company is in Brazil. You can think of his approach this way: "We transfer responsibility to our people. We hand them their freedom."

He has written several books. The one I bought and read was "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works."

His basic ideas run like this: If work is meaningful then people will do it because it has meaning. If work is fun then people will do it in order to have fun. If the workplace accommodates the lives of people then they will embrace the workplace as part of their lives. If people are allowed to take charge they will do much better than if they are told what to do. And the business will benefit as well.

His business is called Semco. Here is an example of how it runs differently than any place you and I may have worked: Employees set their own salaries.

There are five pieces of knowledge involved, three known by the company and two by the employee. The company has salary surveys so it knows what people outside the company earn. The company also knows what everyone inside the company earns. And the company knows current market conditions and what it can afford to pay.

The employees know what they want to make and what their coworkers make.

The company then shares its information with the employees so they can make informed decisions. The types of compensation available are salary, bonuses, profit sharing, commissions, royalties on sales, royalties on profits, commissions on gross margin, stock, stock options, initial public offerings, and sale of business units. (He explains all these in the book.)

How well does this work, then, really?

"The flexible reward system mirrors our philosophy that people will understand that it's in their best interest to choose compensation packages that maximize both their own pay and the company's returns." Because "if workers understand the big picture, they'll know how their salaries fit into it."

Occasionally someone has to leave the company to make what they think they're worth. Occasionally the company pays someone more than they think they're worth. Generally, all sides pretty well agree on it though.

There are several companies under the Semco umbrella. They have been sweetly profitable. Most of those who work there stay for decades. But, you may ask, if this is so good, why hasn't Semco taken over the world? Because they have more important things to do.

Because work and profit are not the most important things for Semco.

Not as important as weekends, for example. "If the workweek is going to slop over into the weekend -- and there's no hope of stopping that from happening -- why can't the weekend, with its precious restorative moments of playtime, my time, and our time, spill over into the workweek?"

If you have a job at Semco, and you need to do something outside of work, and you can schedule it, then you go, even if it's a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, or a day at the beach, just because you want to stick your toes into the sand and sit for a while. No one comes around to sniff your chair seat. No one touches it to see if it's still warm. You are expected to act like an adult, and so is the company.

What about the bad times, when you just have to ax people and ignore the blood? That happened too. They decided together. Meetings sometimes go on for weeks there, with people drifting in and out, and hashing and rehashing ideas until they find a reasonable consensus.

It was like that when the company hit the skids some years back. The conclusion for most was to take a 38% pay cut, and make it up later with an increased share of the profits. Some people were spun off with a grubstake to start their own businesses, some retired, some went elsewhere. But there were no massive layoffs.

There was no loss of valuable staff, no slow bleed until the company was brain dead. They all pulled together, and it was their decision as a group of adults. People is all any company has anyway. Staff is all any company is. Without people who know the business, its history and philosophy, there is no business. It's not the buildings or the advertising or the bank statements. It's all people, all the time.

To give you an idea of how much Semco respects people, the company devised a custom email system. It is impossible for the company to read staff email. It was so fundamentally important to them that they wanted to ensure that it could never happen even by accident and certainly not in secret, if anyone was ever tempted to peek.

They are strong cooperative individuals working together in good faith toward a common goal. People naturally want to do, and to do well, and to do well together. That is pay.

Don't believe it? Skeptical about a smallish sausage company and some foreigners you've never heard of?

They aren't alone. There is a good article in "Fast Company" magazine from a few years back, about a company you have heard of.

"Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication. He organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams to 150 to 200 people at most."

So what?

"Pound for pound, the most innovative company in America is W.L. Gore & Associates."

Listen to Diane Davidson. "I came from a very traditional business." At first she didn't know who did what.

"I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy."

"'Who's my boss?' she kept asking."

"'Stop using the B-word,' her sponsor replied."

"'Secretly, there are bosses, right?' she asked. There weren't. She eventually figured out that 'your team is your boss, because you don't want to let them down. Everyone's your boss, and no one's your boss.'"

At Gore people are free to communicate, collaborate, and to follow up on their own ideas, just because they want to, because something might come of it. The company mixes up people in diverse groups containing researchers, engineers, designers, production workers, sales people and others.

"You're supposed to morph your role over time to match your skills. You're not expected to fit into some preconceived box or standardized organizational niche. Your compensation is tied to your 'contribution' and decided by a committee. The company looks at your past and present performance as well as your future prospects, which takes away the potential disincentive for investing time and effort in speculative projects. Gore encourages risk taking."

People go there, people work there, people stay there, and people make the company successful because they get more than a paycheck. They get true rewards. They are fully paid.

"No one has to follow. You attract talented people who want to work with you. You draw them with your passion and the credibility that you've built over time." Just like that.

In 2004, Gore was a $1.6 billion company. They must know something.

How is your job?

 

References:

How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead, by Ralph Stayer, (online) and in book form

Ricardo Semler. His books: "Maverick!", "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works", "Managing Without Managers"

"The Fabric of Creativity: At W.L. Gore, innovation is more than skin deep: The culture is as imaginative as the products.", by Alan Deutschman, Fast Company, Issue 89, December 2004

(This post originally published January 23, 2008.)

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Exceedingly not that important.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Customer Service, Where Ha' Ye Gone?

In what is now the past, I had a few interesting times dealing with reputable businesses. Hold on a sec. Maybe I should qualify that. I'd have to call one of them a formerly reputable business.

I had a hosting company, in the sense that I contracted with them for services. My first account worked out really well. They were a relatively small company that the owners had built from the ground up. They were on top of things and had created a bunch of custom features and though not a giant company had a good reputation.

I bought in. I had a few small problems, mostly due to inexperience on my part, and the service was great. I always sent a final email thanking the service technician when my problem got resolved. I figured that I owed. I figured that people like to be thanked. And I was grateful.

Times were good. My site stayed up, it worked perfectly, I added to it, and had no further problems. So after almost two years with this company, they were the obvious choice for my second site.

A few months before this I'd seen a few emails coming in about the hosting company "joining forces" with some other company. Or maybe they called it "teaming up", or something like that. I vaguely wondered if something unfortunate was going on, but since nothing seemed to be changing, I ignored it. About the only change I could see was that they were offering more services at lower prices. Whatever.

Not too very long after setting up my second account I began checking it every morning. Every now and then the site would be unresponsive. I wondered if my internet service provider or my DSL provider was having problems, but then before I could get too worked up things seemed to resolve themselves.

This happened maybe once a week for a few minutes. Then it seemed to be getting worse, but it was sporadic. I'd had some problems early on with my DSL provider, a major phone company whose telephone support had been vile. But they had been OK for several years now. I wondered if I was getting hosed by them again, or if my ISP was mucking around, though they had been dead reliable and even had helped me figure out that the phone company was lying to me when outages were really the phone company's fault.

Anyway, one day my site simply did not work. I checked everything I could. Browser OK (I had four installed). Computer on and running. Other web sites came up OK. In fact I could access any other web site that I could think of except my own site number two.

After pulling some hair out and thrashing around looking to define the problem, my site was suddenly there again. This happened several times over the following weeks. It seemed to be down about 20 to 30 minutes, and then it was back. I kept notes.

Finally one day when this was happening I submitted a support request to the web host, documenting what I'd seen. The logs for my site showed nothing and there were no reports from the hosting company, or notes in their forums.

The response I got was to let them know if it happened again. I think I ate my tongue. But after a few minutes I got back on track and let it slide.

Then a few days later it happened again. After a half hour of thrashing around checking things I saw my site come up again, but five minutes later it went down and didn't come back for another 20, so I submitted another support request. And got pretty much the same response, so I kept after them, saying that I'd at least expect them to check things and let me know what they checked, when, and supplying some proof.

I got a condescending response from someone who said he was a technical support supervisor. He mentioned a couple of things that weren't all that deep and basically let me know that they were not interested in following up on my problem.

OK fine. I love you too.

About a week after that my site disappeared again. The original site was still doing fine. I never did have a problem with that, but the newer one was down. I decided to log on to the control panel and check the logs. I don't know much about web servers and the back end stuff, but I can make some sense of it.

Except that I couldn't get there. The whole server had disappeared from the internet. I checked the company's forums for an announcement, and checked my email inbox but found no news, so I submitted another support request in case they were unaware. I got a reply that they knew there was a problem. And beyond that they supplied nothing else, ever.

A couple of days later I received an email notifying me that my request for support had been resolved, so I queried them. They said that after three days of inactivity, their system considers all support requests to have been resolved. Period. Thank you very much now go away.

Then my site went down again and so did the server. Totally gone.

I submitted another support request and asked that it go straight to a supervisor. I said I was fed up with a web site that kept disappearing, and a server that did the same and wanted some answers and a resolution.

OK, children, now it gets fun.

After some back and forth the person identifying himself as a technical support supervisor told me three interesting things.

One was that they would provide no support for application programming problems. He said that if I was having problems with my web site I should contact my developer and work things out there.

I had a contact form on my site which had been working fine, but after the server disappeared it stopped working. Cold. Dead. I hadn't touched the site in several weeks and made this clear several times. Nevertheless, this guy had to make a point of telling me not to even think of getting any help of that kind.

Up to that moment it hadn't occurred to me for the obvious reason that I had had a perfectly working site and hadn't changed a thing. It could not be my faulty code.

The second thing this guy said was that they would provide zero help configuring anything whatsoever within my account. Since I was on an Apache server on Linux, there were .htaccess files and file permissions and things to fiddle with. But I hadn't, and hadn't asked for help either.

Then the third thing I was told was that if I thought that the goofiness I had been experiencing were due to hardware, operating system or server software problems, it was my job to verify it (right, from my apartment 1500 miles away), document it, and tell them exactly what they had to do to fix their system.

And by the way, we didn't notify anyone or put the outages on our company forum because that's reserved for major outages. (He didn't answer when I said that having my server disappear was a major outage for me.)

Talk about your body slam.

So there I was, having been told that no matter where the problem was, they were not going to do anything to help. Thank you very much and please don't call again.

Luckily my first account had only about a month to run, so I found another host that looked good. I even queried one of its customers. Everything sounded OK. A little more expensive, but I could consolidate two accounts into one for about the same total cost.

So then I notified the first company that I was going to move my first account, and in case I missed the deadline I did not want my account to be automatically renewed (which they normally do). This unleashed another load of stuff that went right into the fan.

It so happens that they have no way of closing an account unless they do it immediately. Their system is set up in such a way that they cannot indicate that an account just runs out and dies. According to them. So they could either close it immediately or if I ran over they would have to bill me for another entire year and then refund me (if things worked out that way).

The information on the company wiki said something else, but they didn't accept that. I got into a major email battle and made it clear that I would consider it fraud, and fight them up one side and down the other. All that fun stuff. They kept saying that the giant robot in the back room would not listen to them. Etcetera. It was lovely.

I spent about two weeks updating the style sheets for my site (on my desktop) simplifying them and bring them up a notch or two in quality. I finished that and got my site moved over to the new host without a problem, and then managed to cancel my account with about a week left to run. Later I noticed that they had changed the company wiki to explicitly say that they could not cancel in advance.

A few weeks later I was ready to move my second site. First I had to get my domain name pointing at the new host's servers. I went into the control panel about three times and for the life of me could find no option to let me make the change.

Sounds like it's time to submit another support request. So I did, lucky me.

The reply I got was "You could change the domain nameservers via BackStage >> Domains >> [redacted].com, click on the 'Edit' button on the left and then you will be able to do that. Hope this helps."

Like I hadn't' been there.

So I replied, and told them that there was no 'Edit' button and sent a screen capture.

Of course the reply I got (from a different monkey) was "Hi, On Domains tab: [redacted].com click on that 'Edit' to change nameservers."

Lovely day in the neighborhood. Lovely.

Eventually, out of desperation I went looking around some more and accidentally stumbled on that elusive 'Edit' button under the name of the account that I had closed about a month earlier. I'm sure they never expected me to find it there, but I did.

So after gluing most of my hair back on I closed that account too, with 16 months to run. No refund of course. They'd never think of that, but I'm glad to be free, and the new hosting company is another small one, with real people working there, and it's their livelihood and they don't offer the lowest prices but they are actually on the job.

So far it's working.

Part two in this story is about a gift to my sister.

I sort of missed Xmas. I wanted to get her something. Life has been especially unkind to her since her birthday is about two weeks before Xmas, and she's been shorted all her life. Mine is in the warm months so I never had that sort of conflict. I can't understand why my parents didn't move her birthday to July instead. They muffed it and she has suffered.

So I owed her. I haven't been that good either, but now that I'm a geezer I realize I won't have another six decades to put it off. If I don't do something now, maybe there won't be a next year to make it up.

Chocolate and coffee seemed good.

I ordered some chocolate. Goofy web site but pretty good deals. Fantastic service. When you submit your order you can specify delivery options, such as an acceptable temperature range, or let them decide when it's cool enough to send chocolate, and so on.

An email confirming the order arrived shortly, then another one told me when the order shipped, and included a UPS tracking number. I followed the order and notified my sister when it had arrived, in case maybe it hadn't really. Then I got another email confirming that the order had been delivered. Everything went beautifully.

I've been buying coffee locally from a great company for 20 years. This was a good chance to share with my sister, and since the coffee company had an online store, all I had to do was order and pay, and let it all rip.

RIP. You know what that means, but I didn't get too much peace out of this one.

I selected two pounds of premium beans, then went to check out. I entered my billing info, credit card number and all that, but when I put my sister's name and address into the shipping address form the system changed the billing info to the shipping info.

I found this out after I submitted the order, on a summary screen. Too late, Jake.

I had to log on to the site (you need to set up an account in order to order) and filled out a contact form notifying them of the difference between the shipping and billing addresses (and that they were two different people). Silence.

I kept checking with my sister. No coffee.

After about a week I logged back into the coffee site and saw a note about the order having been shipped, but there was nothing else there. No tracking number, no way to follow up on anything. After 10 days my sister informed me that the order still hadn't arrived so I logged onto the site one more time and sent them a few flames. I gave them a day and a half to provide me with a definite delivery date, which had to be within the following week, or I'd have to cancel the order and demand a refund.

So then I get an email. Finally someone wants to talk.

Dear sir, so sorry. Order has been faithfully delivered. Here is fabled UPS tracking number. Please see for yourself. Meanwhile we are sending a duplicate shipment Real Soon Now just in case. So sorry please.

It was about then that my sister went snooping out in the office of her apartment complex and found that her original order had indeed arrived and gotten stuffed away somewhere. Since they hadn't notified her (as they used to do) she hadn't thought of going out digging around.

The other half of this is that if I had had a tracking number in the first place I could have told her to go look on a particular date, to verify that it had or had not actually been delivered.

So I'm a butthead. My sister is at fault for not being curious enough to look for something that she did not know was coming, and the merchant created a bad experience by being secretive about all of this. I still don't know if the second, courtesy order has even been shipped. I just logged in to the web site and the address was still wrong, about a week later. And so on.

Great coffee though.

(Original post was written in 2008 but I'm still mad.)

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Glad I forgot which hosting company that was.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Just More Corporate HR Marketing, or...

I'm still evolving. I hope you are too. It means you're alive. Possibly troubled, but alive.

I got contacted this week by what appeared to be a good employer. On the surface it appeared to be a good job and a good company. Maybe better than that, even. Maybe great.

The opening words to my reply were: "I thought I'd deleted my resume from every place it was posted, after getting spam for .Net jobs in New York City for about two months, so was surprised to hear from you. But that's OK."

The part of the recruitment announcement that caught my attention was "our development philosophy is to write software correctly the first time, without shortcuts; to build reusable components whenever possible for use across all of our development projects; and to ensure that our existing code base is our biggest asset, rather than a liability."

Yow!

Then they went on to say how one of their people was working on an Ajax tool to generate scaffolds in Ruby on Rails.

Yow! They work with Rails!

Of their 10 requirements, I met nine, but not the first, Ruby on Rails experience in production applications. I've been trying but haven't made it there yet. Possibly due to sloth. To get there, since I have no experience, I'll have to manufacture experience, by going out and finding freelance work, which then may still not qualify, in the eyes of an employer.

But what's a fella gonna do, I ask yers, what then?

I decided not to strain myself by leaping at it. The job is in an isolated city of 30,000, and the person who contacted me, the company's technology manager, has the same name as someone who went to school in that town, and has been active in posting comments about religious subjects hither and thither.

I've been lucky enough to have had lots of fun experiences in life. Among them being trapped in a small town, and working at small companies owned by families who gossip about their employees over lunch, and being approached by my boss and given religious pamphlets to read. And most fun of all, not all at the same place, so it wasn't just one scary black hole in a world full of light and the smell of roses.

Still...

Then, thinking more, several other things about this company began to worry at me with little teeth. They started in 2001 with two employees and had 60 as of a year ago. Why? Why do they need so many, and how does this mesh with precision software development? Wouldn't you expect to find people throwing things around, just to get their work backlogs down? And wouldn't you expect there to be a lot of chaos?

I think you would, no?

Thinking more, a process which may or may not be good for me, but which I can't quit (though I did give up smoking many long years ago), I began wondering what made this company special.

They have a good idea. It's sort of like a social networking site to pre-qualify contractors and bring them together with customers for home improvement work, plus some glass and automotive stuff mixed in as well. Brilliant idea, in fact. Nearly recession-proof.

But they advertise dead plain and simple, just like everyone else. When you read the ideas they lay out and think back, what you imagine is just another business. You don't think fun, quirky, imaginative and welcoming workplace where you can finally fit in and make a difference.

What you think about is all those classified ads you've read over the years that all say exactly the same thing in the same way, some better than others:

CORPORATE

Research & Development

To become a recognized leader in the food industry it takes a successful pattern of constant growth with many new and innovative projects on the horizon. A true phenomenon occurs when brilliant research minds meet the challenge of a technological society. At Star-Kist, makers of 9-Lives cat food, and Jerky Treats dog snacks, we are committed to this through the caliber of our employees. If you would like the opportunity to show what you can do, we have something for you...

Successful candidate must have experience in pet foods or low-acid canned foods...

Right. You can hardly avoid stepping in it.

So back to "my" company:

We reward ambition with a pay-for-performance plan that includes a competitive compensation package, including bonuses for meeting/exceeding performance goals.

Which, as I noted in my reply, could mean that they have a really great place, or it could be all knife fights all the time, winner take all, or it could be so-so yawn time. Can't tell. Can't see anything through the haze of HR bafflegab.

By this time, of course, I'd decided that I didn't want to drive 300 miles for an interview just to be told that they really wanted someone with paid experience, just as they'd said, so I had nothing to lose and was honest.

But I was trying to be helpful. Really. I pointed out some things like this, like how their words were really great but how they nevertheless sounded like just another PR machine. I've been burned before. You can tell, can't you?

More snooping around their web site paid off. They offer six days of vacation the first year, nine the second, and then it shoots up to 12 days and stays there forever. Six days a year? This is a cutting-edge company? I'd rather get more time off instead of a raise, or better yet, get time to do interesting things on the job with a flat two weeks a year. Never mind that Australians and Europeans expect a month, no questions asked.

What happens when a staffer exceeds expectations, say? What if I worked there, and invented a way to shave eight hours a week off the time for my tasks? What would they let me do with that extra day? Would they even think that way? Would they ever assume that the time was then mine?

Hard to say, but I bet not. I bet they grind. Grind through the work. Grind out profits. All of which is OK, but where is the payoff? What do you get for working besides enough pay to keep going? What do you get to feed your soul?

They don't say.

As I said clearly in my resume, I'm a generalist. I do lots of things, most of them well and a few exceedingly well, and am looking for a place where I can make a difference doing interesting things in a supportive environment. (Three things, count 'em.)

I think of Humanized, which I stumbled on at about that time. I got the idea that I would have liked to send them money just because they deserved it. It was clear that they were all so smart that they'd never even let me shine their shoes, but if somehow I ran into one of them at a party, I'd probably have a lot of fun, and learn so much that my head would hurt for weeks.

They presented themselves as a few people on a mission. It sounded as though they really cared about what they did and why they did it, and as though they had at least three or four major interests each, outside of their work. The message was clear and engaging. They were different.

They weren't recruiting, but if they had been, people from everywhere would have been climbing all over each other to get there. It's absolutely clear that they were not the same old whatever.

And that's why I'm still unemployed, or, um, er, still in the process of getting my company started.

Yes. That sounds much better.

Damn. Did I just outsmart myself again with all this thinking?

Ahem.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Recently nominated for something by someone, somewhere.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Your Training Wheels

Throw them out.

The craftsman loves the tools while the artist despises them.

Odd, innit?

Look at the idea.

Odd, innit?

Like this: The artist has a vision to animate. The craftsperson likes comfy familiarity.

The artist burns with creativity, and lives to create. The craftsperson seeks a cozy workshop.

Routine.

A place to go, to hang out.

That's enough. For some.

But not for artists. Not for grownups. Not for leaders.

It is easy to carry training wheels into adulthood. But awkward once there. Limiting.

They help at first.

They get you going.

But you have to leave them behind, or you can only keep circling the same block.

In the world of business it's doing what others are doing. Being trendy.

Being contemporary. In the groove.

Worrying what others think.

Fitting in.

Looking impressive.

Bluffing.

Like it was a few years back: dot com.

The burn rate, the office furniture, the sleek desks, the fancy chairs, the company cars, the shiny buildings.

Which resulted in you-know-what.

Copying, a great way to start.

Get a feel for it all. Do what others have done. Slot in. Learn.

But you can't stay there.

Or you never grow up.

Richard Feynman, after selection to the National Academy of Sciences, resigned. Because. Members were more interested in status than science.

Fluff over fundamentals.

In the end you need to produce.

The more talented someone is, the more they burn to do.

The more strongly they want. To be alive, to make something live.

The less they mess around.

No frills. No props. No pretension. No cover. No distraction.

Sit down. Think. Decide. Do. See how it feels.

Repeat until done.

Maybe, just then, you realize you've created what no one else ever has.

Life without a net.

Running without crutches.

Driving past the training wheel stage.

Do it.

A thought from 2011.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Hoping that some day I'll manage to live up to this level.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Exploration Phase

Lost in the jungles of possibility.

I used to keep seeing a blog about fashion. Women's. Somehow.

It kept showing up. And. Now and then I took a look. Not obsessively, but...

Because.

a) It was written by a lovely woman.

b) Sometimes the titles tickled me fancy.

c) The woman who wrote it (lovely) had her husband photograph her in her constantly changing outfits (nice). You know — nice.

d) The woman was lovely.

So, cool. Cool for me, in a pleasant way. Not the point though.

Here I start sounding cranky. Then she had to show off a new apartment.

Struck me, it did, this thing — Her drawers.

No — the other ones. So neat. So tidy. So perfect.

Bathroom arrangements. Toothpaste, bits of necessity in ranked orderly array.

She knew what she wanted, what she needed, and she made it so.

Her design was set.

She had her template.

She knew what worked.

She had a franchise for living.

She was so tidy and clean and organized that my teeth ached. Or something. Something ached. Maybe it was the teeth. There was an aching going on.

Her life, its organization, her pride in it, like a parking lot at the end of a road. The product. The result. The manifestation. The culmination. The good idea fully fulfilled. A patented pattern. Fruition.

Good ideas, where do they start though? How?

Not printed 30 by 40 on glossy paper in six colors, handed out on street corners. Not to start.

Not laid out grid by grid with millimeter precision. Not to start.

Tidiness preserves. Tidiness tidies, suppresses. Tidiness is good, once you have a thing, to keep that thing squeaky and bright clean, in order, perfectly, forever. But you don't invent tidily.

Inventiveness needs mess. For inspiration. At least some. Some mess.

With some mess (not too much) and some disorder (a reasonable amount) you get hope of inspiration.

You never know. That's the thing.

You never know. Where or when or how or from what direction.

Creative destruction and creative anarchy are siblings. Don't be a slob, but cultivate fermentation. The right kind of mess can be in your head, and sit there comfortably, invisibly, a nest of ideas genially partying in the back room and tickling you every now and again.

Get to know the process first, see what comes of it, and judge later. You judge later.

Up front, float when you have a problem or an assignment, for a while. Float for a while. Wander. In case of inspiration, take notes then.

Be friendly, and welcoming to strangers, especially if they're emerging from your head. The right people, at the right time, too, in the right place, are good to have. The right teammates.

Explore. Explore it all. While maintaining a subcritical mass. For a bit. While you wait for the thousand flowers to bloom.

That is: First, make mistakes. Leave room for them. Kill time by making lists.

Mix them up. Randomize. See what you get. Or not. See it all.

Anyway, welcome the unexpected on its terms. Be stupid and open-minded, as the best are, innocently. The best creators.

There be fun things, new things, creative things yonder. Yonder — some far yonders but some near yonders too.

When you come to something, face-to-face-wise, and it takes your breath away, and you're not sure exactly what is happening, and when you recover, but not really — then. Then.

Then you have something. You have something when you look at it and get dizzy all over and over again.

After that you can get organized.

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Feeling smart today. About time for another faceplant then, I guess.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Who, Me?

There seems to be a lack of individual responsibility around these days. Maybe that's just me. Maybe it's always been this way. Probably. Some things I don't notice so good.

I've always been surprised by how lazy and opportunistic people are. Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not as bright as I've thought, or maybe I just haven't caught on yet to the true meaning of life. Something like that. I guess that I haven't caught on to massive sloth and grabbing what's easy.

I noticed during job interviews, or even worse, while on the job, that I scared people when I told them I stood 100% behind my work. Don't know why. That seems like a good characteristic to me, but it's never flown. People get spooked. Someone once asked me if I carry a gun.

Maybe a lot of them are scared to see someone care. Most of my working life has been in state government, where, if you swing through the trees, you see a lot of sleepy apes. The entire point of a bureaucrat's life is not to do anything. If you do anything you can be blamed, but you can never be blamed for not doing any one thing. Everyone in that kind of environment understands the idea of making decisions judiciously, without question: i.e., doing nothing.

That's why it can take a year to get a stapler unless you steal one from a desk that's just been vacated.

That world works that way because there is never a positive incentive. There is no profit sharing. No bonuses. You don't get big stock options if you bet your job and a lot of company resources on a bold gamble. There is none of that, only the opposite.

Negative incentives.

What is, is. The status quo is the highest good. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." "We've never done it that way." So, try something, muck up, and the only option is punishment. ("We warned you.") Do well and you mess up the status quo. The only option for that is also punishment. Keeping up appearances is the highest good, and it's not good to make the others look bad in comparison to yourself. ("You aren't being fair to everyone else.")

I've worked with people who were demoted and moved across town into jobs they knew nothing about only because they happened to work for someone else who lost a turf war. I've seen a talented and experienced programmer given a desk and chair and nothing else, expected to sit there until he gave up and quit, only because he once spoke the truth. I know someone who, as a project manager whose project failed, was promoted fol following the rules. Right into the ground.

No change, no gain. No gain, no pain. A small promotion is about the best you can get, and failure restores quiet, enduring balance to a bureaucrat's life. A few dollars more a month from a promotion seems like a positive incentive but it's really more of a threat. You have to work harder to keep up appearances, so maybe it's not a good thing to get. And you still have to show up every day for decades until they finally have to turn you loose. No matter who you are, how good you are, if you play in this system you weather down to the same level as everyone else. You want only to get through today, and live long enough to retire. Nothing more. Trying to actually do something only causes confusion and pain.

I was a member of two different Meetup groups based around web technology. This was years ago, but both failed. At the second one, there were 71 members and only nine or 10 ever showed up at meetings. The two organizers did the presentations and the rest sat there. People kept joining. And not showing up.

So easy. So clean.

I sort of know a web developer who lost his job when the big bust came a few years back, in the times following year 2000, after the world didn't end but other things had to, so... His name was Henry Shires. In 1999 he hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, using a shelter that he designed and made himself. He did it because he wanted to. He didn't sit around waiting for someone to ask, or to give orders. He needed to do the hike for personal reasons, so he went and did it. To help him do it, he designed a shelter that was sort of like a tent and sort of like just a tarp.

Later he got into web development. I don't know much about this part of his story, but having talked to him a time or two I heard that he lost his job. It was bad all over then. Happened to lots.

Sometime later, after he'd posted his original tarptent plans, then updated them with a new model or two (all free information for the taking), I found that he was in business. Making and selling tarptents.

Now he's one of the big names in the ultralight cottage industry class. Sounds like damning with faint praise but it's really praising with no damns at all. This is tough work, in a small, low-margin, highly-competitive market, and now he has a worldwide clientele and a reputation to go with it.

This is what personal responsibility is about.

First Henry had a dream, to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. And then he went and did it.

Then he had a job, and then he didn't.

Then he created a business and made it work.

This is real web development. Henry Shires had a stake in it. He had something to gain. Web development is no longer just something for his resume. It is a vehicle for his business. He had a reason to work with that, which was to develop his business, because he liked hiking and liked tarptents. So he took on the responsibility of it all. It gave him a payback. Not like what you get when you decide to become a member of an anonymous "Show up or not. Meh." group.

Not a big story at all, but nice. A nice story. Not like clicking a link on a web page and joining a group and never showing up. First Henry showed up at life and then the world joined him, with money in their hands.

Now if only I could be so smart.

Refs:
Tarptent.com
The original Tarptent

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? I've never done it that way, I swear!

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Good, Goodest, Or Goodenough?

Bruce Mau's "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" lists 43 items.

Number two is "Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

In other words, if I may paraphrase, excellence is not guaranteed by consensus. Results are not even guaranteed by consensus. Working toward consensus may lead only to deadlock.

Take a post by primo web designer Douglas Bowman. In "Goodbye, Google", part one, he tells of his resignation, and of some reasons why. "Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

Sounds like a good reason to leave, even for Twitter, which is where he went.

Some things cannot be decided by committee no matter how much time is put in.

In my own life I've seen a clear example of this.

First I lived in a state capital, where I was closely involved with a bicycling club. At that time my life was mainly bicycling. Day, night, weekends, and holidays. I lived for three years without a car.

When something needed doing, the club talked about it and then appointed a committee to study it.

I moved to another city, one not associated with government. I drifted into the bike club there to have some human contact, and although I was not a member, and not involved in running the organization as I had been in the first city, I noticed a difference.

It was obvious.

In this second place, when the bicycle club had an issue to confront, they'd discuss it for a few minutes, and then someone would say "I'll handle it." And it was done, and it was good. And it was settled.

True. This is different from creating a design for something, but the idea transfers.

Bruce Mau Design uses the power and promise of design to create an ethical sustainable future for our studio, our employees, our clients, our community and the world in which we live; for us, it is not about the world of design, but the design of the world.

It's like speech. Free speech. Which everyone is for until it is exercised.

Free speech is what no one wants to hear, but must hear. If you aren't offended or upset or opposed to what words muss your hair and run through your ears, then you aren't in the free speech zone. Free speech is what you don't want to hear, not what you agree with.

The same goes for "acceptable", "good", "excellent", and "Oh my effin god!!!!".

Committees do not surprise. They stupefy.

Keep thinking this: "Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

It might even hurt, but it's worth it.

 

Refs:
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
alt Mau link
Goodbye, Google
alt Bowman link

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Not as smart as you think you are.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Personal, Personal, Personal

Communication. It's an art. It's necessary. It's easy. It's hard. It depends.

You can't escape communication, and you don't want to. You need it, I need it, every person needs it, every business needs it. It's really all we have. But it can kill you if you turn your back on it.

One thing you can do is to keep it personal. Make all conversations unique. Own them. Act as though you mean it, and do. In fact, this is what you have to do. Otherwise you lose people.

It always takes at least two to talk, and to talk you need something to say, and you need trust, and a common goal. And you need to work at it.

Bad communication is easy. Just don't try. Mumble. Treat people like you don't care, which you don't, if bad communication is your goal.

Bad communication is avoidable communication. It's avoidable contact. It's avoidance in every way possible. Don't talk, don't write, don't answer the phone. Skip eye contact. Drone. Never smile. Join the undead. Escape reality. Escape involvement. Escape context. Escape business. Be vague. Be forgettable.

Bad communication is pointless communication. It never stands its ground, or gains any. Say something today and something else tomorrow. Forget. Make random noises with your mouth, put random words into your ads, build a random web site. It doesn't matter. Whatever.

Make no sense. Equivocate. Break promises. Represent nothing. Claim you didn't mean it. Concede the high ground. Keep at it until you are all alone. That's your measure of success.

Bad communication is simple communication. It's so simple that you don't need to think about it at all, ever. It's really that simple. You never need to worry about what you say or do because it doesn't matter. You can do anything. Or do nothing. OK either way.

If you want to communicate poorly then you don't work at it. Who wants work? Not you. You want to keep it simple. As simple as possible. Simpler.

No need to make sure you're being understood. Or make sure that you have understood. Or that you're making sense. Sounds like a plan, which may be a sign of too much work. Why bother? Try less, less hard, less often. Give up.

Bad communication fits all sizes. No tailoring a message to the audience. Stock phrases work great. After all, who cares anyway? Too much like work. Didn't we already cover that work thing?

Remember that you're going for the steady state of zero communication, zero contact, zero activity, zero complexity, zero gain. So don't bother checking who you're talking to or about what. Make something up. Anything. It will do.

Then, once you've learned this easy technique, keep it handy. Pull it out for any and all occasions. Why worry about who you're talking to? They're only people, and people are people. All the same. Numbers. If they don't like you they can go somewhere else.

It's not as though you want to have a relationship with anyone. Or like, care. Any place, any time, any people — doesn't matter. Bad communication works on all of them.

On the other hand you might consider another point of view.

• That no matter what you do, you are communicating something. You can't avoid it.
• That whomever you are dealing with will remember what you said and expect you to stand by it.
• That communicating takes work, and thought, and perseverance, and integrity.
• That if you want customers, you have to treat them with respect, as unique individuals with unique problems to solve.

So then, do you expect your web site to communicate well or not?

If not, then why have a web site?

But if you have a web site, why not have a great web site?

Remember, you can throw a few dollars at a wall and get nothing more than flying shadows. A good site doesn't cost much more than a bad one, and you get a relationship at no extra cost. A solid communicating relationship with someone you can trust, who does good work, and who will help you gain and hold business rather than losing it.

Because the downside of bad communication isn't simply gaining less. It's losing what you already have.

Or was that what you wanted?

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Still trying to make sense.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

I Was Once A Drone Too

Easy target. Gummint. Drones.

I heard one night that someone I knew was going to lose his job. He worked for the state Parks and Recreation Commission. They were getting hit hard.

He seemed to be an OK person. Didn't know him well. Didn't hear this from him.

The new state budget was announced about a week before I heard that. Everyone was figuring out what to do between the beginning of May and the beginning of July, when the new budget would kick in. Apparently some places had it figured out in advance, and were only waiting to hear the official details, like the Parks people. So they kicked in right away. They had to give 90 days of notice and all.

I can't say if this guy deserved to keep his job or not, but the Parks system was obviously not high on anyone's list of essentials. Not like schools, not like highways, not like law enforcement. Just one of those things that is so important until it becomes time to save money, and then it isn't important any more.

I spent a lot of years working for state governments. Two governments, about 20 years in all. In a way it was an advantage. I didn't earn all that much but over all it was more secure than some places, and I'm frugal. And beyond that, that kind of work gives you a great perspective on large organizations.

It's easy to criticize government but it's no different from any other large company. Not that much. Aside from never ever being in danger of closing completely, there really isn't much difference.

"If you take two parts pathological aversion to risk, mix it together with one part apathy and a jigger of laziness, what you get is the government workforce culture" applies all around. *

I've seen it.

Over the years I developed a rule of thumb. Of the people you work with, one third do the work, one third do nothing, and one third actively screws things up.

The corollary is that incompetence is rewarded and competence is punished. Do good work, work hard, be dependable, and you'll be given someone else's work to do as well. Management prefers to avoid those who are completely undependable or who cannot be awakened. So they pick up the work of those people and dump it on the good ones, who feel guilty that they can't get it all done.

And then those people get angry.

And then they get bitter.

And then they leave.

Guess who gets left on the job?

I have to say that I can sum up all of my experience and all of the problems of a large organization in two words: incompetent management.

I don't know if this guy I heard about was good or bad at what he did, but it wasn't his fault. When the governor at that time came in, she was planning to improve things. It wasn't all her fault. All of them are to blame. Everyone is.

The legislature meets for a month or two, passes laws, and goes home. The governor passes instructions to the heads of the various agencies, and then goes back to glad handing and planning for the next campaign. And whatever else governors actually fill their days with. Then the heads of the various agencies turn to their lackeys and pass the instructions along, and go back to lying to each other and continuing political knife fights. And so on down the line.

The best people in the system are at the bottom. They take things seriously. They believe in what they are doing and keep things running. And they make the least money and have no power.

After a while, a year or two, or five, everyone gets to a common level. No matter who you are, what your talents are, how good you are, how much ambition you have, how much education or training, all you want to do is to live long enough to retire. You just want to get through today, and tomorrow and so on, and get that never ending going-away basket of fruit and sit down and wait to die.

This is not good.

I've looked around a few times and decided that things could be run with almost no staff, compared to what I've been in the middle of. I realized this pretty clearly when I was in an office of 50 programmers and analysts and managers and so on for only one state agency, and heard that Borland Delphi was built and maintained with fewer than 10 people. A product that worked well and was sold world-wide.

All of us state boys and girls could barely keep our bag of rats working from day to day. It took weeks to get a meeting, and then no one made decisions. We had no contact with our customers or understanding of what they did. No training, no tools, no incentive. We were all hoping to get in enough years to retire, wave goodbye with one finger, and retreat to lawn chairs where we could finish our days swearing to ourselves about our wasted lives and talents.

So the next new governor came in and had a big plan and nothing happened. It could have happened but it didn't. Then the next election came. Then the economy tanked. Then the legislature met, and cut. Then people were wondering how long they could live in their cars, and when they would have to eat their pets or sell their children.

You can bet that almost everyone in management at any level of management, would stay. Because they are always so important. They have to keep the flame and pass along the secret knowledge about how to mumble, shuffle, obfuscate, intimidate, delay, and dodge.

The watchword was always "wait". Can't do that now — wait. Not ready for that — wait. We don't have the resources — wait. Not enough staff — wait. You're thinking way ahead of everyone — wait.

In 2003 I was pushing to switch to Microsoft's .Net technology. I ran an agency's internet site. Though web stuff was new to me I had experience in other platforms, and two college degrees. I taught myself HTML, CSS, ASP. I became good. Then I sent myself to .Net training and paid for it with my own money. And they didn't care. Six years later they were still running the web site on ASP. They didn't care.

If the budget collapses they just shed a few expendables. They don't care.

Things won't get done. They don't care.

A few children die. They don't care.

They never have.

Every six months or so a child does die in state in foster care, or from an abusive parent. Big news, big time. In all the papers. On all the broadcast stations. Gigantic fuss.

Six weeks later everyone has forgotten. Management waits. Wait long enough and every problem solves itself by being forgotten.

Then another child dies. Same story. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Everyone forgets. Nothing happens. System continues on autopilot.

I worked with some intensely intelligent people. People who knew the whole social-worker system, the laws, the right, the wrong, people who knew what was good and what was bad. Too bad they didn't run the place.

I had left behind a permanent job to come aboard starting as a temp just so I could make a difference, help to develop something. I worked hard. Did things no one else could do, or was trying to do, or wanted to do. We were on a project to rebuild the whole old mainframe system as modern software.

Then after a while we saw some contractors among us. Then more. Before too long the contractors were running everything. They didn't even talk to us. I managed to leave the original project and switch to web work, and after a while longer got on at another state agency doing data warehouse work.

The original project continued, ever inflating. Two of us, with another four or five well chosen people, could have finished a bare bones but rock solid implementation in a year. But guess what... Everyone liked all those contractors buzzing around, looking important, using big words, making $200,000 a year compared to our $40,000. Obviously, since we were making less we were not as good, so more contractors appeared and pushed out all the regular staff. One of them played online poker at his desk. Others read the newspaper and killed time, all day. And so on.

About two years after I left the whole thing collapsed. Only a small glitch, about $12 to $14 million wasted, I guess. Throw it away and start over for the third time. Or was it the fourth? No one cared. Too little money to fuss over.

So then, eventually there came a downturn and people began losing their jobs. Too many people, too little money. Same old story. When times are plush, you hire. Then later you lay people off, and never worry too much about really getting anything done. There is always time and money to start over, and start over again, as often as you like.

Nobody thought ahead. No one who was important. Funny how they never do. They just wait. Whatever it is, it blows over, and then they celebrate with another coffee break and hire more staff because they're all so overworked.

Right. It's true. They get so fatigued thinking about all the things they'll have to do someday that they want to go and take naps to recover in advance. To nap, perchance to dream. To dream, perchance to see all those fresh compliant staffers whose head count alone indicates how important you are. Just wait — they'll be flowing in the doors one day, and we'll all be important again. And then, after one last coffee break we get to retire and finally switch off for good.

Government work. All work, in any organization — it's one of those problems with, by, for, and about people.

 

References:

* From "The Register" (original link) or Internet Archive

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Not any more.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Different/Difference

Make Me Different. Make A Difference.

Say you have an idea. A big idea. A really, really big idea.

Cool, so who cares?

Size does not matter, potency does.

Your idea does not matter unless it matters. That's all that matters.

It gets easier when you ignore everyone else. Things get quieter. Like in your head. And then things can happen. You got that message before. Maybe it's sunk in by now. Hope so.

When you chase around, biting at flies, if you are successful you get to eat a fly for lunch. Chasing ideas is like that too. There are lots of bad ones around and you really don't want to catch any of them.

When you have a fixed idea about ideas, you are fixed. The way your neighbor's dog is fixed. Which is fine if that is your goal, but maybe not. Usually, when you have fixed ideas you are fixated on someone else's idea that happens to be stuck in your head.

And once it is, once it is stuck in your head, that alien idea, stuck there, then you have a problem.

It's like a piece of spinach stuck in your teeth, but in a good way. A good way because it's a good idea. (You aren't dumb enough to chase a dumb idea. Duh? No.) You chase good ideas. But it puts you in a bad way too because that idea is already taken. You can only borrow it, at best. Or steal it and pretend you didn't.

But it's already used.

If you borrow an idea you can't make it your own. And a borrowed idea isn't new. Not fresh. Not so interesting. You will wow no one. Fact of nature. Game over.

You can't start the race after it's over. Doesn't work. All you get is a view of horse butts.

So you lose.

This is good.

Nothing succeeds like failure.

Failure is the world's way of freshening up. Once you know you are a failure you have nothing left to lose. You already know what does not work, so you are way ahead.

You have a freshly-fertilized garden, but freshly-failed, and no one is expecting flowers from it, so you are A-OK, ready to go, cleared for liftoff, in a position to wow.

Someone else's idea is not yours. Someone else's game is not yours. So you reset the system, and you get to start over, with rules that you yourself make up. Because you are a failure, and because you have tried to copy success, and have played by the rules, and have had that gold ring on your mind for quite a while, and lost out, you are desperate.

Or were. Once.

Recently, in fact, but that didn't work, so you give up. You gave up.

So now you just play around at something, and that is when it can happen. Not always. No guarantee, but it can.

What can happen? What it is it?

Something new. Something unique. Something yours. Something that can change the world, or at least a part of

it. Something you are in control of. Something real.

Real. Really real.

Focus on that.

Focusing on the real makes it real.

And also, that which impresses may be big, and entertaining, but not always valuable.

That which speaks in a small voice may only be a random squeak, or it may be something valuable, and true. It may be something that has come to you and you alone for love and nurturing, because you were ready for it. Something that whispers truth and can change the world.

But you have to be there, and be open, and be honest, and be willing. Copying is not allowed.

If you are true to yourself at least you are true. You can't fake true, and people notice.

People like true. They will help you to be true, and to make more true, and to spread true around, and to become true like you.

Big ideas are always true at their core, and always start small, with the true part. Small is easier. Easier to understand, to make, to spread, to sell, to share, to appreciate.

Big comes later, but true comes first.

True is unique and different and honest, and wants a good home. And is always true. It is different from everything else and so makes a difference.

It will make you different and make a difference for you.

Which is what you want in creativity.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Still wondering.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals