Accidentally in Code

Tag: work

  • Working for The Man

    Dreaming about work / Soñando con el trabajo
    Credit: flickr / Claudio.Ar (not too much online)

    I keep reading people who’ve quit their job in order to make a living as a blogger. There’s all this stuff about minimalist life, and freedom from routine.

    Is routine so bad? Is stuff so bad? I like to live in different places, but I like to live there. And I like having stuff. If you own less than 100 items, what about skis?

    I have no desire to start my own business.

    I’m starting to think that’s weird.

    The blogosphere is great, but lately it seems like there’s a consensus that working for a company is bad. Perhaps it’s just a change from grad school, but working for the right company is awesome. There’s access to resources and expertise that I wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s diversity of opinion that’s really helpful. There’s constraints that require creativity to work around – yesterday that led me to more deeply consider my solution.

    I’m excited to go into work today. Not about the 25 minute drive, so much, although that’s good time to reflect. But to arrive, and work on my Most Important Task – collaborating to try and create something awesome.

  • Student Workaholism

    The infinite corridor, from the main entrance
    Credit: flickr / Ed Yourdon

    It’s been bothering me a little lately that some people have been describing me as a workaholic, I think that university effectively rewards workaholism and in the real world it’s easier to avoid. Here are a list of reasons I’ve come up with (feel free to suggest more!):

    • No distinction between work place and home place, since home is where you work some, if not all, of the time.
    • Ditto work time, even people on flexi-time often have set hours in the middle of the day where they’re expected to be working. This is not the case for students.
    • The demarcation between your job and extra curricular activities is fuzzy when you’re a student – i.e. volunteering is in a sense part of your studies, as is the part-time job you do to fund them.
    • Students are rewarded for perfectionism.
    • Studying is infinite – as you will never know everything.
    • Students talk a lot about how much work they’re doing, mostly they’re not doing that much (takes a while to figure this out though) which can skew an individual’s perception of how much they should be doing.
    • The organization of the semester, with little work at the beginning and lots at the end, is inefficient.
    • Feedback is typically limited to letter grades, which do not provide a full picture of work and achievement.
    • Students are sometimes encouraged to manage their time badly through pointless assignments and irrelevant reading.
    • Most time management advice for students seems to consist of “don’t procrastinate”.
    • Businesses have incentives to provide tools to increase efficiency, university’s don’t have incentives, and rarely seem to educate students on tools that will help them work more effectively (for a list of tools I think are useful, see this post).

  • Working With People Who Suck

    This post has been formulating in my head for a while now, as I thought how much I loved 7 Habits and The 4-Hour Work Week (Amazon) and all the other great stuff I’m reading. However there’s one question they don’t seem to answer – what if you have to work with someone who sucks?

    I mean, the boss who makes a mistake, causes you more work, but never apologizes, or the one that makes you take the fall for his mistake? The one that calls you incessantly, at all hours and at the weekend until your partner begs you to quit? The person who screws up every small task, from booking a car or buying stationary, to transporting something from A to B? The guy who doesn’t run his code before committing it, and doesn’t know what a test case is? The coworker who’s been there 10 years but can’t write an SQL statement? The person who makes their ignorance your problem? The guy you’re continually covering for because his drinking is out of hand?

    (Yes these are all situations that either I, or people I know have been in.)

    Tribes is the first book to give me that answer. Here it is: make change happen.

    And then I thought, what if it’s just a job, not a career?

    So? Make change anyway.

    I’ve been struggling a bit with the organization of WISE lately – I don’t feel like some people are committed and I’ve ended up micromanaging and I don’t want to! I think this book has given me the answer though – I need to have more faith in what I’m doing and in myself, and lead.