Work – Page 2

Cleaning The Machine

27 March, 2019

I should have cleaned my espresso machine this weekend. I normally do without fail every other weekend, but I got wrapped up in this Hackathon and failed to prioritize it. Result: my espresso this week doesn’t taste as good as usual. It’s not that big a deal, but it builds up, and as stale flavors increase in the coffee it becomes more and more noticeable — and makes me more and more annoyed with myself for not following my usual routine.

My dad used to quote famous pianist Artur Rubinstein on this — it went something like

If I miss a day of practice, I know it.
If I miss two days, the critics know it.
If I miss three days, my audience knows it
(Turns out this was probably either Franz Liszt or Anton Rubinstein, hilariously, and is nowhere attributed to Artur Rubinstein who was not related to Anton. Dad was not one to let silly facts get in the way of a good story.)

Anyway something similar applies to the coffee machine: The longer I go past the regular cleaning date, the more people can tell the coffee has nasty stale overtones.

Unsurprisingly, I am going to use this as a metaphor for life. People require regular maintenance, cleaning, and refreshing. If they don’t get it their work becomes stale and unpalatable. I’m pretty good about remembering to provide this kind of thing for the folks who work for me, but not so good about providing it for myself. Not that I don’t take plenty of vacations (I am famous for this), but between them I have a bad habit of just never stopping.

There are so many things to do, and so little time to do them in…

The Playing Field

25 March, 2019

I spent the weekend at a Hackathon. I mean fortunately I didn’t spend the entire weekend there, unlike the participants who actually in fact did spend the weekend trying to produce some decent code, taking catnaps on the floor in between work sessions. No, I am much too old to do any productive work this way, but I did spend a lot of time there talking to some very smart young people who were trying to solve interesting problems and competing to win prizes. My employer Red Hat was one of the sponsors of the event, called Tech Together, and from our standpoint it was a great success — we have signed up I believe five interns for this summer, possibly more, and we learned a lot about how to make the event more successful for us in the future.

The interesting thing about this particular Hackathon is that it was restricted to people who prefer to be referred to as “she/her.” There are lots of good reasons to have a Hackathon so devised, an important one being that young people who prefer the same pronoun I do (“he/him”) are so goddamned obnoxious and horrible in large groups. (I say “are” without speculation as to the reason why, although being a staunch relativist I think it’s mostly just the way us he/hims are socialized.) At any rate, Hackathons restricted to she/hers provide participants a way to work in groups, learn, and compete without some he/him dominating the conversation, keyboard-barging, and otherwise impeding the group dynamic. The teams involved actually do write useful code and solve interesting problems, and my guess is they become more confident in their own abilities and meet a bunch of other interesting people taking a similar path in life.

There was one aspect of Tech Together that struck me as problematic, though, and to be honest I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The point of a Hackathon, for the participants at least, is to compete to win prizes. Some of the prizes are quite substantial — Microsoft gave away like 5 X-Boxes, for example — and worth competing for. Yet I found Tech Together’s overall vibe, from the name on down, was mostly about inclusiveness and “Isn’t this great that we’re all here together you are all so amazing.” It very much did not feel like it was about “Our team is going to kick all your asses and win this thing.” I think we can take it as a given that she/hers are every bit as competitive and even cutthroat as he/hims, so why sublimate the competition part? I suppose it is a natural consequence of trying to make the event a protected space, which is absolutely a good thing… but could we have a protected space, that nonetheless still has a little ass-kicking going on inside it?

I think what I mean to say here is that finding the right approach to rectify an imbalance — like the ridculous “she/her” deficit in tech — is subtle. You have to provide a space where people can achieve, without feeling like their achievement was only made possible by having the space. To that end, I’d like to see a little more explicit acknowledgement or even encouragement of the competitive aspect of Tech Together. Let the winners come away feeling like they have triumphed; it will make the losers leave determined to return the next year and crush everything in their path.

Not Ranting

20 March, 2019

I have a few pent-up rants that I keep thinking about posting here, but every time I go to launch into them I remember that there are at least one or two people who actually read this thing. Ranting will make me feel better, but will it help them or resonate with them? Unlikely, I think.

(I will happy to rant to any of you in person about our annoying landlords or any number of other subjects any time you like, but let’s put that off for now.)

What prompted me to write about this was a meeting I was in yesterday in which a very knowledgeable person whom I respect took up most of everyone’s time with a predictable rant on an unsurprising topic. Nothing he said was wrong, or even exaggerated (much), but it did not in the end serve any purpose. So why did he do it? Frustration? Hope for a solution to magically appear? An evil desire to waste fifteen minutes of everyone’s time for no reason?

All of these are part of our motivation when ranting or snarking or being generally counterproductive, but the primary driver is always a search for connection. A sufficiently succinct and powerful description of how desperately fucked up things are, with no apparent solution, brings commiseration and hence camaraderie. Rants are not requests for solutions or advice, they are attempts to bond. Sometimes, they work; sometimes they work too well and political parties are formed out of them. What is a Trump rally, after all, if not a large-scale rant?

The problem with bonding over ranting, though, is that agreement on the problem does not constitute agreement on the solution, or maybe more importantly agreement to help work on the solution. Identifying a problem and proposing an approach to solving or at least reducing it is a Better Thing To Do, in all respects, than uncorking a full-scale diatribe. Unfortunately it’s also hard, and it immediately opens the proposer up to criticism, bike-shedding, and all sort of other evils.

I am as guilty of ranting or, perhaps worse, corrosive off-hand snark as anyone in my industry. I am however trying to be better — I’ve resolved this year to at least pause and try to think of a better approach before launching into a full-scale airing of grievances. I don’t know if this will make me any more effective — maybe people will just stop listening to me — but I’m pretty sure it will make me happier.