Dyepot, Teapot

I’ve been neglecting my blog so much that even my mom noticed. Oops. I’m too busy again. Some neat things are coming out of that: a new group for local women who write code (or want to learn), much craftiness, talking with various people about contract projects, getting Yog’s Notebook in front of a wider audience (we were at the Portland Zine Symposium this past weekend). And so on. If you were expecting to hear from me and didn’t, this might be a good time to send a reminder.

Anne Zelenka has been writing some really interesting things about the nature of work lately, as an extension of her work at Web Worker Daily. She proposes that there are two models for knowledge workers, one older and one emerging now.

Busy: Show your face during all standard working hours.
Burst: If you produce what you need to, we don’t care when you do it or how long it takes.

Busy: Manage the hierarchy inside your company.
Burst: Connect laterally outside your department and company.

Busy: Always available during working hours.
Burst: Declarative availability.

Seeing the response to this has been very interesting. The replies on WWD seemed mostly positive. Several people said, “This is how I want to work, but it goes against how our work environment is set up.” Elsewhere, including her own blog, followers of Peter Drucker’s management philosophies are complaining. “You misunderstand. What you’re talking about isn’t meaningful. That’s just frosting on the ideas we’re promoting.”

I disagree. When Matthew Hodgson says the Drucker credo is, “Worker, manage thyself. Organisation, get out of the way”, I know he’s not getting the burst work concept. Because what I hear from Anne is “Workers, organize yourselves.”

For those of us that glommed onto the burst concept automatically, I think the issue is this. We procrastinate. We work hard, and then we take breaks. Our day looks like a mishmash, but we’re productive. And traditional management and organization structures, even in ‘knowledge work’, are not very accommodating of these patterns. When I’ve done project management, I actually prefer situations where people aren’t all in the same office (and especially the same room) together, because it helps me remember that I don’t need to care what people are doing at any given moment as long as the work is getting done. The very nature of being able to see everyone in person all day is that it’s really hard to support anything but a ‘busy’ work pattern.

I’m in kind of an odd situation right now, employment-wise. I’m not working full-time for anyone, but I’m running a (very small) business, doing contract work, and generally enjoying the chance to write and network and claim my own time. At the moment, that just barely pays the bills. I’d like to be earning more, but it’s really hard to trade away this kind of freedom. I get work done. On time, and to spec. What else matters?

I keep thinking that I’ve already spit out everything I can think of on this topic, but a comment I saw on Tim Bray’s blog reminded me of something else. There’s a lot of focus on a particular route to working with technology, running from early childhood computer use, to high school programming classes or college CS studies, then finally getting a real world job in the field. It’s the formal path for this, right? So then when we talk about how to get minorities actively contributing in the world o’ tech, we focus on smoothing that specific route. But in reality, a lot of us actually studied or worked in other fields at some point, and came to technology from elsewhere. In my case, I learned BASIC in grade school, played with computers tons all the way up, but didn’t take a single computer class in high school, and in college I majored in geography instead. The particular kind of technology work I do now mostly involves things I didn’t pursue until I was away from formal education systems.

I’ve heard similar stories from a lot of other people, too. Many real live computer programmers have a background in something other than CS. And that’s wonderful. I think it’s much easier to learn computer skills on the side than to get an in-depth look at many other fields that way, and a background in something else can give you so much material for what questions technology is needed to solve. So when we’re thinking about how to increase the diversity of who works in technology fields, it’s really important not to neglect the indirect routes. Many modern jobs involve computers in some way. We need to think about how to help people become not just passive consumers of technology, but active contributors. Even if all they do is write their own web page or a small script. Even customization of existing tools or just a good understanding of how they work is part of this.

Not everyone will want to get into the nitty gritty details with tech, and that’s okay too. I wrote a post after Recent Changes Camp about how organizations can recognize and support involvement at many different levels. But while there are many great reasons to reach out to as diverse a pool of kids and students as possible, to facilitate their future involvement, I don’t want to forget the adults who are already out there using these technologies on a daily basis, who may just need a nudge in the right direction to take a more active role.

And maybe we should also be talking about expanding our definition of who counts as a technology worker in the first place. Shouldn’t this include anyone who creates or modifies tech for their own needs, whether or not they’re working under the umbrella of IT or programming at the time? Not to make the numbers and diversity ratios look better, but to reach out to people who may not realize there’s any kind of community or resources connected to those activities.

More to think about.

I’ve been meaning to write about the commoditization of labor for a while, but the direct impetus for this post is Tara Hunt’s discussion of Riya’s decision to close their India office, and in general how outsourcing affects the economic landscape for programmers there.

One of the things that tends to happen when those of us from the developed (first, northern, etc.) world spend some time talking with people and communities in developing (third world, southern, etc.) countries is that certain (even well-intentioned) stereotypes are challenged. Ideas like “everyone is equally poor over there” but also “R&D really only happens in the developed countries”, and “people in these places don’t know how to create things they can use themselves” which is directly tied to “those poor people don’t know what they need”. It’s very easy to start making people into single-use widgets when it comes to their role in the global economy: young men from India are the Java programmers stealing your jobs, the educated classes of China will sweep our engineering capacity, women in Mexico and the Philippines can assemble clothing quickly and deftly, etc. Some of these things may be true some of the time, but if we understand that the reality is more complicated at home (among the people we know), why do we try to impose this on people everywhere else?

That might be a trick question. Labor markets in the US definitely take a two-dimensional view of their workers. If you’ve ever been through the job application process at a large company, you’ve probably experienced the checklist of detailed requirements that are supposed to represent the ideal worker for the job. You also probably know that it’s possible to hire someone who meets those exact requirements, and yet can’t do the work adequately.

I have a particular stake in this argument as well. If companies see me as “intermediate-level Ruby programmer with business writing skills” or somesuch, they’re missing out on huge chunks of what I know and can do, and I’m missing out on potentially interesting opportunities. I think for any kind of work that requires skill or training (and large amounts of work are this way now, thanks to various kinds of automation), determining who is qualified, let alone a good match, can be fairly complex. I’m not suggesting we make hiring any more of a PITA than it already is, just this: keep in mind that “labor” is made up of individual people, not widgets with various certifications.

Going for the cheapest labor without other considerations disrupts business every time the market conditions change, as well. It’s heartbreaking to watch interviews with textile workers (already in a precarious economic position) who’ve lost their jobs because their employer found cheaper workers elsewhere, but what about the impact to knowledge industries when they do this? Losing an entire team of programmers at once is certain to require adjustments for everyone else, and may mean losing specialized knowledge that’s difficult to recreate.

So here’s the point I’m trying to argue: it’s better for business to not over-commoditize labor. People are complex, multi-dimensional creatures, and the best choice in a given situation depends on more than monetary price. In addition, the cost (internal and external) of switching groups of workers is much greater than switching supplies of actual commodities like lumber or canola oil, and these costs should absolutely should be taken into account.

I caught something on the radio yesterday that seems tied to this. On Morning Edition’s business report, they had an interview with someone who had just completed a survey on outsourcing in engineering. The general conclusion was that the availability of qualified engineering graduates in the US was sufficient for our business needs, and that significant parts of the potential pool of engineers in China or India were not qualified to our standards, so while companies are saying “we can’t find the qualified workers we need” what they really meant, if you dug in, was that they didn’t want to pay for homegrown workers. I think this does everyone a disservice.

Morning Edition had an interesting segment in their business news this morning: a woman wrote in to say that she felt her boss was too interested in her personal life, and wanted advice on how to respond. The part that caught my attention is barely summarized in the story’s page on the NPR website, though. At the end of the conversation with Kathy (the employee) and Ben Dattner (a workplace consultant and psychologist), Ben asks, “Have you thought about why her interest in what you do outside of work feels like prying?” And they talk for a minute about how our past experiences, and family experiences in particular, affect how we interpret people’s actions when we interact with them at work.

It’s a short piece, and you can hear the whole thing on the website (linked above), so I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in this topic to go listen.

I’ve decided to resign from my job at Planet Argon, after much consideration. At least in the short term, I’m planning to use this as an opportunity to focus on a few projects of my own, particularly Yog’s Notebook, but also some programming and writing and art things and so on.

However, since the contents of my bank account are finite, I need to line up some kind of paid employment. In particular, I’m looking for freelance and contract work. Here are things I know how to do:

Programming. Ruby. Rails. Perl (if I spend a day or two getting used to the syntax again). I’d also like to dabble in a little desktop application development on the Mac.

Project management. I am very good at breaking big things into bite size pieces and figuring out how to get it done.

Design. I can do HTML and CSS (standards compliant, yes). I’ve been learning to use InDesign for page layout, and response to my work there has been good. I’m interested in learning more about user interaction design principles.

Photography. See my Flickr account for examples.

Writing. The obvious example is this blog, but I also have a lot of experience with writing in a business context.

I’ll be at PA through the 21st, then take the rest of the week as a little mini-vacation to read and play video games and generally slack off. We hope to have the zine printed by around then, too, so there may be some kind of release party that weekend. After that, back to work.

The zine. It’s coming together nicely. We have stories to print. No one has run screaming at the sight of our publishing contract (yet). Two people have even thanked us for prompt and polite rejections. Buying InDesign was bad for my credit card, but it’s a dream to work with. Still need to figure out where we’re going to print it, and find out if I can get it into any local stores.

Publishing. It’s a weird business. I was thrilled to rediscover that the front of the Chicago Manual of Style is a guide to bookmaking, which has enough crossover for serial publications to be useful and interesting. I really wish someone had a similar kind of guide to serials, though. I’m discovering that print on demand is a hot topic right now, even though it’s immensely impractical for most kinds of publishing. I’m discovering that most people still don’t want to talk about business mechanics and economics. I don’t get this, because looking at the mechanics of things makes me feel like I have more control. Don’t other people want to know where to apply the lever?

Work. There isn’t much I can say in public. I’m feeling frustrated and burned out. We’re so close to finishing the project, and yet… not.

Planning. This is another area where it’s all about mechanics. You have resources, you have time, you have goals. Getting all of those to work together is mostly an issue of breaking it up into pieces and knowing where you can compromise. One of my coworkers likes to talk about goals as a kind of boundary. You use them to determine whether a given activity is inside or outside. So if the goal is to fix the car’s engine, you don’t waste time cleaning the windows. It doesn’t feel hard to me, but it must be more difficult than I think because a lot of people are really bad at this. They don’t pay enough attention to the details.

I’ll stop there, because I have a long list of bugs to fix. If anyone feels like commenting, tell me: what have you been wanting to talk about?

Addendum on planning: I’m really tired of people acting like I’m an asshole when I say, “Given our resources, the only way we can finish by Tuesday is by cutting a deliverable.” or anything similar. I’m not doing it to yank anyone around. It’s just my honest assessment of the situation. If you don’t like it, change the timeline or add more resources (though there’s a limit to what you can do with that second one–see Mythical Man Month).

I haven’t spent any time on my photos since I last posted. Instead, I’ve been burying myself in several books: Idlewild, The Android’s Dream, Ender’s Game (I never got around to reading it before now), The Cassini Division, and the first 50 pages of Herzog, which is the book club assignment this month, but I’m getting the impression that it’s more style than plot, so I don’t know if I’ll try to finish it.

Work is hectic. My job has changed a fair bit from what I expected when I started, and while I enjoy project management, sometimes it makes it hard to focus on just programming. But slowly I am getting the hang of test-driven development, and the project hasn’t exploded yet.

The lack of sunlight in our office is really getting to me, too. Only one side of the suite has windows, and almost nothing filters over to the developer area even on sunny winter days like today.

I’ll try to post something more interesting soon. I had an idea the other day to talk about how my knitting process is a lot like the way I program. “Do the simplest thing that could work.”

It’s a little calmer today. I’m glad. I have the proposal for the next iteration mostly finished, the styling for the current round looks decent (there are a couple of bugs, but nothing that makes the pages unreadable), and I found a little extra time to read blog posts (though I’m not even nearly caught up).

The guy peeing on the outside of our building when I went to go grab lunch was kind of gross, though.

Work is exhausting. In addition to Rails programming, I took on some of the page layout work, and the project management tasks for the site I’m working on, because essentially we’re understaffed. I really enjoy all of these kinds of work, but because I like what I’m doing, it’s easy to spend so much time on it that I feel worn out. I am trying very hard to keep work from creeping into my weekend and evening down time.

Lucas and I are taking a long Thanksgiving holiday in Arizona and Las Vegas starting on Saturday, and the timing could not be better.

It’s already over a week past the other fall holiday, but here’s what we went as for Halloween:

Lucas is Wayne Rooney. I’m Rincewind the wizzard (but not one person asked why it said that on my hat).

It’s been a good (but too short) weekend. I got two pairs of Doc Martens super cheap at a warehouse sale. I’m listening to a recently purchased copy of Bowie’s “Heroes” album. Sputnik is napping. The whole apartment smells like gouda because I just made a batch of cheese biscuits. In a week I’ll be in Vegas (or at least Laughlin, having flown into the Vegas airport, after which we’ll hang out in Arizona for most of the week, see the Grand Canyon, and come back to Sin City for two nights of cheap drinks, roulette, and taking pictures of drunk tourists and neon signs). And I’m going to a Blazers game tonight.