Everything In Between

I hate working on something without knowing why I’m working on it. I also hate working on something without actually understanding what the desired result is. That’s very, very annoying. It’s also very, very inefficient and ineffective.

These past two weeks at work were prime examples of just such an occurance. The fact that these two weeks were supposed to be the weeks that I was getting additional training just makes this fact even more frustrating. Instead of additional training, which I still feel like I desperately need to be effective at my job (because the particulars of this product are so damn, well, particular), I was tasked with a vague and unexplained assignment.

(The kicker, by the way, is that in addition to the vague assignment, I was also given the task of training a new hire. So let me get this straight. You’re going to cancel my training, and then ask me to train someone. While I apprecaite the vote of absolute confidence, that’s more than a little backwards.)

The problem with vague assignments is that they don’t give me a direction to work in. There is certainly a balance to be struck between micromanaging an employee and giving them no direction. Neither side of the scale is appropriate or helpful. It’s interesting to me, however, because never before in my life have I experienced the “no direction” side of things so often. This assigment takes the cake, even in this job.

I understand now what it means when employers and managers say that they want someone who can “work independently.” What they mean is “we just want to give you some vague idea about what we’re looking for, because honestly we have no idea what it needs to look like and only sort of know what it needs to do, and you should fill in all the details yourself. Oh, and you’d better get it right.” (How the hell should I know what right is if you don’t even know, and I’m doin this for you?) Naturally, this makes a lot of sense and sounds perfect (especially to managers). After all, why shouldn’t employees do this?

Well of course they should. The problem isn’t in the paradigm, it’s in the execution. This paradigm assumes that the employee already knows what the desired result is and how to accomplish it. If this were the case, then the request wouldn’t have seemed vague to begin with. It’s the fact that I don’t know enough about the situation (see infuriating lack of context), the product (see infuriating lack of training), and the requirements (see infuriating lack of clear communication) that make it vague.

Thanks to so many reasons such as the Peter Principle and the nature of managerial work to forego employee’s interests in favor of shareholder’s interests, companies consistently sabotage their own best efforts to be successful. While I am sure that the size of a company is one contributing factor to this sabotage, I think that it misses the point. More to the point is the fact that managers are to blame.

A company that does not strive to “be large and successful” is not going anywhere. But it’s the manager’s fault that such horrendous acts of self-mutilation happen over and over again. Workers need proper training, managers need proper communication skills, and both parties need the wherewithall to understand the basics of teamwork. Frankly, these things are all sorely lacking pretty much everywhere.

Just another of the countless reasons why I know I’ll never be happy in corporate America. The more of this shit that happens, the more convinced I am that I’m here for the experience only. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right? It’s just a question of when the next better opportunity comes along. There’s no point in suffering to gain experience when experience can be gained without suffering.

Just a note before bed:

• Google search ranking for a search on my last name: 9^th
• Google search ranking for a search on my first name: 7^th
• Google search ranking for a search on my nickname: 1^st

Hmm….

In programming communities, there is often a religious debate: TIMTOWTDI versus TIOOWTDI. (Half of my readers just made an extremely puzzled face, but watch me ignore them.)

Well, a friend of mine just sent me all the evidence I need to showcase why the world is so screwed up. The proof is in the pudding, my friend.

For the past two days I have had the unexpected (and much appreciated, especially this week) luxury of being able to work from home. This is not exactly new for me. When I was freelancing, I routinely worked from home and typically for extremely long hours, because I could. What’s novel for me now is that I’m working for someone else, but I’m still at home. This bears some thought.

First of all, how is it that I actually can work from home? Well, networking technology, of course. It’s certainly not a surprise to anyone anymore that the business world looks nothing like what it did twenty, ten, or even five years ago. With telephony on its way to becoming free (ala Skype), video conferencing becoming increasingly prolific, and mobile PDA devices that give people access to email, instant messaging, and web access on the go, we’ve never been more connected.

As a result, there’s no reason, technically, why I can’t work from home, from the office, from a friend’s house, from a coffee shop, or from a boat in the ocean as long as my connection is fast enough. That very fact alone, decoupling the physical location of the workplace from the activity of work itself, was one of the very first motivators that pushed me into technology as a career path.

Being physically where I want to be and feel comfortable is a hugely important part of how productive I feel. The key bit in that phrase is where I want to be; just being mobile isn’t really decoupling the workplace from the work, it’s just working in more than one place. That can be fun (for those, like me, who enjoy travelling), but it’s missing the point.

In the future, as technology continually finds new and more effective and comfortable ways to keep our connections to more of our work available longer and cheaper, more people will begin to realize the benefit of working where they want to. I would even dare to optimistically suggest that this fact alone will increase everyone’s overall productivity by several orders of magnitude because giving people the choice of what environment suits their needs and mood will make people happier, and happier people do better work. This future has always been my goal, and learning about networking and remote management tools early on was a manifestation of this desire. My obsession with mastering complex VNC and SSH tunneling configurations was an early example.

So other than the fact that technology has decoupled the workplace from working (or, gives the possibility of decoupling, anyway, since most of the time I do actually have to go to some physical location in my current job), what other benefits can it bring? In a word, I say specializtion.

In a practical sense, however, what is specialization? We all know the word, and it’s clear that with advancements in technology in all industries more and more specialized sources of this, that, or the other thing have cropped up. Companies who were once manufacturing giants like BMW are now honing in on their differentiators and hammering the marketplace with what they’re best at—marketing cars (not manufacturing them), in BMW’s case. (See Wikinomics for the reference.) At the same time, other firms that are better skilled at the things others are weaker on have come to fill the void, and this is the crux of issues such as outsourcing and globalization.

This move towards honing strengths and farming out weaknesses drives specialization even further. Having each company or individual working in a more collaborative environment better enables the end result to have the best of all possible worlds while at the same time not penalizing (indeed, actually encouraging) specialists to contribute their efforts. But the question still stands: why is this a perk?

Isn’t it bad that specialization is becoming not merely a nice-to-have, but a requirement to keep yourself employed or your business in the black? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

I see this ever-increasing specialization as a positive step for the worker because it means he or she will have to spend less time dealing with uninteresting problems, whatever they are for her. In the past, an entrepeneur had to not only be skilled in his business, but also had to focus strongly on being a vigilant accountant, salesman, and strategist. These things aren’t going away, but the amount of effort and time required to do them right is going way, way down.

Specialized companies that offer extremeley targetted services like Vebio, a web site that let’s freelancers and consultants keep accurate timesheets and invoices, are filling in the gaps. With more of these services cropping up all the time, motivated business people can spend a greater chunk of their energy actually tackling the problems they want to, instead of the ones they have to.

Not only that, but the reverse is true as well. With increasing options to take advantage of specialized services and products, people who will be more versatile and able to adapt quickly and effectively to more specializations will see more work and opportunities coming their way. In effect, being a specialist at specilizing in something will increase your implied odds of success in whatever task you undertake more than ever before. The more able you are to apply specialized skills to a broad range of problems, the more valuable your skill set.

So technology is driving many great things for the every day worker. Even though these perks haven’t touched a large population of the workforce yet, I believe everyone will at least begin to feel them in a few more years. Businesses that don’t adapt will lose employees to opportunities that offer a better work-life balance. Our society will have to adjust to the idea that the 9-5 isn’t as efficient as it once was (and is still often thought to be).

Especially when more folks from my generation join the workplace (I realized recently that I was in some ways unfortunately too damn early to the party), the generation that has been socialized in cyberspace just as much as they have been in meatspace, the very structure of our hierarchical corporate foundations will shift beneath our feet. And you know what, God bless that change.

A long, long time ago, on a server far, far away, I started my very first web site. It’s since moved through various places, and it’s funny that each step in the redirect process still exists. What’s even funnier is that not only do the redirects exist, but so too do my old geeky writings.

Warning: Emotional ranting follows. Don’t want to read angsty, angry drivel? Then don’t read further. You have been warned.

Oh my god. What am I doing? This situation just keeps getting worse. I’m amazed, utterly and completely amazed at the childishness of all of this. I have no idea what I’m here for, what I’m doing, what to do. I get forwarded emails with questions to which the answers are behind a single link in the email itself. (Why are you asking questions? You obviously didn’t actually read the email.) I write up huge amounts of detailed information on the situation only to be told I sound like a technical madman guru, and to please compose a Power Point presentation instead. (Technical madman guru? I didn’t even use a single acronym in the whole document, nor did I even talk about computers. I talked solely about the ridiculous interpersonal antics of the people I’m working with. Or not working with, as the case may be, because of said stupid interpersonal antics. And Power Point? Oh, I get it, no full sentences and really big text. Yeah, that does seem to be the norm for some reason.)

No one smiles, everyone talks quietly. Walking over to each other’s cubes has been replaced by email because of the tension. (What sense does it make to send an email to each other when I can hear you breathing not ten feet from me?) I can’t believe this is what the modern workplace is like. I’m so disappointed in our society right now, so angry that people as a collective don’t see this as a major problem, an incredibly unhealthy and dirty thing.

I feel so fed up with all of it, so much like just screaming at the top of my lungs at all these zombies around me. They are so dead, so…plugged into their insignificant activities. I loathe the thought that I even look like any of these people with their bland clothes and black leather shoes, identical haircuts and PDAs and black Dell laptop bags. It feels disgusting, like heavy vomit.

I hate it. And most of all, I hate that I spent the entire day doing “work” and I didn’t learn a damn thing about anything interesting.

Update: In fairness, today was a much better day, though in large part only because I found out I’ll (probably) be scheduled for additional training in the coming weeks. It was supposed to be three additional weeks, then two, but then there’s a holiday, so it’s really one and a half weeks, but that’s better than nothing. I just hope this won’t be like the first time I went to so-called “training.” I want to actually feel like I’m learning something that’ll help me.

Second update: So it turns out training was totally canceled on me, which is not a big surprise, but I did get the opportunity (probably by being pulled off the project I was on) to work from home for a few days, which was absolutely awesome (and educational!) anyway. And today, my first day in three days back in an office, I got to meet the new “boss” guy, who seems nice but, better yet, made an impassioned 10 minute speech about the importance of team building, ongoing training, and knowledge sharing to a successful team. Maybe things’ll get better around here after all. I can hope, can’t I?