Work & Labor

  • Begin with your work

    A Quote by Edward Tufte

    In doing creative work, do not start your day with addictive time-vampires such as The New York Times, email, and Twitter. All scatter the eye, and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short-term memory. Instead, begin with your work. Many creative workers have independently discovered this principle.

  • Your life adds up

    Weber's German word for a vocation, Beruf, contains two resonances: the gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills and the ever-stronger conviction that one was meant to do this one particular thing in one's life.

    An English locution roughly conveys what he meant: your life 'adds up'.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​All in & with the flow​​
    2. ​​The saddest designer​​
    3. ​​I've designed it that way​​
    4. ​​For something believed in​​

  • So much knowledge not being applied

    Most organisations have a lot of documents and data floating around that hardly ever gets revisited or used. They all have research, reading, and relevant information collecting dust.

    Stuff that should be informing the decisions and strategies of the company. Some of it sits unread in a knowledge base or a wiki. Some of it lies in the drives of individual employees who don’t have a way to share it productively.

    So much knowledge not being applied!

    Except that’s not how we work as human beings. If you haven’t read it, experienced it, and contextualised it, then it isn’t knowledge to you. Knowledge is a quality that people possess, not documents, and the only way to transfer it from one place to another is for people at both ends to apply themselves and make it their own.

    Baldur Bjarnason, On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software

  • To form an integrated human milieu

    EVEN IF, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom and leisure — the essence of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this is possible, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city.

    Guy Debord, Situationist Theses on Traffic

  • Baumol’s cost disease

    Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth.

    The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.

    Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org

  • Intrapreneurship

    The characteristic of 3M that enabled it to attain such diversity in its product line is a policy of what has generally come to be called "intrapreneurship". The basic idea is to allow employees of large corporations to behave within the company as they would as individual entrepreneurs in the outside world.

    ...It is 3M's policy (and that of other enlightened companies) to allow its engineers to spend a certain percentage of their work time on projects of their own choosing, a practice known as "bootlegging".

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    1. ​​Cannibalize yourself​​

  • On Criticism

    People are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing I think you can do for somebody who’s really good and who’s really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn’t good enough, and to do it very clearly, and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not much room for interpretation.

    Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview

  • From the desk of: Austin Kleon

    How do you work?

    When I get home, I have two desks in my office — one’s “analog” and one’s “digital.” The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on the desk — this is how I keep myself off Twitter, etc. This is where most of my work is born. The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, my Wacom tablet, and a MIDI keyboard controller for if I want to record any music. (Like a lot of writers, I’m a wannabe musician.) This is where I edit, publish, etc.

    Austin Kleon & Kate Donnelly, From the desk of
    fromyourdesks.com
    1. ​​Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand​​

  • Violence to the very structure of our being

    If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.

    Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

  • The right kind of building can do great things for a culture

    "Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture," said Pixar's president Ed Catmull.

    Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you said 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."

    Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

  • Values vs. strengths

    There is sometimes a conflict between a person's values and his or her strengths. What one does well – even very well and successfully – may not fit with one's value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one's lift to (or even a substantial portion thereof).

    Values are and should be the ultimate test.

    Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself

  • The dual ladder

    The first task for growing designers, as opposed to managers, is to craft a proper career path for them, one whose compensation and sociological status reflect their true value to the creative enterprise. This is commonly called the dual ladder. It it easy to give corresponding salaries to corresponding rungs, but it requires strong proactive measures to give them equal prestige: equal offices, equal staff support, reverse-biased raises when duties change.

    Why does the dual ladder need special attention? Perhaps because managers, being human, are inherently inclined to consider their own tasks more difficult and important than design and need to deliberately assess what makes creativity and innovation happen.

    Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design
    1. ​​Senior craftsperson​​

  • Roman empire military

    Image from pketh.org on 2020-09-10 at 1.26.54 PM.png

    Rome military diagram.

    Most company structures are based on the Roman empire military. CEO Caesar says he wants something, and the lieutenant managers below him on the org chart break it down into smaller tasks for the soldiers to accomplish.

    On a development team, programmers are the soldiers of these shitty new armies. They open their Jira issues and add whatever feature it says to add, or fix what it says to fix. If I can save time by adding another dependency, or skip a meeting by implementing a mockup exactly as designed, why should I care?

    Pirijan Ketheswaran, Why Software is Slow and Shitty
    pketh.org

  • 9. Scattered Work

    Problem

    The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.

    Solution

    Use zoning laws, neighborhood planning, tax incentives, and any other means available to scatter workplaces throughout the city. Prohibit large concentrations of work without family life around them. Prohibit large concentrations of family life without workplaces around them.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    1. ​​Men are not an abstraction​​

  • Men are not an abstraction

    Placing work and commerce near residences, but buffering it off, in the tradition set by Garden City theory, is fully as matriarchal an arrangement as if the residences were miles away from work and from men. Men are not an abstraction. They are either around, in person, or they are not. Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life—men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women.

    Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
    1. ​​9. Scattered Work​​

  • 80. Self-Governing Workshops and Offices

    Problem

    No one enjoys their work if they are a cog in a machine.

    Solution

    Encourage the formation of self-governing workshops and offices of 5 to 20 workers. Make each group autonomous—with respect to organization, style, relation to other groups, hiring and firing, work schedule. Where the work is complicated and requires larger organizations, several of these work groups can federate and cooperate to produce complex artifacts and services.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language

  • Manual labor

    Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for job retraining. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers don't often see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​Making coal miners into programmers​​

  • A dry, husky business

    Despite the furor over their aggressive unmanliness, clerks, and with them the office, crept silently into the world of nineteenth-century America. Moral philosophers were mostly preoccupied with the clang of industrialization and its satanic mills, and most regarded as negligible the barely audible scratch of pens across ledgers and receipts that characterized the new world of clerical work. It was only a “dry, husky business,” as the narrator of Bartleby had it.

    Nikil Saval, Cubed
    1. ​​Dark satanic mills​​

  • Each fascinating crisis

    The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.

    Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

  • An extremely closed structure

    Nearly all housing in Japan today consists of exclusively residential units for salaried workers and their nuclear families. Such residences have, by definition, no reason to interface with their surroundings.

    Salaried workers commute to workplaces outside, and often a considerable distance from, their homes. Residences built for these workers do not contain a place of livelihood—in the broader sense, a place for exchange. This "residence-only housing" is only a place for the nuclear family to eat and sleep, with no occasions for interaction with the outside world, and no need to foster a sense of belonging to the community at large. Thus the only organizational principle is the maintenance of privacy. Both in external appearance and in lifestyle, it is an extremely closed structure.

    Toshiharu Naka, Two Cycles

  • The cubicle

    The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker.

    Nikil Saval, Cubed

  • Taylorism in software

    Interestingly, just as software people were talking about how we need to kind of follow this very Taylorist notion as the future of software development, the manufacturing world was moving away from it. The whole notion of what was going on in a lot in manufacturing places was the people doing the work need to have much more of a say in this because they actually see what's happening.

    Martin Fowler, The State of Agile Software in 2018
    martinfowler.com

  • Long-term

    "Apart from his own design work, this is the second greatest achievement of Dieter Rams: establishing a design department within a company, which succeeded for decades in preserving its own individual approach and rigorously advancing it, without really being influenced by changing market interests." — Klaus Kemp

    He is right; it was a remarkable feat. It takes a considerable degree of doggedness and conviction to follow the ungratifying and difficult path of insisting on a consistently long-term view in a corporate world that is constantly shifting and full of short-term decisions.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible

  • Shorten the wings

    The labile tastes of certain decision-makers in a company are often a great burden for designers. Too many feel themselves qualified to pass judgment. And how insensitive, how superficial these judgments often are.

    Taste, believes Rams, is something that needs to be trained, since the aesthetic decisions at this level in product design are intrinsically bound to the entire form and function of the object. It would be unimaginable, for example, that the management of an aerospace company would ask the designers of a new plane to shorten the wings because they think it would make it look prettier.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    1. ​​Classical absurdity​​

  • Selling your own ignorance

    When you sell your expertise - and what I mean by sell is to move ahead in a corporation, or sell an idea to a publisher, or sell an ability to a client - by definition, you’re selling from a limited repertoire.

    However, when you sell your ignorance to move ahead, when you sell your desire to create and explore and navigate paths to knowledge, when you sell your curiosity - you sell from a bucket with an infinitely deep bottom that represents an unlimited repertoire. And, you sell in a way that’s not intimidating, in a way that joins the explanation to the fascination that comes with understanding.

    Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding

  • Defining craftsmanship

    By craftsmanship I refer to a style of work and a way of life having the following characteristics:

    1. In craftsmanship there is no ulterior motive for work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation.
    2. In craftsmanship, plan and performance are unified, and in both, the craftsman is master of the activity and of himself in the process. The craftsman is free to begin his working according to his own plan, and during the work he is free to modify its shape and the manner of its shaping.
    3. Since he works freely, the craftsman is able to learn from his work, to develop as well as use his capacities.
    4. The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living. For him there is no split of work and play, of work and culture. His work is the mainspring of his life; he does not flee from work into a separate sphere of leisure; he brings to his non-working hours the values and qualities developed and employed in his working time.
    C. Wright Mills, Man in the Middle: The Designer

  • The star system

    The distributor is ascendant over many producers who become the rank-and-file workmen of the commercially established cultural apparatus.

    The star system of American culture – along with the commercial hacks – tend to kill off the chance of the cultural workman to be a worthy craftsman.

    C. Wright Mills, Man in the Middle: The Designer

  • Office survival

    “The caveman was undoubtedly very pleased to find a good cave but he also undoubtedly positioned himself at the entrance looking out. Protect your back but know what is going on outside is a very good rule for survival. It is also a good survival rule for life in offices.” — Robert Propst, The Office: A Facility Based on Chicago

    Nikil Saval, Cubed

  • An unfolding network of associations

    We know strategy is an unfolding network of associations:

    The evidence from the case suggests that the concept of strategy can be reappraised. From strategy as a static set of choices made at a specific point in time to strategy as an unfolding network of people, shared experiences and artifacts that is constantly being remade.

    And we know that only 30% of employees can articulate a company’s strategy.

    And I believe in the hyper-connected age we live in both of these things are becoming more true - that strategy is increasingly “in motion” and that most organizations are realizing their OODA loops are too slow for the modern world.

    This causes the articulation of strategy to stall and get left behind - how do you articulate something in motion? It’s easier to write strategy down when it doesn’t change right?

    As a result - there’s a widening gap between the perspective on strategy that the executive team has and the received ideas of the company’s direction that teams and employees have.

    Tom Critchlow, Narrative Strategy
    tomcritchlow.com

  • Strings and clots

    The walls' texture was mostly smooth, but if you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave when they're paid by the job and not the hour and thus have no motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

  • What Le Corbusier got right about office space

    An Article by Tim Harford
    timharford.com

    In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

    Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

    ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.

  • Background textures of work

    An Article by Lucy Keer
    lucykeer.com

    One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it.

    ...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun.

    What a great idea – work as material, tangible, textured.

  • I don’t believe in Zoom fatigue

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org

    It’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash.

    It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this.

    The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.

    Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:

    • In a video call
    • In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
    • In a doc together
    • On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around

    And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.

  • Say yes and never do it

    A Quote by Mel Brooks
    www.newyorker.com

    You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

    I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes
You say yes, and you never do it.

    That’s great advice for life.

    It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.

  • Thanks Doc

    An Article by Robin Rendle & Craig Mod
    www.robinrendle.com

    A couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.

    It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!

    But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and
hey
actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.

    1. ​​Good Things​​

  • Efficiency is the Enemy

    An Article
    fs.blog

    Many of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing. One way or another, something gets delayed. The increase in busyness may well be futile.

    1. ​​It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity​​

  • Spreadsheet Portfolios for UX Designers

    An Article by Erica Heinz
    ericaheinz.com
    Image from ericaheinz.com on 2020-09-22 at 11.07.08 AM.png

    The “case study?” column was the whole point of the spreadsheet — identifying which projects I still needed to write up for my portfolio — but at this point I looked at the sheet, and thought “This is honestly a better overview of the work I do than any ‘portfolio’ I’ve seen”.

    So I tweeted a screenshot, joking/trolling that it WAS my portfolio (I didn’t include any winks or notes that I was still planning a “real” portfolio), but people didn’t respond with the lulz I expected — they got the idea, or took it at face value and said they were going to do their portfolio this way too!

    1. ​​My Anti-Resumé​​

  • My Anti-ResumĂ©

    An Article by Monica Byrne
    monicacatherine.com

    A couple years ago I was having dinner with a playwright, Bekah Brunstetter, and her director David Shmidt Chapman. We talked about how rejection is just part of the landscape for all beginning artists, no matter how talented or hardworking they might be or how successful they might appear. David said he’d love to publish his “anti-rĂ©sumĂ©â€ someday—a list of all the things he didn’t get.

    1. ​​Spreadsheet Portfolios for UX Designers​​

    Emphasis added.

  • The Third Way

    An Article by Kevin Kelly
    kk.org

    But all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone. Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could “own” for a while.

    
We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers. AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it
This is the era of the third way.

  • Individuals matter

    An Article by Dan Luu
    danluu.com

    One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.

    Individuals matter.

    1. ​​On Talent​​

  • Deadlines are bullshit

    An Article
    contrariantruth.substack.com

    In software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.

    1. ​​External vs. internal deadlines​​
    2. ​​Why are internal deadlines evil?​​
    3. ​​Engineers who love their work​​
    1. ​​Hofstadter's Law​​
    2. ​​The Thing-deadline calculus​​
    3. ​​Never enough time​​
    4. ​​Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake ​​

  • Touch the keys

    An Article by Rach Smith
    rachsmith.com

    In his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.

    This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.

    Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.

    1. ​​To pick up my pen​​

  • I haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either

    An Article by Rach Smith
    rachsmith.com

    I have never felt like an “imposter”.
    I have always deserved to be here, I’ve worked hard.
    I don’t suffer from a “syndrome”.
    Identifying the gaps in my knowledge and being aware of what I don’t know is part of my vocation.

    In recent years it’s become trendy to discuss how we all apparently suffer from this imposter syndrome - an inability to internalize one's accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. I take two issues with this:

    • it minimizes the impact that this experience has on people that really do suffer from it.
    • we’re labelling what should be considered positive personality traits - humility, an acceptance that we can’t be right all the time, a desire to know more, as a “syndrome” that we need to “deal with”, “get over” or “get past”.

  • Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor

    An Essay by James Somers
    www.theatlantic.com

    Should we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft?

    Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic—for being so preventable—brand of public sin.

    Bob [the driving instructor] oozes concern; he wants to infect the state of New Jersey with good driving habits. He respects his public role, the fact that the minute he's done with these kids they head straight for their parents' car keys and out onto the roads we share. When I asked him what he likes to do outside of work, he laughed: "This is my life."

    His reward is the pleasure of depth itself.

  • If we didn’t live to work

    A Fragment by Charlie Warzel
    warzel.substack.com

    When you talk to people who reject the modern notion of a career, many of them say the same thing: They crave more balance, less precarity, and better pay. They also, crucially, want to work.

    What’s profound about the career rejectionists is that their guiding questions are simple. What if work didn’t make you feel awful? What would life be like if we didn’t live to work? What do workers and employers actually owe each other? What if we structured our work lives around a different idea of success?

    From the article, What If People Don’t Want 'A Career?

  • 136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling

    An Article by Baldur Bjarnason
    www.baldurbjarnason.com
    1. The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
    2. Have some personality.
    3. Minimalism is garbage.
    4. Metaphors are fantastic.
    5. Naming things is fantastic.
    6. Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
    7. The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
    8. Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
    9. A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
    10. The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.
    1. ​​Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know​​

  • The brag document

    An Article by Julia Evans
    jvns.ca

    It’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did.

    The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season!

  • The saddest designer

    An Essay by Chia Amisola
    chias.blog

    I am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.

    To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.

    In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.

    1. ​​To see the fulfillment of the work​​
    2. ​​Your life adds up​​

  • Contrafreeloading

    A Definition
    en.wikipedia.org

    Contrafreeloading is an observed behavior in which an organism, when offered a choice between provided food or food that requires effort to obtain, prefers the food that requires effort.

  • Two types of work

    An Article by Jorge Arango
    jarango.com

    There are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.

    Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.

    Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.

    Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.

  • At least everything was important

    A Quote by Mads Mikkelsen
    www.vulture.com

    My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

    1. ​​The most important thing you do​​

  • Apprenticeship: An Internship Replacement

    An Essay by Ivana McConnell
    louderthanten.com

    Universities are often too large, dulling the student-educator relationship. Internships are often transitory and involve large volumes of work without context or learning: building web pages or presentations from pre-built components to meet a deadline, for example. It’s work that people need to do, but it doesn’t require learning or understanding the client or the project. Thankfully, there is a middle ground that we seem to have forgotten about in tech: the apprenticeship.

  • Senior craftsperson

    A Fragment by Wilson Miner
    staff.design

    The thing that you’re talking about though, which I’ve never seen a mature company really have a sustainable space for, is the “senior craftsperson.” They’re not pivoting at some point in their career to saying “I’m going to take what I know and leverage it through other people.” They’re saying “I want to get better infinitely at the thing that I do.” I believe that that’s possible.

    You see it more in pure-art kind of careers. Like “I’m an illustrator” or “I’m a concept artist” or something, and there’s a need for that person being really fucking good at that one thing, and continuing to do that one thing. I think a lot of people can intuitively understand why that would be really satisfying for someone as a career path.

    1. ​​The dual ladder​​

    From an interview with Miner (a designer at Apple) on the Individual Contributor career path.

  • When we were all together in-person

    A Quote
    www.theverge.com

    “We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”

  • Building Momentum

    An Article by Dan Mall
    danmall.com

    Fight the Waterfall

    Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.

    Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often

    When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.

  • Life as Protest

    A Fragment by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com

    I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.

  • What doesn't seem like work?

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    paulgraham.com

    The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.

    So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?

  • Questions to ask on a new job search

    An Article by Sally Lait
    sallylait.com

    The role and expectations

    1. What does this job entail?
    2. What's driving the hire?
    3. What are the biggest challenges?
    4. What scope is there to do x, y, z?
    5. How/when/why would you consider hiring me to be successful?
    6. What does progression from here look like?
    7. What's the biggest mistake I could make?

    The wider business

    1. Can you tell me a bit about the company?
    2. What about the culture?
    3. How does diversity, equity, and inclusion play into this?
    4. What's the most exciting thing on the company horizon?
    5. What's been the impact of COVID-19 on company finances/strategy?
    6. What are the best and worst things about working here?

    Day to day

    1. What's the size/structure of the team I'd be around/have reporting to me?
    2. Which other people would I work most closely with?
    3. What technologies/tools would I work with?
    4. What could I do that would make your life easier?

    The practical bits

    1. What salary are you offering for this role?
    2. Additional package/benefits
    3. How do you approach distributed working, and is there scope for this?
    4. What timescales are you hoping for?
    5. Holiday
    6. Job title

    Give yourself an extra shot: Is there anything I've said today that makes you hesitate?

The small web is beautiful

An Essay by Ben Hoyt
benhoyt.com

I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it.

  1. ​​Why aim small?​​
  2. ​​Features and complexity​​
  3. ​​Solving the problem of software bloat​​
  4. ​​Raw size isn't enough​​
  1. ​​Rediscovering the Small Web​​

  1. Why aim small?

    Why aim small in this era of fast computers with plenty of RAM? A number of reasons, but the ones that are most important to me are:

    • Fewer moving parts. It’s easier to create more robust systems and to fix things when they do go wrong.
    • Small software is faster. Fewer bits to download and clog your computer’s memory.
    • Reduced power consumption. This is important on a “save the planet” scale, but also on the very local scale of increasing the battery life of your phone and laptop.
    • The light, frugal aesthetic. That’s personal, I know, but as you’ll see, I’m not alone.

  2. Features and complexity

    Niklaus Wirth of Pascal fame wrote a famous paper in 1995 called A Plea for Lean Software. His take is that “a primary cause for the complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want”, and “when a system’s power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality”.

    1. ​​A Plea for Lean Software​​
    2. ​​Speed is a feature​​
    3. ​​Requirements proliferation​​

  3. Solving the problem of software bloat

    But instead of just complaining, how do we actually solve this problem? Concretely, I think we need to start doing the following:

    • Care about size: this sounds obvious, but things only change when people think they’re important.
    • Measure: both your executable’s size, and your program’s memory usage. You may want to measure over time, and make it a blocking issue if the measurements grow more than x% in a release. Or you could hold a memory-reduction sprint every so often.
    • Language: choose a language that has a chance.
    • Remove: cut down your feature set. Aim for a small number of high-quality features. My car can’t fly or float, and that’s okay – it drives well.
    • Say no to new features: unless they really fit your philosophy, or add more than they cost over the lifetime of your project.
    • Dependencies: understand the size and complexity of each dependency you pull in. Use only built-in libraries if you can.

  4. Raw size isn't enough

    A few months ago there was a sequence of posts to Hacker News about various “clubs” you could post your small website on: the 1MB Club, 512KB Club, 250KB Club, and even the 10KB Club. I think those are a fun indicator of renewed interested in minimalism, but I will say that raw size isn’t enough – a 2KB site with no real content isn’t much good, and a page with 512KB of very slow JavaScript is worse than a snappy site with 4MB of well-chosen images.

    ...[Instead, it's about] an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers.