If I had a Toyota, I’d drive it to work one morning, crash it right into the front lobby of the building, get out, say good morning to everyone, and blame the whole thing on a faulty accelerator, just to break up the monotony of daily living . . .
I’m getting some coffee in the lunch room . . . no one else is present.
One of my colleagues walks in and says, “Are you talking to yourself, Paul?”
“No, actually I wasn’t saying anything.” Which I wasn’t. “Maybe you’re hearing voices,” I suggest. “And ironically, you were just insinuating that I was nuts.”
Most of us at work have offices with doors. People close the door sometimes for privacy, but mostly when they just want to work uninterrupted for a while.
So today I had a brainstorm of an idea: I could just close my door and go home!
People would marvel at my new work ethic! “He’s in there working all day and night,” they’d say. “He doesn’t even come out to use the bathroom!”
They were like spectators. You had a feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.
We had a manager’s meeting today on the subject of employee recognition. The text we were given to read in preparation for the meeting was indistinguishable from a handbook on training your new puppy:
Behavior which is reinforced is usually repeated. . . . You risk extinguishing the positive behavior by not recognizing it. . . . Provide compliments in a timely fashion, as soon as possible after the event occurs.
That seems demeaning to me and it trivializes the work. I like to be recognized as a person who does good work but I also want to be recognized as someone who cares about his work. I know better than anyone when my work is good and when it isn’t. I’m not looking for pats on the head.
I said in the meeting that I’d rather try to motivate people by giving them the opportunity to do great work, to have some choices about what that work is, and to become the person they’ve always wanted to be.
I pointed out that we’re giving up our youth, our family — everything we hold dear — to come in to work every day, and if the work isn’t worth doing well for its own sake, then it’s a pretty poor exchange.
“We come to work to make money,” Manager A said, as though explaining something very obvious.
“We should sell off our lives one day at a time to the highest bidder?” I asked. “That seems like a good idea to you?”
“Do you really believe the things that come out of your mouth?” Manager B asked.
Manager C stated that in “the real world,” 99 percent of the people he knows are working their jobs for the money and, financial considerations aside, would rather be doing something else with their lives.
The highest-paying job I ever had — before or since — I quit after eight months. I didn’t have another job to go to; I just hated going in there in the morning and I couldn’t wait to go home in the afternoon. I never got a chance to do anything I enjoyed or anything I was good at.
I’m not doing this stuff to get rich. I am a programmer.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
“What kind of work do you do?” someone asks you.
“I’m a web developer,” you reply.
“How interesting! What site do you work on?”
“It’s just a small site. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“Oh I’m on the web a lot. I may have seen it. What’s it called?”
In a barely audible voice, halfway between a mumbling cough and a coughing mumble, you say, “DogPoopBags.com.”
“Ha ha ha — for a second there I thought you said DogPoopBags.com. I . . . uh . . . oh, sorry.”
I saw a guy I used to work with on LinkedIn today . . .
The thing I remember most about him is that he believed it was bad luck to wish good fortune on someone. For example, if you said to him “Have a good day,” he believed that would in fact cause him to have a bad day.
When I worked with him, if I saw him as I was leaving the office, I’d say “Have a crummy evening.” And he’d say, “Thank you.”
I saw a guy yesterday — let’s call him Jack — that I used to work with 20 years ago on my first programming job.
My most vivid memory of him is the day he offered to sock another programmer — let’s call him Sid — “right in your f^$&ing face, Sid” because Jack was unhappy with the quality of Sid’s work.
You rarely see that kind of passion and zest in the workplace anymore . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
A co-worker walks into the break room just as I clumsily drop something on the floor. That’s embarrassing.
“Next time, try to walk in right when I do something good,” I say. “Okay,” she says.
Jerry Weinberg has been for almost 50 years the leader in considering software engineering not just as a technical practice but as a human activity. I’ve read seven of his books and with the exception of people I’ve actually worked with, I’ve learned more about IT from Jerry than from any other person.
He’s recently been diagnosed with what doctors say is a fatal illness. He has a CaringBridge site where he can read messages.
When the guy comes by my office with my pay envelope, I raise my hand and say, “No thanks. The work is its own reward.”
“You’ve said that before,” he says.
“Doesn’t it get funnier every time I say it?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
I got this email at work today:
Due to an erroneous payroll submission by ADP (our payroll service,) a duplicate deposit of your paycheck was entered today for those who have direct deposit. Expect these funds to be retracted tonight by ADP.
Well the joke’s on them because I already spent it haha . . .
It occurred to him that what had seemed perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.
“But if that is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it — what then?”
Here’s a simple presentation tip that would help a lot of people: Get to the fucking point.
At a meeting this morning, the company sick time policy was explained to 100 people over the course of 30 minutes time via two PowerPoint presentations by two different people.
I’ll summarize it here:
If you’re well enough to work, you should come to work. If not, stay home. BUT — if you stay home too much, it may negatively affect your annual performance review.
That’s the policy. Let’s open it up for questions.
Don’t take 15 minutes to say something you can say in 15 seconds. Don’t feel like you have to include a historical introduction to the topic, charts, graphs, trends, industry comparisons.
Other people are not in love with the sound of your voice the way you are . . .
Here’s another colleague in the break room, wiping something off the front of her shirt . . .
“I spilled coffee down my shirt,” she explains.
I ask: “How does that compare with just drinking it, as far as a pick-me-up is concerned?”
