Loving work

Nearly a year has passed since I’ve signed my first employment contract. Compared to all those years I spent in school, it doesn’t feel like a very long time. It is enough time to think about those inevitable questions, questions repeatedly asked of me (both by others and by myself) since I’ve joined the workforce.

Q: Are you happy with your work?

A: For the most part, yes.

Q: How do you know [that you’re happy with your work]?

A: I like what I do. I look forward enough to it that I try to get to work early just so I can have my coffee before beginning, because that makes me feel better. I try to do as good as a job I can because I’d like to think I’m a good software engineer and can always be better. I take pride in my work, and if people find something wrong with it, I try to fix it; I’d be quite embarrassed to think I’m turning in mediocre work.

Not everyone is blessed with the opportunity to do what they love right out of college. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be in my circumstances either – notice that my answer contains nothing about financial compensation. I consider myself to be one lucky fellow.

We’re told that we should do what we love. This makes sense. I spend roughly nine hours a day at the office, two hours out on the road, and eight hours asleep. That leaves me with just five hours of free time, and by the time I get home, I’m too tired to do much with what’s left of the day. One thing I’ve learned quickly is that “work-life balance” is a myth. There’s no work and life to balance, only life to live, of which work is a subset of. When you spend most of your day at work, whether you’re happy or miserable there very much determines whether you’ll be happy or miserable in general.

Why doesn’t everyone do what they love then? Well, many consider their jobs, not as a calling or a passion, but as a means to an end. “This pays well so I do this”. That’s why people continue doing jobs they hate, working in miserable conditions somewhere far away from their loved ones, even when they’ve got other options and strictly don’t have to.

In her essay entitled “Why Work?” Dorothy Sayers points out that, more than profits and remuneration, carrying out work properly is a reward in itself as it allows the worker to ponder the perfection of his own work. She observes that people constantly engage in hobbies that bring them no economic benefit, and that it’s only when work is done in order to gain something does it become a miserable thing to do. Sayers also points out that the satisfaction comes “in the godlike manner, from looking upon what he has made and finding it good.”

Come to think of it, God got jack squat for creating the universe, and he was pretty pleased. Turns out man’s like that too. It must be that getting created in His image sort of thing.

Paul Graham notes that great hackers are only willing to work in interesting projects and refuse to use bad tools. Also you can never pay hackers fairly in the economic sense because they’d be happy to take three times as much but are actually ten times as good as everybody else.

People are meant, are called to be good engineers, doctors, managers, lawyers, and so on, and it just happens that they get paid well because of their good work. Instead, people want to get paid well and then try to become something in order to achieve that. As a result everyone tries to get into some Western-style, post-Industrial career ladder (complete with arbitrary career milestones) in order to make more money. In this system, someone will eventually get “promoted”, say, from being a brilliant engineer to being a mediocre manager. You get the Peter Principle.

I believe this idea of a “calling” can apply to institutions as well as individuals. I think that the best “Corporate Social Responsibility” a corporation can engage in is making a good product. After all, when people talk about, say, ABS-CBN or GMA, they talk about the brilliance (or dreadfulness) of the programs and the talent (or lack thereof) of their personalities. Nobody talks about Bantay Bata or the Kapuso Foundation. It’s no wonder the more jaded see CSR as pathetic PR whitewash. When you can’t even do your main business correctly, giving surplus revenue to charities isn’t going to make up for that, and people will see it as hypocrisy.

Incidentally, whenever people talk about serving the poor, they talk about institutions like the Missionaries of Charity and the Salvation Army – they are called to do just that. The primary purpose of TV networks is towards providing decent and interesting entertainment and/or accurate and relevant information, not feeding people in the slums.

In another essay Paul Graham also notes that the idea of doing what you love is foreign to what we learn as kids. After all, kids play, adults do dull hard work. And you go to school to prepare to do that hard adult stuff. This is how the false “work/life” and “work/play” dichotomies arise. We’re no longer kids, so we don’t play, we don’t play, so we don’t have fun. Work has to be miserable then.

Or does it? Have you noticed that among those people who are very handsomely paid are athletes and actors? People who play and pretend for a living, stuff kids do all the time. Then again they are more likely to get engaged in ridiculous childish behavior as well, but I digress. Now is it any wonder why many would like to be like them?

I remember reading a newspaper article about a certain helicopter mechanic. This guy enjoyed machines as a child and wanted to become a mechanic so much that he put himself through aircraft maintenance school. He makes PhP 12,000 a month, while saving the Air Force PhP 35 million a year. I don’t think the guy would mind if you pointed that out to him. He’s probably very happy simply doing his work well as any good craftsman would do. He’d also be just as happy seeing those choppers he’d been working on fly as any little kid would do. The perfect marriage of work and play.

Thinking inside the box

Your friend hands you over a clever brainteaser. He’s grinning from ear to ear as you’re stumped thinking of the solution. “Think out of the box”, he says. It’s a cliché you’ve heard many times. You might often hear it from your boss during those particularly unproductive meetings. Both your boss and your friend mean the same thing: think of the non-obvious. Be creative. Creativity makes money and solves problems and brings world peace and stuff.

I’ve been a software developer for almost a year. I find that the IT industry is full of smart and creative people who make lots of money and solve real problems (I’m sure we’ll get to the world peace part in the future). Funnily enough, I find that most people – especially neophytes such as me – have problems thinking inside the box.

What I mean to say is that, in my own observation, programmers are likely to implement creative (usually confusing and convoluted) solutions even for relatively trivial problems instead of taking the obvious route through easily available tools.

Perhaps it’s because we’re a bunch of nerds, and we just really like to do non-obvious stuff out of a need to be clever. There’s even the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, where programmers churn out working programs by intentionally using a creative (and as the name implies, confusing) approach.

Maybe it’s the fascination with the new and the cutting edge. Many times a coder will implement some new technology he has just read about; meanwhile nobody else understands what he just did. Ask a programmer to write a small app that calculates 1+1 and he’ll go on the Interwebs, browse some blogs, go “oooh, shiny!” and download this thermonuclear software library in order to build it.

It could be just plain newbie ignorance. After all if you’ve only got a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. You might genuinely have no idea that screwdrivers exist and get creative with using hammers on screws. I’m sure you could, for example, uncork a wine bottle with a hairpin. That’s impressive, but not very useful. The corkscrew may not be as fun, but it is the most efficient in uncorking wine bottles.

I’m not saying that being clever or creative is bad. What really matters is getting the solutions right. Google, for example, is very clever. You can type in anything – names, dates, phone numbers, zip codes, and it’ll know what you’re looking for. Ultimately, it’s great not because it’s clever, but because it works. Heck, I can even type in “399999999999999 minus 399999999999998” and it gives me the right answer! But I digress.

Wow! Clever out of the box answer! I better tell my math teacher!

The bottom line is, if there’s an obvious solution to something, use that first! Look inside the toolbox. Familiarize yourself with what’s inside before trying to “think outside the box.” It’ll save you a lot of time and energy. When you master the hammer as the in-the-box solution to putting pieces of wood together, you can take your problem solving resources away from the nails and channel them into thinking (outside the box, if necessary) about building better houses, making money and (hopefully) gaining world peace in the process.

Knock and Ping

Let me start off by describing how a car’s gasoline engine works. First, air and fuel is mixed and gets sucked into a chamber. Next, the chamber is closed and the air-fuel mixture compressed by the piston. The mixture is then ignited by a spark plug, which expands rapidly as it burns. This expansion pushes the piston, which is connected to a rotating crankshaft. This crankshaft is connected to your wheels, which makes your car go. The combustion chamber is opened and the burnt and spent air-fuel mixture is released through your exhaust pipe.

That sounds simple enough that I managed to describe the basic principle in one paragraph. In the real world, it’s not so easy to achieve this. A car engine is a complex mechanical device that does the combustion process thousands of times per minute. Get the timing or the mixture a little wrong, push the engine a little too hard, and the mixture can blow up in an uncontrolled and premature fashion. This phenomenon is called detonation. Detonation reduces power and fuel economy, increases engine wear, and results in a characteristic noise commonly known as knock and ping.

You can probably see where this is going. I’m sure you’ve noticed that title of this blog is Knock and Ping. Right now, you’re probably thinking, “All right Carlos, what’s the connection? Where are you taking us with your stupid metaphor?”

I’m a person who likes to think – a lot. Whenever the opportunity arises, I take time to simply ponder upon things – anything at all. Whether it’s about computers, cars, politics, religion, the tactile feel of my keyboard, whether I’ll have coffee now or later – nothing’s too trivial or too deep to explore. I prefer that things make sense to me, and many times I think I’ve just come up with a brilliant idea, an excellent, thorough, rational way of explaining something.

All is perfect in the private world of my inner thoughts, of course, but great ideas are meant to be shared. Often however, the moment I try to communicate ideas with another human being, I run into a wall. I talk (or write) in circles. I bore or confuse the other person and end up getting confused myself. Everything blows up in my face, instead of smoothly coming into the concise and clear conclusions that I’ve imagined.

In Paul Graham’s excellent essay about… well, essays, he notes that the word essay comes from the French essayer. Essayer means “to try”. That is, to try figuring something out by putting your thoughts into writing. Graham notes:

Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I’ve written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.

Even though I think a lot, it turns out I often don’t think very well. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been putting off starting a blog for so long. A used car salesman may be aware that his engine is out of tune; he’s reluctant to give test drives for it’ll knock and ping and make all sorts of noises betraying its true mechanical condition. Most of my ideas are actually dumb, mediocre, lacking and nonsensical; publishing them for the world to see would expose them for what they truly are.

Then again, the used car salesman can choose to fix his vehicle. I, likewise, can choose to fix the way I think.