I run Buttondown (http://buttondown.email/) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year.
My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that:
1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor,
2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements;
3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipped to build because it reflected my own experience (support for Markdown, a REST API — basically developer-adjacent functionality.) [^1]
I think we are in general pretty awash in bad products; it is not particularly difficult to pay attention to what you use over the course of a week and see what could use some obvious improvements.
[^1]: People often think of 'niching down' as adding features, but I would argue it is often just as much about removing features. As companies grow, they must add more and more surface area to satisfy certain use cases. Side projects do not have this problem; they can be laser focused on one or two such use cases, and as such remove all the surface area that many users find to be detritus.
Too many meetings, especially the recurring ones. Domination of spoken culture instead of written for collaboration.
Lack of proper sleep and rest. Working outside of your normal brain activity hours.
Sudden fire drills - "unforeseen" audit with deadline next Tuesday, a security vulnerability mentioned in TV and you needing to redeploy/upgrade everything ASAP.
Simple solution for me was to do a dopamine detox. This requires getting rid of things you enjoy, but that's somewhat the point. Instead of doing things you want, you are wasting time on things you don't.
After giving up video games, programming was fun. Reading nonfiction was insanely fun. So much so, it became a new addiction.
Maybe giving up things you enjoy is easier said than done.
I have often read books on topics I was already well-informed on. My philosophy is "think of it like a meditation". You might know very well about a psychological mechanism like the one described in Paradox of Choice (by Barry Schwartz) - you may have seen a TED talk and you already "get it". But it's rather different if you spent 10 hours of your life reading a variety of examples on the topic, and think about it (as you are reading it). The lesson sinks in far better - it is much more likely you will actually benefit from it.
This blows my mind. I know, it's much more incremental than it is revolutionary, but I think the form factor achieves a much greater degree of access for many people than a typical Pi whose bare hardware may be a lot more intimidating. Now, it's "just" a computer, which happens to expose a 40-pin connector for the standard Pi hardware fun. And unlike other options you might find, this has the massive built-in community that comes with Pi
It reminds me of what Apple does when it redefines a product category by "just" bringing together existing technology into a more convenient form factor and UX.
I don't know if this will quite have that level of impact, but I see the potential, especially now with remote learning: My kids are on a hybrid schedule. I'm fortunate to be able to provide them their necessary computing resources. Not everyone can: The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book.
I'm also old enough to remember when you'd be hard pressed to find a desktop computer for under $1000, perhaps $1500 adjusted for inflation. One for $70-$100 really just hammers home how far we've come.
Seems an appropriate time to post my favourite piece on news addiction by Charles Simic in the NYRB.
"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life..."
"But one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth; one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others, another, driven on by the greed of the trader, is led over all lands and all seas by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own; some there are who are worn out by voluntary servitude in a thankless attendance upon the great; many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men's fortune or in complaining of their own; many, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn—so surely does it happen that I cannot doubt the truth of that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: 'The part of life we really live is small.'"
Flexibility means you’re willing to do any task needed, whether it’s filling out some spreadsheet or going to a conference or figuring out how to come up with an intelligent database schema. Flexibility also means you don’t need to build everything perfectly, that you have the flexibility to leave some things a little less-than-perfect.
Humility to admit you don’t know what the best route is, because everything is in the primordial state. It may involve a company-wide pivot, it may involve something much simpler and easier, but admitting you might not know everything is crucial.
Optimism helps you ensure all the things stewing about you don’t totally get you down, and that you will find a way out. Some pragmatic thoughts and realism are needed, too, but optimism in the early stages means “sure, I think I can do that” comes to mind rather than “oh gosh that sounds really hard, I think we shouldn’t even try.”
I have this issue too, I think it also has to do a bit with cultural background sometimes.
I grew up in a hispanic family in a majority hispanic community, where my everyday conversation with people was people talking over each other. It was common to start making your point while the other person was still finishing theirs.
The difference is, because everyone did it, we would just keep talking, even if we were cut off, and finish our thought. The other person would hear it, while still talking, and the conversation continues naturally. If you were in a group, you had to go louder than the currently speaking person in order to "grab the baton" and get your word in (something I was often too quiet for).
This was my normal throughout childhood.
It was a culture shock when I went to college and eventually someone called me out for cutting people off all the time. It was then that I realized that now, when I cut someone off, they actually stopped talking.
I still struggle with this, because I reflexively expect people to not let me stop them.
“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
This will sound odd, but hear me out: assuming that whichever way you choose, it will be wrong, which would you choose? If you quit this job to pursue your side project, and that doesn't pan out, will you forever regret having given up this job? Or, if you don't quit this job, will you forever hate your career because part of you is wondering what would have happened if you just "went for it"?
Figure out which mistake would be less crushing, and do that one. If it happens to actually work out, great. If not, at least you won't be spending the rest of your life regretting.
By the way, for reasons I won't speculate on, this method (assume failure, which would you pick) turns out to be a pretty good way of picking the option more likely to succeed, actually. But assume you won't succeed no matter what, and use that scenario to decide which way to go.
Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.
You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.
You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor.
Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager.
Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects.
Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learning, you might find you quickly lose interest in anything once you’ve figured it out. The execution side of performance might bore you, and you’d rather constantly be learning new things. This can end up being less lucrative than finding a niche and repeating the same formula, but that might seem too boring or unchallenging to you.
I've been wrestling with this for most of my career so far. I think it's all about striking the right balance. If you're not constantly learning you will stagnate. At the same time, jumping continuously from learning one new thing to another (esp. if the things are not very inter-related) can spread yourself too thin: you need to "go deep" on some things to become an effective/valuable contributor.
I sometimes feel resentful of the amount of time I've spent as a software engineer dealing with what I often feel is boring or pure B.S. (e.g. almost everything other than designing/building some novel complex system from scratch). But in reality looking back I see that a lot of that sh*t-shoveling has actually made me much better and wiser at my profession, despite how mind-numbing and boring it often was. So I'm trying to keep that perspective to get me through those really dull days when I want to just rage-quit and move to a rural commune :)
We don't use money to "regulate and monitor the agency" people have over their own lives. We use money as a medium of exchange enabling people to get other people to do things for them. Money doesn't make you happy. Being able to pay a doctor to take care of you when you're sick, pay a private school teacher to heap attention on your kid, pay a chef to prepare nice meals for you at a restaurant--those things make you happy.
If all people wanted was agency over themselves most people could do it--living off the land in the middle of nowhere is still pretty cheap here in the U.S.
I think its because through experience people have figured out a lot of unspoken things about what its really like being an employee.
They have figured out that its much more about connections and office politics than hard work.
They have figured out that there is really no job security, and they could be one layoff wave away from unemployment.
They have figured out that its much more about face time and spending long hours at work rather than actually being productive.
They have figured out that the majority of their work, to their surprise is not actually that important or necessary.
They have figured out that its important not to take too much vacations, because its an opportunity to loose the little work they have to someone else.
They have figured out that they are never going to get payed the true value of their work,and that is almost the definition of being an employee.
They have figured out that its all a system of serventry not too different from the medieval relation between master and servant.
They have figured out that its a system that they are being grinded through and discarded, and that they are condemned for life to making someone else rich, never getting a chance to trully furfill their dreams and ambitions.
All of this takes a lot of time to figure out and piece together, it takes over ten years, and so the age 35 seems about right.
Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it's only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it's not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.
State > Coupling > Complexity > Duplication. I find that
to be a very sensible ordering of concerns to keep in mind when addressing any of those.
We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue.
One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own.
“Well I just don’t get why the baby didn’t defend itself from the bear.”
> It took me about a year to recognize this pattern, but eventually I learned to catch myself whenever I was seeking this form of comfort
Most of the advice from self-help books can be condensed into this line - Recognizing a pattern and catching yourself.
Only after this in place can a behavior/habit be replaced. Or improved. Or removed.
If there is no self-awareness, changing behavior/habit is infinitely more difficult.
Only tangentially related, but I can’t possibly be the only one who read this and thought about a particular codebase...
> The answer to these crisis and challenges is to build up structures - say, bureaucratic or military - in response. Each time a crisis is faced and solved, society finds itself with an extra layer of complexity. Now, Tainter says, as complexity increases, the benefit of this extra complexity starts going down - he calls it "the marginal benefit of complexity". That is because complexity has a cost - it costs energy to maintain complex systems.
I’ve made a bunch of assumptions about what you mean; I guess you asked a broad question so you’d get a wide range of answers :)
I’m a software engineer by trade but now I teach others how to write code. When I’m not doing that I work with clients to write teaching material for the products they own, and I run a non-profit in my spare time. I hate the phrase “digital nomad” but I’m writing this from a co-working space in Morocco, so the shoe fits. Here’s a brain dump:
* There’s an expectation that when you start a project you’ll be able to hit the ground running; clients don’t want to pay for you to ramp up to become productive. Luckily, starting a new job is something you get better at with practice; you learn how to phrase the dumb new-guy questions and abstract just enough that you’re competent quickly. Part of this is showmanship.
* That said, you’re a subject matter expert in your field.
* Perhaps you’re able to work off-site, in which case you’ll need better time-management skills than you might need at a traditional desk-bound job in your field. Perhaps you travel a lot for work or otherwise.
* Unless you’ve got a solid client-base you might find yourself hustling for work. Certainly your client-management and self-marketing skills will be better than someone who changes jobs once every three or four years.
* You might get to choose your holidays. I’ll be working over Christmas.
* You’ll have more cash money but no benefits unless you pay for them yourself. I’m from the UK so I don’t have quite the same healthcare issues as my friends across the pond, but I’ve got to manage my relationship with the state explicitly.
* I’ve got a fucktonne of airmiles.
* Maybe you’ll work unpredictable hours in weird places, so explicitly making time for your family and friends is important. I don’t bump into mates any more, so making friends is just something you have to make a point of.
* You’ll be more exposed to boom and bust hiring practices - supposedly, you’re charging more money as your position with a client is more mercenary.
* Unstructured work isn’t for everyone. I don’t like the idea of going back to an office job with a boss any more, but it’s different strokes for different folks. In the last month I’ve worked in New York, Montreal, London and (now) a small town in Morocco. Next month I’ll be in Ghana then London. I love it, but that much solo travel puts a strain on whatever kind of relationship you enjoy with people.
I'm convinced that our decision for how much effort to exert on work is not governed by the rational part of our brain. It's part primal - fear of insecurity and belonging to a social structure - part ego - accomplishment as confirmation of existence and your salary as a concrete number to compare favorably to others - and part culture and habit.
I also think overwork is a byproduct of a globally connected society. Humans are happy if they are relatively well off compared to what they know. With smaller societies, we know less and thus expect less from ourselves and our situations. But it becomes more difficult to remain this way as small societies get replaced with large social networks.
As a small example, you can be having a great life one day and feel woefully underpaid the next, and the only thing that has changed is your knowledge that in the valley, people get paid twice the amount you do in the UK.
I believe we need a generational understanding, acceptance, and appropriation of some of the unintended side effects of modern society.
I like his comment at about the 2:06[0] mark where he says "They knew how to manage but they didn't know how to do anything..."
However...a dynamic I see happening in my professional world is that the 'how' of doing things is changing so rapidly that managers aren't able to keep up and so might find themselves in a position where when they first started managing they were an expert in their domain but over time the domain has changed so much that their expertise has fallen behind. At that point I think a manager can still have value by performing classically managerial tasks:
- setting/reinforcing/communicating the vision (as Jobs notes in the video)
- recognizing great work by individuals on the team (both within the team and across the org)
- minimizing uncertainty within their span of control/removing 'blockers'
- providing autonomy to their staff
- facilitating collaboration
- striving for fairness and transparency in management decisions
A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude."
"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost.
"The man below says, "You must be a manager."
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."
--
This is the sentiment that I see in the article.
It reads like someone who is not a software engineer criticizing software engineers because they don't do what he wants. Sure there is a reference to culture and that. But, ultimately, he wants software engineers to care about business and market issues over software issues. He sees the software engineer as an impediment to the problems he is trying to solve rather than someone who tries to contribute through his domain of expertise. This situation is not going to change by using the amateur psychology of not rejecting an engineers ideas when they are starting out. That is insulting and, frankly, the heart of the problem -- that he sees software engineers as children to be led rather than peers who you can collaborate with.
It purports that Henry Adams wasn't so off the mark when he proclaimed that power is "a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies." The breakout quote here:
"Subjects under the influence of power, [Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley] found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view."
The high profile cases surrounding sexual abuse recently seem to indicate that the problem is systemic. It represents an illness of society, humanity, or a factor of both that we can only insulate against by understanding the root of what is causing the issue and how to work against it. It's not as simple as: Louis CK, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein and crew are evil.
It's amazing how you can write a whole article on this, but the gist is they built something with low utility value. period.
If you look at it from this point of view, everything else is just side effect.
- It failed because it's not fashionable? => No. See bluetooth headset. Also see Crocs. If it's useful, people will use it.
- It failed because it waited 5 months to sell it? => No. See Apple.
- It failed because the excitement died off by the time it shipped? => No. See all kinds of films that succeeded WITHOUT any initial hype (such as the Matrix)
- It failed because it couldn't get any influencers to endorse the product? => No, see Snapchat. Yeah their original app itself.
- It failed because the content couldn't be ported over to other platform without cropping? => No. In fact, if Spectacles would have succeeded, Techcrunch would probably be blabbering about how the key to success is how brilliant its marketing strategy was, so that all the videos uploaded to youtube and instagram had the "signature snapchat crop", which got everyone else curious.
The only arguments I agree with in this article are related to its utility--how it's considered rude to be video taping someone else, and how it was limited to sunglasses format.
The rest is bullshit because they're one of those "MBA case studies" type after-the-fact interpretation, which in most cases are bullshit.
Just go build something useful and you will never have to worry about being "fashionable" or all the gimmicks. In fact as a tech company you should never see yourself as a fashion company. It's a myth created by ignorant media pundits who's never built a product in their life.
...including this article, which pivots from Cernovich to Silicon Valley to politics and Trump.
A far more interesting discussion would have been about the rampant neurosis of above-average (nationally speaking) educated young people in tech that rate themselves as being better than they actually are, leading to a deathly fear of failure and accountability (leading to "pivoting"), perhaps (IMO) coming from the psychological reluctance to take a good hard look in the mirror and admit that they are not as good/better than others as they think they are.
My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that:
1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor,
2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements;
3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipped to build because it reflected my own experience (support for Markdown, a REST API — basically developer-adjacent functionality.) [^1]
I think we are in general pretty awash in bad products; it is not particularly difficult to pay attention to what you use over the course of a week and see what could use some obvious improvements.
[^1]: People often think of 'niching down' as adding features, but I would argue it is often just as much about removing features. As companies grow, they must add more and more surface area to satisfy certain use cases. Side projects do not have this problem; they can be laser focused on one or two such use cases, and as such remove all the surface area that many users find to be detritus.