thirdbIT

They just went to a four-day work week. “Urgency is poisonous!” says Jason. I couldn’t agree more.

Dear Internets,

I have been neglecting you. That’s because I started a new job last month, at a place called Smartleaf, doing Ruby on Rails development for 20 hours a week. It is fantastic. It is a lot of fun. It’s great people, good food, easy commute, and coding. I haven’t been an employee for years, so it’s quite a change for me, and in a good way. (It turns out that you can write better code without children yelling in your ear.)

But I’ve got these kids and this life and this job and I’m kinda busy.

Also, I’m supposed to be writing a book about computer science for practicing programmers. It’s meant to be an overview and sourcebook for people who didn’t get CS degrees but are working as programmers. Which, it turns out, is most of us. And when I signed on to write it, I hadn’t actually anticipated that a great job opportunity would drop into my lap, the way this one did, so I thought I’d have four or five hours a day to work on it. But suddenly I have about three minutes a day to work on it, and I’m having a really hard time. The subject matter is not easy. It is not just something I can write in my sleep. I don’t know the stuff I plan to write about. And even though I’ve lately become a big believer in the idea that you can accomplish an awful lot in just fifteen minutes, I fear that it is turning out not to be the case that you can write a book about computer science in just fifteen minutes a day.

Actually I emailed Steve Yegge about the book (partly because he was an inspiration for my wanting to write it, and partly because I wanted to use some quotes from his blog in it and wanted his approval) and he wrote back and said something like (I’m paraphrasing here): Hah, good luck. Many have tried, all have failed to write such a book. Which was a little bit depressing and discouraging, but honestly, what do you expect from Stevey?

Still, my editor is getting restive (hi Daniel!) and with good reason. Maybe we should put the book on hold, he asked, and see if it’s actually going to happen? Ick, I said. That is a terrible idea. I am going to write the damn book. Of course I can do it.

But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to do it, internets. I need your help, hive mind. I asked my friend John if he wanted to write the book with me, and he was like “hah, no.” All he does is send me links to stuff that I should read for the book, and recommend books that would be helpful, and talk about how much he wants to read the book. I asked Max to make me work on it for an hour every morning before the kids wake up, but the kids somehow magically sense when I am awake and wake up with me. And I have never been a morning person and I just can’t think at 6:30 a.m. And I have two hours on Saturday morning to myself when the kids go out to the French library with Max, so today I managed to clean the bedroom, set the robot to vacuum, and dump all the clean laundry on the bed in an enormous mountain so that I am forced to fold it before bedtime. I also went for a short walk and stopped in at the bookstore. And finally started typing this and as I am writing the family is returning, and a baby is running down the hall crying for me. So that was my morning.

And I realize how obnoxious it is that, out of amazing good fortune, I have a book contract, an actual book contract, with people who are my programming heroes, and here I am complaining about it, and basically just screwing it up.

So this is what happens: i get some bursts of energy to work on the book — like I spent two weeks reading and learning a bunch of stuff about C, and figuring out all the different ways to get segfaults, and I wrote a few pages of notes for a chapter on C, and I found awesome documents like the ANSI C Rationale on the internet, and I also read a bunch of stuff about machine architecture and cache memory and pipelining and bitwise operations and analog computing and I took a bunch of notes, and I thought a lot, and I wrote some stuff, and I made what progress I made by basically doing nothing but that, work, and cooking dinner. I mean, I basically ignored my children. I’d be like “uh huh, that’s great, but I’m really trying to understand the semantics of arrays in C right now, sweetie pie.” Oh, and I didn’t get quite enough sleep. After a couple of weeks of that I needed to do things like make plans for our trip to Europe in May (for my oldest friend’s wedding, not just because we’re decadent francophilic wine-and-cheese freaks, although we are that too, but man, that Euro is PAINFUL now) and get the taxes ready to send off to the accountant, and fight with the insurance company about various claims they refuse to pay for various ridiculous reasons. And read to my kids, and spend ten minutes alone with my husband, and parent help at Ari’s preschool, and everything else. And honestly, our lives aren’t even that busy. Our kids are not in a ton of activities. We don’t schlep around to baby music and movement classes. Ari is in no organized sports. He goes to preschool three mornings a week. Max and I each work 20 hours a week, and we have about 18 hours of babysitting.

But somehow I just can’t manage it.

What this tells me, first of all, is that nobody out there is managing it. We have far, far more time than most other parents with two children under five, and it’s still not ‘enough’. There’s an endless pile of stuff that I think should be getting done that isn’t getting done. This tells me that my ideas about what has to actually get done are just wrong, because I’m not getting a lot of these things done but things go on just the same. So I should probably just drop that stuff off my list. Like “inventory our crap for insurance purposes.” And “clean out the basement storage room”. And “start tomato seeds.”

But honestly, I’ve already dropped all that off my list. I’ve even dropped baking bread off my list, for the time being, and I’m someone who has an actual grain mill sitting on her counter. I grind my own damn wheat to make my own damn bread, and I haven’t done it in a couple of months.

I don’t watch TV or movies. The entire season 3 of Lost is sitting on my dresser waiting to be watched, but it’s an enormous commitment and I just don’t see how I can make the time. I’ve cut my newsfeeds down. I do no recreational reading except that I sometimes give an hour to the New Yorker.

Look, internets, I really want to write this book. It’s a lot of fun, except when it’s so painful I want to die or puke or something. I’m learning a lot. I think I could help other programmers figure out how to learn the stuff about computer science that they want to learn, and help them figure out why they should care. But it turns out, unsurprisingly, to be really, really, really hard to write a book. At least this kind of book. Well, I’m sure any book, really.

But am I just a big lazy whiner? I honestly don’t know. I thought maybe the book would be a year-long project, and it looks to be more like a five-year-project, especially at the pace I’m going. Now it’s true that Don Knuth is still working on his opus, but I’m not Don Knuth. Does the world need what I have to offer, or am I torturing myself and my family for an unnecessary project?

I keep thinking, okay, well, I didn’t make much progress that way, I’ll try some other way. And so I try all the hacks I know of to motivate, and make time, and make progress. And I keep trying in different ways. And when I drop it for a few days and fall off the wagon and stop meeting my goals, I just try again. So I’m sorta impressed with myself about this, that I keep trying, even in the face of basically constant failure and what feels like a pathetic lack of progress. But boy does it take an emotional toll. Writing this book (or mostly not managing to write it, as the case may be) is incredibly emotionally and intellectually taxing. Not to mention time-consuming.

I know we don’t have a ton of blog readers out there, really. But if anyone out there wants to offer some encouragement, or has any suggestions, I’d love to hear from you.

“Technically gifted and passionate RoR engineer wanted for one month”

As per policy, I won’t link to the offender. But what are the chances you will find a gifted and passionate engineer available RIGHT THIS SECOND to work a few hours a week for a month, at $50/hour, total payment capped at $2500?

I don’t like this whole job posting obsession with “passion,” anyway. It seems a bit much to demand not merely competence, productivity, honesty, attention to detail, professionalism, and time from employees/contractors, but also passion. It’s a bizarre conceit, I think, somewhat akin to the invention of romantic love in marriage. It’s an attempt to paper over an economic transaction under the guise of emotional attachment. It’s not enough for workers to give our time, our energy, our thoughts, and our creativity to our work — we must also give our very selves, the part of us that is able to feel passion.

I resent this attempt to colonize my emotional landscape. I don’t blame individual job-posters, of course; they’re just using the job-listing language of the day, and not thinking very much about what, actually, it means. Perhaps only freakish people who spent too much time reading cultural studies in college stop to think about the meaning of the current vogue for demanding passionate employees.

Is there evidence I haven’t seen that passionate employees are better employees? Passion does not necessarily improve one’s personal life; I don’t know why it would necessarily improve one’s professional life. On the contrary, passion would seem to most often be a disability at work. It clouds reason and judgment. It encourages overexertion followed by disappointment and ennui. It contributes to misunderstanding and strife, shortens tempers, and fosters unrealistic expectations.

Perhaps I’m just being pedantic, and what the job-listers really mean is “looking for someone who likes their work” but they must use “passionate” because of rampant adjective inflation. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want to hire people who like to do the job. But that’s not the kind of information you’ll glean until you talk with someone anyway, so there doesn’t seem to be any point in putting it as a requirement on a job listing.

I see “passionate engineer wanted” and think “unrealistic and possibly abusive employer/client”. My passion is not your business, people. Ask me to be professional, mature, conscientious, skilled, creative, honest, efficient, knowledgeable, curious, persistent, thoughtful, and engaged — I can be all these things. But don’t ask me to be passionate. It’s not a love affair, it’s a job.

So we got some really nice links this week, and with the links, a bunch of click-throughs. And some wonderful comments, all of which we deeply appreciate. And now of course, I’m choking . I have about 20 posts in various states of readiness, from “just an idea” to “nearly done but I suddenly think it sucks and wasn’t a good idea for a post in the first place”, but nothing ready to go.

Oh wait, here’s something to keep you from dumping us off your feedreader (or dumping us faster, who knows?!). A snippet of a column by Cary Tennis, Salon’s advice columnist , responding to someone who can’t decide whether to give up a career opportunity for his girlfriend, whom he loves passionately:

You say one cannot calculate the value of a job or a relationship, but I do not think that is true. I think one must calculate it. Courts are called upon to do so. Moreover, intuitively we do it anyway. For instance, suppose that you and she settle down and have a good relationship and good jobs. Say that one day a supernatural being comes to the door and says that you must give up either the job or the relationship. Which would you choose? Which would you consider expendable? Which would you consider replaceable?

While in science many problems are difficult because they are complex, in life many problems are difficult because they are simple, but we are human and we want everything. While in the conduct of science we would never suspend physical laws to get the result we seek, in life we try that all the time: Can one person be in two places at the same time? Well, people say no, but maybe in this case … I don’t know … if I accumulate enough free miles maybe I could fly from Toronto to Oakland enough times that I could appear to be in two places at once …

I don’t think so.

If you’re reading this blog and wondering why Max and I have this crazy idea that we’ll somehow each work part-time, or consult together, or work out of the house, or do something weird and web-worker-daily-ish, and we don’t want to travel much for work and we don’t want long commutes and we don’t want to be these people, toiling away in the “Silicon Valley salt mines” — that’s why: We’ve got one life to live here, people, and we can’t be in two places at once.

So I woke up this morning and saw that 7 people had saved my method_missing post to delicious. How can this be? I wondered. Who even reads this blog? We checked our stats and saw a bunch of pageviews, because someone linked to us from Reddit (No, we didn’t submit ourselves. We have two small children, here, people, we don’t have time to go around flogging our blog under pseudonyms. We barely have time to flog … never mind). Anyway, then someone else commented, quite correctly :

This isn’t “10 things you should know”. It’s ten paragraphs, each assigned a number for no reason other than the fact that “X things…” lists are better reddit/digg-bait.

It’s funny, because I had a whole paragraph in the original draft about precisely that. I went back and forth about calling the post 10 things, and I went back and forth about numbering the things, and I dithered about the numbering, and the post took me three hours to write and I had other things to do, so I finally decided that the paragraph about whether to call the post “10 things…” was gratuitous meta-blogging, took it out, and left the numbers in.

I’ve never written a 10-things post before. I’m not a ‘pro-blogger’. I do sometimes read posts like ‘10 tips to publicize your blog’ though, because I need money, and therefore I need work, and so one way I can try to drum up Ruby on Rails work is to try to contribute to the community in some useful way, and if you’re going to contribute it helps if people are reading you, at least a teeny bit. Etc. So what the hell, I thought, I’ve been meaning to write about method_missing for a while, I’ll see if I can do it in a 10 things format.

So I wrote out all my thoughts about method_missing, and it looked nothing like 10 things. I reorganized it to make the major points more obvious. I took out some stuff that didn’t belong. I revised. Still more of a meander than a 10 things. More revising. Better structure, but not 10 unrelated things; more like 10 points, each leading to one another. (Hmm, an essay. But the internets don’t like essays! ) Okay, I did my best, I thought, time for bed.

And then I wake up and there we are on reddit, with the harsh light of a tiny amount of publicity showing me up as an obnoxious blogging publicity-hound.

Oh well. 7 people thought the post was interesting and useful enough to save to delicious, so that’s something.

And no, I don’t really have a list of 10 things I didn’t know about Reddit. Just one: I had no idea how successful a tactic it was to call something “10 things…”. Beyond my wildest dreams. Though I don’t think I’ll be doing it again anytime soon. Go ahead, reddit readers, flame away!!

“MS/SQL Developer/Anal”

I swear to god I did not make this up. What, you couldn’t spare the extra three letters?

Also: why do you ask for our salary history? Do you really want to hire someone who is un-savvy enough to send you their salary history along with their resume? Do people actually provide salary history?