What matters

I earlier talked about priorities.  Here I'll go a little more in depth in one area: work.  Work itself is not the priority, of course, it's what you do outside of work that matters to most people.  Things like food, shelter, clothing, and hopefully something left over to do more with.

The part of work that enables you to do anything else is, quite simply, the pay.  This can be cash, of course, but also includes other benefits (health care coverage, retirement funding, etc.).  There are non-monetary benefits, too, such as flexible work hours, but you pretty much either have them or you don't, and changing that means really one of two things: finding a new job with a different employer that is more flexible, or negotiating with your manager (and, if that fails, resorting to the first option).

So, let's focus on the pay.  What actions can you do to affect your overall remuneration within your current job?  Most obviously, this is simply doing the work required of you, doing it well, contributing to others' workloads (positively), ... well, that's what a lot of people think.  It's not.  It's what most positively affects the guy paying your salary.  And that's not your manager.  Or her manager.  It's the customer.

But, do you really care about the customer? Not really.  You care about your pay.  Let's see if we can follow that back a bit.

The reason I try to write high-quality code and contribute to our documentation and drive for better message quality and and and ... is so that the customer doesn't call me and interrupt my work.  By getting fewer interruptions, I get more work done.  When I get more work done, I get a better year-end review rating.  When I get a better year-end review rating, I get more pay.

I don't care about the customer.  I care about my pay.

And so far, I haven't had a manager complain about this logic.

Priorities

One of the first things I try to get across to new team members, whether transfers from other departments, new hires, or interns, is the concept of priorities.  We all have them, we all operate based on them, and few of us can find a correlation between the two.

For example, many people today will say that the environment is a priority - and then, in the same breath, tell you about their planned plane trip to another country.  They don't think that their pleasure is a priority over the environment, but they act that way.  Is it hypocritical? Sure.  But we're all hypocritical, so we can't exactly fault them for it.

This is not a rant about the environment.  This is an essay about priorities.  Specifically, discerning what your priorities are, what you'd like them to be, and keeping them in mind at all times.  And knowing when your priorities have been changed on you so that when you break your priorities, you know that you're doing so, and you know why you are doing so.

When I first joined IBM (yes, I work for them, no I don't speak for them, you know the drill - I'm a software dev, not a spokesman), I had a mentor of sorts named Jay Lennox.  I can never express how grateful I am for his advice and mentorship, even though there was no official mentor relationship there.  He gave freely of his advice, much of which will likely show up here over time.  But the first piece of that that I will share is his simple statement on priorities.  It's something I had always known, but never put into words.  And once I had the words, it also became easier to follow.

"You can work to live, or live to work."  It's such a short and simple philosophy, but also so critical, especially in an age where everything operates at top speed, where your employment seems to define who you are, but also where we are expected to put in crazy hours.  You can so easily find yourself sucked into a vortex of ever-lengthening work hours, or you can put a stop to it, put in your allotted time, and go home, and do other things.  Like date, marry, have kids, play with your kids ... or whatever it is that is your passion.  Even if that's writing open-source software.

This doesn't mean that when your boss asks you to be on call over a weekend, or straight out work the weekend, that you say no.  It means that you find that compromise.  And if that means you might give up a promotion here and there, well, you have to remember what your priorities are: is it to become a high-level manager, or to play with your kids?  If that's the tradeoff you have to make (either giving up the management position, or giving up on having kids), then that's the tradeoff you make.

I have regular conversations with my manager about our work-life balance.  Very regular conversations.  We're always looking to adjust things to provide better balance over the long term.  That's not to say I'm not well off that way as I've been working from home since 2002.  But, as management and direction changes, things can skew the wrong way, and we need to remember our priorities to try to drag things back.

Common sense ain't so common no more

Reading through p5p, I see a long rant from Karl Williamson.  And the merits of the actual post, positive and negative, aside (there are much more capable people than I who may or may not respond to the contents of the long, detailed, and seemingly well-thought-out post), one little phrase sent me reaching for the "rant" button.

"That is common sense".  Gah.

We've all heard, and maybe even said, that common sense isn't so common anymore.  Well, the problem with that is that it never was common sense.

What a person calls "common sense" is really the unspoken assumptions about life that they have made themselves.  This isn't a statement about anyone other than the speaker.  You make a statement about your own biases when you talk about common sense.

I actually find talking about "common sense," especially as a defense against the behaviours of others, to be somewhat self-centered and arrogant.  It is practically the opposite of "empathy."  Instead of recognising the perspective of another, you've rejected it already as invalid (and minority) by appealing to the majority (Argumentum ad populum).  The arrogance here is that you, not the person you're talking to, represents the majority.

I've made a conscious effort over the last number of years to exchange "common sense" for "makes sense to me" or some variation that is very similar.  Not only is this more accurate, it invites further discussion, and it's only under further discussion that I can learn new things, new ways of thinking.  I don't always agree with those ways of thinking, but it's only through understanding how others think that I can understand who they are and live in better harmony.

Thoughts on ...

Just some thoughts on that which comes to mind.  I've given a lot of advice over the years to junior team members, so I thought I might try writing down at least the not-$employer-specific aspects here for my own posterior.  Er posterity.  Whatever.

And, I expect a few rants to show up here and there.