I don’t know what the rest of the world thinks when they use the phrase ‘power tool’, but for me it’s visceral, literal. My experiences using them and watching them transform my family’s work permeated my time building Puppet. These power tools aren’t little plugins to expensive frameworks, they’re large capital investments that dramatically change your job.
I grew up building houses with my dad. The worst task he gave me was trying to paint a set of louvre doors for a closet while in high school; I had to flip the doors over every 90 seconds to catch drips getting through the slats. After three days of misery, my father relented and rented a paint sprayer, with which we finished the job the same day, at a much higher quality.
Around the same time, my dad would rent a pneumatic nailer for big framing jobs. By the time I finished college a few years later, that critical tool went from borrowed to owned and traveled everywhere with him. Initially used only for large jobs, most contractors now have multiple nail guns to cover framing, trim, and every other use case, and the air compressor needed to power it is as important as electricity.
It might not be obvious, but both of these are examples of automation. You replaced a very manual process - applying paint, or nailing things together - with a machine. If this were a factory, these days you’d call those machines robots, but because it’s a construction site, we just call them tools.
And these tools were expensive. Even with how much faster we finished that painting job, I expect it cost more to rent the sprayer than to finish the work manually, because of how little he was paying me. (This does ignore the soft costs of listening to me complain, which were likely high.) Even today paint sprayers and nail guns are often rented rather than purchased, because good ones cost a lot of money and aren’t needed all the time.
It’s no surprise that discussions of tools and productivity are easier to understand from my experience as a carpenter than as a sysadmin. There’s plenty of room for arguments about what is or is not a software power tool, but when it costs more than a week’s wages, it trails a bright orange cord everywhere it goes, and it can nail your hand to the wall while you’re standing at the top of a ladder1? It’s a power tool.
There’s a common story about what robots and automation do to people like my dad (and both of my brothers, who followed in his footsteps): It steals their jobs and ruins their lives.
What utter poppycock.
If you think of your job as driving metal spikes into wood, then a nail gun is a mortal threat. But if this is your value add, your biggest danger was never automation. My dad never sold his ability to join raw materials together quickly; he sold homes, he sold the opportunity to enjoy your house and family more. How did these new power tools affect that?
They were awesome. Painting and nailing are classic examples of menial, low-value work, and yet we spent most of our time on them. All of the differentiation we offered to our customers was packed into a narrow slice of work, because implementation took so much time and money. As we were able to bring more powerful tools to bear, the menial work shrank and larger portions of our time could be spent on design work, customer interaction, and tuning our customers’ homes.
Interestingly, my father’s next career step was even more pointedly about experiences enabled by tooling. He took a job with a state hospital in Tennessee, fabricating custom furniture for severely disabled patients. Suddenly he was using industrial sewing machines for upholstery, and partnering with medical professionals to design multiple beds for each patient, enabling them to be happier and more comfortable (and also avoid bed sores, thus saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient). Given the tragically minimal budget allocation for this kind of work, every dollar saved through automation and tooling directly delivered health and happiness to his patients.
It’s no wonder I see the value in power tools, that I am more conscious of the benefit they can deliver than the loss of low-value menial work.
I had a similar experience as I was building Puppet. I would meet executives and salespeople (I don’t know why it was always them) who would say, “Oh, automation? Great, you can fire sysadmins!” No. Beyond the obvious reality that I was selling directly to my users, who would never buy on the promise to fire their coworkers, that was just not why we were valuable.
Puppet gave people a choice between lowering cost but keeping the current service quality, or keeping your costs flat while providing a much better service. “Wait, making things better is an option? I didn’t know that!” Most companies were aware that their IT sucked, but they only knew how to measure and manage cost, so that’s what they did. Once you believed in the power to make things better, power tools turned out to be great investments for both the user and the buyer.
By letting people spend more time on the parts of their work they enjoyed, the work that makes them special, we also delivered higher quality experiences for their customers and constituents. “Spend less time firefighting and doing menial work, and more time shipping great software.” If the heart of your skillset is clicking buttons or responding to outages, Puppet might have been a threat to you, but our users knew where their real value was. We helped them spend more time there and less time on the boring, low value stuff. The sysadmins hated the work, the customers hated to need it, and the executives hated paying for it. Great, done, don’t worry about it.
That’s partially why productivity has stagnated2. The world has not changed that much - some of the greatest improvements to productivity come from making large capital investments in tooling for your workers - but how we spend our money has. People balk at a $5k computer, when the Mac IIci would cost more than $13k in today’s dollars just for the hardware, yet was a powerhouse in desktop publishing. This is to say nothing of how the mobile app stores have driven down what people are willing to spend on software.
Yes, Adobe’s software is expensive, but it’s that price because it delivers so much value. If it didn’t, no one would buy it. Every large market should be so lucky as to have the collection of power tools that graphic designers get. It sounds crazy, but we’re suffering from not enough expensive software. Instead of building the most powerful software possible and finding customers who see its value, companies are building the simplest thing they can and trying to get everyone to use it.
There are bright spots in the industry, like Airtable and Superhuman. I’m hoping they help to shift momentum back to automating away the tedious work and enabling focus on what humans excel at.
More powerful tools improve your life, but they also make you happier even if you can’t buy them. They tantalize you, promising you great returns, if only you can come up with the cash. And they’re maybe just a little bit scary, warning you that buying them is not enough. You must master them.
A friend of ours managed to do this when working alone in the time before cell phones. ↩
Yes, I might be being simplistic to make a point. ↩
What Voltaire and the Flaw at the Heart of Economics Have to Teach Us About Software That Doesn’t Exist
Voltaire’s Candide juxtaposes an optimistic philosophy with unbelievable tragedy. He was angry at the 19th century philosophers who proclaimed that we lived in the best of all possible world while destruction and death unfolded around Europe on an epic scale.
We might hear the claim that we live in the best of all possible words and scoff. Of course, we’re too enlightened to be such naïve optimists. But are we? Isn’t the belief tempting? Or even, doesn’t the behavior of those around you make more sense if you realize they believe this, at least a little bit?
Economists are theoretically rational, analytical, big picture thinkers, but at the root of modern economics is a belief shockingly close to Candide’s parody of optimism. They have what they call “The Efficient Market Hypothesis” (EMH), which roughly states that all assets are valued fairly. This is built off the idea that asset values in an open market are fair because they include all available information, and all the actors in that market are behaving rationally in regard to both the asset and the available information.
This theory tends not to trigger the cynicism that Voltaire does. Intuitively, it sounds not just right, but defined as so. Isn’t an open market essentially a mechanism for finding the fair value of an asset? It’s not so simple. And when it goes wrong, it does so spectacularly.
Modern economists cannot be as destructive as the great thinkers of the 18th century, whose big ideas justified eugenics and many other horrors. Just because they cannot as easily be used to justify mass murder does not mean they should not be accountable for the downsides of their obviously incorrect theory.
“No”, I hear you say, “the EMH is not wrong; it’s correct by definition.”
Economists have convinced us of what Voltaire was protecting us from: We live in the best of all possible markets, where all information is public and all assets are fairly valued. If the market does not value something, that it must actually be worthless.
But of course, if that were true Warren Buffet would not have become a billionaire buying stocks that were worth more than the market was paying, the finance industry could not have been built on advising clients about public stocks, and you’d have no need for lemon laws or other regulations that fight information discrepancies. Nor would Kahneman and Tversky have won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that actors in an economic system behave anything but rationally, puncturing the EMH for good. Thankfully, this has forced the field to begin to grapple with its flawed underpinnings, but many modern beliefs are implicitly built around these bankrupt theories.
You might be patting yourself on the back right now for not being silly enough to draw Voltaire’s ire, but it’s baked into the value system of the world around you, especially if you live in the US.
The market moves from irrationally ignoring new technologies like the blockchain to irrationally dumping money on them, without any fundamental change to justify the shift
Investments are made based on proximity and serendipity rather than rationality and opportunity size
We tend to claim that the rich earned their status through hard work, rather than recognizing the role of privilege, inheritance, and luck in their status
Of course, not everyone in the market operates with such optimism, but each of us is biased in this direction. It affects our thinking whether we want it to or not.
“Ok”, you say, “even if I accept some people make optimistic investment decisions, what does that have to do with software?”
Great question. If we live in the best of all possible markets, where all information is public and all assets are fairly valued, then we can trust the market’s assessment of what software should and should not exist. Lack of software to solve a problem is a sign that it’s not worth solving.
If, on the other hand, our world could be better, or if our market is imperfect at valuing assets, then we can’t trust intuitive conclusions about where value resides. This is most true when it comes to valuing unsolved problems. It might be that a given problem has no solutions because it is not worth solving, but mundane reasons are more likely to be at fault.
Most great companies exist because they provided something the market did not know it wanted. Their founders encountered a flaw, and managed to build something great in the opportunity created by it. Henry Ford claimed if he’d have given people what they wanted it would have been a faster horse. The market knew how to value them, but not cars. Before Apple, the market did not value personal computers. Before Google, the market valued directories but not search engines. Before the iPhone, the market valued expensive phones for professional use but not personal.
These value statements were market failures, and their resolution generated billions of dollars for the companies resolving them. Now, of course, the market sees great value in what these founders have created, but not because the market is so smart; it’s because it can no longer fool itself.
It’s easy to grow despondent in the face of such obvious market failures. If the wisdom of the crowds, the great invisible hand of the market, can be so wrong, what hope does a lonely entrepreneur have? I take a different way.
I luxuriate in these misses.
They surround us. We bathe in them. Yes, many great companies have grown into critical market gaps, but even with all these successes, there are untold problems whose solution should be valued but is not.
Only once you reject the market’s flawed opinions about what matters, you begin to see nearly limitless opportunity. There are so many more unmet needs than there are perfect solutions. These are your opportunities.
Of course, just because the market dismisses a space doesn’t mean there’s a great opportunity there. It’s your job to know the problem, your customer, your user, your buyer well enough to draw your own conclusions, to develop enough certainty that you don’t need someone else to tell you what to believe.
Because that’s the real point: Trust yourself, not a bunch of paternalistic optimists.
Modern capitalism raises the flag of the free market while pitting centrally planned organizations against each other
It’s quite a journey from being born on a commune to raising more than $87m in funding at a software company. This journey forced me to wrestle with existential questions about my true beliefs, and how they intersected my life as an entrepreneur. One’s work is rarely a pure reflection of ideology, but companies need a clear and authentic strategy, which requires a tight alignment between company operations and the founder’s philosophy. I have discovered more about those differences between what I believe and the best ways to grow a corporation while studying economics - that is, how money is made and exchanged - than any other area.
A worldwide conflict between communism and capitalism defined the latter half of the twentieth century. The United States’ ideological battle was the central drama of my childhood, and it was with a combination of glee, pride, and “told you so!” that my fellow Americans watched the wall fall in Berlin, and the USSR dissolve shortly thereafter. I expect few would deny that the US is the standard bearer for capitalism.
Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism - the corporation - works more like an authoritarian state. Given how much of our world is built around corporations, this truth and its impacts are critical.
I grew up apart from America’s passion for capitalism. In the era of Reagan, I was living on a commune. My parents did not earn money for their labor, and we didn’t have personal property. My family left the Farm when I was 8, and as I matured, my ideological roots were in conflict with the US’s nonstop pro-capitalism message. As I joined the workforce and eventually started my own company, I found myself attached to neither the communal roots of my childhood nor the Wolf of Wall Street world I moved into. I grew slowly in convictions, as I encountered problems in the course of scaling a company.
The first real conflict came when it was time to hire managers. I founded a company primarily because I did not thrive as someone else’s employee, so what led me to think others would? More importantly, anyone who has ever operated at the front line is aware of the severe costs imposed by the separation between the people who do the work and the people who make the decisions in hierarchies. Hiring managers was just going to make the company do worse, not better, right? Right?
I expect three of you are gleefully shouting, “Yay, holacracy!” right now, while the rest are confused and either offended or think I’m an idiot. I did consider a manager-less world, but a little research provided only examples of disaster, because the only available options just replace an explicit power structure with an implicit one. In other words, it’s still hierarchical with the founder on top, but now decision making is opaque and the system is easy to exploit because of the lack of controls (which looks surprisingly like the cult/commune I grew up in).
Those who are confused or offended by the idea that managers make performance worse would be informed by a deep dip in economics. One of the core principles of the free market is that central planning committees can never be as efficient or as effective as the people doing the work. By definition a free market economy lacks a decision-making hierarchy; the ‘free’ means every agent (individual or corporation) can decide for themselves, without needing permission from a manager above.
While there are many aspects of modern American capitalism I reject, this one I wholeheartedly support1. The downsides of a strong central executive were taught to me early.
Like many other communes, the one I grew up on routinely failed to feed its people - my parents speak with horror of the ‘wheat berry winter’, when we lived on little else. While his people were short on food, the founder of the Farm was off touring Europe as the 3rd drummer in a band, “bringing our message to the world”.
Thankfully none of us starved to death, but the failing was similar to what most communist countries experienced: The central organization could not feed everyone. For years, I assumed this was just incompetence, whether at the scale of the Farm or China. The truth was far more structural. Millions starved during the Great Leap Forward because the central organization was trying something impossible: Managing the productive output of an entire country. The Planet Money podcast tells a great story of how this central planning was walked back in China, but the general point here is that these communist countries did not just nationalize the means of production, they tried to centrally control all of it from within a small group.2
When people talk about communist countries not being a free market, this is what they mean: They tell the farms what crops to produce and in what quantity, rather than letting them decide for themselves. China even went so far as to dictate what hours a farmer should start and stop working, and then directed managers to ring a bell for transition times to control every little group of farmers. Anyone who’s ever had to punch a clock into a rigid, dysfunctional hierarchy is likely getting painful flashbacks about now.
It should be immediately obvious why this fails miserably: The distance between the central planning committee and the farmer is so great that good decisions are nearly impossible. It’s nearly impossible for critical feedback to make it from the edge, where the farmers are working, to the central planning committee in time to affect decisions, and then for those decisions to make it back to the edge in time to be useful. The podcast linked above also points out how unmotivated the farmers were under this regime, cutting productivity even further. Those who have studied lean manufacturing, agile development, and DevOps are likely seeing parallels here.
The result was catastrophe. When a corporation is painfully inefficient it loses money and might have to do layoffs, but when a country fails at growing food, its people starve to death. I don’t mean to imply that central planning was the only cause of famine under communist rule - there were political operations that led to mass starvation, just like in the West - but learning more about these helped crystallize what I do truly prefer about capitalist models. It also converted the phrase ’the free market’ from a catchy slogan into something meaningful to me.3
The most important feature of free market economies is that each person within them is able to make independent decisions in their own best interests4. If you’re a farmer, you can decide what to grow, how much to grow, and when to work to develop your crop. Heck, you can even choose not to be a farmer any more. Success is merely dependent on your finding a buyer for your work at a price you can tolerate. Any given year might not be perfect, but your decision making gets better over time as you learn to respond to customer demand.
This pattern is easy to understand in any system where the people doing the work make the decisions. If you’re a jeweler, you can decide what to make, how much to sell it for, and what to spend your time on. Same if you run a small restaurant, lead local tours, or are a one-person shop doing house remodeling. It’s a free market, where you can charge what the market will bear, and you can quickly and efficiently respond to its whims, ensuring that you are getting the best use of your time.
This was a powerful organizing principle for a long time. The history of human commerce developed largely this way: One person, or as many people as could fit in one shop, would turn labor into a product, then find a buyer for it. Most large-scale efforts were organized by the state of the time: Monarchs and the landed gentry, who were the only ones capable of marshaling enough resources to build palaces, roads, and other large construction projects.
This began to change in the 17th century when corporations like the Dutch East India Company were able to deliver massive windfalls to investors by pooling money and using it to extract resources from colonies. There was a step change in the 19th century, as corporations went from generating wealth to building and owning infrastructure. It’s one thing to outfit a single ship for a year-long voyage, yet another to maintain railroad schedules across the United Kingdom, or run a telegraph network around the whole US. These aren’t just short-term money-making exercises, they’re long-term commitments with big capital outlays and large returns over years and years.
We still live in a free market economy, but it’s not one Adam Smith would recognize. Instead of individual or small operators, ours is composed almost entirely of corporations. Really big corporations. And these companies, they use the same kind of central planning that we so despise in communist systems. I know. I’ve done it.
By the time my company got near 500 people, we had a multi-week planning process, where the leadership (i.e., me and my lieutenants) set out top-level goals, built a top-down plan to accomplish them, then drew information from the front line to see where it needed change. We called this a bottom-up plan, but it was only bottom-up from the perspective of numbers - how much money we’d have, what our costs were, etc. - rather than from the bottom of the organization. We could see no way to have a system where the people doing the work built a plan for the organization. Even thinking about it now, my reaction is, “How would they know what my goals are?”
That’s the kind of question you can only ask in an authoritarian state, not in a free market economy. My goals became my company’s goals, and the only real way to ensure people worked toward them was providing a plan. You might argue that a corporation should focus on shareholder value, but that doesn’t help make decisions about what the company should actually do.
Great leaders find a way to listen to everyone in the company, but in the end, leadership is about making decisions. That’s essentially the definition of the word. And we all know leaders who did not bother to listen, or just did not need to in order to be great; today’s most vaunted tech leader, Steve Jobs, was famously disrespectful of the opinions of others, yet made a lot of world-changing decisions (not all for the better).
This is exactly why working in a big corporation is so stifling. If you’re in a small company, the executives are close enough to the front line that it’s more like working in a tribe, but in a big company, the leadership is so removed from whose who do the work that executive teams operate like the politburo we so decry in communist countries. Certainly the bureaucracies are no more enjoyable or forgiving.
I find it both ironic and painful that my inability to work for someone else resulted in my creating a company that involved a lot of smart, capable people working for someone else.
I wish I had a solution. If this were an easy problem, its solution would already be pervasive, because the benefits are massive. Just in terms of efficiency, we’ve seen how much better the free market is than planned economies, but it also has a hugely positive impact on quality of life. People are happier when they’re in control.
I know the solution is not more freelancing and contract work, which America’s corporations are addicted to. That’s the worst of both worlds: The exploitative nature of capitalism with the inefficient bureaucracies of communism. Transactions on the free market work because they’re good for both sides, but most people only accept part-time contract relationships today when they have no other real choices.
Holacracy certainly isn’t the answer. It’s fundamentally flawed because of its implicit power structure - Tony Hsieh still runs Zappos, even if he does not use a central planning committee to do it - but the biggest problem is it makes no mention of economics. Without a clear system for scoring the transactions (i.e., money) it’s impossible to build a free market.
This problem of how to handle economics within a non-hierarchical company might lead some to think of using blockchain tokens as an internal currency. This is impossible today, beyond the fact that the world of blockchain is mostly about fraud and black market sales. The biggest problem is that we have no idea how to value most of the work people do. I mean, we might know that what a developer should get paid for a year’s work, but how much is that work worth? The majority of the work done in modern corporations is incredibly hard to value, which is partially why companies are so inefficient and make so many bad decisions.
That brings up an even bigger problem - companies today hire workers to make money from their labor. In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money, while the front line does all the work and makes very little. This is true even at the big tech firms; software developers might be well paid relative to hotel workers, but they’re paid a pittance compared to the founders and executives. This might speak to why we have no solution yet - free market corporations would tend to reduce concentrations of wealth, which would be terribly disruptive to the current system.
Like I said, I don’t have a solution. But at least now I know what makes the current system so painful, and it gives me some hope that we actually can come up with a better answer. I know I’ll be working harder in the future to manage the downsides of what we have today.
Although I might stress the “well regulated” part more than most modern economists. ↩
The arrival of the smartphone has convinced the world of the value of great software design, but it’s not all good news
The smartphone has reached more people and delivered more value faster than any technology ever seen. Much of the world has had to adapt to this arrival, but software design suffered the greatest reckoning. As the smartphone ascended, developers finally adopted reasonable design principles, realizing that they could not pack every feature ever seen into the smartphone experience. This recognition of the value of design - and especially, minimal design - is a good thing. Mostly.
I could not be happier that the industry finally accepts that there are principles of design, and there is a practice and discipline behind building great software. It’s great that we’re seeing more focused software that does little, but does it very well, rather than the previous age of the GUI when software attempted to own large parts of our lives by doing anything and everything. For a long time, Microsoft Word was used by nearly everyone who had a computer, and their strategy was to ensure no one ever had a reason to choose something else by building every feature anyone might ever need; their toolbar was the canonical example of never saying no.
The smartphone changed all that. Those rows of icons would fill the screen on a phone and leave no room for typing, and of course, no one would use them anyway because of how different the usage patterns are. As people realized they could no longer just throw in the kitchen sink, they began hiring (and listening to!) actual designers, and those designers have been steeped in the culture of Dieter Rams and the minimalism of the Bauhaus movement, which is awesome. Mostly.
Unfortunately, the phone caused everyone to focus on the final design principle of Dieter Rams (“Good design is as little design as possible”), without apparently remembering the nine that came before it, or why they were earlier in his list. I get it; the design constraints in a phone are intense, and it might not be a good idea to minimize everything, but it sure is easy.
The consequence of this mobile brutalism is a new movement building simpleton tools: Software that anyone can use, but no one can become an expert in.
Trello is a great example. I adore Trello. I think it’s great software, and it’s clearly a success by any measure. However, for all that I’ve relied on Trello daily for years, I feel no more an expert than I did just after starting to use it. It’s not because I haven’t tried; it’s because there’s no depth. You can pretty much plumb the product in a couple of days.
That’s fantastic for getting new users up to speed quickly, but deeply frustrating after a couple of weeks. Or months. Or years. Compare that with Vim, which I still use for all of my code editing, yet it’s so complicated that most people don’t even know how to quit it, much less use it. I’m not going to claim its lack of user friendliness is a feature, but I will defend to the death that its complexity is.
Apple’s Notes is the ultimate expression of this trend in text editor form. It’s a fine text editor. I know some people have written huge, impressive programs in similarly simplistic editors like Notepad on Windows. But I personally could not imagine giving up keyboard navigation, selection, text munging, and everything else I do. The fact that complicated work can be done on simplistic tools speaks to the value of having them, but in no way invalidates the need for alternatives. Yet, on the current trends, no one will even be trying to build this software I love because they couldn’t imagine two billion people using it on a smartphone.
I think it’s fair to say that that’s an unfair standard, and even a damaging one.
I miss the rogue-esque exploration that tool mastery entails. It’s not that I want tools to be hard; I want them to be deep. I want to never run out of ways to invest in my tools. I don’t want to have to swap software to get upgrades, I want to upgrade my understanding instead.
But I look around my computer, and everything on it was designed for the “average” user. I was not average as a CEO with 40+ hours of meetings a week while receiving more than 200 emails a day, nor am I average now as someone who spends more time writing than in meetings. There’s no such thing as an average user, so attempting to build for one just makes software that works equally poorly for everyone.
It is a rookie mistake to conflate the basic user who will never plumb the depths of their tools with the expert user who will learn every nook and cranny of your software. It is a mistake to treat the person who sometimes has to solve a problem the same as a person who spends 80% of their time working on that problem.
I don’t want to be an expert in all of my tools - for all that I take thousands of photos a year, I don’t think I’m up for switching to Adobe Lightroom - but for those tools that I spend the most time in, that most differentiate me, I want the opportunity for true expertise. And I’d happily pay for it.
Back in the days when computer screens were tiny, there were plenty of stats that showed that paying for an extra screen would often give people a 10% or more boost in productivity. I know it did that for me. As a business owner, it was trivial to justify that expense. Monitors cost a lot less than 10% of a person’s salary, and don’t need to be replaced every year. Heck, the whole point of the automation company I built was to allow people to focus their efforts on the most valuable work they could do.
Yet, when it comes to software being built and purchased today, to the tools we use on a daily basis, somehow our software ecosystem is failing us. There is no calendar I can buy that makes me 10% better, no email client available that I can spend five years getting better at.
It’s great that people are finally making software that everyone can use, but that’s no excuse to stop making software for specialists, for experts, for people who could get the most advantage from that extra 10%.
Most of our software is confused about what job we’ve hired it for
I’ve really enjoyed playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but my life has been changed more by one of its reviews than by the game itself. The review had a unique view on what made the game so great. It contrasted Zelda to other games - Destiny, for example - saying that while others tended to distribute gameplay across multiple areas (e.g., in Destiny, the radar is a critical part of the game), Zelda really focuses the game into the main screen where you walk, glide, ride, and fight.
The review (which I unfortunately cannot find, because of the quantity of posts online that all use similar words) called this “where the game lives”. I love what this phrase evokes. I absolutely loved the game Borderlands, but I was deeply frightened of ever finding out how much time I spent at its store screen, because item collection and management was such an important part of the game. A lot of its fun was specifically from the collection, rather than the playing, but that meant a large chunk of the game lived in the store, as opposed to out in the world.
Most of our software could use a similar dissection.
Like Destiny and Borderlands (which are both great, and quite similar), the tools we use show a surprising distance between what they help us do and what we’ve hired them for. If I may be permitted to steal from this review, this distance is a sign that our software is confused about where our work lives.
To pick a counter-example, I’m writing this post in Ulysses. People who choose this software laud its simplicity, which makes it easy to focus. What they really mean is, all you can do with it is write. There’s almost no formatting, very little organization, very little anything but writing. The work lives in the writing. (My first draft was written on an ipad, which further simplifies that focus.)
Contrast that with any task or project management tool. My wife and I are in the middle of planning a bunch of camping, and we’re using Trello to organize many of the options. What is Trello’s opinion about where the work lives?
Last time I looked, my wife had three browser windows open, each with about fifteen tabs. She’s also working in RoadTrippers (Pro, natch). To get this work into Trello is a process of copying, pasting, writing copy about why you pasted it, and then using Trello to file it so you can find and manage it later.
In this operation, where does the work live? It’s scattered across maps, calendars, browsers, and applications like RoadTrippers. Does Trello know that? Does it agree? How does its opinion of where the work lives affect its utility? Brief introspection leads us to conclude Trello has no idea where the work lives, and the humans using it are entirely responsible for connecting the two.
Here’s a simple exercise for anyone using a task tracking app: Envision yourself going into that app and just marking everything done, even though you obviously haven’t done the work. It hurts to even consider, doesn’t it? Your brain has absorbed that these tasks are representations of work, and it’s your job to match the representation to the work, because you know the tool won’t do it for you. When you mark something done, of course nothing goes out and does the work; you’re just lying to your software about the state of the world. And it has no idea! This disconnect is what leads to an allergic response to the idea of marking work done in software that is not yet done in the real world.
I’d like to say that Trello was just a bad example, but I think all task tools share this confusion. Bug trackers and project management tools are specialized examples of this, and they obviously have no idea where the work lives. If I’m writing code, all of the work is done in my text editor, in files on disk, and maybe in my testing tools to ensure the work is done and done right. I then go somewhere entirely different to mark the work done. Why? Shouldn’t GitHub know it already? Why do I have to explain it? The answer is because these trackers think tracking is the work, when of course, the work is the work.
It’s no better in personal tools. I just started using Things 3 for my own tasks, nearly all of which end up being expressed in email or calendars, yet Things 3 has no conception of either. It has no idea where my work lives, and expects me to put out all of the effort necessary to connect them.
Speaking of email and calendars, they have their own role in this conversation.
Email is interesting. Everyone hates it, because it’s so important to everyone that we use it constantly, yet this animosity is a result of its utility and criticality. In other words, people hate it because it works so well. But when you’re doing email, what work are you actually doing?
I’m not sure I know. You’re communicating. But usually, you’re communicating about some other kind of work, like a document, a meeting, or some kind of activity that takes place outside of the inbox. A well designed application will remove the need for communication via email - Google Docs is a great example of this. Its sharing and commenting features have allowed many discussions to move from email to where the work is, in the document itself; their addition of suggestions has doubled down on focusing on the work, rather than talking about the work. (Note that this is completely different from Slack, which advertises that it gets rid of email, by which it means it moves the conversation, not that it does a better job of bringing the work into the software.)
Of course, how do you have Google Docs tell you someone commented on your document? Email. :)
What about calendars? Why do calendars exist? As a tool, where does their work live?
I am thankful to have had to try to explain to a friend my position on this, otherwise I’d think it was easy to understand. It’s so counter to how people work today that a relatively obvious truth is impossibly counter-intuitive: calendars are about how I spend my time.
When using a calendar, the work is what you actually do. You, a person, out the in the world. That’s what the calendar is about. Its job is to ensure you do the right things at the right time, with the right people, in the right place. It’s about doing, not documenting, managing, or notifying. You can put something in a calendar and not do it, or do work that’s not in the calendar; any of us would say, obviously, that it’s what you do that matters, not what the calendar says. Merely creating an event has no effect, and thus no value; it only matters if it then affects your behavior. The work lives in what you do. But does your calendar make even the slightest attempt to directly manage how you spend your time? What would that even look like?
To pick a small example, my calendar apps seem to not care what city I’m currently in, or where I’m physically located. Isn’t this weird? The tool whose primary job is to manage where I am physically located makes no attempt to represent or take into account the core fact it is meant to control. It still dumbfounds me.
Yes, they can tell me in real time when I should leave for a meeting based on travel time (as long as travel involves driving, rather than walking down the hall to a conference room), but they can’t say, “Given that on Tuesday you’ll be in Portland, working from home, you should block out travel time to get downtown to lunch and back”. That is, they can alert me in the moment, but they can’t do their core job - reserving time to ensure I’ll be doing the right thing in the future. Because they can’t do this, I have to create those blocks myself, else I’ll find myself choosing between skipping one appointment or being late to another. The whole point of a calendar is to manage time, but in this simple example they fail to ensure I will have space to transition my corporeal existence between physical locations. Shouldn’t that be step one, rather than an exercise left to the human?
I also reserve time for tasks I do alone every day, like working out and writing. I do this primarily to ensure it gets done, rather than because those times are special (although I do get a bit jittery now if I don’t write first thing in the morning). There’s no way to explain to my calendar what I’ve actually blocked that time out for, and thus no way for it to respond to whether I’ve done it or not, even though my computer knows if I’ve done my writing, and my watch knows if I’ve worked out. Wouldn’t it be great to see your calendar dynamically rearranging your day because it noticed you missed your workout?
My calendar is confused about what work I’ve hired it to do, and therefore does not know it needs to look in those places.
We’re so used to the idea that our software represents the work that we seem to have lost hope that it will actually help us do it. Most of the tools we use are entirely disconnected from the work they’re supposed to help us with. Marking something done does not do it, deleting email does not indicate communication has happened, sitting at your computer while your calendar says you’re writing does not produce text. The representations are not the work, yet we forgive our tools for only dealing in representations, not actual work.
I don’t know if that reviewer was right about why Zelda: BoTW is so great. I can’t even imagine what all the software I use would look like if it were built around where my work lived, rather than merely being used to model and manage it.
What I do know is that our software can and should be built to help us do the jobs we’ve hired it for. But because it is confused about why we use it, what we do every day is lower quality, less fun, and just downright confusing.
This also shows just how much opportunity there is to improve the software we use on a daily basis.
I’m a tech founder and recovering SysAdmin. I helped found DevOps and grew up in open source. These days I am convalescing from a decade of physical and mental neglect while running Puppet.
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