Shitty morning remover always starts the same way. If the baby cry could not get me out of bed, then the nagging wife will do it with a guarantee. Crazy nine in the morning, after an hour daily-sync-up, and yesterday, as always, done nichrome. I quickly brew coffee and comp. Five minutes before the call, the pull request with the code of enterprise quality weightily stood in line for the build. I'm going to smoke, but on the way the phone screamed - for some reason I installed skype on it, and now work can get to me anywhere. Smoking is postponed, I am getting ready to be indignant that they called me earlier than expected. He pulled on his headphones and accepted the call. Instead of the familiar manager’s girlfriend, some unfamiliar person started calling. "Hello everyone, Anya got sick, I will replace her." Okay, who cares, they could just as well send us a dog as a manager - nothing would change.
The guy quickly convinced me:
- And what, you have no practice of using webcams on dealers?
- No, why the hell are they needed?
- Blah blah blah, research, blah blah, using webcams improves team performance
- Uh, where can there be a connection?
- Blah blah blah, success, overcoming, teamwork, millions of opportunities, blah, Blah !!!
Under a bunch of words there are always hidden very simple things that no one ever says directly. Ideally, he should say: "Without a webcam, I do not believe that you are listening to me." And I have to answer, "I'm not going to listen to you, but I will continue to hide it." And if you dig deeper, then the conversation is very simple:
- I do not want to work.
- I have to.
I have been writing code every day for years and I know very well that if I don’t want to work on something, it will turn out slowly and badly. The business I dealt with introduces KPI, and they show that I often do not work very well. Businesses do not like this; it is beginning to demand better performance. Demand from me, from the lead, from the manager, and from manager to manager too.
Here, each of us begins to contribute to the improvement of indicators. The main manager introduces, for example, webcams on syncaps. An ordinary manager makes us more accurately estimate the tasks, which is why we stop thinking about how to solve the problem - we think about how long we can accurately call the ticket completed. Lead splits tasks into smaller ones. And instead of writing systemic, stable code, I just bullet small, stupid fixes that close tickets. KPI improves, the business writes all these steps to a notebook, hangs it at the entrance to the head office, hires a notebook keeper and submits all development to this artifact.
So numbers are born, which they later prove to me - rituals work. And at this moment, I mentally thank all the gods for not writing medical software. Pieces of shit, which I call my contribution to the project, someday, very soon, will fail. Somewhere, some business will lose some money, someone will be fired, someone will bring new figures to their boss that will prove that their testing department is not working properly, and they will drag their rituals there too. But no one will die, I will get my money, and I will decorate the resume with Agile key case.
This corporate practice only eats the budget, processing it into false reports that show how this practice has improved and accelerated everything. Based on these reports, management gives the Edge more budget, and the Edge gives even more reports. But this system does not have tail tail recursion optimization, the stack space will end, the company will go bankrupt, managers will talk about the crashes that are needed to gain new experience, and they will go to bury the next company.
And I understand them. We live in a world where human life, like, is the main value, but human desires are worthless. You never know what you want - they paid you, work. It's just that the ways that businesses influence employees have evolved. Instead of punishment, they began to break into our unwillingness to work and squeeze out of us as from oranges, results against our will.
I have been encouraged many times, given bonuses, raised my salary, just praised. But this always happened after I closed the ticket before the estimate, or clapped several tasks at once with one PR. That is, they told me that they were satisfied with my work only when I gave them speed.
Such a wild emphasis on speed to the detriment of quality is not a strategy, but a combination of circumstances. Because speed, unlike quality, can be counted without straining the brain. Their stupid business value is just what a project manager can see. As a result, you are faced with a choice: either you are a shit-maker or a worthless worker. Yes, someone has the strength to convince everyone around, to bend their line, but certainly not for most of us.
We are never hired as shit makers, and we are not taught to be ticket conveyors. But you start to work, and they silently hint to you, “come on, Phil, do it faster, with the lowest possible quality, so that it doesn’t fall apart today.”
Sometimes this system crashes, I write good code, and no one notices it - say thank you for not breaking it into a shabby estimate. Then I come for an interview, they ask me to talk about cases where I am proud of myself. I retell the very moments when I did something well, scoring on agile and managers. And they say to me: “Cool !!! We need such people. ” But two days later they write in slack: “I did not understand, you have already spent two days on a task that, in fact, is done in 20 minutes. We need to phone and discuss your progress. ”
I’m tired of explaining to everyone around that there are problems that should not be decomposed, that the “temporary” solution will now give rise to hundreds of the same in the future, and they, in turn, will give rise to even more crutches ... Each such change in the shit project worsens it even more, regardless of qualities of the person who introduced it. For me, these are common truths; for business, I am a dangerous fool who argues with his numbers.
Yes, I can do some crap all my life, but I can build important things, or even stand at the origins of a great project, like some Stollman or Torvalds, so that later successful successes kick me out of it, because I'm an old toxic asshole, which spoils their community. The problem is that all this does not matter. Fools without vision, who sooner or later begin to determine any important process, will ruin everything.
Successful successes manage to turn anything into a faceless, vile pop music. They figured out that programmers like to develop, and came up with the concept of "Drive." They figured out how to distinguish those whom they “drive” from those whom they “do not drive.” Hundreds of patterns were created in order to cram any worthwhile idea into a shiny plastic box and make it as ordinary as possible. They took away all the uniqueness of everything that I would like to do.
They did so, because this is their entire successful essence - there is no uniqueness in them, and they cut it wherever they can see, because they hate and are afraid. As a result, I was offered an industry, creative in its essence, in which there are no options for uniqueness. Everything is very simple - you, Phil, a cog in the mechanism. Do you want to be one? Fine. This is our favorite type of cogs. Here is a lot of money for you, get used to it so that you don’t even think about leaving us and try to do something yourself. Here you have cookies, a cool office, a remote place, a community, candy parties, great coffee, respect, the ability to not do anything at work, whatever you want - just don’t think about saying that our world is not real.
My motivation to do the job is not well influenced by money, team building, corporate spirit or the goals of the company. I work for engineering self-fulfillment - such a feeling when you go into your pull request and think "hell, this is fucking done." When each of your commits improves the code base of the project, and thousands of your ideas work harmoniously with thousands of ideas of your colleagues, forming a coherent system. This is real magic, and, to be honest, this happens to me very, very rarely.
I would rather forget about most of my “contributions”. A ticket to rezolved, grandmother at stake, another week of life lived only so that I could live it. And I turned out to be another "dumbass that worked on the project before ...".
Successful successes, and other bio-garbage, on which my well-being depends, have gone to bomb and will not read to here. Therefore, you can start talking about really important things.
The thing is that I understood - I do not want to work. I mean, absolutely. Not just “I want to relax” or “I need to figure out how to become productive” or “find a business that I like.” I do not want to work at all, absolutely, never and on nothing.
Even if you imagine that I’ll get into the perfect company or open it myself, the problem will not disappear. Artificial motivation is not enough to change this. And I would really like to want to work all the time. But I do not control it. In the end, I force myself.
We are so arranged that when day after day we encounter an unsolvable problem, we come up with a value system in which this problem does not exist. So I'm starting to lie to myself that if I do not write code and do not sit at the computer, this does not mean that I do not work - I kind of think about the task. And if I’m not ready to write code right now, then I don’t have a vision yet, and I don’t need to write code yet. This, of course, is tough self-deception.
Companies take into account the fact that people do not want to work five days a week for eight hours without interruption, and are struggling with this. With the help of money, values, and other corporate tools. This only worsens the situation. I worked as much as possible, people come to me and say - now we pay you more, but you have to work more. But I can not. But I don’t admit it to myself, benefit is benefit, and I agree. And I’m starting to work more, more and worse. Because of this, I become unhappy, I begin to hate the profession and corporations. And then they come and ask to work even more. And I agree again.
You cannot get out of this vicious circle. I can no longer afford to live even one month without receiving at least two hundred pieces. I can not do something in parallel. Even if I don’t do nichrome work all day, my conscience does not allow me to work on something of my own. And most importantly, I'm already starting to believe that, bitch, that’s how it should be. My words at rallies, when I copy the sheep of project managers, laughing homerically to myself, slowly cease to be irony. I have been pretending to be successful for so long that I am slowly becoming one of them.
This is terrible, but only this saves me. Do you know how philosophers proposed to solve Sisyphus’s dilemma - “die right now or live a meaningless life full of suffering, and die anyway”? They said - "become a successful success and push the stone with a smile on your face."
So, guys, smile and push.