Finding value in work
I'm struggling with the idea of value in work that is performed.
I think this is related to my general dissatisfaction at web development. Sure, there's a lot of stuff going on. Sure, there's even a little money to be made. But why is it valuable? Why does anyone care?
Ultimately, we're just presenting and shuffling textual information. This is valuable to a point. Certainly, I love to be able to punch in any old company's name, get info on their offerings, contact numbers, buy their stuff, etc. That's great.
Sidebar: I'm trying to find some good Bluetooth chips. There are a half-dozen manufacturers that make them. Philips/NXP make some very promising-looking products but don't provide a datasheet on the web, so I can't decide whether they're suitable. I find the number for the local sales office and it turns out to be a poor woman in Accounts who doesn't know why she's getting so many technical calls. She forwards me to reception. Reception says that no, NXP doesn't exist any more, it's some other company. This other company doesn't have a website, but here's the mobile number of a guy that can help me. I call the mobile. Guy doesn't call back. It's like, I will give you money if you answer a few simple questions, and I can't even find the right person to talk to.
But if you start getting meta about it, things get too abstract. News aggregators are the beginning: a site that generates value by presenting content from other sites.
I spoke to a guy at BarCamp Brisbane who had the idea that people could put a sidebar on the side of your screen and it would scroll 'interesting' news items throughout the day. To support this system it would run contextual advertising, of course. Little ads would scroll through with your regular feed.
There are so many things wrong with this idea that I don't even know where to begin.
OK, I'm being overdramatic. There are a small number of things that are just really dumb:
- Constant motion on the screen.
OK, so widespread adoption of usability techniques got sort of forgotten the moment the dot-com boom came around. We've taken a tremendous step back in usability over the last decade, going from "yeah, we're starting to get the hang of this" to "fuck that, what a waste of time! Let's put more ads in!". The idea of usability has been ripped out, thrown on the floor and shat on. It just Does Not Exist any more.
Right, where was I? Constant motion. Highly distracting. Keeping in mind that we generally use computers to perform a task and not just circle-jerk on cam for the amusement of others, unnecessary motion is bad. Don't do it.
- The very idea that you would want to be constantly notified of things that might be interesting is absolute poison to productivity.
Time and time again, people notice that when you turn off IM popups and email popups and mobile phone interrupts and desk phone interrupts and get cranky when people stop tapping you on the shoulder, your productivity goes through the roof. Oddly, nobody notices that that highly productive state is how things naturally should be. All of these interruptions are destroying our ability to get work done. They're now so ubiquitous that we don't even know what it was like before.
This is not just a bad idea. This is such a bad idea that I would pay to have you not install this piece of software on my computer. If this piece of software was compulsory on all new PC's, through some implausible-and-yet-terrifying piece of legislation that says "you gotta use it", I would throw my PC in the bin and build a new one from logic gates. Words cannot express how stupid this idea is.
If you're the guy who had this idea, I'm sorry. It's just a really dumb idea and I didn't want to say anything because everyone else liked it.
And herein lies the problem. Web programming is cool. It's hip and trendy. Everyone wants to be a web coder. But does it achieve anything? Does it better the human race? Are you creating anything new or interesting?
In the vast majority of cases, fuck no. You are probably useless to the human race. If the Earth was going to explode and I had to choose a thousand people to be flown to Mars on a rocketship, I would not take any web coders.
This has become so much clearer to me over the last few weeks. I haven't had any urgent work to do, so I've been exploring a little. I've been loving Armadillo Aerospace's bloggy thing. They're doing new work, highly experimental work. They're creating new techniques and ideas and trying things out. We, the human race, are richer for their work. They are doing Valuable Work.
(side note: most of the people doing interesting blogs were doing so pre-web-2.0, just not calling them blogs. They were online diaries or journals or 'news').
So, if you're going to choose something to work on, I beg of you. Don't decide to work on a website because it's cool. Don't choose to build an iPhone app because it's the new hotness. Work on something with value. Work on something that you have great ideas for. Work on something that actually solves a problem.
Do you have a new idea for how to structure an ORM or web framework? Great! ORMs and web frameworks universally suck.
Want to improve car combustion efficiency? Fantastic. Even if we weren't in the middle of an energy crisis ICE efficiency has benefits in many areas.
Want to make a new Facebook app because lots of people will see it? Please asphyxiate yourself in an oven instead. You'll get just as much press and it's a whole lot less effort.