Anxiously seeking work/life balance? Give up. You’re bound to fail. You’re bound to fail because you’re framing the problem the wrong way. The phrase itself is a false dichotomy. It’s not work OR life, it’s just life, and work can and should be as much a part of making it rich and fulfilling as all the other aspects of life. Chasing the mistaken idea of work/life balance won’t make you happier.
I don’t mean work should be fulfilling in a “do what you love and the money will follow” kind of way. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it’s realistic to expect everyone will have a job for which they are perfectly suited to as an individual, one that taps into their unique abilities and passions. That would be nice, but probably isn’t realistic. I don’t think work needs to meet this unrealistically high bar in order to be a fulfilling part of your life. Anna Quindlen got the emphasis wrong when she said,
Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. … The second is only part of the first.”
I’m guessing she said this at a graduation ceremony. A small refactoring of her second sentence would fix it up just fine, however. Substitute “a big” for “only”, and I think it’s spot-on.
A first order approximation of work’s significance is that it represents half of your adult life. Once you’re out of childhood and through your education, you get about 88 hours a week after sleeping, eating, and personal hygiene. That means typical work hours for a lot of jobs are pushing 50% of your discretionary time. Thinking about this strictly from a systems perspective, I’d say you’re making the job of living a happy life much more difficult if you write-off work as a potential source of satisfaction, accomplishment, creativity, and fulfillment. That is exactly what the phrase “work/life balance” seems to me to imply, and why I don’t like it.
Read more »“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
—Winston Churchill
Opening a new office in Detroit has me thinking about space a lot lately. Our first space in the East Building was 2000 square feet with a conference room in one corner and a tiny kitchen in the middle. That seemed to work pretty well, so when we bought a building in 2003 we tore out a bunch of interior walls, left the corner conference room, and renovated the kitchen area. Now, nine years later, the space is a lot nicer than when we first moved in (real HVAC, sound absorbing ceiling clouds, built-in bookshelves and marker boards, nicer lighting, cubbies for backpacks, etc) but the decor is still “shabby chic”, and the fundamental layout is the same.
The main reasons our space works so well for us is because it promotes communication and collaboration, it’s flexible, and it supports our team-centric approach to company organization and work. Shopping for office space in Detroit made me more fully appreciate some other aspects that are important about our workspace and our company. Access to natural light and windows that can be opened are both unusual (for software development in West Michigan, anyway) and, I believe, subtly important. We don’t open the windows that often, but when we do, it sure feels great. And we’ll sometimes complain about the glare, but working without electric light on a sunny day feels very personal and cosy. Having only two floors, using stairs, being able to get out of the building in 30 seconds or less, seeing the traffic drive by, knowing what’s going on on the sidewalk, walking to lunch, having friends notice the logo in the window — all these things are what I summarize as attributes of “human scaled” buildings.
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Atomic Object is opening a second office. That’s a big deal for Atomic, as it’s our first expansion beyond Grand Rapids, and a big deal for me, keen as I am on the issues of size, quality and culture. We chose Detroit for this expansion, for reasons I blogged about on Spin. What I’d like to share here is the approach we’re taking to establishing a new office.
Growth without growing
Atomic is good at what it does. Ten years of consistent, organic growth, happy customers, successful projects, regular innovation, and a deep talent pool prove it. We create a lot of value for our clients. Since we can create value and generate wealth, I feel we have a moral obligation to do so. This obligation doesn’t always align with my personal interests, however. I like the way Atomic is, and operates, in the range of 30-35 people.
Read more »Atomic has been interviewing candidates to be the managing partner of a new office we’re opening this summer. The role of managing partner is broad, with the ability to sell our software product development services high on the rather long list of skills. Considering the candidates from this perspective got me thinking about what it takes to be effective in this role. What makes a good technical sales person?
I wrote last summer about a study on the personality traits of successful sales people. Surprisingly, these included modesty, conscientiousness, curiosity, and lack of gregariousness. Doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype, does it?
While I haven’t done a study of my own, I think I can predict some other attributes that would be necessary or at least extremely helpful in selling for a company like Atomic Object.
Read more »Helping entrepreneurs with their startup requires you to begin from a place of surplus, with a reserve of certain capacities not easily measured. The obvious sort of capacity — developer time, designer time, wall space, team space — is the kind we’re perennially short of at Atomic, but which can be readily measured and planned. I realized, in the middle of a recent day-long project kickoff, that engaging with entrepreneurs requires personal reserves of optimism, creativity, persistence, patience and generosity of spirit.
One of the reasons that I believe innovation services firms are so important to our economy is that they are incubators of talent. Whether a firm retains the talent it helps create and therefore makes it available to its clients, or whether the talent migrates to a product company, the economy and our communities benefit.
The structure of innovation services firm demands a lot from people. That in turn tends to attract people who are very serious about their craft and work. Passion, and the ability to focus on craft rather than a single product or career advancement, creates an ideal environment for young people just starting their work life. Because these firms also provide a natural home for more experienced people to practice and refine their craft, the young people have a source of mentorship and teachers.
As everyone who’s recently tried to hire developers or interaction designers knows, there’s an acute talent shortage in the US. This should be worrisome to everyone, given the importance of software to nearly all aspects of the economy, but is especially troubling for firms like Atomic Object that provide innovation services in software product development. And of course it matters greatly to companies seeking to innovate through software. A recent article in Forbes goes so far as to say that we’re seeing the rise of Developeronomics, an economic system based on the critical need for software and the scarcity of development talent.
The market is beginning to react to the disparity between supply and demand with new forms of training and education. Universities still matter, I believe, and I’m sure they are trying to increase their output, but there are a host of creative new attempts to address the shortage. Some are aimed at particular sorts of people, some are designed to address the perceived shortcomings of a computer science degree.
Here are a few of the new programs, all for development, I’ve heard about in the last month. I’m much less familiar with training programs for interaction design, but I guess there must be something brewing there, too.
Codeacademy in Chicago provides 12 weeks of beginner-focused web design and development training. Their target customer seems to be entrepreneurs.
RoleModel Software’s Craftsmanship Academy is an intense 6 month training program, followed by a one year apprenticeship. Ken Auer has been mentoring and training developers for years. It seems that Craftsmanship Academy is a formalization of this work.
The governor of the State of Michigan, Rick Snyder, recently announced that the State will be developing a program to train programmers and piloting it in three cities. The Shifting Code program is run by the Michigan Economic Development Program and is a recognition of the fact that the talent shortage is hurting our economy. No details yet on this one.
Jen Meyers spoke about Girl Develop It at the SCNA conference this year. GDI trains women in programming. Given the paucity of women in university programs, this grass roots, bootstrapped effort is going after the 50% of the population that is nearly lost to the profession.
The software craftsmen at 8th Light have a very strong and well-defined apprentice program. I’m not sure on the details, but I know these guys and know how seriously they take their apprentice program. People accepted into it are very lucky.
Oh; tears. That’s ok. We can keep talking in the meantime.
That’s how I’ve handled tears in the office. Most of my experience comes either from my own strong emotional reactions or when working on hard stuff with our female employees. What’s been common to all the latter situations is a distinct sense of shame or regret I sense from the woman I’m talking with. I didn’t really understand this until I looked into the conventional wisdom on crying in the office and talked with some women. What I’ve discovered made me think more deeply about crying, and made me realize what a double standard exists in the workplace.
Tears indicate strong feelings. So do yelling, swearing, talking loudly, and slamming doors. Strong feelings can be an indicator of passion. At work, tears have always signaled to me that the cryer gives a shit. Since that’s one of Atomic’s value mantras, crying never struck me as particularly bothersome or problematic. It’s certainly true that I’ve been privileged to work with strong, competent, level-headed, caring women, and relatively few of them, but I’ll just go ahead and generalize anyway: in my mind, tears are usually an information radiator for caring.
I just got home from the Software Craftsmanship North America conference. As usual, Obtiva and 8th Light did a great job putting together an excellent event. In only its third year SCNA has grown to nearly 300 attendees, yet not lost its original passion and focus.
I gave a talk on Saturday morning entitled Companies for Craftsmen. I briefly described my idea of the innovation services firm, the common traits of such firms, and how important they are to the economy. I see innovation services firms as a great natural match for craftsmanship. That’s not to say that every innovation services firm on earth is a great place to work, respects craftsmanship and has established a culture that makes it a happy and satisfying place for skilled makers to work, but I see strong natural alignment between these two.
The common cultural elements I’ve found at companies that are good places for craftsmen include:
- Transparency – in their facilities, business practices, customer relationships, and projects; alignment across these dimensions is powerful
- Values – articulated, understood, strong and shared
- Trust – in many layers and directions, between employees, owners, leaders, and clients
- Friendship – a natural consequence of spending time solving problems together with people with whom you share values
There were plenty of interesting questions at the end of my talk, and conversations that continued into the hallway, that told me people related strongly to these common cultural traits of great companies for craftsmen.
One of the things I really enjoy about getting together with other companies like Atomic is the variety I see in business practices. While we share the common cultural traits above, we have a very wide and creative range of solutions to common business problems. I came away from SCNA this year with some new ideas to try, a strong sense of community and our place in it, and some new friends and kindred spirits.
My friend Matt introduced me to Russ Roberts’ EconTalk podcast while we were in Germany in September. At his suggestion I recently listened to an episode that delved into F.A. Hayek’s distinction between “made order” and “emergent order” in human systems. The main thread of discussion in this podcast was differentiating law (emergent order) from legislation (made order). The law/legislation discussion was quite enlightening, but it was the more general point of made/emergent order that really struck a chord with me. I found it particularly insightful as I wrestle with the challenge of ownership and governance at Atomic Object.
