My friend, Fayza, recently wrote about her perception of a common dilemma in the field of law, her chosen profession: that no one is happy.  Although my own field, engineering, is not universally analogous, I do draw some similarities where it comes to the particular species of engineer populating Silicon Valley.  Our work is consuming.  It’s something that defines us.  That’s why we either paid big bucks to get an elite degree, or we moved away from our friends and family to be part of a “revolution.”   Fayza’s final observation is that everywhere she looks in her field, the distinguished practitioner sees her true calling elsewhere.

In the comments, I suggest that happiness is perhaps, primarily a function of expectation.  It’s a notion that’s obvious, but has the potential to be devastatingly disruptive.  That’s why I think it’s commonly ignored, because taken at face value, it could unravel our very manner of living.  Especially for those of us who are smart, and *especially* for those of us who are driven.  If you want to be consistently happy, consistently exceed your expectations.

Let’s disect a few ways in which we can bring truth to that statement.  The first is that the lower your expectations are, the easier it will be to exceed them.  Second, the proposition relies on the fact that you can perceive your expectations with clarity and also judge how far above or below that mark you’ve actually landed.  People inherently employ a range of techniques to satisfy one of these two conditions, and most do it without giving the process an ounce of thought.  

In days past, the average person was often constrained to the same life their parents had lived.  The expectation was obvious and casually met.  In the civilized world though, we’ve removed that constraint, or at least given it a run for its money, if you’ll pardon the turn.

And more common, especially among the smart and successful, is the ability to lie to yourself.  When employed properly, you can formulate just the right mental sound bite to prove that you’ve met an expectation.  You can also rewrite history!  Just alter what it was you were expecting in the first place to something that fits the outcome. 

Now, let’s suppose your hatred for dishonesty rivals only your love of the American Dream.  Now you’re in a pickle, ’cause you’ve got high-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes, and you’ll probably only meet half of ‘em.  That’s a ticket for the bipolar express.  

Question: How does one dial back their expectations without being fundamentally disappointed?

The art of happiness is perhaps the art of estimation.  Let’s assume that there are several classes of expectation, who range independently from the amount of intelligence or will power you can apply to the problem.  

For example: I expect to be a lawyer.

This expectation is not for the faint of heart.  It’s gonna require lots of money and lots of studying and probably a fair amount of neglect of other important things in your life.  But it’s achievable, given only your determination.

I expect to be a successful lawyer.

This is a little trickier, and will depend largely on how you define success.  Is it a discrete salary that does it?  Is it a certain number of court victories?  If so, you have a fighting chance with the right amount of determination.  Is it to be respected by other top lawyers in your field?  Hold on right there.

I expect to be challenged, excited, or even satisfied.

Notice that these are all passive expectations.  I find them to be commonplace and, because they aren’t things you can really control, utterly dangerous.  This is where I think my middle school gifted program gave me (and many others) the wrong idea.  Nobody’s going to sit me down in a bean bag chair and entertain my inner-most thoughts–businesses look for skill sets, not philosophers.  If you’re not challenged or excited on your own: tough sh**, they’ll find somebody who is.  This is not to say there’s never a match between employer and employee, but I assert that the system is simply not designed to support sustainable matches for evolving human beings.  

Moreover, even the most well-meaning of these organizations is not really looking out for your interest, like a good network of friends or family would.  They’re looking to be opportunistic.  If you fit into a certain category of person who is thrilled by an amazing benefits package, you’ll do well at XBM.  If being around the top minds in your field is exciting to you, try Yoogle.  If you love, love, love solving puzzles, you’ll do wonderful at Zicrosoft!

I don’t know how it works for y’all, but I’m a complex mixture of all these things, and I usually don’t fit the archetype in their job listings.  Despite all that, my parents have never told me I might be better off with another family.  My friends have never said, come back after you get more experience in scalable relationship architectures (at least to my face).  

And when they don’t, they exceed my expectations.  I was loved, respected, and I’m satisfied.  The hope is that once you can discern a healthy expectation from an unhealthy one, you’ll be able to take out the trash without missing the reek.  Careful, though: it’s sometimes easy to miss those compound expectations.  So when you say, I expect to move to San Francisco and get a job, was that really *all* you expected?

Question: how does one get those moments in their career?

Short answer: you don’t.  My contention is that the systems are so fundamentally different that it’s very rare to get treated well for very long in any job.  I’m not talking about shallow things like benefits or salary.  I’m talking about addressing the needs of folks who take a hard stance on becoming better people, in directions that often provide no additional value to the core of your business.  There is simply no incentive.

Lately, companies have begun to claim that they are good at addressing this problem.  Some are getting away with it in ways that may be more damaging than we think: by creating a caricature class of employee, turning her into a rockstar, and homogenizing her dreams.  Once that uniformity is achieved, the company can afford to seem selfless–but it’s manufactured.  No matter how you slice it, business is business, and humans, at their very best, are different.  

So when you *are* challenged or respected or honored or loved or encouraged at your job, be also surprised at the surplus.  Your expectations have been exceeded, even though you were happy simply to have them met.  You should know her well, the fulfillment of your healthy expectation, treating both her surplus and deficit as if an impostor.

P.S. - In the church of my youth, we called these surpluses, blessings.  It’s sad to see many important religious concepts overlooked, for fear of its caricature.

From jobba.TheHutt’s google code project page:

A simple, reliable, high availability, distributed job queue/worker system, written in Python.
 

Author’s note: the project was largely based on bradfitz’s project, TheSchwartz, hence the questionable taste in nomenclature :)

An Impractical Ideal is No Ideal

The following doesn’t constitute a plan of action, but it informs an approach to developing a plan.  Any plan of action conceived in the real world requires give-and-take–that multiple parties contribute distinct requirements toward a common end.  

Having passion is necessary, but insufficient to develop a successful plan.  In fact, passionate, unyielding voices shouting at each other too often slow down the process of making concrete steps in a positive direction.  With the best of intentions then, a passionate actor contributes more to the delay of good than to the enactment of her ideal.

A rational actor, on the other hand, achieves a balance between her ideal and her perception of group consensus, such that the greatest concrete good is enacted on the least evil schedule.  This concept merits further exploration, but let’s assume for now that an impractical ideal is the same as no ideal at all.  Also, a multi-billion dollar center for world peace on Alcatraz island is not a “concrete good.” 

Marketing is a Mating Call

Marketing is at the fore of your relationship with a customer.  It’s what you say on your first date.  It’s the first impression you give.  Most of us have spent time investing in a relationship that didn’t work out.  Maybe it was an young crush, a frustrating job, or scientology.

When we’re young, we’re able to justify the time spent in these dead-end roles: I was learning to love myself; or, I found out I work better in smaller teams; or, hey, at least I know what it’s like to go through deprogramming.

But, as we grow more experienced in each of these types of relationships, we enter a wider market of competitors where relationships are more liquid.  This means we tolerate less of what we perceive to be “abnormal” behavior, because each time we make a choice to try something new, our average cost-per-switch goes down.

Website visitors are in a special kind of relationship market, where the natural switching cost is almost zero.  This is an issue for vendors, because we are unable to sustain ourselves without a devoted (read exponentially expanding) group of visitors.  The issue can be addressed by artificially raising the switching cost, a.k.a. vendor lock-in, or by a form of vigilant competition where marketing and product development are so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.

Since I presume you agree that an artificially raised switching cost is as evil as it sounds, and that the collective wisdom of your audience will sniff that fact out in no time, let’s focus on marketing’s role in the kind of businesses that work on the web:

Successful Relationships

Since marketing is a mating call, the sum of your interactions with your visitors is a relationship.  The cycle of a successful relationship, given the characteristics of our beloved hyper-efficient market, is something like this: seek, speak, act, listen, and repeat.  

Marketing is traditionally concerned with the seeking and speaking, but my contention is that impotent marketing, which is not part of the product development cycle, can take down a franchise faster than you can say “hipsters dating hipsters.”

Truth is the Grease

Marketing is a swagger.  It must be proud, confident, and bold, but it must not be deluded.  When the message you convey over-promises, it pipes efficiency straight out of the seek, speak, act, and listen process.  So your current feature set doesn’t match up with the set of features about which you’d like to brag.  This is a difficulty, but it need not compromise the integrity of your message, because…

An honest message is enhanced by the promise of commitment.  That is, your message should communicate that your attitude toward your companion will be unfaltering in the face of an unknowable future.  When you absolutely need to make a promise that you can’t yet make honestly, it’s time to update the product.  Otherwise the promise is not worth making, as it drains too much long-term efficiency from your creation process.

Diligence is the Engine

So you can’t promise everything to everyone without losing too much efficiency to the overhead of dishonesty.  In fact, the larger the potential market, the harder it is to make appealing promises.  The key to making honest, appealing promises then, is to narrow your audience into smaller affinity groups, prioritizing those groups who will bring the most value to an ongoing relationship.

As your target audience grows, so do the variety of promises you must make to remain interesting, but with smaller groups, a marketer may be confident that the nature of her input to the product development cycle remains manageable.  

Surprisingly, there are large groups of folks who feel their base needs are unmet.  If you meet them where they are at, they will be grateful and devoted.  And we all know that’s the best kind of relationship for creating a long, prosperous future.

Postscript: Evil is in the DNA

Because of the history of business, the history of humanity, and a bunch of other hand-wavy factors, marketing is one of the first places for the deep-seated, hereditary evil of business to crown its ugly head.  Fortunately, as the market becomes more efficient, as it has on the web, evil becomes less profitable.  There’s nothing magical at work here, it is simply that folks despise being disrespected.  When a new level of respect becomes a market option, morality becomes a differentiator.

It’s been almost two years now since I wrote a post listing the factors that I consider to be the most effective measures of a meaningful, contented engagement with one’s existence.  Operating at capacity, these metrics ravel into a sort of divine sonata–a pied melody–whose ability to compel and comfort goes unmatched.  It sure makes sense, then, to make some projections when you’ve got a big decision coming up.  And that’s what I did back in June of 2006.  I decided to leave my frustrating, corporate job and join a startup, leading to my eventual move out here to San Francisco.

Paul Graham is Wrong

Since then, I’ve managed to not lose all faith in the utopian scenes of entrepreneurship painted by the influential figures in my community.  It’d be hard for me to refute the central point Paul Graham makes when he implies that employees at large companies are working under sub-human conditions.

Unfortunately, Paul consistently restricts the set of affirming traits to just a few of those on my list, with all its shortcomings.  In so doing, he damages the integrity of his point.  While my life’s recipe contains the lot of Paul’s prescribed ingredients, his essays and the populist reaction which amplifies them, would leave me wondering why I’m not writhing in a state of radiant bliss.

Onward and Upward

And so begins an in-depth examination of the set of traits I find essential to a satisfying tousle with my own humanity.  By exploring each trait individually, I hope to achieve the following: unearth the sometimes subtle affections that make the trait worthy of appearing on the list, gauge my own standing as it relates to my discoveries, and to reclaim my voice.  The mob mentality of nerdy navel-gazers can be an effective muffling force, but I must reassert my axiom assigning nerdiness to just one (important) aspect of greatness and not its whole.

You don’t belong there, you’re too smart and effective;  you don’t belong here, you’re not a workaholic.

Be true to yourself; your job is a lifestyle.

Your creativity is your differentiator; optimize your productivity.

Have the courage to question establishment; the blogosphere has answered that question.

Startups are becoming a commodity; “startups don’t need ‘good’ workers… [they] need ‘great’ workers.”

“The lucky … work to make that luck;” working to make luck is not luck at all, and working without luck is just working.

Upon what brilliant solution will our fair blogosphere settle?  Will it coddle those slackers?  They with an irresponsible longing to engage in a satisfying, meaningful toussle with life?  Will it vindicate the workaholics, whose bloodlust for achievement compares only to their unflinching dedication?  Will “balance” collapse under this omnidirectional perversion, becoming the enemy of all?

The extent to which greatness demands monomania is the extent to which our system is broken, and only greatness can fix that.  Passion is not just for the luck-makers, lest passion too be perverted.

Meanwhile, Jarrett’s trio renders the only anecdote that smiles on my company: “There’s a place for us.”  We who are smart and true, creative and courageous; will we allow ourselves to be called only good?  Surely we are great, because what we stand for is great.

Come to-day, and come to-morrow,
I do love you both together!
I love to mark sad faces in fair weather;
And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder;
Fair and foul I love together.

[It’s] this act of contrasting needs. We are pulled in many directions. And we are pulled by our need to individuate, we are pulled by our need to get along in the world, we are pulled by the need to self-sustain, to find comfort in closeness. But to grow our capacity to succeed in any of these, we are also asked to open. We are also asked to meet intimacy in a brave and fearless way.

And jumping in to the void, as this experience may be felt in our early years, is frightening. And the question of our 30s and 40s is: how far afield have we gone acting out our fear of intimacy, acting out our fear of what life has really called us to do, which is to sit still in the truth of our lives so all of these needs may line up in the same person?

Let’s join our gentleman, Don Quixote, shall we? He has recently gone insane. He’s decided to become the kind of hero about whom he’s been feverishly reading: a chivalric knight. There’s one small problem; the helmet he’s found has no visor.

His [Don Quixote] ingenuity, however, enabled him to remedy this, and he proceeded to fashion out of cardboard a kind of half-helmet, which when attached to the morion, gave the appearance of a whole one. True, when he went to see if it was strong enough to withstand a good slashing blow, he was somewhat disappointed; for when he drew his sword and gave it a couple of thrusts, he succeeded only in undoing a whole week’s labour. The ease with which he had hewed it to bits disturbed him no little, and he decided to make it over. This time he placed a few strips of iron on the inside, and then, convinced that it was strong enough, refrained from putting it to any further test; instead, he adopted it then and there as the finest helmet ever made.

Logicians know it’s often easier to disprove by contradictory demonstration than it is to prove by some rigor. Accordingly, I know less of what I am, and more of what I am not. I am not agnostic, because I have more faith. I am not simply Christian, due in part to the forthcoming reasons.

Using these anchors as a basis for spiritual triangulation, I approach this description of a theist. I think today, there are more “great difficulties” than existed in Voltaire’s day. Because I’ve spent more time in the Christian world, proper, I resolve many of my own dissonances with Christian-centric counter-examples. There are, however, great difficulties that continue to confound me. I will discuss them openly with any interested party and seek to resolve them using the same mechanisms I’ve used to this day.

As is so often the case, the world requires a shallow label, and our own requirements come from within–that sense of curiosity or purpose or belonging. Here is Voltaire’s description of a theist, which resonates strongly with me. Derived independently of his direct influence, my own ideas parallel many of his, which are well voiced and resonant.

THE theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a Supreme Being as good as He is powerful, who has formed all beings with extension, vegetating, sentient and reflecting; who perpetuates their species, who punishes crimes without cruelty, and rewards virtuous actions with kindness.The theist does not know how God punishes, how he protects, how he pardons, for he is not reckless enough to flatter himself that he knows how God acts, but he knows that God acts and that He is just. Difficulties against Providence do not shake him in his faith, because they are merely great difficulties, and not proofs. He submits to this Providence, although he perceives but a few effects and a few signs of this Providence: and, judging of the things he does not see by the things he sees, he considers that this Providence reaches all places and all centuries.

Reconciled in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not embrace any of the sects, all of which contradict each other; his religion is the most ancient and the most widespread; for the simple worship of a God has preceded all the systems of the world. He speaks a language that all peoples understand, while they do not understand one another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all wise men as his brethren. He believes that religion does not consist either in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, or in vain display, but in worship and justice. The doing of good, there is his service; being submissive to God, there is his doctrine. The Mahometan cries to him–” Have a care if you do not make the pilgrimage to Mecca !” ” Woe unto you,” says a Recollet, ” if you do not make a journey to Notre-Dame de Lorette! “He laughs at Lorette and at Mecca; but he succours the needy and defends the oppressed.

On my honour I promise that—

1. I will do my duty to God and the King.
2. I will do my best to help others, whatever it costs me.
3. I know the scout law, and will obey it.

Aside from the fact that this little ditty smells like a nasty case of infinite tail recursion, how do these three steps relate to developers? As the inimitable Dr. House says, “here, please hold my metaphor.”

First, we have a duty to our users. Ipso Facto, Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Ad Hominem. When it comes to the code we write, our users serve as God and King. Every poorly scoped data structure, every unfortunate inheritance chain, it’s all for the user. If it’s not, you tempt a fate I wish upon no man: irrelevance.

This duty requires that our code be useful. That it serve some end in making a feature, and finally a product, that our users want to use. This is not a binary choice we have to make–each module or feature lies somewhere on a continuum of uselessness. And let’s face it, I’m talking mainly to nerds. We love challenges and ownership, and all too often we love them to the point that our exuberance overshadows the most important factor in our decision to write that next line of code.

Second, fellow scouts, and this rule follows from the first, we must write our code to be pleasing to our compatriots. We’re all working together to achieve #1. To do that as efficiently as possible, we must set aside our stunning individuality and write code that makes sense for others to read and manipulate. Why? This is simple. This is the power of a team. This is why organizations are formed. Because together, we can be something greater than we can individually.

This is not to say that you should double check every API call you make with each of your team members before you make it. Or even that you should spend twice as long writing documentation as you have written code, that will coincidentally never be read. Rather, you should:

• Balance terseness with comprehensibility.
• Write with refactoring in mind.
• Minimize namespace clutter. If your language allows you to code descriptively, then for god’s sake, do it.
• Be careful about scope. The localer, the better. Tighten that contract up and make refactoring exponentially easier.
• Just-in-time abstraction. Don’t create one unless you need to, but as soon as you need to, do.
• Don’t hide shortcomings. Getting creative with whitespace and extra long lines of code is deceptive. If you find yourself wanting to do this, it’s usually time for a better abstraction.
• Self deprecating comments don’t make up for incorrect code. Your fellow developers understand there are always ways to make things better. Get it to the point where you don’t need to mention the magnitude of the approaching hack, before you commit.

Of course there are *always* exceptions to the rule, and you’re called upon to make those judgment calls time and time again. But you’ll do fine if you remember the first two Code Scout rules:

1. I will do my duty to the users.
2. I will do my best to make my code a living document for multiple authors, no matter what it costs me.

And the final Code Scout rule:

3. return arguments.callee.apply(this, arguments);