The Vacuum: A Monitory Statement

The political stuff has turned monochromatic. Yes, it's all deadly, but it's also become deadly boring, so perhaps you'll excuse me for punctuating it with a rant about a long-time irritation of mine.

We begin with a few quotes from an unforgivably ingenuous article about "work-life balance:"

In theory, the concept of “work-life balance” seems to make sense – splitting your days and weeks between a collaborative and connected working life while also enjoying personal activities and leisure time with friends, family, pursuing hobbies, exercise or just watching TV....

But what if everything you thought you knew about work-life balance was a myth? Alexander Kjerulf, founder of Woohoo, and an international thought leader and author on topics relating to happiness at work, says he believes “work-life balance” as it's traditionally defined doesn't actually exist anymore....

"The modern concept of work-life balance is focused on offering employees the flexibility to work anywhere, anytime -- leaving fewer fixed working hours and more project-driven or service-level deadlines and opportunities for ongoing streams of innovation and communication between team members," [managing partner of AgreeYa Solutions Ajay] Kaul says.

The emergence of cloud-based IT infrastructure and the prevalence of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies now allows employees to work from home or remotely and seamlessly continue collaborative efforts with colleagues and team leaders, Kaul says.

"With companies of all sizes becoming more dynamic, flexible and accommodating in their use of enterprise social collaboration tools and solutions and BYOD, the 'mobility effect' will continue to cause an overlap of the workforce’s professional and personal lives," Kaul says.

Soak yourself in that for a minute or two, Gentle Reader. Let it distill itself within you. Let its essence s-l-o-o-o-o-w-l-y pervade your brain. What do you think these "thought leaders" are really trying to say -- without saying it, of course?

In the future they're steering toward, you'll be "on the clock" 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Oh, they'd protest to the skies that that's nowhere near what they mean. They're offering you freedom! You could choose your own hours, decide for yourself when to work and when to play, without being tied to the Procrustean bed of a standard work day and work week. Do you feel like going on a wine-tasting this Tuesday instead of dealing with the pile of crap in the in-box? Or perhaps you'd rather keep watching the latest episode of 24 than answer your insistently ringing company-issued "emergencies-only" cell phone? No problem! Our future will be all about flexibility: your unchallenged right to do as you damned well please at any instant of the day!

Not a chance, Gentle Reader. As you'd discover the very first time you declined to answer that cell phone while straining to relieve yourself of a particularly stubborn turd.

---

The "mobile worker / flexible workday" canard that article promotes isn't a boon; it's a trap. It would allow management to view your entire existence as being at their disposal. They would regard your in-office hours as being written in the stars, theirs by divine right, with no need to appreciate you for them, nor for the contributions to the company you make during them. Their invocations of your time and attention when you're not in the office would become the balance sheet upon which you'd really be evaluated. Your entire career would depend upon being immediately and unconditionally available for whatever they might choose to ask of you.

I've been there. It brought about the one and only occasion on which I've offered violence to a supervisor. (Believe me, he had it coming and a lot worse.)

The hell of it is, this isn't an entirely new idea. Rather, it's the culmination of a long trend. Telecommuting, which does provide certain advantages to the employee to whom it's available, is just the least part of the puzzle.

The seed idea is that of the salaried / exempt or "white collar" corporate employee.

About half of all office workers in these United States are salaried / exempt. That means:

• Your salary is fixed at a certain amount until management decides to review and adjust it;
• As an exempt employee, it's up to your employer whether to pay you for your overtime;
• As an exempt employee, you need not be paid an elevated rate for overtime or "off-shift" work.

In my field, software engineering, overtime pay is a rare exception. Inasmuch as most software engineers voluntarily work more than the statutory 40 hours per week, it would seem that their employers are getting the better of the bargain. Sometimes that actually is the case. However, the incentives are bad both for management and for the engineering labor force. Management comes to rely upon the availability of overtime at no cost, while the engineer steadily comes to resent management's assumption that no hour of his life belongs exclusively to him.

Adding overtime pay to the equation doesn't improve matters. Suddenly quite a lot of salaried / exempt employees will absolutely "need" that overtime to complete their "urgent" projects before their deadlines. Management will, of course, be dismayed at the increment to its costs, and will fix a limit to the practice -- which will elicit a slowdown with which any union member would be quite familiar.

Absent a rigid insistence on a 40-hour work week that neither side has the right to violate, there is no solution. The "mobile worker / flexible workday" notion, however benignly it might have begun, is an attempt to rupture that bargain irreparably.

---

It can be hard to insist on a rigid work week, especially when times are tough and there are more willing and able workers than there are jobs. That doesn't reduce the importance of the bargain one iota.

About twenty years ago, I went on an interview at a company about which I knew little. (No, I didn't need a job at the time; it was simply my policy not to turn down an interview, especially one to which I'd been invited without my solicitation.) The interviewer was a typical middle manager who hadn't been hands-on for some years, if ever. He spoke glowingly (of course) about the company's plans and prospects, and fetchingly (of course) about the position he had in mind for me. It took him longer than usual to reach the point I'd been anticipating, which was (of course) that "our engineers are available to our customers at a moment's notice, no matter the day or the time."

"Oh!" I said. "I didn't know this was a field service position." I stood. "In that case, I'm not interested, but thanks for thinking of me."

He became alarmed. (Probably never had a really big fish spit out the hook before.) "No, please don't misunderstand me! You'd be running our entire research and development effort. It's just that our market window is so tight that all of us must be immediately responsive to any contingency."

I smiled. "That's a pity. It means that you're more likely than not to miss that window. If [the company's] fortunes are that precarious, I'm only available on a consulting basis. I charge $250 for every hour or part of an hour."

His look of chagrin was classic. "But this is a permanent position, and the career possibilities..."

"Sorry," I said. "If you intend to pay me a salary, I intend to work 40 hours a week for it." I extended my hand, and he took it numbly. "From what you've said I'm really not the man you want, but thanks for thinking of me."

This is a lot easier if you're financially secure and confident of your value. Nevertheless, it's at the core of my understanding of an employment relationship:

An agreement to sell one's labor is the same as an agreement to sell anything else: the good to be delivered and the payment for it must both be well defined.

That definition becomes impossible if your "workday" can be altered arbitrarily by your management and your "workplace" is wherever you happen to be at the moment. Your whole life -- possibly the lives of your spouse and children as well -- will be sucked into the vacuum that results.

Be tough about it. Give an honest day's work for your day's pay, but nothing more. Take it from someone who's looked into the abyss. It's not a pretty sight.

Wizards Of The Cube Farm: A Tale Of Two Opposed Dynamics

By way of the esteemed Charles Hill we have some commentary on developments in engineering that have displeased many:

Once upon a time, software was written by people who knew what they were doing, like Mel and his descendants. They were generally solitary, socially awkward fellows with strong awareness of TSR gaming. They were hugely effective at doing things like getting an Atari 2600 to run Pac-Man or writing operating system kernels that never crashed, but they weren’t terribly manageable and they could be real pricks when you got in their way. I once worked with a fellow who had been at the company in question for twenty-three years and had personally written a nontrivial percentage of the nine million lines of code that, when compiled, became our primary product. He was un-fire-able and everybody knew it. There were things that only he knew.

This kind of situation might work out well for designing bridges or building guitars (not that Paul Reed Smith appears to miss Joe Knaggs all that much, to use an inside-baseball example) but it’s hell on your average dipshit thirty-five-year-old middle manager, who has effectively zero leverage on the wizard in the basement. Therefore, a movement started in the software business about fifteen years ago to ensure that no more wizards were ever created. It works like this: Instead of hiring five guys who really know their job at seventy bucks an hour each, you hire a team of fifty drooling morons at seven bucks an hour each. You make them program in pairs, with one typing and the other once watching him type (yes! This is a real thing! It’s called “extreme programming”!) or you use a piece of software to give them each a tiny bit of the big project.

This is what you get from a management perspective: fifty reports who are all pathetically grateful for the work instead of five arrogant wizards, the ability to fire anybody you like at any time without consequence, the ability to demand outrageous work hours and/or conditions, (I was just told that a major American corporation is introducing “bench seating” for its programmers, to save space) and a product that nominally fulfills the spec. This is what you get from a user perspective: the kind of crapware that requires updates twice a week to fix bugs introduced with the previous updates. Remember the days when you could buy software that simply worked, on a floppy disk or cartridge, with no updates required? Those were the wizards at work. Today, you get diverse teams of interchangeable, agile, open-office, skill-compatible resources that produce steaming piles of garbage.

And indeed, it is so. But the travails of the hapless, helpless users are well known; what deserves a closer look is the pair of dynamics that has produced today's state of affairs, which is not...quite...as "wizard-free" as Jack Baruth, the author of the above, might think.

It's a subject on which I can speak with a certain authority.

---

One powerful reason I've resisted being elevated above my current position as a hands-on or "front line" supervisor is that management above my level is so easy as to be boring. Those who occupy those levels, of course, would disagree, but that's in the nature of the personalities one finds in management. In a healthy company, a manager of any level has only four responsibilities:

• He must apportion his section's work load rationally among his subordinates;
• He must find out what they need to get their work done and get it for them;
• He must hold them to their promises;
• He must protect them from interference from above.

This extremely simple breakdown of the responsibilities of a manager applies to any non-hands-on manager or supervisor at any company. Yet the typical manager reacts to that breakdown much as a vampire would react to a crucifix: "No, no! My job is much more complex and difficult than that. Why do you suppose I have a private office, wood furniture, and this schedule of meetings with other very important people?"

It's natural. We all want to believe we're important: if possible, more important than anyone else in the company. But it's not so. Managers are far easier to replace than line engineers. The generality of managerial skills makes managers of a particular level almost interchangeable, if individual energy and "connections" are omitted from consideration.

Line engineers are a completely different subject. We're not interchangeable; some of us are far more intelligent and insightful than others. Also, the longer an engineer labors at his trade, the more expertise he acquires. His exposure grants him a working knowledge of what can be done, what can't be done, and what shouldn't be done. That's not something one can acquire from a textbook; it takes actual conversance with the development, debugging, and maintenance of the sorts of systems in his demesne.

But the typical manager is determined to "manage," by which he really means to control what's going on beneath him. It's the core of his self-image: the guy whose laying-on-of-hands is the final, irreplaceable blessing that renders the product "good."

That puts manager Smith directly at odds with senior engineer Jones. Jones resents being told how to do his job, or with what tools and under what conditions. Jones can usually resist Smith's interference effectively, because Smith seldom has the slightest idea what Jones is really doing, or why. If Jones should remain in his trade for sufficiently long, then despite whatever Smith might do, Jones will become an element critical to any engineering shop: the "Old Man In The Back."

---

In A Shortage Of Engineers, Robert Grossbach's wonderfully funny and poignant novel about the travails of Zack Zaremba, a young engineer at a typical middle-of-the-road company, Zack soon encounters the notation OMITB, which is stippled liberally over several important circuit designs. It takes a while for him to decode that acronym, which stands for "Old Man In The Back:" an extremely senior engineer who has become the go-to guy for severely challenging technical problems his colleagues cannot solve. He's so important that he's protected from excess attention by his colleagues. Management never dares to intrude upon him. Without him, the company might not be able to function at all.

A gifted engineer who remains in love with his trade long enough, and who resists the seductions of management, can become an Old Man In The Back: a senior figure who knows how, why, and why not when less gifted or less well traveled technologists are at a loss. Moreover, his persistence at his work will engage management in a dynamic it cannot resist, for it is prior and superior to all else: the need to get the work done. He will become indispensable by management's own decision to keep him at it.

This happens in every company that employs technological expertise. It gives rise to a culture of whispered legends about persons who, visible or not, are regarded as "above the rest," to be approached only at great need. It produces half-concealed avenues to product fruition, seldom openly discussed, with which management dare not interfere. And it produces resentment by management that this wizard, this unmanageable maverick, should find it so easy to flout corporate policy without penalty.

But he who is "above the rest," who has been deemed a "wizard," is inherently hostile to control by management. It would pollute the thing he's put at the core of his soul, which he loves above all else: his work. And management, if it possesses a shred of good sense, will bend to the realities and leave him alone.

Even so, the two opposed dynamics -- the manager's drive to control "his" section versus the objective need to get the work done -- will remain in operation. The people involved, both the managers and the engineers, are simply like that. And whoever has the upper hand at any given time will determine whether the company releases functional and reliable products, or, in Jack Baruth's words, " steaming piles of garbage."