My Personal Creed of Employment

After taking a sabbatical, a time I was very fortunate to spend with my family and children, I was preparing to return to work. As I walked in the park a day before I wrote these thoughts, wanting to capture the perspective I had gained during the recent months. This is a collection of thoughts I had at the time, I wrote them as I walked.

These thoughts are incomplete and lacking context; they do not apply to everyone, but they do apply to me and I reread them when I become frustrated at work and they help me. They are inspired by the good and bad times I have had in my career. They have become my own personal creed of employment, describing the attitude and practices I wish to follow. I hope some of them might help you. Please interpret them charitably, some come from dark places.

• Stay calm. Remember, you can’t become worse off than when you started.

• Cultivate a professional mindset. You are above the company, descending to help them. Do the work required, do honest work, help them achieve their goals, but don’t become mentally trapped.

• Negotiate. Books can help with this. There are thousands of good books to help develop “soft skills”, read them and use them.

• It’s my moral obligation to update my resume and get it out there at the first signs of trouble. Don’t stew over bad or unfair situations, improve my situation, find better work.

• Keep private life private.

• Don’t think adversarially. Be professional.

• Remember the feelings of others. See from their perspective.

• When leaving a company, others will feel slightly resentful toward you, and you will feel excited because of new opportunities. Do not be too jovial in leaving or it will damage the memories others have of you. Empathize with them, tell them they will be missed, show concern for them and let them see you working hard on their behalf one last time.

• Don’t half-work just to put in the hours. It’s better to give full effort half the day and then be done. Cultivating an ass-in-seat mentality is harmful to myself. When needed, give full effort all day, exceed expectations and demand compensation.

• Consider doing personal projects early, before work. Give my best self to myself, to my own projects.

• Do the bullshit. It may not make sense, it may not be right, but the resulting respect and power may be worth it. Do the silly certifications, compete for silly rewards, participate, have a good attitude.

• Communicate with my adversaries. Help them, help them on their turf. If a contest arises, best them on their turf. They don’t care if I best them on my own turf.

• User interface matters. For most users the interface is the application.

• None are above me, all are coworkers towards the company goals. It is not my place to decide all things, it is not my place to decide what I work on, or where I would be most valuable.

• Don’t seek personal satisfaction through company projects. This leads to frustration. Be professional, take satisfaction in helping the company achieve its own goals, not my own. Personal projects are for personal satisfaction.

• Do not complain at lunch with coworkers. Do not speak about your boss as though they are an adversary. Help your boss, they have struggles too, they need your help. Communicate with them, ask them how to help.

• Appreciate marketing. It seems like bullshit, but it’s bullshit I don’t want to have to do. I’m glad someone else is doing it, I’m sincerely grateful for their efforts.

• Don’t insist on 100% code coverage. Do make a culture of testing available as a tool to developers. If a developer wants to write a test to ensure their code works, make sure they have a place to put the test, and that the test is run regularly.

• Thinking is work. (also)

• Don’t rewrite. Go to the problems.

• Never burn a bridge just for personal satisfaction. Avoid burning bridges, but don’t let fear of burning bridges stop you from doing the right thing. Especially as you get older, you only have to maintain a good reputation until retirement age, not forever.

• It’s your moral right to push for high compensation. Maybe even your moral obligation. Negotiating for a high wage will help others do the same. Keep your resume up to date.

• All problems should be viewed through the lens of “How does this hinder the companies goals?” With this view, people will want to hear your problems, but they may not choose to solve the problem the same way you would. Management wants to know the code sucks, but they might not choose to rewrite everything. That’s their choice.

• Sometimes you might think you could rewrite and manage the product better yourself. Maybe. But then you’d be responsible for everything: marketing, sales, customer support, front-end, back-end, you’d have to do all that yourself. It’s not glamorous to go it alone. Besides, there’s probably better things to work on than rewriting whatever cruddy app you maintain at your day job.

• Just because people don’t think of things in the most abstract, general, or elegant way possible doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Sometimes you need to give people something that matches their way of thinking.

• Don’t sneak out at the end of the day and hope nobody asks you about hours worked. Focus, do good work quickly, sell your work, make sure people know your important contributions, and then face the “hours worked” conversation with courage and good negotiating skills. Leave no doubt that you’re a valuable member of the team.

• If you believe something may lead to problems, but nobody wants to change, watch for the problems to occur and when they do you can propose the change again. If no problems occur, then maybe it wasn’t really a problem.

• Be kind. There’s rarely anything you can do that is more important than being kind.

• The purpose and objective of work is to collect a paycheck by doing honest but comfortable work, enjoy the time and effort spent with your team, and not work too much overtime.