Sometime about ten years ago a savvy programmer dropped a meme, and we laughed at it as a whole department — and the meme was called “Hot Air” and dated all the way back to 1969: it was from the newsreel magazine Fitil. Modern effective specialists don’t suffer from that kind of nonsense, so you can write freely — nobody will read it anyway. But we did suffer, and the funniest part was that the boss laughed along with us — because he wasn’t the top boss. The top one wouldn’t laugh at that sort of thing. And he’s wrong not to.
And really, what is one to do: everything is tuned up, it works, if not in the best way, but the boss hasn’t yet attended trainings on robustness and ensuring 99.999 — which means the progrommers have nothing to do. But other trainings come to the rescue: the ones that call for an urgent need to ship new features that will produce a wow effect for the client.
In the end a manager appears with a new vision who says how it’s done right. Programmers get to work, build new features, test hypotheses; if it isn’t confirmed — roll the features back, watch the competitors on the market, work is boiling, everyone feels needed and responsible for the result. The manager absolutely must formulate tasks so that the wow effect happens for the programmers — otherwise the new specialist’s vision is not on trend. So programmers level up new skills, which they ought to be glad about, since they become more in demand on the market while carrying out the will of heavily trained and charged-up managers.
Deadlines, deadlines. A little button that doesn’t fit the new design half-collapses the sales funnel, because this exact style will produce the wow effect for the user who, on Friday evening, having climbed out of his squirrel wheel, decides to enjoy the service and lets a little dough drip onto the tongue — from which, the manager will note by the way, your, programmers’, salary is formed, that is, one might say, life.
Once a shrewd Jewish guy simply said: folks, you’ve done everything and I have no more work for you. Everyone left — that was that. And there’s something honest in that — roughly everything. You worked, got paid, there’s no more work, you scattered. But what if you do that with a million people? That’s already dangerous for the keepers of the dough — what if millions start to see clearly? Fine if they realize that twenty sotkas of land is enough to survive and need nothing: they’ll simply disappear off the radar and that’s it. The dough-holders, however, understand that the craving won’t wither for most people — which means you have to drip them a little dough and create the illusion of bustling activity. Lifted the veil ;)
Alright, alright — you won’t reshape the world, but you still have to understand this. And when fussy and proud colleagues start showing activity, maximize how significant that activity looks for you and don’t fall out of the flow — while not letting the flow, whatever it may be, penetrate deep into yourself.