Nikhil Suresh

I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.

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Since largely escaping the office, my "work" has been very different...Some of this is a real accomplishment, some of this isn't2, and the jury is still out on a fair whack of it.

But the character of the work itself is very, very different. For one thing, I am earning A$90K less per year (i.e, losing that money in opportunity cost) because I refused to take a five-day-a-week gig last year, and currently receive only about A$1.7K a year for my writing, but I value that little bit of money so much more. It just about pays for all my music classes being forty-five minutes instead of thirty minutes, and I savour every second of them because I feel like I've earned them producing something that brings people joy.

In fact, there are all sorts of stark differences. When I went to an office, I'd have days where I'd drag myself out of bed and wish I could get just a little more sleep in, but the neighbor's dog woke me up at 5AM. Now I wake up and think, "Well, I'd love to sleep a bit more, but I get to make a cup of tea and enjoy working in that beautiful moment before the world is fully awake." I frequently force myself not to roll out of bed and start writing within a minute of waking up in a desperate bid to maintain some semblance of not being a Ritalin-addled Silicon Valley "thought leader". This is a relationship with labour that I never expected to experience, and it really is wonderful.

I opt to proceed by redoing the entire database. It takes a while. Then we rework the Angular app (also very painful) to work with the new (correct) data model. The decision to just do the right thing here instead of limping on forever gave us huge speed benefits later on, and I think it's one of my proudest professional accomplishments even though it sounds simple. It was boring, painful, and no one other than my friend would ever appreciate it. I knew that going in, and I still did it.

Incidentally, I was allowed to do so only because management had been so negligent in allowing things to get to this state that they also didn't notice I was getting them out of this state, and thus couldn't insert their asinine opinions on how good practice is actually too slow. We've got to ship.

There seem to be two major clumps of engineers.

There are the engineers who have read 1+ books on a given topic, and sometimes on several topics, and they all come off as extremely competent. These are, for the most part, the people that make up the audience of this blog. Of course, you do not literally need to read a book - a sufficiently high volume of technical blogs or courses are probably the equivalent at varying levels of efficiency - but take it for granted there is some Large Sum of information that someone has studied.

Then there are engineers (and people in every profession) who never try for the entirety of their careers, and this is the majority of every profession. I spoke to a reader who is employed as an extremely high-level engineer...who described the average professional as sleepwalking through their working lives, and this rung true. Of course, they are not literally asleep so something else is going wrong, but the description still seemed apt. There is movement - enough movement to fall down a flight of stairs - but none of the awareness needed to avoid such an outcome.

The most scathing condemnation I have of the majority of people that would call themselves leaders is the fact that... well, most of them don't read, or proudly proclaim that they do most of their study on LinkedIn. I have heard multiple people say the latter without a hint of shame. And with this, I cannot help but question whether they're bad at technology, or bad at everything.

The majority of people that unironically call themselves leaders seem to be fighting a constantly losing rearguard action around what their area of competence actually is. Leadership in the absence of a skill is just aspiring to run a cult of personality. I am assured that while they can't program, they know a lot about running I.T projects. Then all our projects run late, but I am assured they actually know a lot about finance. Then we are unprofitable, but I am assured they know a lot about retaining staff. Then the staff leave, and I have most recently been assured that they are working hard on increasing salaries - that must be the reason everyone is leaving because it couldn't be that they've lost faith in leadership.

A few months ago, David Kellam told me that you've only got principles if you suffer for them sometimes, and a local CTO named Alan Perkins regaled me with a story of walking out into the worst job market of his life after being told to do something illegal. At what point do funny blog rants go from just that, some funny posts, to someone complaining about a self-inflicted situation?

...The next time that someone says I've "spoken truth to power", I hope that I'll be able to look at my tower of responsibilities and the empty pits that used to contain my savings and think "I earned it this time".

It has become exceedingly clear to me that the average company is not a suitable environment for someone that cares about the craft of programming. To make things worse, once your standards are high for yourself, I'm guessing that only the top 1% of companies in terms of workplace culture is not a personal offense. The only options laid out before me are:

1. Have my own business be successful
2. Find a top 1% company in terms of engineering culture
3. Leave the technology space

...It's a given that the tech industry is large - very, very large. I can't even begin to guess at how many jobs there are available for people who can make computers do things for a living. But something that I'm starting to very sincerely believe, and I don't know how it could be otherwise, is that the number of jobs for serious people is probably very, very small.

I will note that a common error with new sabre fencers it that they will attack your blade instead of you because they think that's what fencing is! You can stand totally immobile and they will frequently bounce off your guard anyway.

At most organizations, a third of the room is interested in making a good chair, another third is hell-bent on removing three of the legs to look good on wood-savings with the intention of leaving for a bigger woodworking operation before the whole thing collapses, and the last third have never seen a chair but nonetheless insist on getting a turn with the hammer. Even if all you want to do is craft beautiful code, it seems that the more important skill is to develop the antibodies requires to defend your craftsmanship. I can't do my job if some random guy gets to pick all my fellow carpenters despite the fact they aren't one themselves, and decides how long a chair "should" take to make as if the reality respects human opinions.

I was getting drinks with one of the saner engineer organizations in Melbourne last week...It turns out that both of them actively cultivate cultures where disagreement is viewed as a good thing because that is an indicator that you're moving closer to the truth. And if you've hired adults, disagreement is actually quite pleasant. You learn a lot, it keeps you engaged, your work turns out better, and this in turn leads to more happiness down the line. And yes, you still get to clock out at 5PM.

If you haven't hired adults, then trying to improve anything is like pushing a boulder up a hill. You push, and push, and push, and then finally give up and it rolls back down the hill. It is very tiring and utterly pointless.

What's the point of that story, you may ask? It's that if you piss me off enough, I will literally study the blade while you talk about Agile all day.

...There's a fine line to walk when it comes to being anger-fueled. When it's done with bitterness, you lose your edge and simply do things that are emotionally satisfying but tactically unsound.