On Overachievers

This has been bothering me for the past few weeks.

I recently read this piece on The New York Times: The ‘Busy’ Trap. Go ahead, read it. The content will seat here, waiting. The piece is worth it, I promise.

And then I see videos like this, which in a very eloquent, lyrically beautiful fashion capture what being a man is:

Well, I believe I am trapped in this ‘busy trap’. The software industry is a great place to be in. There is immense growth. There are billions to be made overnight. There is a lot of great engineering and science in place. It’s a cozy and rewarding place to be in. And I love it. But it traps you. Company founders work 18 hours a day, and college life is not that different for tech students. However much we mock them, those wine-drinking nude-model painters surely seem to live a happier life.

How different is it really to work on the industry as an entry level engineer or as a Senior Principal Engineer Career-Incredible Architect Lead (S.P.E.C.I.A.L.)? Yes, responsibility is different, tasks are different, and the pay at big software companies is also substantially different, but the mindset required to get the job done is the same. The daily rush from seeing code compile as an entry level engineer might even be better than just getting the achievement of completing a project as a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. The grease on your hands smells better than the ink on your wrists. The pay for either title can easily support you and your family. And yet, almost everyone you talk to wants to climb high up the ranks. Everyone at the big companies complain that no matter what kind of results they achieve, they will never zucker Berg; he is the founder of the company!

So what then accounts for the insatiable nature of men? Is it in his nature? Maybe some psychologist could chime in with the latest theory on this. Is it the recognition of achievement?

The point is that I know that I am trapped in this feedback loop of overachieving. I am a workaholic. Everyone around me is, and we validate each other. Each one of us makes the others more competitive. We want to eat the world in days, and because of software, we are mostly able to do it. I still do not entirely understand why we do it, though.

It could be a matter of age. Everyone at a young age might swing for the fences, whatever the reason. While a few of them make it to the big leagues, the others settle and are left to enjoy whatever they have after their attempts, be it family or solitude. Recently, an exec in the industry was asked how he balanced work and personal life. His answer made everyone in the public chuckle: “What balance?”. The rumpus caused by a Facebook exec for admitting to leave work at 5 is a perfect example of where the industry stands.

It, then, becomes a matter of wisdom: you have to know when the payoff is not longer paying off so that you can hit the breaks soon enough to start being what Anis thinks a man is, to pursue other things besides career development. Go as fast as you can while you are young and learn to slow down as you get tired or priorities change. It would be awful to become the dad who is considered to be quite successful but is never home.

It could also be I have not found what I want to fully throw myself at.

Let wisdom be on my side.

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If you like this, considering following me on Twitter @aggFTW.

On Sharing

The few who knew what might be learned,
Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show,
And reveal their feelings to the crowd below,
Mankind has always crucified and burned.

Faust to Wagner

On Worthwhile Endeavours*

*It is very difficult to talk in extremes, so I beg for your patience. This post reflects my belief on what it is worthwhile for me and the majority of the population to work on.

If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it freakin’ matter?

Three semesters ago I took a class called Philosophy of Science. This class describes what the definition of science is, studying the texts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Thomas Khun, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, amongst others. For those not versed on their work, these outstanding individuals made brilliant arguments on what it is that science is and how one should conduct the business of science. Their work also relates to the study of how science has been done in historical terms, History of Science.

It was a very entertaining class that gave me ample time to think and reflect on how one should do research, what type of knowledge I value, and how I want to spend my time working. Related to this kind of thought, I recently finished reading ‘Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman’, a compilation of stories on my hero Richard Feynman. His view on life, his passion for physics, and his quest to discover the inherent beauty of nature is something that I find deeply appealing. Inspiring really.

Philosophical discussions make for great drunken passionate conversations. I sometimes gather with friends on Thursday nights for a session of “grababeerandgetmeone pseudo-discussion”, as a great friend of mine likes to call them. We discuss politics, religion, sociology, music, and etcetera. However, it is this discussional nature of philosophy that bothers me.

You see, I do not question its value. It teaches us to question and double-question assumptions, to come up with witty arguments and even wittier rebutals. It helps us discover –construct?– our deepest values, and it lets us justify whatever behavior we want to get away with. It is fun. It is interesting. It is necessary. But it is not practical. What I mean is that it does not yield concrete products or services. It does not build spaceships, electric vehicles, or electronic payment platforms (Elon Musk, seriously, WTF?). Its seductive discourse makes brilliant individuals argue for millenia, without arriving to any definitive answer.

Because of its unquestionable benefits, philosophy should be taught in 1 or 2 classes in every University, regardless of major, but it should not become a major career path. Not for most people, at least. I have talked to some engineering or science students who after taking a class in philosophy become so enamored with it that they spend months sitting in chairs massaging their beards. It is certainly not time ‘wasted’, but it is not the best use of it.

The same logic applies to most types of knowledge. Discussions on religion, the pitfalls of democracy, human nature, and etcetera, build beliefs and cement ways of thinking, but should not become the subject of one’s work. They should shape how we do work, but after getting acquinted with the different views on these topics, one should spend very little time thinking of them, in hopes that with enough people doing this, we all focus in more worthwhile endeavours.

In short, learn philosophy, love it, discuss it, and get it over with. Instead, build, ship, and deliver. Philosophy and related areas let us dream; dreams lead to doing, and doing leads to progress. The key step, though, is doing.

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If you like this, considering following me on Twitter @aggFTW.

On Personal Branding

I am in the middle of my second internship at Microsoft and wanted to write this first post on some things that I have learned or realized recently.

It turns out, much to the shock of an engineer like me, that out there in the real world sometimes hard numbers are not used as metrics! I write about Microsoft as an example because it is what I know, but I am sure that it is the case for a lot of big and small companies out there.

Our security group, for example, secures applications that come out of Microsoft. The analysts are top notch, and I can tell you that the process has been designed and re-designed to make it of value to our customers, both internal and external ones. Now, this question of value really interested me: how are we making sure that we add it to the applications that go through our program?

Surely, I thought, there must be sensors along the way that statistically tell us how much more or less successful are attacks against the applications we secure than to the applications we do not. Well, I went around asking the team about these metrics, and to my surprise, I found out that we do not have the numbers, for a variety of reasons.

You see, the practice of making software secure, or ‘trustworthy’ as Microsoft would say, has everything to do with how we measure risk and how we desire to cope with it. The combination of impact, probability of attack, and efficacy of response is what determines the inherent risk of an application, according to our team. These three values are inherently difficult to quantify –how would you measure the probability of an attack?–, so experts got together and determined a score for different attributes of an application. That is all warm and fuzzy for trying to decide what to do when we receive a new application, but it does not tell us what the value of our actions is.

How, then, are our customers coming back and are all of our engineers at ease? The answer, it turns out, is that we humans are really bad at calculating risk. We fear much from small risks and avoid any thought of big ones; all the cognitive heuristics and biases that we use, coupled with our risk averse personalities, make us crave for reassurance that our actions are as risk free as possible. That is where trustworthy computing groups come in; that is where we satisfy that craving. It does not matter that we do not know for sure if our actions are adding value or not; our customers do not care, at least not that much. Management certainly does care, it is only logical that we do make things better by checking software than by not checking it, but our customers value more the feeling we provide, the familiarity of the experience, the consistency of the service, the distribution of responsibility, and the visibility of our process.

Anyway, I digress. I will probably write more about securing software some other time, but I did want to arrive to that part about the metrics that the industry values. Of them, visibility is very important, as I found out on my own and as it has been discussed recently because of the stack ranking used at Microsoft. In the tech industry, visibility is king. In the end, visibility is what Jeff Atwood suggested, as many others have, to become awesome: create things and do it in public!

In recent days I contacted Tess Rinearson because a friend of mine told me she had met her over the weekend. I had read some of her posts thanks to Hacker News, and had not realized that she was also interning at Microsoft. I went to her blog, read some posts, and took a look at her resume. I was impressed to see everything she has accomplished for her (slightly) young(er) age.

I suggested that we should meet for lunch and talk about personal branding, something that I think she is good at, even if she does not realize it. I liked her answer. The conversation was something like:

Me: I basically wanted to talk about career dev, personal branding and tech in general 🙂 I like your blog posts.

Tess: Thanks. I honestly haven’t done a ton of that, at least not intentionally. I’m a freshman >.> so mostly I just have been writing and thinking.

She has just been writing and thinking. Well, that is a helluva an answer. I had been thinking of starting a blog for a while, carefully selecting my topics, deciding on what I would be writing in advance. I had it all wrong. Your persona is not something you design and showcase. Sure, you can try to engineer it, but you will only be cheating other people and possibly making a fool of yourself in the future. No, your persona is something that shows every day and that is inherent to all the things that interest you. You do not have to choose what you write about; you do not even have to think too much about what you work on. If your brand is interesting and worthwhile, it will show and other people will enjoy it and find value in it.

So here. This is my first post and this is how I have chosen to showcase it. I had been doing a lot of thinking, but not a lot of writing. I’ll follow Tess’s simple response and hope that the conversation I have with all of you is worthwhile and that it makes for a coherent picture of who I am.

With that said, I leave for lunch. Blue cheese burger anyone?

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If you like this, considering following me on Twitter @aggFTW.