Work is a Mess
It’s tempting when reading an engineering job description or scrolling through a sleek startup’s website to imagine life as a web developer as a fast-paced, smooth, and modern line of work. You’ll crank out code like the tech wunderkind you always knew you were. Your design team will impressed by your elegant design decisions. The projects will be delivered on time with 110% test coverage. Your customers will be blown away with your MVP that scales effortlessly. You’ll soon get promoted and work in a modern workspace surrounded by dozens of succulents, Edison bulbs and midcentury modern furniture. You’ll get a special trophy for adhering to the SOLID principles and watch your stars on github shoot up after one of your npm packages blows up. All your ducks are in a row, exactly as you coded it to be.
In reality, it’s quite possible your project might be delivered a bit late. The feature you’re excited about demoing? Surprise! The main stakeholder in that feature has PTO so everyone on the call has no idea what they’re looking at. Have 100% test coverage? That is fantastic, but nobody’s going to build a monument in your honor. That fancy office space? It’s actually really hard to focus there and, though the furniture looks nice, your back is killing you. That assumption your team made while working on version 1.0? It will definitely come back to haunt you on v11.0.
Michael Carrol in his book Awake at Work shares with us a helpful slogan: “Work is a Mess”. Quite simply, our day-to-day is never going to go 100% as planned. Pretending that it will only sets us up for disappointment. If instead we accept this truth, we can step around our instinctual, unhelpful patterns of “How could this happen?! Who did this?! Why does this always happen to me?!” and instead view these surprises as opportunities instead.
“Work is a mess” encourages us to first recognize that we can never have a completely neat relationship with our livelihood. Treating work’s messiness as if it were a mistake or liability only creates further unnecessary distress and resentment. By developing the attitude that work is a mess, we can learn to relax and be curious about the surprises and interruptions. By engaging the messiness of work directly — appreciating both the advantages and disadvantages — we become fully equipped to engage such events in all their variations.”
-Michael Carroll
Is your project going to be late? That is unfortunate and is never a fun position to be in. It is very hard to predict the future, after all. Chances are, it won’t be the last project you work on that goes beyond a deadline. The main stakeholder absent from your demo? Sounds like a good opportunity to engage or re-engage with other folks in the meeting. Have 100% test coverage? Accept you’re probably not going to get a pat on the head, but know that you’ll be able to sleep better at night and that your successor will know very quickly when they break the build. Did you make an incorrect assumption months or years ago? Congratulations, welcome to the tech industry. Try and learn what you can from the situation and develop a plan to fix it.
Is “Work is a Mess” an excuse to throw up our hands and give up on trying to fix bottlenecks, pay off tech debt and avoid iterating on inefficient workflows and processes? Absolutely not. Worshipping at the altar of nihilism won’t help anyone and, like expecting perfection, will only end up serving you disappointment and distress. It can, however, be an invitation to take a breath, acknowledge that things often won’t go as planned, and take it one surprise at a time.
Part of a series of reflections on Michael Carroll’s Awake at Work and their relevance to life as a software engineer. Contemplating these slogans has certainly imbued my day-to-day with new meaning, context and purpose. Perhaps it will do the same for you. Buy the book here.
