The Good Work

If I don't have the money to afford the food, shelter, clothing that I need, then any work is good work. Once I have enough to survive, though, be it through savings, investments, a lottery, or by any other means, good work takes on an entirely new meaning. Earning money becomes more important than just getting it. The purpose of what I do takes on more relevance. In this state of mind, what work used to be satisfying, pleasurable even, seems stifling. I begin to question the value of what I am doing to the customer, and whether I deserve the money I am getting in my job.

If I get the sense that I am building products that are sold largely by marketing, branding, or any such means other than the intrinsic value of the offering, I feel less motivated to produce the best. After all, whether or not someone buys my product is almost independent of what I create, and in many cases, the success of my company bears no correlation to the effort I put in, so why should I break my back on it? In software in particular, people buy stuff with either the zombied faith in pre-sales messages of what it'll do for them, or with the resigned acceptance that the product will be well short of what they need, that bugs will pop up at anytime, and they have to deal with it anyway. It may even give many IT department experts and consultants/system integrators a sense of job security that they have so much more work to patch the issues in new technology.

As a producer of technology, I wonder what difference my software has made in the lives of my customer. And anything that comes to mind is debatable. The main things I have gained from computer technology after spending thousands of dollars every year for the last decade or two, are ability to talk better(email), find better(web search) and broadcast better(web publishing). And I see very little work today that is even trying to make any of these experiences better, though many may claim to do so, which is the selling part. The value of process automation in my life is debatable, since in many cases, automation cuts down the flexibility that was available through human interaction (how many times have you found the options presented on an online commerce site or automated support responses on phone inadequate?). You may disagree on this one, but I am sure everyone has had the question "Why the !@#$%^ don't they __________?" while trying to do something on a website or on a phone system.

And even these experiences are still in their infancy when it comes to the user's experience.

For instance, all popular email clients provide a default view that has 20-50 messages listed on the screen when you log in. No one can really act on all of these messages in any meaningful way, except maybe to delete them. Then why are all these emails in my face?

And we all know about search. How many redundant sites, ads, search query variations do we have to go through to find anything new, even in the best of search tools?

In terms of publishing myself, how much do I need to spend in time, money and effort, to get people to see my site today? How many bells and whistles do I need to add over my main message (which is often as simple as "I sell great ice cream. Everyone come and buy from me!") to keep people on my site long enough?

And above all this, how useful has technology been to improve the productivity of users? My ideal experience in being productive would be to have a simple tool that I feed in everything relevant - my tasks, my email, links from the web, my appointments, my rules/preferences, etc. and the tool in turn, at any time tells me what I need to do next. In spite of a gazillion tools I have invested in, I don't still have that ideal experience. Is anyone doing anything about that?
I am not claiming that these are easy problems to solve. However, these things are what I would consider valuable to me. Most of my tech spending, usually in hindsight, is a huge waste and a victim of very creative marketing, branding and selling.

So, what then, is good work? The farmer, who lovingly ploughs his land, sows, nourishes and harvests his grain, with pride on the fruit of his effort and the assurance that the crop will feed someone is good work. An artist who creates his work passionately is doing good work.

What would be the equivalent of the proud farmer's work in the software industry? It would be to attempt to solve real customer problems, and to enhance the value of technology to the customers, as verified by the customer after using the product, and not the media or the salesmen of the product company.

So good work, in summary, is creating something that customers value after using it, and creative work, which gives pleasure irrespective of how well it is received.

Even if I do good work and put it up, it is possible that people don't accept it enough to try it. This is due to the sad skepticism with which we view everything today. The solution lies in the buying experience and the revenue model, coming up next.

Company or human - choose!

A company is a lot like any other animal. Granted, it doesnt have body odor or the kind of libido that humans and skunks share, but it is possible to mistake a company for a man if you see it walk past you on the street, if it could. Check out the overwhelming similarities:

1. Both are lumps of smaller units that work collectively for its good (employees work for the company, and organs->tissues->cells for the human body).
   
2. In both cases, the individual units are of lesser importance than the whole.
3. Both companies and humans have a legal status as an entity with rights, responsibilities, etc.
4. Both companies and humans can be happy or sad or angry or heartbroken or shy or outspoken, in a truistic sense.
5. Both grow and survive, and are both usually interested in growing and surviving.
6. Both die, eventually, or if some religious theories are to be accepted, are reborn in other forms.
   

Now, 'intelligent' design notwithstanding, Darwinian natural selection dictates that companies will compete with humans and other beings for survival and dominance. Let's see how they are doing.

1. Companies set rules for the humans they deal with, and the humans accept or are forced to accept them.
   
1. Companies spend infinite resources on lawyers refining their employee agreements, and employees usually sign them.
   
2. Companies define what they provide to their customers, and in many cases, customers pay first and use later.
   
1. Consider, for example, the activity of browsing through a music store. You are hit by aisles and aisles of music CDs that you buy either based on trust in the singer, or on how well the CD cover has been designed(which incidentally is done in most cases by someone completely different from the artist, and even if the artist did it herself, they may well be better designers than musicians).
2. In most large grocery stores, notice how many common commodity items (dairy, eggs, meat) are stocked far away from the entrance, forcing you to walk through labyrinths of enticing goods from chocolates to magazines with shiny covers. Again, the company (the grocer) decides what you should see. How many times have you walked into a store to buy a can of milk and landed up buying ten other things alongside?
   
3. Companies decide what employees can do with their time, resources and brains, whereas an individual employee has almost no say on how the company sells its resources.
4. It is widely believed that a person can decide what to do with her money. Let us take computers and software, as an example. Since the arrival of a computer in the common man's home, about twenty five years ago, many people routinely spend some money every year on technology - hardware upgrades, software, operating system upgrades, application upgrades, etc..
   A reasonable question to ask may be, why would we want to upgrade our software when software from a decade ago still works fine for my needs? But I usually have no choice, since some essential software in its current generation forces us to upgrade. For example, older browsers wont support the newer web pages, and newer browsers wont run on older operating systems. So, we have to upgrade, spending time, money, and a lot of frustration through the upgrade process, to get something that does exactly what we were able to do before. But let us set aside the question of upgrades and ask ourselves, what value has technology really brought to our lives today? In my life, there are only three things that technology has changed that has been of significant value to me:
   
1. reach and speed of communication (email, etc.) ,
   
2. ability to find previously unfindable information instantly (search engines, etc.) and
   
3. opportunity to express myself (blogs, web pages, etc.). And all these things have been available for a long time now, and they are available for free as well on the internet. Then why have I been spending the money I have spent every year on upgrading technology? I believe, in my case, that I have been suckered by top notch marketing, to spend my money where I would much rather not have spent it.
5. The trend described above is not exclusive to the software industry. People get less and less of value in return for more and more of expense in almost every field. Frequency of upgrading everything in our lives has increased. Every dollar that a family has (or will have, in terms of creditworthiness) is constantly stalked by various companies to bite off the largest piece with the least cost to the company (both in producing the good and in supporting it after it is delivered).

So, the corporation is clearly winning, and the individual human (defined as a human with individual choice of his actions) is fast losing out.

Why is it that corporations are winning? It seems obvious isnt it? Humans are constrained by various factors to hold back their basal instincts towards other people. Society, culture, tradition, the law, all work together to restrain a person to live, but restrain almost every impulse that comes his way. And this is required to avoid complete anarchy in society as well. However, the companies are allowed to roam wilder and are not as constrained in what they are allowed to do.

1. A company can "kill" other companies - that is called competitive advantage, even if it is done by means like unleashing an archaic patent on a successful product.
2. A company can fire employees, even tens of thousands overnight, but there is no system that allows an individual the power to do the same with tens of thousands of companies.
3. A company can spam the user through every medium possible - mail, email, phone calls, everything goes - and not much is done to stop it. But a company can prosecute a solicitor for trespassing if they have a 2 point font notice on their glass door which says they can.
   
4. A company can even kill human beings, as long as they have the money to get away with it. Case in point: cigarette companies. If a person grows marijuana in his home garden and sells it to a friend, he can be jailed for it, but a cigarette company can make something at least as harmful and sell it, killing thousands every year, and get away with it, just because they can.

Maybe some day, not too far in the future, there will only be companies and employees,. The paychecks are automatically distributed between other companies and reconciled between them as intercompany transactions at the end of the day. People smile triumphantly at television and computer screens, fully convinced they are getting more than their money's worth. What a deal!