Impress Myself

Posture is important it has been lauded, practiced, and enforced for hundreds or thousands of years by everyone from the scientific literature and spiritual practitioners to your grandmother.  Here is an entry from the Journal of Physiology http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1403108/ if you need more proof just google the “effects of posture”.

Our posture affects our blood pressure, mood, concentration, and even the way we breath. As I was slouching in my chair the other day, I came to an obvious realization. The way I sit and the posture I hold while working, has a large impact on my work. So I started to take an aggressive stance. I started to sit tall with both feet firmly planted on the ground. I straightened my back and I leaned in to my work.

I noticed the results immediately. I became more focused, more energized, more productive, and found myself solving problems more easily.

If you are a desk sitter and sit in front of a computer like you’re watching a movie, I encourage you take on an aggressive stance and show that mongoDB who’s boss.

In general the tech industry has been working hard to maintain unsustainable business models —in order to “compete”— and in response the industry has felt the need to employ ludicrous hiring models. Because businesses are often starved for resources it is difficult for them to justify hiring the staff they need at the skill level they need, even though many times it’s more cost effective.

To solve the problem of underfunding and to justify every dime spent, they often hire young unskilled professionals that will work ridiculous hours at low pay. These young people don’t have many responsibilities and can spend years doing an endless grind.

But what everyone young product team wants is a unicorn. The unicorn has spent years honing their craft, they have learned technology stacks in and out, they know how to scale quickly, and how to develop core functionality on a dime. They can carry a project and out produce everyone team member combined.

So companies work very hard to find and attract these talented unicorns. The companies offer free lunches, great locations, window seats, dry cleaning, and any manner of hip alternative benefits to gain those employees. But they don’t offer pay that is much higher, they demand ridiculous hours, and they don’t offer many viable long term incentives. The majority of the benefits they use to pull in candidates are cheap and short term. Which worked for a long time, because developers needed employers.

Things have changed.

The last several years has a seen a boon in cheap scalable resources for small teams and individual businesses. It is now easier than it has ever been to start your own business. Businesses trying to pull in a unicorn are no longer competing with each other, they are also competing with a persons ability to employ themselves. It’s getting harder and harder to find expert employees willing to take on awful working conditions for marginally higher wages.

How is the technology industry responding to new employment horizons for it’s best employees?

    By hiring hoards of recruiters to comb the planet for the perfect candidate that’s also willing to work for peanuts.

    By asking the government to allow more foreign technology workers into the country.

    By asking the educational system to produce better cheaper employees.

Employers want the world to solve their problems for them, but it won’t work. It’s just a band aid. All of these options will eventually lead right were we are now.

Technology companies are asking their employees —especially the unicorns/rockstars— for long hours, big commitments, constant availability, and all for a relatively low long term reward. Why would an amazing developer pour out their heart and soul for a company, when they could start their own.

Employers have to start providing proper incentives to attract great employees. This might mean companies can no longer under hire and over work employees. This might mean companies need to use sustainable business models.

If you want the best employees the world has to offer you need to offer them something they can’t find anywhere else. Free lunches and foosball are no longer good enough.

You need to offer the incentives they can’t generate themselves, incentives that have real long term benefits. Gold plated health care, actual work/life balance, generous amounts of vacation time, great retirement packages, and actual competitive pay. Get creative, I’m sure there are tons of things a well established employer can offer developers that they can’t find anywhere else.

There isn’t a shortage of great technology workers, there is a shortage of employers willing to compete for them.

Let’s address my personal failings 

The decision to leave the social web had nothing to do with any person or group of people on the entire internet. It has have everything to do with a very flawed person — myself — and what I feel is a flawed idea.

I can’t handle feedback. Good feedback, bad feedback, it doesn’t matter I am addicted to feedback. The desire to be noticed makes me do some terribly stupid things. This is a problem that many people have.

There are people on every social network that endlessly bait for responses by posting pictures, wonderful things, trashy things, and making a scene in general. I’d like to think I’m not among the worst offenders but who knows, it’s hard to spot our own flaws. I do know that I have wasted a ton of time trying to get noticed on the internet. 

Now on to the reasons I left social media

Making Friends

I have made a handful of casual acquaintances online, some people that I might call ‘internet’ friends. The majority of people I “know” online would literally not notice if I died. Maybe 5 or 10 would, but that’s out of hundreds maybe thousands of people that I have an online connection to. 

That sucks. 

If I would have put the same time and effort into making friends in real life, I would have far more friends and much better connections with them. The physical and emotional distance of the internet and social networks makes friendships progress incredibly slowly. The internet is a terrible way to make friends. At least it is for me. I also suspect that it has kept me from making friends in the real world, due to my lack of attention and lack of effort.

Much of the time I have been spending on social, I will be diverting to real life relationships. A text message or photo sent to just one person only meant for them is so much more personal than a broadcast to anyone who is listening. It says I sent this to you and I think it’s important that you see this, because I think you are important. It’s exclusivity.

I wish every social thing I ever made was sent to only person, and that it had been a small piece of building a good relationship with them.

Growing An Audience

Don’t grow an audience for a thing that may exist one day. It’s so incredibly stupid. I was so incredibly stupid to do that. If someone starts following you because they like your tweets, then they will be angry when you stop tweeting or start posting tweets about your project. Can you blame them? They showed up for one thing and are now getting something else.

Build something, and if the audience wants tweets about it they will let you know. Some things need a twitter account others don’t. No matter what, a vibrant twitter account will be the result of a thing made really well and not the result of trying to con people into looking at the thing you made.

Attention Attention Attention

Not only have I spent a ton of time trying to get followers, fans, friends, likes, favorites, retweets, reposts, and reblogs; I have been distracted by it. 

I have missed some nice moments in life because I was trying to read tweets and keep up with what my “friends” were doing online. I have sacrificed a ton of my attention away from life and more worthwhile endeavors to be absorbed in the social. I regret it deeply. Social media has a magic spell on me. I will waste tons of timing reading stuff that I don’t care about, written by people I don’t know, and not remember any of it. The time I spend on social networks provides me with very little value. 

I could be spending that time on anything else. Primarily I do the creative side of things when I’m not doing anything. So when I’m waiting in line at the bank I write articles in my head, I work out programming problems, I design solutions, I imagine riffs. That is when I’m not looking at social media. I’ve missed a lot of great opportunities to imagine new things.

The distraction reaches further, attention is an allusive beast. The important things, the things you know you should pay attention to, aren’t the things you pay attention to. The loud things, scary things, the satisfying things, the immediately gratifying things, those are the things we pay attention to.

Not only is it hard to pay attention to the “right” things in life, it’s hard to figure out what’s important. We all know paying attention to our kids is more important than Facebook —even if we don’t do that all the time—, but is reading more important than Facebook, Is sitting to concentrate on a blog post more important than working on the yard?

 After obvious higher level decision making, we have subconscious attention. Did I remember to pay the bills, feed the dog, mop the floors, or do whatever I’m responsible for. Attention is horribly difficult and the easiest way to make it better is too remove as much complexity from the equation as you can.

For me, social media is not worth it’s cost to my attention.

What’s The Incentive

My falling out with social media has led me to one important question, how do the incentives of the social media platforms effect my personal relationships? It’s kind of a strange idea, but important. We are taking much of our interaction with other people and putting it into a platform. It has tools, rules, restrictions, ads, designs, all of these elements that can be used to manipulate it’s users.  

A fine example is that when we get a new notification it pops up on our phone. Everyone likes that feeling, it’s satisfying, it’s a tiny little reward. If Facebook manipulates the way it shows content to give things with the phrase “hip hop” more prominence  and that gets more likes and you get more notifications. You may end up talking about hip hop a lot more.

That’s a fairly benign and easy to understand example, but it illustrates the fact that we are moving a lot of our personal communication to places that have great influence over us and the way we communicate, and therefore social networks have the potential to greatly influence our interpersonal relationships. This worries me. 

I can easily imagine —both intentional and unintentional— scenarios were a social network does serious harm to our relationships. A businesses number one goal is to earn money, and many businesses will gladly hurt it’s customer to make a dime. (A company that rhymes with lacebook comes to mind.)

I’m even starting to worry that the very idea of a social network is a bad idea. Anytime you get a business or platform in the middle of your personal relationships you are at the whims of battling incentives. As a person you want to improve and strengthen your relationships and as a business they want to make money. 

The idea will cause people to say I’m some kind of hipster technology hater and will also point out that there is always something between us and our relationships. Ma bell, the postal service, and literal noise. All real world platforms do not have the incentive to change the way you communicate, their incentive is to make sure your communication happens.

So mail, telephone, text, they are all delivery mechanisms. Facebook, twitter, Google plus, all social networks, are all social platforms that make money with ads ( therefore page views ) and all kinds of crazy data mining activities. Instead of making sure that your communication gets delivered effectively, social networks are making sure you keep coming back. That’s scary.

The Other Part

The other part of the platform I don’t like also revolves around a personal flaw. When I am on a social network I personally feel the need to edit and contain my speech in ways that I don’t during personal communication.

I have the need to create a persona either an enthused technologist or a fun loving family man. Those are both relevant parts of who I am, but not the whole of me. In a conversation with a friend all of this stuff comes up, overlaps, and gets worked in. I don’t feel the need to censor out entire chunks of my life when having normal direct communication with friends. There is something about broadcasting to lots of people, and possibly the whole world, that makes me very careful about what I say and how I say it.

The problem with partitioning your personal life on social networks is that it creates a thin shallow picture of who you are and you get the same hollow picture of everyone you know. Which in turn creates thin hollow relationships.

I hear you, why don’t have more in depth conversations with these people in other ways? Well what are we going to talk about, I already told them everything on Facebook, and I am too busy to talk them because I’m on social media all the time.

As I mentioned previously this is really the story of a flawed individual who just can’t handle social media  maybe none of this applies to you. In the future, I may understand how to use social networks better and how to get more benefit without the negative side effects.

Until that happens, I’m going to concentrate on making things I like making, enjoying my family, participating at church and in the community, building good real life interpersonal relationships, and paying attention to things that matter.

For one reason or another, I was already in the midst of reevaluating my digital life and then Google announced readers shutdown, which led down the rabbit hole of rss. What am I doing with rss and is it working?

I’m entertained

I wanted to be entertained. I wasn’t. I just kept reading because I was caught in the treadmill of making sure I didn’t miss anything. After a couple days of missing things, I’m starting to be OK with missing stuff. I don’t need to know everything that happened. I don’t need to know John Gruber’s every feeling. I’m fine reading one or two great articles a day, and thinking thoughtfully about them.That is far more entertaining than sifting through hundreds of pointless articles, to not miss something.

I’m Informed

I wanted to stay up to do date. When I evaluated how well I was staying up to date with the tech industry and associated issues, and I found a surprising answer. There is nothing to stay up to date with. There is an endless treadmill of speculation, ideas, theories, and business antics, but there is rarely anything important going on. Missing all of my feeds for a day or a week or forever is unlikely to affect my ability to know whats going on. 

I could replace all the time I spent on rss everyday and all the work of managing my feeds, by simply looking at a couple popular sites every two or three days. I won’t miss anything important by not following the minutiae of everyday tech goings on. 

The vast majority of the things published in my rss feeds were just filler. Content creators trying to produce content, and willing to write about anything that could get page views. There was very little that was personally helpful or that provided any long term information that might help shape my thoughts and perspectives on technology.

I doing communities

I just wanted to be a part of something. I wasn’t. No one was interested in my vast knowledge of the tech industry and no was impressed by my beta accounts to the latest services. Burying myself in online reading made me less a part of everything. Talking with people makes me more a part of a community, helping out, volunteering, making stuff, makes me a part of a community. Not sitting alone meticulously sorting through rss feeds.

Fin

It’s really a shame what has happened in the blogging world. RSS feeds have become a tool to manipulate readers into generating more page views. While smart thoughtful bloggers have felt the need to fill up their blogs with junk( filler ) to provide value or stay current. I don’t want to follow someone who posts ten items a day. I want to follow someone who posts 2-3 really thoughtful articles each week or each month.

RSS feeds aren’t going away, but they are going to be more and more obscure. It’s not because of some great service popping up or going away. It’s because rss has been perverted and raped so badly that it will never recover. It’s been used to pump tons of garbage to users, with previews, ads, and a bunch of other stupid crap. 

Wherever a person has something thoughtful to say and people who don’t want to miss it, rss will be there. Unfortunately, that’s a small number of people on both sides.  

I recently deleted all of my rss feeds and I’m going to start over by subscribing to thoughtful authors who produce a few nice things a week or month. 

I’m not saying you should, but I think the alternative is sucking on a fire hose filled with raw sewage.