And yet the world is still beautiful

One of my favorite film scenes is in a movie called Castaway from 2000. The scene begins with focus on a glass of scotch, cradled by Tom Hanks’ character as he recounts in front of a fire about his experiences being lost on a desert island. Woefully, as the rain beats staccato and the wind blows, Tom Hanks talks about his lowest point on the island. He stares blankly as he describes his realization that there would be no help coming and that he’d never see his wife again. Hanks’ character in the movie is a bit of a controlling-type of leader, and the powerlessness of his fate pushed him to realize that the last thing he had control over was when and where to die.

The Dangerous Business of Being Chip Leader

I grew up around poker. My dad paid for college with winnings against his Jesuit professors at Seattle U and his co-workers at the Seattle Times. When I was a kid I’d often be dragged along to watch him and his friends from undergrad play monthly at a farm in upstate Washington. I remember the sounds of plastic chips smacking together, plastic glass clinking, cards bridging in loud wooshes and snaps, and laughter mixing together into the early hours of rainy Sunday mornings. It seemed natural then that when I went off to college that I’d get into the game myself. And while I’m nowhere  near as good as my dad and still learning how to play, poker has been a regular part of my life for the last few years.

The Zone

It starts about five minutes before the SRM begins. My heart rate increases, the room gets hotter, and all of the voices and sounds around me start dying off. This sort of focused but frantic expectation is the sort of thing I feel before I fight in a tournament match in Kendo. But unlike that sensation, there’s nobody staring back at me. There are no swords, and there’s no shinpan yelling loudly at me in Japanese. There’s just me, a 15.4″ LCD screen, and an extraordinarily hard problem. Whether it’s the flags dropping and someone yelling “Hajime!” or seeing a Java JPanel pop-up saying “Coding Phase Beginning,” the feeling remains the same. The world dies off and only one thing matters:

Solving the problem.

Grinding XP until I Ding Vice President

A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies use numerical hierarchies that rank you into tiers based off of seniority and position. For example, if you start as a new college grad software engineer at NetApp you’ll start as a MTS 1 (Member of Technical Staff, Level 1). At SAP, you’ll be a SE 1 (Software Engineer level 1). Promotion increases the number next to your title. If you’re there for a year or so and do good work, you’ll see a salary bonus increase and an increase in the number next to you name. Boom, now you’re a level 2. You move up the ladder. You can tell people you’re a “level 2.” Everyone’s happy.

Whether you’re Google, eBay, NetApp or Microsoft, numerical hierarchies are all the rage. I imagine that it makes a lot of things easier for HR folks to so clearly delimit rank and order by number. But I suspect that there’s another reason why this kind of numbering system is used as opposed to the traditional “junior, associate, senior, executive” or “associate, partner” scale used in traditional firms.

My crackpot idea: it’s because of Dungeons and Dragons and Final Fantasy. It’s because we nerds love to level up.

There’s something cool about having an elegant and clearly defined line of advancement. Knowing where your rank ends and the next one begins is a great incentive to work harder for that higher number, and there’s a very real sense of accomplishment when you visibly advance from one level to another. This kind of appeal is one of the reasons why a lot of people play games like World of Warcraft. The challenge is clearly defined, and when you work hard and conquer it you’re clearly marked for your hard work (phat lewt, clearly a level 80, new titles, etc.)

Just like in WoW or in Oblivion, working hard at your job to get that next level is a sort of addiction unto itself. But unlike online or pen and paper RPGs, this type of fanatical obsession with incrementing a number is socially acceptible. Even for the non-geeks that don’t go crazy when they hear a “ding” sound and a glowing yellow halo appear around their avatar (I’m still waiting to see this happen in real life, by the way), it’s cool to get promoted because it gets you access to tons of new toys. You get new cars, new houses, new opportunities to ball out of control around the bay area. So unlike staying at home and playing WoW, working hard and levelling up in the office is a socially “good” thing.

Geeks love leveling up and all of the other cool things that come with it. If you tell a geek he can increase his STR or CON stat by working out in the gym with enough polish, I’m sure he’d pump iron like Arnold every day just so he can go home and change his character sheet every once in a while. So is it any wonder that smart companies tier their employees based off of RPG-esque numbering systems and arm them with flashy “phat lewtz” such as exclusive swag, all the while promoting a social structure that promotes workaholic tendencies because it makes you rich and thus cool? Call me a crazy man, but I seriously wonder if this appeal to the inner geek is another way to get us all to take the job all the more personally and work much harder and much longer.

I guess we should all be lucky though: at least we don’t have to run Molten Core for a living.

We Didn’t See It Coming

Over a cup of coffee capped white with a cream-colored lid at one of the four Starbuckses in Foster City, she flipped back her hair and smoothed her complexion into a relaxed ease that only saturday morning coffee can bring. “Sure,” she began, “Harvard Law is definitely the ideal. But I mean, in general I just want to go to law school.” Edlyn was back from college, and was starting to show the signs of being a Boston resident: no usage of the word “hella”, an intimate knowledge of the affiliate schools, and a sort of refined air that was definitely against the sandals-wearing freedom of California culture. As I sat there and dived into her mind, I watched Edlyn pen out the future with her intimate knowledge of what was to come. It was set in stone: Edlyn was going to finish masterfully at Wellesley, go into law, and eventually politics.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Edlyn’s not going to law school (at least yet). Neither Edlyn or anyone else knew at the time that she’d spend her next summer at Kiva doing Microfinance. Edlyn didn’t know that her time around MBAs and IB types would introduce this new path in life to her. “Future Edlyn” of her plans is definitely not the Edlyn I saw last week. But even though it’s in direct contradiction to her plans then, the investment banker who I sat on a roof wuith last night is far from unsuccessful.  Still, this definitely wasn’t scripted.

She never saw it coming.

Summer in Bullet Points

My summer in a series of bullet points:

• Lying down on a rooftop in New York City with a flask of rum on a warm summer night talking about how PageRank works.
• “So what do you do?” “Guess” “Investment bank-” “DINGDINGDINGDING!”
• This:
  
  

Recessions, and Other Things You Hear in a Piano Suite

One of my favorite pieces of music is Debussy’s Clair De  Lune. Beginning normally and procedurally, Debussy moves into exploring a symphony of emotions by using full range of his instrument. Certain parts of the piece are very classical and procedural, but these moments are broken by sharp transitions and jumps that tonally rock the piece. This adds an organic and very real quality to the dreamy angelic piece but adds a level of uncertainty that can be distracting.  If you focus on these “jumps” though – if you worry about when the dreamy beauty of a certain part will fall to a droning melodrama – you miss the whole point of what I think Debussy’s trying to tell you: it’s all beautiful. Up, down, certain and uncertain, it’s all majestic.

In fact, that uncertainty that’s so troubling is central to such beauty. From a swirling maelstrom of what could come and what tomorrow might bring trickles out chaotic but very tangible beauty. It may not be the beauty that you’d like, but it’s still majestic and awe-inspiring nevertheless.

Passion, Success, and Beavers.

For someone infatuated with mathematics, science, or technology, MIT holds a certain social status as the pinnacle of geek intellectual power and might. Movies emphasize how smart their characters are by saying they went to MIT. Engineers who graduated from MIT ended up making wacky things like Linux (Richard Stallman), Hewlett-Packard, Rock Band, Intel, and the mouse. The mere name conjures up images of brilliant engineers who can make electrons do anything and everything with only effort and caffeine.

Google I/O 2009 – The Myth of the Genius Programmer

Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman gave an awesome talk at Google IO on collaboration in programming. Titled The Myth of the Genius Programmer, these two guys that’re responsible for Subversion (SVN) talk about how huge taboo issues such as insecurity and prideful glory-hounding can lead to problems with innovation in computer science, software engineering, and academia in general.

The talk is a pretty deep discussion on team dynamics and the human condition. A lot of the language is in geek speak (allusions refer to things like compilers and IDEs), but the heart and feel of the topic is powerful beyond the monitor and keyboard.

Check it out!

Not a Bloodless Revolution.

I opened the door and Karla and I both supported Dad on either side as he clutched the helmet to his chest, and we walked into the house, his appearance generating little interest in the overall crowd. We went into Michael’s room where we placed him on the bed.

He was ranting a bit: “Funny how all those things you thought would never end turned out to be the first to vanish-IBM, the Reagans, Eastern bloc communism. As you get older, the bottom line becomes to survive as best as you can.”

“We don’t know about that yet, Daddy.”

I pulled off his shoes, and for some time Karla and I sat beside him on two office chairs. Michael’s machines hummed around us as our only light source was a small bedside lamp. We sat and watched Dad filter in and out of consciousness.

He said to me, “You are my treasure, son. You are my first born. When the doctors removed their hands from your mother and lifted you up to the sky, it was as if they removed a trove of pearls and diamonds and rubies all covered in sticky blood.”

I said, “Daddy, don’t talk like that. Get some rest. You’ll find a job. I’ll always support you. Don’t feel bad. There’ll be lots of stuff available. You’ll see.”

“It’s your world now,” he said, his breathing deepening as he turned to stare at the wall that thumped with music and shrieks of party-goers. “It’s all yours.”

And shortly after that, he fell asleep on the bed – on Michael’s bed in Michael’s room.

And before we left the room, we turned out the light and took one last look at the warm black form of my father lying on the bed, lit only by the constellation of red, yellow, and green LEDs from Michael’s sleeping, dreaming machines.”

- Douglass Coupland, Microserfs