The Week Ahead
What's the weirdest job you ever had? I once spent a whole summer shucking clams. I'd grown up clamming on the river near my house, digging my toes into the wet sand as I waded, knee-deep. I kept a small knife in my back pocket so I could shuck and eat them right there. That one skill made me a sought-after specialist for a brief time. This week I suggest we all try to remember that surprisingly wonderful things can be found in the mud, and the most magical thing might be right under our feet.
Is one kind of work — or worker — more important than another?
I was a geologist, a line cook, and a book editor before I started in tech. (I'm leaving a few other jobs out. Looking forward to your guesses as to what those might be.)
One thing I’ve noticed is every kind of work has a hierarchy to it.
In a kitchen there’s the chef, the sous chef, then the line cooks below that. Dishwashers, despite providing a vital service, are at the bottom of the stack.
In book editing you start as a proofreader, then move on to copyediting, then developmental, and beyond. It's a progression, a hierarchy. It goes step by step.
In geology — this is a fun one — there’s a distinction between hard rock and soft rock. I'm not making this up.
Hard rockers work at the intersection between geology and chemistry or physics. They're petrologists, mineralogists, geochemists.
Soft rockers deal with the overlap between geology and biology, and study things like paleontology, paleoecology, sedimentology. (I was a soft rocker. Try to look more surprised.)
There was always a sense that hard rock was somehow more impressive, more demanding, more pure.
That’s due to the hierarchy in science itself. While all the sciences overlap and build on each other, it’s generally understood (in academic circles, don’t at me) that physics are at the top of the heap, followed by chemistry, then biology, then everything else.
Of course this is nonsense. Rubbish, I say.
My work as a geologist was about reconstructing long-ago oceanic environments. Based on the location and distribution of tiny, microscopic fish teeth, I could tell you, to a remarkable level of detail, what the ocean depth, salinity, oxygen levels, and turbulence was like in a given time and place.
That was thanks to my ability to weave together strands of chemistry, biology, and physics. They were inseparable. Of a piece. I needed them all to achieve the result.
Now I work in tech. I build software. I'm on a multi-disciplinary team of people who play different roles and bring different skills to the work. I think we're all important. I think we need everyone on this team to achieve the result.
But then I see a conversation on LinkedIn about layoffs, and what kind of work is more expendable than others. I see one kind of worker makes significantly more pay than another, when both are contributing the same value to the end goal.
I think we inherited a lot of old thinking from the way things have always been done, especially in academia, but also publishing and the trades. We think too much about hierarchy and not enough about collaboration, integration, interplay.
Play, in fact, is an important word. Why is play the opposite of work? Is it? Really?
I was also a band kid. Yeah, you know it's true. Low brass. I look forward to your guesses as to what I played. Okay, it was the euphonium. You never heard of it? Yeah, we get that a lot.
Not every piece of music has a part for euphonium. Sometimes you find yourself playing a part written for trombone, or tuba, or even cello. You learn how to adapt, transpose, play different instruments. It makes things more fun when you can do different things.
There's a lot of sitting around in band practice while the conductor is focused on harassing some other part of the band. So we poke each other, trade instruments, learn how to play different things. By the time I graduated high school, I wasn't half bad at a playing a whole handful of instruments, without ever having taken a formal lesson in them.
I think we can learn a lot from the kids in the band.
I've seen it myself on some really great teams. I've been lucky enough to find myself on teams with a great mix of folks from the usual fields — engineering, research, product management, interaction and content design — where we all had a strong sense of what each individual brought to the work.
Sometimes we "traded instruments," because one of us was too busy, or curious, or just bored. The engineer might run a few research sessions. The designer writes code. The content designer digs into the data and pitches — successfully — what we should build next.
Does that mean we're generalists? No. We all still have own instruments clipped to our shirts. But it does make us better at working with each other and picking up each other's cues. It means we're better at making great, sometimes wildly unexpected music together, when everything clicks.
It's not a single bit like the ordered, hierarchical world of publishing houses, or graduate school. It's a little bit like restaurant work, but hey, those people can play. And now that I think of it, lots of kitchen workers are also musicians, so there you go.
Instead, on the best product teams I've been on, it's like we're all in the same band, playing in harmony with each other, digging the same tune. Some of us keep the beat, some hold down the melody, harmony, bass. Different songs and styles call for different instruments to come to the fore.
I think we do our best work when we're all in the band.
As a team leader and hiring manager, I look for contributors who have something special to add, and who also show a spirit of curiosity and experimentation to the work that they do. Someone who metaphorically picked up another instrument occasionally, because they wanted to see what it could do. Someone who loved sharing their own practice so others could play along, too.
As an individual contributor, I seek out teams that function like a well-rehearsed band. That doesn't mean they're always perfect and in lock-step all of the time, it means they have a level of trust, openness, and curiosity that allows them to play, to get in the pocket and jam. That means people actively support each other and make sure everyone feels like they belong.
As a member of a discipline, I'm less stressed out by new technologies than I am curious about what they can add to this or that work. I approach new projects and opportunities — on my best days — with an openness and confidence I can pick it up as I go. I ask other people with other specialities how they do what they do.
Isn't that the kind of work that works best? When we can play well with each other? When we improvise and surprise ourselves by what we can achieve? Maybe I'm a weirdo. But I'd rather be with the band.
