Early in the pandemic, I was watching Essential Craftsman videos. The channel features Scott Wadsworth, who has over 40 years of experience in the construction trades, and who is a phenomenal speaker. An excellent channel if you are interested in understanding the scope of wisdom borne of experience.
I remember there was a moment where Scott was explaining different ways to swing a hammer. He recommended avoiding a particular technique for hammering overhead nails upwards as it would lead to serious elbow problems after 10 or 15 years if you made it a habit. This was a revelation to me, as any time I’d ever swung a hammer, I was simply concerned with getting the nail into the wood without hitting my thumb. I started thinking about my daily work.
I looked around at my home office and realized I’d spent the past couple months sitting in an excessively cheap office chair where my elbows couldn’t touch the armrests. I realized that I hadn’t had an eye exam in ten years. I realized I was three years into a tech career that would always require me to spend eight hours a day typing, and I didn’t know how to touch type.
I solved these problems. Better office chair. Optometrist appointment once a year. And a new keyboard with no characters on the keycaps, plus a year of TypingClub here and there between meetings. I don’t have back pain, I have better assurance that I’m not going blind without realizing it, and I can type twice as fast.
I’m sure there are a hundred other things I’m still missing, which I will only find with more experience.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s hierarchy is a flawed and incomplete model of what a person needs in life. Because it is a flawed and incomplete model, it is useful. Maslow’s central point is that people don’t seem to care much about art appreciation when they are trying to avoid being eaten by wolves. There are different levels of needs, and high-level needs like beauty and social acceptance usually don’t feel important until lower-level needs like breathing air and avoiding dangerous predators have been fulfilled.
I think a similar model could apply to working effectively. Here are a few candidate levels, going from low to high. I’m not trying to present this as a complete theory. These are just examples to illustrate the point.
Physiological: physical comfort and safety
Psychological: low-distraction environment
Social: psychological safety (e.g. you can ask questions without being belittled)
Tools: tools that you need to do your job (hammer, desk, Emacs, etc.)
Skills: your ability to use the tools effectively
Information: understanding the environment you are working in
Objectives: business goals to work towards
Scott Wadsworth’s advice on how to swing a hammer made me realize I was failing to fulfill lower-level needs in this hierarchy, despite being preoccupied with higher-level problems. I was trying to design and implement a complex network infrastructure project involving a lot of unknown unknowns. But I didn’t really know how to use a keyboard, even if I thought I did at the time. And my legs were falling asleep every thirty minutes because of my terrible chair. So I didn’t have the skills to use my most basic tools well, and I wasn’t physiologically comfortable in my working space.
I was trying to frame a house when I didn’t know the right way to swing a hammer.
A year later, after a move, this same line of thinking would lead me to install a CO2 meter in my new home office. I was getting headaches and feeling drowsy in the afternoons, and finally it occurred to me that my office might be insufficiently ventilated. The Wisconsin DHS says that 1,000–2,000 ppm is the “level associated with complaints of drowsiness and poor air.” It’s enough to impair your performance on cognitive tests by 25-50%, if this article’s sources are to be believed. Or 50% if you believe this video, although they’re probably citing the same study.
The CO2 meter revealed my office was hitting 1500 ppm every afternoon. Did I spend several months doing knowledge work while I was 25% dumber for half the day? Isn’t that almost like showing up to a job site without any shoes on?
Industry Parallels
To be clear, I don’t know anything about construction. The only construction project I’ve ever worked on was an 8x10 shed I built as my Eagle Scout project. But I do try to learn more about it, because I believe there is a lot to learn from experienced people.
Computers are young, while architects, civil engineers, and construction workers still apply principles today that were used five centuries ago to construct St. Peter’s Basilica. Or nineteen centuries ago, to construct the Pantheon. Or as far back as you care to look. Archaeologists have found bronze nails that are over five thousand years old. Obviously that does not indicate a single lineage of experience, and much has been lost and rediscovered over that time. But we’ve had hammers and nails for a lot longer than we’ve had keyboards and text editors.
Unix time started ticking 53 years ago. That’s enough time to have produced a few people with 40+ years of experience, but not many. And none of them were learning from anybody who already had 40+ years of experience. They were figuring it out the hard way.
Consider electricity. Alessandro Volta invented the first battery in 1800. Francis Ronalds invented the electric telegraph in 1816. Michael Faraday demonstrated the first electric motor in 1821. The earliest generator used in an industrial process, the Woolrich Electrical Generator, was deployed in 1844.
Edison didn’t create the first commercially viable indoor light bulb until 1879, and his first power plant (funded by investors to create a market for light bulbs in Manhattan) didn’t go into service until 1882.
So there was an eighty-year arc leading from scientific experimentation, to industrial applications, to the first commercial applications in the home. But the first unified American electrical code wasn’t created until 1897, fifteen years after that. And it was created by fire insurance underwriters, not electricians!
Thomas Edison and his cohort were running around electrifying houses so they could sell more light bulbs. And enough houses were burning down that the insurance industry had to step in to tell electricians they needed to insulate their wires. I think about this when I see news of people getting hacked through vulnerabilities in their IoT sex toys.
First industrial usage of electricity: 1844. First electrical code: 1897. That’s 53 years. Enough time to have produced a few people with 40+ years of experience.
Conclusion
I believe imperfection is part of the natural progression we always take with new technologies. The tech industry is filled with smart, hardworking people who are collectively learning new things every day. But I think the culture is still naive compared to industries that aren’t so young. You need a few generations to go by before you learn the lessons you can only gain from experience. Computers haven’t been around long enough for people to have gotten good at the craft of building with them in the same sense that someone like Scott Wadsworth is good at carpentry.
This shows in the tech industry’s approach towards apprenticeship. I was years into my career before I independently realized I needed to learn to type. I had gone through a computer science degree and then a college-hire technical development program, but all of that experience was focused on higher-level work needs, like algorithm design or understanding how cloud services fit together. Maybe I should have had a mentor standing over my shoulder, telling me “you need to fix your posture and you need to learn to touch type, or else you’ll want to quit before you’re 35.” Maybe then I wouldn’t have spent years subconsciously struggling to type special characters quickly, breaking my concentration as I looked up and down from the keys. They might seem small, but I believe these kind of lower-level problems with your workflow can significantly impact your long-term career. People who can’t type int intArray[];
without looking at the keyboard might get frustrated or distracted more easily as they code, and over the years those papercuts can add up to burnout, just like swinging a hammer wrong will eventually ruin your elbow.
So now I try to think about Maslow’s hierarchy from the bottom up. Instead of starting with a business objective and only trying to solve lower-level problems when they seem to directly impede that objective, I try to get the lower levels squared away first. It’s a process of reflection and discovery, because many of these lessons are only obvious in retrospect. I hope one day I will know enough to help the next generation learn them the easy way.