When Choose Boring Technology was published earlier this year, it hit home for me. If you’re spending money trying to ship, say, a music notation app, there’s no point in rewriting the operating system scheduler.
Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity, but the general tendency is to overestimate the contents of your wallet. Clearly this model is approximate, but I think it helps.
If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble.
Today the personal lesson finally percolated out of this team decision. Why is it I can’t make any progress on software? I care about too many things. This isn’t just about choosing technology, which is a small part of what technologists do (though it does imply passing all of the other caring, about ethics and finding potential customers and selecting customers and retaining customers and making money and hiring people and firing people and evaluating performance and making the lunch and designing a product and creating an experience and plumbing the toilets and other things to other people).
It’s about those things, the technical things, and more. If I care about all of those things then there’ll always be something not quite right about what I’m doing, which will be morale-destroying. Or it will make me work on fixing the thing that isn’t quite right, rather than whatever I need to make progress on. Or both. Often both. And, of course, given the size of our industry and the number of bloviators in it, for any subject upon which it’s possible to have an opinion there will be multiple opinions written, so plenty of possibilities to research how to care about whatever it is I’ve decided to care about.
Choosing what to care about is a skill, and a valuable one to have. Choosing not to care about something doesn’t necessarily mean ignoring its impact, though that is one way to deal with it. You can hire someone else (directly or under contract) to care about it, make an arbitrary choice and go with that, or get someone else to make an arbitrary choice that you then follow.
If the division of labour was the driver of efficiency in the industrial age, then the division of caring is that driver in the information age. Now to choose what to care about.
