a lefty’s log

everyone else, back to work! not.

interesting article about the role of work at work. another tip from life after coffee’s jon emmons:

The Rule of the Lazy Class, or Why The Puritan Work Ethic Has No Place in IT

World-class IT and software shops realize that automation is not a technical thing, but rather a cultural thing. The best teams celebrate those who sit back and let their computers do their work for them. You want to have a project team that considers repetitive development activities to be tasteless. Sometimes necessary, but generally frowned upon.

This is also a case of something being good for the team and good for the individual at the same time. For the team, process automation yields greater consistency and predictability. For the individual team member, automated builds, scripted deployments, and the like often mean the difference between going home and watching The Simpsons with dinner at 7PM, or going home and watching it Tivo’ed with your re-heated dinner at 9PM.

attribution: approach.botonomy.com via life after coffee’s writeup on it.

jon and the ABC site itself approach this from a purely IT angle. and they’re allowed that perspective. i tend to skew this towards a wider outlook.

any manager of any sort should allow this level of automation to happen, be it from a computational perspective, or a knowledge-worker perspective. that level of disconnect allows the manager to know that the work is being done competently (because of the level of trust for his or her employees) and when new problems arise, those workers will not be bogged down with the mundanity of their own tasks to tackle the new challenge.

that disconnect, to the aware manager, allows him or her to keep aware of new approaches in the field or drum up new business by ever-shifting their place in the market.

for example, in my field of print, we have established a decently automated system to complete the bulk of our work. some level of human competence is required to direct that automation, but largely it happens with the help of managing editor’s CLS and quark express.

we used to use a combination of quark and an extention called xdata. xdata was cool, and robust, but didn’t allow much for automation.

for comparison, i offer this analogy:

CLS : xdata :: wordpress : html by hand

with CLS we can roll out something as cool as headers over a display ad or multi-colored liner ads with just a few minutes of setup and testing. this would have been impossible with xdata, or would have required lots of mundane and easy-to-miss edits by hand every time we slapped together a publication, i.e. several times a day.

but i don’t work in IT, not “real” IT. and yet, this level of “laziness” has proved to be beneficial to me.

really, laziness, as defined here, is the mark of the modern worker. it’s a combination of creativity, openness and application that is so important, yet undervalued by managers who don’t understand its use.

i imagine this could change as a new class of managers rise to the fore. or maybe i have too much faith in people. who knows.