4 ms·

It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed.

It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed. I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.

wpietri 5y ago
For sure. My summer jobs were in restaurants and factories. It deeply shaped my notion of what work is. It's been a long time, and I'm still excited I get to work from my house basically solving puzzles. It has downsides, though. One thing you learn in blue-collar businesses is that the direct work is primary, with other stuff secondary. In a restaurant, nobody shuts down during the lunch rush to talk with everybody. In a factory, everybody understands that the machines keep going; any administration is done very much on the margins. So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture.
- sdoering 5y ago
  Oh wow. Thanks for the distinction. This cleared up something for me that was knocking in the back of my mind. I had the same feeling having had a lot of blue collar jobs while studying. Discussions/management was scheduled around getting work done. I was working as a cook once and the real chef (I was studying literature and history at that time) and I were doing reviews of the evening after the kitchen was closed, cleaned and we were sitting at the bar drinking our one final drink of the evening. It was a little bit like a sprint review with the sprint being just an evening long. Sprint planning so to speak happened before guests arrived and the restaurant opened. We prepared the kitchen, chopped stuff for salads, prepared sauces and stuff and were discussing who would do what when the rush started. So even without knowing the actual ordering of dishes and the amount of every specific dish we roughly knew what to expect (how many orders aka tickets we would have in the sprint/evening). So we had a sprint planning, a sprint and a (internal) review. And our service people would give us feedback on what went well and what went wrong also, because they had the direct guest feedback.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Yes, absolutely. When the work is visible and straightforward, it's so much easier to understand and optimize what's going on. That's part of why I'm a big fan of kanban boards for work. If you make our pretty abstract work visible, you enlist people's natural intuitions. Especially when there's the habit of regular reflection. Of course, that takes a culture that supports it. It sounds like you had a really good place to work!
- vxNsr 5y ago
  > So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture. Block out portions of your calendar with recurring work time, and let them schedule their meetings around that.

wpietri 5y ago

For sure. My summer jobs were in restaurants and factories. It deeply shaped my notion of what work is. It's been a long time, and I'm still excited I get to work from my house basically solving puzzles. It has downsides, though. One thing you learn in blue-collar businesses is that the direct work is primary, with other stuff secondary. In a restaurant, nobody shuts down during the lunch rush to talk with everybody. In a factory, everybody understands that the machines keep going; any administration is done very much on the margins. So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture.

sdoering 5y ago
Oh wow. Thanks for the distinction. This cleared up something for me that was knocking in the back of my mind. I had the same feeling having had a lot of blue collar jobs while studying. Discussions/management was scheduled around getting work done. I was working as a cook once and the real chef (I was studying literature and history at that time) and I were doing reviews of the evening after the kitchen was closed, cleaned and we were sitting at the bar drinking our one final drink of the evening. It was a little bit like a sprint review with the sprint being just an evening long. Sprint planning so to speak happened before guests arrived and the restaurant opened. We prepared the kitchen, chopped stuff for salads, prepared sauces and stuff and were discussing who would do what when the rush started. So even without knowing the actual ordering of dishes and the amount of every specific dish we roughly knew what to expect (how many orders aka tickets we would have in the sprint/evening). So we had a sprint planning, a sprint and a (internal) review. And our service people would give us feedback on what went well and what went wrong also, because they had the direct guest feedback.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Yes, absolutely. When the work is visible and straightforward, it's so much easier to understand and optimize what's going on. That's part of why I'm a big fan of kanban boards for work. If you make our pretty abstract work visible, you enlist people's natural intuitions. Especially when there's the habit of regular reflection. Of course, that takes a culture that supports it. It sounds like you had a really good place to work!
vxNsr 5y ago
> So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture. Block out portions of your calendar with recurring work time, and let them schedule their meetings around that.