Fortune Favors The Bold

marco:

“Christopher distinguished himself by consistently working at roughly half his capacity, which fortunately for us is more than enough considering the output of the vast majority of our other employees. His ability to provide adequate, mostly functional web applications at the last possible minute, leaving no time for feedback or changes, was a hallmark of his working style. Christopher is highly intelligent and has good analytical and communication skills, which he frequently utilizes to avoid work, and/or limit the amount of work he has to do. These talents combined resulted in a long, largely uneventful, somewhat productive 15 year run at [company].”

— Topherchris’ actual recommendation letter from his previous boss to Tumblr. Sounds like all of the personality traits of the best programmers. All good programmers are lazy, avoiding tedious and boring work at all costs. That’s what makes them good: that’s a valuable skill in programming, in which you’ll benefit highly from automating repetitive tasks and avoiding large amounts of work that seem necessary at first but probably aren’t. (“I don’t like the way someone else wrote this perfectly working class, but I have to add a feature to it… let’s rewrite it from scratch using my favorite new buzzwords!”)

I agree with the sentiment that often the most clever people you’ll find are the ones who know how to make clever solutions for tedious work.

Too bad slacking off doesn’t work in a serious job search. And all the job listings I’ve seen lately are for tedious contract jobs for overqualified candidates. Working at a laid-back startup - and I mean working, not taking a job where half the day is half-court office basketball - feels like it would be winning the lottery.

Do hash tags work on Tumblr? #unfriendlytechindustry #burnout #needwork