How Do You Spend Your Time?
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as his moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. — Ayn Rand
I was reading Anil Dash’s post on LifeHacker, What Works: The Web Way and The Wave Way, and found it to be a very interesting perspective on what it takes to bring breakthrough technology to market. Among all the wonderful insights, was the following nugget.
“”…And a weekend-scale implementation on a personal site usually translates roughly into a 90-day implementation cycle in a business context, which is a reasonably approachable project size. (In tech, three days in personal effort often translates to three months of corporate effort.)”"
I’ve always intuitively believed that there is a significant productivity improvement which can be found when sufficiently motivated and talented individuals work on their own projects compared to when they work on corporate projects. But this statement implies a 30x productivity gain. Can this be true? Maybe so…
3 Accelerants to Personal Tech
When looking at how highly talented technical people typically work on projects of their own (personal tech), there are several aspects which are typically present.
Inspiration. Weekend scale implementations are fundamentally based on the inspiration to create something of great significance to the individual. This inspiration will drive all aspects of the individuals thoughts, emotions, behaviors over the weekend. While this is always the case for weekend-scale implementations, it is clear that it cannot always be said to be true of corporate technology development.
Getting in the zone. In order to achieve the weekend-scale implementation which is described above, there are not many distractions which will take away from productivity. Most likely, the individual working on the weekend project will be “in the zone.” When in the zone, time is not marked by minutes and hours and a deeper level of consciousness is achieved. A weekend will expire without looking at a clock – possibly without sleep. Clearly when in the zone people are powered by the passion for their craft more so that food and water.
No Limits. No Fear. Weekend scale implementations are also typically built with a fundamental principle of not having any technical constraints. All is possible, and all may be tried. No fear. This will commonly result in experimentation which drives innovation. Much of the exploration (which comes about as part of experimentation) will lead to dead ends. Some will lead to paths which achieve great breakthroughs. Having the freedom to operate in this risk-free manner in a major difference from most corporate environments.
3 Dampers to Corporate Tech
When looking at the perspective of working in a corporate tech manner, we often see a different world view.
Multiple masters. Time sharing across projects. In corporate tech environments it is common the highly talented people are in very high demand. The Pareto Principle applies here in a very strong way. This will commonly lead to a necessity of sharing these people across many high priority (and often competing) projects, and possibly moving them to an oversight role instead of the hands-on area where the individual has great strengths. This will not only eliminate the strengths of the individual, but cause a good deal of overhead with the start-stop churn in moving between projects in which the person is working.
Authorization. Checkpoints. Status. Sign-offs. Projects in the corporate tech world are not based on inspiration as much as by achieving a solid ROI on the investment of resources (people, time, and budget). This process will typically require careful business case based authorization process before funding is provided. Once funding is made available, and careful planning takes place, a series of checkpoints and status meetings will take place which essentially serve to track the project and protect the investment. Sign offs are necessarily required to make sure that the appropriate stakeholders are not only in the loop, but authorize the acceptance of deliverables and authorization the continuation to subsequent deliverables. All of this adds time that, while adding to overall control of the project, takes from the “just do it” mentality.
Legacy integration. In the corporate tech world, it is rare that there is a clean sheet of paper to start from. Inevitably there are other entities, other systems, other interfaces which need to be accomodated. More often than not, these integration points are with entities which are long in the tooth – and occasionally do not play well with others. Rather than be seen as a welcome challenge, these integration points are frequently a buzz kill for the high end techies.
Maybe the Most Significant Reason for Productivity Gain
As mentioned earlier, the Pareto Priniciple is alive and well in the technology development world. The 20% of the people who do 80% of the work, can probably be applied a second time (Pareto squared?), leaving a highly prized 4% which are the uber-techies who would undertake the weekend-scale implementation projects. These people fly in rarified air and attract similar people who thrive on the same challenges and inspirations. In the course of the weekend there would be a small handful of these people who will undertake the challenge collectively and live on Red Bull and pizza, effectively not only multiplying the efforts, but drawing synergy from one another. In contrast, these same people will be diluted and taken out of their element in the corporate world, greatly diminishing their effectiveness and leaving the heavy lifting to the 80%+ who do not have the same talents.
In retrospect, maybe the ratio is greater than 30:1.
