Vocation and Virtue
Or, how does virtue (not) make you a 10x developer?
I periodically find myself fascinated with the subject of vocation. We all have multiple vocations, or, "callings". In one way, they can be subjective; for example, I feel "called" to write. But I'm also called, outside of myself, to fulfill a number of responsibilities and roles — husband, father, friend, worker, etc. When people talk about vocation, it's usually that last one, the calling of our professional selves, that they have in mind, and it's the sense of the term that I'm concerned with today.
For most of us, our work takes a significant amount, if not a majority, of our waking hours, so it makes sense to explore, discuss, and interrogate the nature of how that time is spent. I'm a software developer by profession, and so that means much of my day is spent at a computer alternating between a text editor, a terminal, and chat app (lately Microsoft Teams).
I recently came across a couple of provocative blogs concerning software development careers that stoked some thought. In the first, David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and CTO of Basecamp, warns his readers that "acting your wage" will atrophy your abilities. The second, from Justin Searls, predicts the "looming demise of the 10x developer".
For those unfamiliar with the term, the "10x developer" is a term coined in the ~2010s to describe a developer whose output is ostensibly worth ten times that of an "average" developer. How this output is measured, and whether or not such developers even exist (a question likely answered by the chosen metric for output) are both open questions. But Searls does argue that "enthusiast programmers may, in aggregate, outperform professional programmers who hang up their keyboard at the end of each shift". That notion seems uncontroversial to me. He identifies the following characteristics that give such programmers and edge:
Tireless: spending more time practicing programming—not under coercion to work long hours, but being intrinsically motivated to do so—will generally make someone a better programmer
Tenacious: chasing down answers with limitless curiosity and relentless, no-holds-barred tenacity—whether or not it’s in their job description to spelunk open source stack traces or debug other teams’ code—will yield better information and faster progress
Thorough: priding oneself on the quality of one’s work and pursuing excellence in the (brace for it) craft—not falling victim to perfectionism, but cutting the right corners when necessary—will produce better-working software that’s easier to maintain
Searls argues, however, that the enthusiast programmer is disappearing. He contends that the large number of professional programmers who also program as a hobby is an historical anomaly, contingent on a number of factors present at a certain time in history. For example, for younger gen-x and older millennials, there was a time when using a computer required some knowledge of how they worked under the hood. The demographic widens when you think about gamers too — they are regularly building PCs, installing and scripting mods, and trying to optimize the underlying machine that runs their games. However, over time, computing tools have become more abstracted and less transparent in their operations — think of smartphones and tablets. Since we no longer need to understand how computers work in order to maximize their benefits, it makes complete sense that, as a percentage, fewer computer users have such knowledge.
In light of that, increasingly, people entering software development careers are not driven so much by passion as by the prospect of financial gain. This was the case for me — I graduated with an English major, and didn't want to pursue a career in academia or marketing. I had the means and opportunity to do a programming bootcamp, which I completed in about a semester's time, and I've had pretty satisfying career since then.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being primarily motivated by compensation when choosing a profession. That's the reason most people work. I would even argue that commerce is a good thing for humanity, à la Dierdre McCloskey. Conversely, I also think it's good for people to maintain some distinction between their labor and their interests. Commerce is a part of being human, but it is not the only thing that constitutes our humanity. We are spouses, parents, friends, and citizens just as much as we are workers. Work is but one thread in the web of relationships that make us who we are. People want their work to operate in service to the whole of life, as it ought.
But there is another tendency emerging that rides on the coattails of the growing consensus around "work/life balance". It goes by a number of names — "quiet quitting", "anti-work", or, as I learned from DHH's blog, "acting your wage". As far as I can tell, the thesis of this movement is that capitalism in inherently exploitative, and we should resist it by working as little as possible and adopting a cynical posture to our careers.
Part of me understands this tendency. Many of my cohort (millennial) are old enough to vividly remember the upheaval and pain wrought by the 2008 financial crisis. I knew people who lost jobs and homes. It was incredibly destabilizing for many. The loyalty supposedly due employers by employees was not reciprocated. The thought that working hard and doing the right thing were guarantors of success seemed increasingly absurd.
I hesitate to add any sort of caveats to the foregoing paragraph. My family was fortunate enough to make it through that time relatively unscathed. But I also wonder if my peers and I learned, not a wrong lesson, but an incomplete one. As the recent layoffs in the tech industry have taught us, your employer is not your parent, and your coworkers are not your family. And as good and valuable as camaraderie amongst colleagues is, the fact is that what we all have in common is a transactional relationship with our employers that can easily be terminated.
But here's where I think I part ways with a lot of my peers. I don't think the transactional relationship is an inherently bad thing. At the very least, it's no worse than a lot of the alternatives out there. While some romantically yearn for a pre- or post-capitalist world, I would argue that many of the things that make modern life not just enjoyable, but livable, are innovations made possible through the wealth creation of free markets. That's not to say that the market is without its problems, or that it's somehow amoral, but that, on the scale of centuries and millennia, the current economic order is the least bad it's been so far.
I am not an expert in economic history or theory. What I'm interested in is how we ought to conduct ourselves in our professional lives given the fact that we are whole persons, and not just economic actors. I think the paradigm of virtue may be helpful here — we should ask what kind of persons we want to be, and what habits would such persons conduct themselves with.
This piece is running longer than I intended, but I think trying to answer the question of what working virtuously looks like is something that I need to address. So, I have my work cut out for me. In the meantime, I think we ought to ask when faced with choices around career, vocation, and work, "what kind of person do I want to be?" How we answer this question is a matter for another post.