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Startup Bug

I’ve been reading Outliers by Malcom Galdwell.  It’s a pretty insightful book on the causes of successful lives.  I’ve also been pretty inspired by it, as Gladwell points out that great success and mastery in life is not directly correlated to innate talents.  Instead, success is the result of hard work (putting in 10 000 hours of practice/work) and the right opportunities.

Among the examples used, he told the story of Bill Gates and Bill Joy, and how they owed their success to putting in thousands of hours of work and practice before becoming successful.

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I guess I’ve always had this notion of wanting to start my own business, and becoming my own boss.  I don’t even want to become super-successful to make tons of money.  I would be happy in making enough to not work for someone else and still take care of my family.

I would like to be financially independent.  More importantly though, is that I would like my work to be “meaningful”.  Gladwell uses the term “meaningful” to refer to work which directly provides gain.  I would like my own work to bring me direct merit.  For example, someone who sets up shop selling hot-dogs on the street-corner is someone who is doing meaningful work, as each hot dog he sells rewards him directly.

Right now, the work that I’m doing is not meaningful.  I am paid a fixed salary to do work.  And whether or not I work really hard and do a lot of overtime, and putting my best work out there, I’m going to be paid that same fixed salary regardless.  There is no direct correlation between how hard I work, and how I am rewarded. I may get a pat on the back and some appreciation, but that’s not going to pay my mortgage.

Of course, I still work as best I can to become a better programmer, and to achieve a sense of satisfaction.  To me, without continual self-improvement work becomes meaninglesss.  But there is still missing that sense of meaningfulness… that whatever profit my work may produce will not return to me.

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So being inspired by Gladwell’s book, and reading through Paul Graham’s essays I’m back to working on my start-up idea.  This time I’ve partnered up with some like-minded people to help keep the momentum up.

I’m by no means quitting my job to work on this.  I have no real capital to do this and support my new family (I am going to be a father in less than a month).  But whatever free time I have to afford, I will try in earnest to build this project.

It seems that the key to a successful startup is hard work and determination, above all other things.

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OCTranspo Transit Strike

So the city transit strike is totally turning my life upside down.  With none of the buses running in the middle of winter, I have no option but to join the masses and drive into work.  Renata and I carpool into work while picking up a few co-workers along the way too.

The problem is that the increased traffic forces us to wake up at 5:30 to make it out on the roads early enough to avoid the gridlock.  We left one day 30 minutes later, and what normally would be a 50 minute commute turned into 2.5 hours of drudgery.

The bus drivers (and/or their union) are a bunch of knobs for striking.  I realize that their intent is to inconvenience the city as best possible to get their demands, but to do that in the middle of the winter is heartless.  Add on to the effect that they’re blocking privately chartered buses too, and picketing the streets… they’re not going to win any hearts.  As an essential service, they should not be allowed to strike at all.  From what I understand, they get paid quite well too.

What also is flipping my life upside down is that work refuses to let us telecommute during this period.  Which is strange because telecommuting does work when used effectively.

There have been vast and complex software systems written by teams that are geographically disparate.  The nature of software development is mostly solitary too.  At the same time, having a team of developers who are tired and frustrated from the commute will not help productivity.

Coding is not a repetitive activity like assembly line work.  The quantity and quality of work is not determined by how many hours you spend in front of the computer, or at your desk.  A fresh mind can produce great code in a few short hours, whereas a dulled and tired one will output garbage, with the risk of lost time spent debugging.  After sitting in traffic for hours on end, without proper sleep, you’re not in the optimal state for productivity.

I personally prefer to work in the office, but for the selfish reason that it fulfills my social needs.  I enjoy seeing and working with my colleagues.  But the real truth of it in terms of productivity, is that if I were to work from home I’d be much more productive.  It takes a lot of time and mental energy to understand and juggle the sections of code that you work on.  It may take sometimes hours of thought and reading to get a clear mental picture of the problem at hand, and once that stream of thought is interrupted, it may be hard to get back on track.  Obviously, the volume of distractions at work greatly exceeds anything you may have at home.  If we had our own private offices, it might be different (Joel Spolsky style)… but that’s not the case at work.

For those reasons, telecommuting makes total sense. It’s a win-win solution to a shitty situation.  The development team is more comfortable for not having to slog through hours of traffic, while at the same time product development is shorter and we have a higher chance of successfully hitting our target dates.

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