go bold

I think the world should be a meritocracy.

There, I went and said it. Come and get me, I’m ready.

First, my definition of merit: the quality of a person’s contribution to a given environment for the role they have been commissioned to fill. This means hiring someone or rewarding someone based on what they can do, rather than what they represent. This means pressing every member of the team to step up and distinguish themselves in some way, rather than hiding in the back trying to blend into the background.

What about rewarding “hard workers”? People should be held accountable for the work they took on, and measured on the quality of the work they produce. In my environment – in a software development environment – if I’m lacking in a ‘knack for things,’ then I should go make up for it in any way I can find: reading books and blogs about my craft and industry, keeping on top of new and relevant changes, finding some way to fill some niche in my environment that has not yet been filled. A meritocracy is no place for complacency (and is apparently not very friendly for work-life balance, either) – everyone should be pushed to be better.

And what about encouraging destructive competition within a team? I think people are big enough to recognize that working together allows everyone to achieve more (I sound like an inspirational poster in a second-grade classroom). Helping others does not detract from the quality of your own contribution, and can often improve skills in other aspects of your life – ones that may become valuable in surprising ways.

More to come next week. Possibly not on the same subject. Can you stand the anticipation?

Note: I’ve formed a blogging support group (pair?) of sorts with a friend. So we’ll now find a way to meet up and/or blog together once a week, as we both recognize the value in: 1) writing down our thoughts in some structured way, 2) exposing our thoughts in a public forum, and 3) company while miserable. Or, at least, company while doing things that all too easily get pushed to next week’s to-do list. Hopefully practice will make perfect – and the quality of these posts will improve.

I’ve been trying to be on my own case this summer. Last summer I was in San Francisco, I was very comfortable – I took the last shuttle home (at 7pm!) every day, couldn’t do work at home (no VPN access for interns!), so did a lot of relaxing, watching Alias, and cooking.

I’d had the goal of going out and “doing the SF tech thing,” which to me at the time meant going to tech meetups and talks and meeting all sorts of cool people, and learning all sorts of cool things. Clearly, it didn’t happen.

So this year I’m trying something different. I’ve been much more proactive about getting out and talking to people – an interesting union of MIT friends in and out of the startup world, acquaintances with interesting backgrounds and experiences, and now and then the occasional stranger whose blog I find fascinating. (I hate the term networking. I prefer “being-enriched-by-the-wisdom-of”.)

While the first category of dinner partners definitely keeps me from feeling like I’m becoming a hermit, it’s the second two categories that are really pushing this summer and myself forward. I walk out of each of these dinners excited about everything I can and want to do, and even more convinced of the importance of constant self-improvement.

So. In the interest of committing myself to a number of things to achieve this goal, here goes the list:

• Blog at least once a week. I’m going to set an alarm on my iCal and commit to posting something interesting I learned, or thought, or accomplished.
• Read 1 ‘improvement’ book for every fun book. I’m in the middle of reading the LOTR series (for the first time!), and once I finish The Two Towers, until I finish a programming- or startup- or productivity-related book, I won’t let myself read Return of the King. Sniff.
• Keep working a few nights a week on my side project (more later) – I feel like I need at least one or two non-school- or work-related projects under my belt before I can respect myself as a hacker. Or, as a lower standard, any sort of programmer.
• Along that line of thought – be more disciplined about said project! Don’t just sit down and start coding. Plan out the project a little more (what do I want it to do? How should it behave?) and use version control / repo management tools as well.

(Side note: am still probably far too awkward to be going around meeting people and making these first impressions. Need to work on that, too – for now, just sadface)

(Last note: tonight’s conversation was described as “covering a lot of ground, both philosophically and academically.” Last week’s was described as “spontaneously deep conversation with strangers.” Good nights, both. :))

I want to do everything. The reason people go to MIT and the curse of the Institution: exposing its students to so much of what is being used, worked on, developed — what has been done, and what can be done.

We’re all surrounded, constantly, by what seems like a neverending supply of incredibly ambitious and brilliant peers – how can we not get distracted?

I’d like to be really damn good at one thing – be it a thorough knowledge of each Javascript library and its pros and cons, or being able to quickly sketch out interfaces to complex multithreaded Java code, or being able to toss off 15 reasons I like Python more than PHP or why Ruby on Rails has saved the Internet. Maybe it’s just that everyone who’s been presented to me as someone to look up to has been really good at one thing, and I’m responding to that.

But I also want to do everything. I want to know everything, I want to mess around with Javascript and JQuery one minute, experiment with Django the next, poke around to see what procmail can do, hack together a visualizer for my scattered Adium logs… I want to drink everything in and there’s just not enough time.

How do people focus? How do you choose to focus – and how many people were forced to focus  on one thing, then lost track of the others?

I’ve never pretended I knew everything. In class, in my extracurriculars, or my personal pet projects. I’m not great at asking for help, either, but I find things out – I look things up, I test by trial and error, and I bang on it until I either cave in and ask for help or the magical cogs click into place and things work the way I expect them to.

In each challenge that matters to me, in each different situation I face, I try. Sometime it isn’t good enough – sometimes I get that B instead of that A, or take an extra three months to get the damn server doing what I want it to. But sometimes that effort spent trying to fix things… fighting to get things done my way, is what makes that success so much more triumphant – or that failure somewhat less harsh.

I’m trying to be better about it, actually. To be better about asking for advice, so that I can trim those three weeks of fighting with Apache down to two days, or to find the shortcut around brute-forcing a problem set. And maybe I’ll find that I learn just as much, and the answers given will stick with me as well as the answers I find myself. And maybe – just maybe – the victories will taste as sweet.