What Precious Things Does The Corporate World Steal From Us?

What Precious Things Does The Corporate World Steal From Us? (via) by Nikhil Suresh.

People talk a lot about the joy they get from stakeholders and customers telling them their product was useful. Not only have I rarely experienced this in a believable way, a fair few of the people who espouse happiness about this strike me as having brainwashed themselves into valuing very strange things.

Like a frog being boiled I would have just kept slogging away, never quite experiencing enough discomfort to arrange something better for myself. I may have my own doubts, like most people, about the value of what I put out, but I won’t be so rude as to deny that other people value it or that it brings me happiness to see it valued. What a terrible deal it all was in retrospect.

The feeling of suddenly feeling smart was just reclaiming the intellectual life that the corporate world demanded I sacrifice.

The fact that I was giving this up never occurred to me because “you’ll be too tired to read something complex” isn’t in the contract I signed with my first employer, it’s just sort of baked into the fabric of the universe at all but the greatest workplaces.

Rich Hickey has a wonderful talk titled Hammock Driven Development, on what it takes to do high-quality work. The man, to the best of my understanding, more-or-less made Clojure, which means we take his talks very seriously here.

Added to my watch list 😊.