The Case for Working With Your Hands
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
No one around me understands what I'm doing on the internet or what all these keystrokes mean. When they see a chicken coop I built, my beautiful tomatoes or home that looks 100x better than before I started on it, I get to see a look of appreciation for that work on their face.
Programming is abstract and the appreciation of it is only a surface level appreciation because they only see what's on the web page, not all the nuts, bolts, and pipes that make it work.
It sounds vain to want that appreciation, but I do. I spend thousands and thousands of hours building an elaborate web system, lots of them actually, and I barely get a smile. People don't even know what it is. How can they appreciate it?
When I work with my hands, I spend a couple hours painting a room and people are like, "Wow! That looks SOOOO much better!" Or "Did you build those chicken pens yourself? You should do that for a living, people will pay good money for pens like that!"
PS Just wait, your computer skills will get you appreciation from the younger generations.
Ah, but you miss out on so much in life by focusing on only one thing. I've found much satisfaction by taking quite the opposite approach; to learn by doing as many different things as possible.
Of course, it's also important to know your limits lest you wind up in over your head.
http://elise.com/quotes/a/heinlein_-_specialization_is_for_i...
But, here's the thing. About 5 months ago I started working on a product that I am hoping will be the basis for launching my own start-up. This particular product was something that people could immediately understand was useful. It did some of those magical things that their computer does, and that they think they couldn't understand in a million years. And all of a sudden, instead of people's eyes glazing over, I started getting comments like "I really don't know how you do this stuff, that's amazing!"
There seem to be two things that are important here - one is that you need to be working on a product that is user-facing, so that they can actually use what you have just made. The second thing is that it has to be done just by you, or by you and just a couple of friends. It was you, and not some faceless organisation that did it, even if you were a part of the organisation.
This idea is why Montessori education is designed the way it is. It is also behind the design of Smalltalk and original vision of the Dynabook. It's a pity that Multitouch is being put to the service of consumption and not to making the direct manipulation of objects and programming more accessible. (In the Morphic framework, you can even open mini browsers on objects by clicking on them and write scripts against them or change their methods. Imagine the hands on exploration that would facilitate.)
I am also reminded of a visit by an admissions officer from Stanford to my high school. He read us one essay that centered around the writer's motorcycle repair hobby. It strikes me that a lot of the essay justified the repair activity as an entry into engineering and science. This article talks about such repair as a worthy thing in itself.
In the end, I think we agree. Shitty jobs where you are not accomplishing Good Things suck and should be avoided. You can find rewarding jobs in lots of places, not just the ones our culture usually promotes. People should consider some kind of trade more seriously. I don't think he is trying to claim that manual labor is sweepingly special and more rewarding than other professions, and I think he is right not to do so. Writing code is undeniably knowledge work and I know that I derive great satisfaction from being able to hit the right combination of keys to make what I imagine appear on the screen. Many people I know are knowledge workers in some way and they have found real fulfillment in those professions. Research, Psychiatry, Writing, etc.
It is very fulfilling to make things with your hands because the results of your effort are so recognizable and tangible, but I think that many have found equal satisfaction in other fields.
To each his own.
When doing the work so typical of cubicle farms, there is little or indirect feedback so it can be difficult to enjoy the work.
I myself used to do some woodwork projects and they are incredibly enjoyable. Whether it is making a simple join and using a miniture hacksaw to get an exact cut, or turning a block of wood into a fruit bowl on a lathe, it's extremely satisfying - both the process and the finished result.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Components_of...
Until I got involved with my startup (3d printing is all about making stuff!), and starting the local hackerspace, and just learning about the process of making stuff in general. When you don't know that it's not that hard to do physical things, it's pretty rough to get started. I'd have thought hardware was incredibly difficult three or four years ago. Or at least difficult for me, and weird.
Now I fool around with electronics and garden. Good times.