I don't mean to be dumb, but I really don't get it. How does that story answer the question, other than to imply that in a few years, nothing the OP will have done will matter at all. Sort of sad.
Not to take anything away from the value of his writing. It's good to stay engaged and delighted with the fundamentals. If you get bored with the simple things, you'll neglect them and spend all your thinking about novel, peripheral, trivial things that you aren't bored with yet. Making the important things you've known for ten years sparkle and rock again is a valuable contribution.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently bad about that, but I just lost interest and moved to greener pastures.
Granted, I am no longer a salaryman so clearly this wasn't my #1 aspiration in life.
I guess this depends on what someone wants to be recognized for. An interesting question worth asking is why the recognition they are seeking compels them to include their boss as part of their community.
At one of my past employers, my boss and I worked with one another more as peers. The organizational structure was there for the sake of everyone else who needed the place to feel more like a company, and he played that part when he needed to. Otherwise, he and I would interact as though he was just another software developer. Peer recognition is big, and if you happen to have a de jure boss who would rather be a de facto peer, this can be a good cause for recognition from a boss to matter.
You present a concrete alternative in your parenthetical note.
Plus, there are emminently practical reasons why one would like to have a boss think you were very good at what you do. It is an intermediate step to getting other things you want.
It can be an intermediate step, depending on two things: you know what is required for your boss to think you are very good at what you do; and, you know that your boss thinking you are a rockstar is going to lead you to what you ultimately want.
One of the things I've come to discover is that these can actually be opposing forces. It depends on the boss, and on the wants.
The more obvious negative implication is that if your want is to be recognized for your technical talents, and the only way to impress your boss is to compromise those talents, then it is an intermediate step to nowhere.
The less obvious negative implication -- because people do this all the time anyway -- is to believe that impressing your boss will ultimately get you what you want (usually, more money). It really depends on what impresses the boss, and if what it takes to make him think you are productive is actually what makes you productive. If not, you are paying for image capital by charging against economic capital. Since customers typically only trade in terms of economic capital, enough of this will result in things turning very bad very rapidly.
Granted, there are other aspects here as well; whether or not the company keeps profiting in spite of it own internal obtuseness, for instance. My point is, unless the boss is clairvoyant and nonpartisan, this levies a cost against all parties involved. Sometimes, that cost is enough to prevent anyone from getting what they ultimately want, because the company busts.
I realize that this may not be the perspective you took when you wrote this, but similar things I've heard from others who took this stance and meant precisely what I am arguing against: if my boss loves me, then I'll win big. That model doesn't seem like the sure bet corporate folklore makes it out to be.
Perhaps, like many other things about work culture, Japan is different. When I look around and see in our corporate culture, I can't help but think the same thing Deming saw in our manufacturing culture: "American management thinks they can just copy from Japan -- but they don't know what to copy!" Maybe we aren't copying and this is just emergent behavior, but we seem sort of schizophrenically halfway between salaryman and cowboy. Either way, I'm perplexed.
That is, they play the part for the areas of the company that need the organizational structure to be comfortable. But, amongst the developers they seem no different than the rest; just as capable, and impressed by the same things.
Over the years as I've looked around me, I've seen a lot of people stagnating in their jobs. Sometimes it's because of lack of effort from the developer, and sometimes it's because of poor management.
But if doing a great job isn't already enough, then maybe the job is a poor fit. The parable in the story touches on both of these issues: trying hard, and the struggle to please management.
A third issue that's perhaps more important: you need to find the work fulfilling for your own reasons. Working exclusively for the praise of your superiors is a good way to be unhappy with your employment in most places. So figure that out, or go to a place where the work matters.
And buyer beware: there are places even in San Francisco where doing good development work will garner you no notice. I just left such a place.
Do you mean focus on what's important to you or what's important to management? I agree that if you focus on what's important to the people you work for and they don't appreciate that, then it's a crappy place to work. But what's important to a developer is often completely irrelevant to the business.
It's funny how thought provoking your question is, though. Because a lot of developers, as you point out, care about far different things for their own reasons. One developer I knew, cared more about everything being 100% as "efficient" as possible before releasing it. She didn't care if things ever got released, really, that didn't matter as much as whether it fit her personal ideas of what's aesthetically ideal. To show you how extreme that was, she spent a week writing a caching layer (in python) using a hashtable + list for a least-recently-used algorithm. When I mentioned she could do this in 2 lines of code talking to memcached, she refused, pointing out how silly it is to talk to an external process with a context switch to look up some data.
Who's right and who's wrong? Hard to say. I guess it depends on the context, and what the company is trying to do. I think the answers are different if you're trying to show good, sustainable results for customers without muddying up the code base, versus if you're writing software for lunar rovers.
It's interesting how people came up with different interpretations or 'take home points.' This thread has made me think about the essence of storytelling. I guess it's like
- people always do things for reasons
- when people do strange things, we tell stories about it
- the stories are interesting because we must reconcile the strangeness with the motivation (ie. its interesting because the motivation is not immediately obvious but we know it must be there unless the subject was insane)
- the job of fiction is to imagine new 'interesting' cases; the difficulty is keeping it 'true.' The author doesn't have the luxury of relating what did happen, he/she has to project what would happen, sort of like a machine plugging endless variables into an equation until an unusual/unexpected (but still valid) result crops up
Someone could teach a high school English class with Joel's SO post
I think the thesis is "If in a few years nothing you have done will matter at all, then go change that even if doing so makes you look like a madman."