Reflections on Robert Pirsig and Quality
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
For example, a lot of people give the advice to buy a cheap tool, and replace it with an expensive one if it breaks. That's OK advice, as far as it goes. But I find that working with bad tools, and breaking a tool, is a huge gumption trap for me. So I buy fewer quality tools instead. If that means I have to do some tasks the hard way, that's OK, because I still find that enjoyable.
This is my current thesis for why software continues to improve at such a slow rate from the customer's perspective.
We as developers spend the least amount of time and energy on our tools. Having marinated in a large pile of mediocre tools, we then set about designing our software to be 'good'. We're standing in a cognitive hole with respect to what 'good' even is and then we get nominally the same results over and over.
Jetbrains frustrates me constantly, in particular because it frustrates me in the same ways it frustrated me fifteen years ago when I first started using it. It's held up as some pinnacle of developer tooling, instead of the table stakes/median yardstick we should be applying to their tools at this point, 15-20 years after they were designed.
Until we expect better of each other the customer is always going to be disappointed with what they get. It takes a massive amount of energy to produce gemstones from garbage.
Having not worked there it's hard to tell if the team shifted to maintenance mode because the dreamers that started the whole thing left, or because the code is so work-hardened that only maintenance can be done on it. But it definitely feels like it's a product in maintenance mode.
I recall too, just before TeamCity launched, that there was a notable uptick in bugs and regressions. As if someone had been working on a new internal product that poached all of the R&D-compatible people and left things in the hand of more junior members.
I think the format - part travelogue, part novel, part philosophical exposition - is a big part of how he pulled that off.
I got a degree in philosophy because of that book, in which I came to understand that Pirsig's project around "quality" was an idiosyncratic mashup of zen and western perspectives. I still loved the book and reread it several times. For a certain overly cerebral person, it's a balm and a respite.
In fact, this is what truly makes this book great.
Two attempted reads and I consider ZAMM one of the most overrated books of all time.
My take on the insanity is that it was connected to the "needless adjusting", "throwing shade" and "treating every little incidental thing as deep metaphor" among other things.
This was the biggest takeaway for me from this book -- roughly that an obsessive pursuit of quality (or definition of quality even) might take someone over the edge of sanity.
Oddly, I distinctly remember what in turn got me on to that then 15 year book in the the first place, a brief flash of the intriguing lotus-wrench cover in an episode of Inspector Morse, of all things.
Odd to think how a such a minor passing reference set me off so far down a road I probably would never have traveled otherwise.
Even then, you probably won't be any closer to understanding quality but you'll at least be more confident in its existence and be able to vaguely conceptualize it.
For me, the starting point is a deep appreciation for the ancient Greek state of mind called Arete (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete). I say 'state of mind' because it was only transformed into a 'concrete concept' later. The Wikipedia article doesn't do it justice as it has been Plato-ized but.. it is something.
Pre-Plato, it was a way of existing predicated on becoming or approaching excellence (as opposed to being a something). It isn't confined to a discipline or occupation and you never 'get there'. For Nietzsche, it enabled a key component of the Will to Power, self-overcoming.
Someone did their PhD thesis placing David Hume and a Jesuit who wrote about his experiences in eastern India in a little French town a little off the road from Paris to Nantes, pre-enlightenment:
https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/comparative...
I grew up on home improvement and woodworking shows, and spent a couple summers as a bicycle mechanic long before reading this book. Particularly in the Home Improvement shows where owners learned about the consequences of their sins and especially those of the previous owners. Neglect can be very expensive, and the surprise of it magnifies the experience. I invest a lot in avoiding big nasty surprises. I also have a weird brand of minimalism where I can be quite precious about a cherished tool or piece of furniture but fairly blasé about many of my other belongings.
For me the book was more of a nod-along, and there are certain conversations that are replaced with shorthand when talking to other people who hover when a desk chair is broken or a projector won't turn on. It is often useful to have other terminology and metaphors available to describe how you feel about something though. A particular problem I've had with the automatic equating of 'preaching to the choir' with 'waste of time'.
It was originally a radio show, way back, before podcasts. The podcast version is a revisit, revision and update but substantially the same as the original. It was recorded some years after the book was public, and he was working as a technical writer, IIRC.
There is a philosophical term that somewhat overlaps with Pirsig's "Quality", to my mind. The ancient Greek idealization of "moderation." When you read Xenophon's surviving text of Agricultural advice; he's pulling much the same move as Persig. When telling you how deep to plant an olive pit, he assumes you'll intuit how deep. He never tries to give a measure just saying something like "not too deep or too shallow." Thanks, Xenophon. He might as well be saying "put it at the point with the highest planting quality."
What I take from Pirsig is this: Most of the brain doesn't speak or process speech; moderns do need to tune into more of their brains, where useful intuitions (from experience) lie. If you decide to roll with just rationality, you're leaving most of your brain behind, and the rest is very helpful (see Antonio Domasio and many other psychology profs.)
Of course, utterly uniformed intuition isn't of much value, but as we get older, it's time to tune into the parts of the brain (often accessed through subtle body feelings) that don't do logic, or language, per se.
And if you understand something's technical aspects, you might feel that you dislike it for technical reasons, or because it makes mistakes that you know are avoidable, or for many other reasons... or you might appreciate it even more for the rightness of the technical approach along with the work as a whole.
Reminds me a lot of Alexander’s “Thing which cannot be named” from A Pattern Language. You know it when you experience it, but it can’t be described fully in words.
my absolute favorite benediction begins with “the peace of god, which passes all understanding…”
Both Michelangelo and Mark Twain have quotes that bear that sentiment.
There are ways to describe Quality by what it is not, and people often do, but defining things in the negative tends to be a less effective coping mechanism. Some people try to describe Quality by its consequences, rather than the consequences of not having it. But it's still slippery, in large part because we often only know it in hindsight. Long feedback loops are notoriously bad learning opportunities.
I truly fear for the children of millions of men who use the novel as some sort of guide to life and being a parent. Putting an 11yo on the back of a motorcycle for 8 hours or more a day, ignoring him as he cries himself to sleep, acting as if he's an abnormal child when he doesn't want to sit around quietly while the adults smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, or get drunk or high. He actually suggests that Chris is mentally ill because he was, of course, acting like a child of an alcoholic, abusive schizophrenic father being forced to endure hours of physical discomfort and neglect.
Truly nauseating.