Dangerously bored or distracted
It shouldn’t be difficult for anyone coming across this site to figure out that I work in technology, and have for years. Come to think of it, every job I’ve had since 1989 has been a high-tech job of one sort or another.
After 17 years in this industry, you start to notice some patterns. For me at least, there is a definite pattern to employment in technology. I first observed this back in the dot-com years, when the pattern may have been more noticable, or perhaps when I was simply in the right place to notice. The pattern, in a nutshell:
- Start new, exciting job.
- Spent lots of time and energy working on and building cool, interesting, new things.
- Once the thing is built, show it off and put it through its paces. Receive acclaim.
- Maintain the thing.
- Become dangerously bored or distracted.
The problem in this pattern isn’t necessarily #5, as you might think. It’s #4 that’s the real bitch, and which leads to #5. This problem is something I’ve seen time and again. It accounts for the massive amounts of startups in Silicon Valley, because under the right circumstances you can go through all five phases of the pattern in a year.
People in my field, generally speaking, love a challenge. We love to build new things, prove new theorems, take new ideas and make them a reality. Part of that is the actual building, thinking, idea wanking, whatever you want to call it. The other part of it is sheer pride in the new shiny thing we’ve just built. Building things is very cool. Being able to show off the fruits of your labor is also very cool.
The problem is, after you’ve got the thing built, someone has to keep it running. Frequently, that turns out to be the job of the designer, builder, programmer or admin. This is a problem, because you have now taken someone who really excels in taking raw ideas and turning them into something, and are now taking that raw ability and using it to keep the floors clean and the windows shiny. Is there a solution for this?
There can be, if the employer is of a size that the employee can be put into another area where they can start the process over again. More likely, however, is that the employee, now dangerously bored and distracted, will find another shiny object at another employer to work on; or she will go off and start her own company with the new idea in her head.
When you combine #4 in the list above with other types of work distractions: budget issues, company consolidation, bad management, or other issues, you then have a real problem because the employee is now maintaining something they built, at a company they don’t believe in. Motivation now becomes a real issue, and #5, dangerously bored or distracted employees, follows quickly.
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