Phthursday Musings: Work Is Not All It Teams

I’ve been working from home for a little over seven years. Most people who worked for my company then were based out of the office, or they were people who traveled a lot. I was the first person hired remotely who was not also going to be a heavy traveler. My previous job, I’d been in implementations, so I’d traveled a lot more, but I didn’t want to do that so much with a tiny human at home.

Working from home did not always literally mean working from home. For me, a coffee shop was often a good place to work, so long as I didn’t have to take an involved meeting. While still living in Chicago, I had two go-to coffee shops, City News and Perkolator. After moving, I settled in to a nearby place, Gosia’s, but if I got the opportunity, I would drive a little further out to go Ashbary.

I’m with Ed Zitron - I’m a big champion of remote work. I took to it immediately. I felt more productive - fewer office-type distractions, all that commute time back - but it was more than that… I felt like I’d gained an opportunity to pivot and adjust to a different way of approaching work, of thinking about that productivity. It also meant that I could actually exercise at lunch time, or immediately after the workday ended, if I wanted to. After I started working remotely, I found I was freed up to run 3-4 times a week, just as a natural course of the day. I could also go to lunch and just bring the laptop with - no hurry about getting back, because I had my work in front of me.

The pandemic ended all that. Most immediately, nobody was going and sitting around strangers for long periods of time like that. Even when things started to settle down some, it still didn’t quite feel right. But by then the nature of my job had also changed a little bit - I was doing less raw coding, more managing, and with the managing, more and more meetings.

Everybody whines and complains about Teams meetings, and some people are much funnier about it. But I also know that I’ve got some readers who don’t actually understand what that even means, people who have never used Teams and never will!

I’d describe it kind of like this: So many little things turn into mini-hurries. Three times a day, you find that you need to rush to the bathroom and back, even if the bathroom is just 15 feet away. One of the strengths of remote work - fewer distractions - has become one its biggest weaknesses. If you’re someone who responds promptly to email, and even more promptly to instant messages, other people figure it out and go to you even more often, because when they get stuck, they think they can get unstuck immediately with the right help. In my experience, at least, office work didn’t used to be quite like that - if you got stuck, you’d kind of try to feel out when a good time would be to get help, or you’d just have someone say, give me 15 minutes. A lot of that is just gone now. Someone looks for help in a Teams group, two other people start commenting, you’re busy but you notice it, and you notice the discussion is headed off in the wrong direction, that you’re the person with the crucial information… you wind up engaged in it, even if you’ve got three other conversations going, even if you’re trying to do something complicated with a spreadsheet that requires some focus.

Sometimes it can be hard to detach, to assess whether what you’re experiencing is unique to you, or partially unique to you, or honestly just what everyone else is experiencing as well. Well, this week, my wife shared a ridiculous Instagram reel with me about Teams meetings, and when I sat down tonight with nothing to write about it, that came to mind, and I realized, hell, I do have general thoughts about all this, and they’re not simply complaints about my job. I don’t tend to write about things like this because I don’t want people I work with to come across it and think I’m complaining about them! But I have over a dozen people who report up through me, I have dozens of other co-workers, and the reality is that we all experience what I’m talking about here. The main difference between my experience and theirs is that I spent my first 4+ years of remote work when most of them weren’t also remote.

That word productivity is a real beast of a thing to discuss. Am I more productive today than I have been in the past? What about my company? What about the overall economy? Well, if productivity in its basest sense is a measurement of output relative to input, then shouldn’t we be clearer on what we mean by output and input? If you do five things fairly well instead of doing three things really well, have you been more productive? What if in the process of producing quantity over quality you’ve been in a constant hurry, feel more exhausted, feel a lot less satisfied - are those not also meaningful things to consider?

When I was in grad school, one of the professors I was a TA for was Al Churella, whose specialty field was business history, with a particular expertise in railroad history. The man wrote a book with the title From Steam to Diesel: Managerial Customs and Organizational Capabilities in the Twentieth-Century American Locomotive Industry and I can see the look on every single one of your faces after reading just that title.

Two or three times, I was one of his TAs for U.S. History after 1877. One of the things he super-emphasized when talking about business and labor history was the Marxist notion of alienation from the means of production - I don’t remember if that’s exactly how he framed it, but the idea was that the assembly line worker installing a door on a Model T was not literally building an entire car and did not feel a sense of completion, a sense of creation. I suppose I knew this, I suppose I’d learned this before, but going through his class multiple times, that’s how the idea really sunk in for me.

The people I work with are an assemblage of tinkerers, fixers, visionaries, creators. It turns out that your creation doesn’t necessarily need to be tangible - or perhaps the better word is tactile - to feel imbued with that sense of creation. I’ve never read up on this subject but I wonder how the Marxist critique of production would conceive of today’s thought workers.

People get into programming and related fields because of interest and aptitude and because they think it’ll be a good way to make a living and all that, but many of them also get involved because it satisfies the creative impulse. I think I understand this in part from reading Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, where he emphasizes the idea of the organizer as a creator, and contrasts the act of creating against acts like acquiring, and argues that creation is what gods do, and therefore that organizers are achieving some loftier goal than, say, financiers. (I might be misremembering the argument somewhat, but if I am, well, I’ll just blame Alinsky for that anyway. He won’t mind. He’s used to being blamed for a lot of bullshit.)

Artists and musicians and writers are all in their own way creators, of course, and you’ve all heard various arguments about the creative impulse, about how some people aren’t meant to do certain kinds of things… and undoubtedly we all have different takes on all of that.

At my mom’s urging I’ve recently finished Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin. Grandin is - or maybe she isn’t - a most unusual person, an expert on animal behavior and autism, a much sought after consultant to the livestock industry, an outspoken champion of neurodiversity. I found it to be an unusually difficult book to read (this comes from someone who had just finished reading a book called Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois) because it was at times unclear what exactly I was reading about. Honestly I’m still not sure what some of it was about. What I know is that I’ve long been deeply fascinated by both words and numbers. I wish I had become a linguist, but I also wish I had become a statistician, and I suppose I’ve never reconciled these things very well.

I’ve never played a musical instrument though, and unless I’m drawing a carrot or a bomb, I seem to be a pretty awful artist.

What I do have, and what I suspect many other people have, is a deep and abiding interest in creating, even if it might be that for long stretches of time I’ve proven to be fairly inept at having anything to show for it - and there too I suspect many other people think much the same way.

One of the things Grandin emphasizes in Visual Thinking is the idea that we’ve gotten too far away from visualizing things, from employing people like industrial designers, in favor of computerizing, employing drafters. We’ve gotten away from common sense design. In broad strokes we’ve not only done a terrible job of emphasizing subjects like art and music in school, we’ve also eliminated subjects like shop, we’ve completely downplayed the idea of craft (unless you count beer - we never downplay alcohol, never ever ever.)

You know what I find incredibly aesthetically pleasing? A well conceived hopscotch course. And, see, it’s okay if the direction fails to be linear, so long as there is still some kind of order to it. I also find a lot of abstract art to be pleasing - Mondrian, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy - but that’s because the abstraction doesn’t prevent me from seeing the order in it.

Alright, dude, what does this have to do with remote work, the locomotive guy, and livestock?

The creative impulse, and one’s sense of order, I would argue, involve more than just a relationship with a finished product. Much as how a road trip is often more about the journey than the destination, so too it is with the creative process.

What I feel like I and other co-workers have experienced with our work, and what I have often read about having happened to musicians, is that the pace and route of the journey are too often disrupted. Think of the pregnant woman who embarks on an epic road trip only to have to stop at every last damn rest area in Iowa. Or, perhaps better yet, once the child is around, and asks every 11 minutes “Are we there yet?”

Teams meetings, in the way they’re conducted, often come off as a form of regimentation that thoroughly thwarts the pace and route of the creative thought worker. It’s like hopscotch where once you reach every third square, you have to stop and have some kid on the playground lecture you about the best way to climb a slide. Oh, and you have to get there right on time, and you have to pee first. And do it all over again the next day, except the meetings are at different times. I think this sort of thing might very well work for some people, but they’ve been imposed on organizations where the people who work there are exactly the wrong people for such impositions. Could you imagine an artist or musician having to spend a working day like that? Their work would suffer terribly. Why would we expect it to be any different for a creative programmer?

If I’m honest, I’m dubious that the quality of my code would be greatly enhanced if I went back to having a slice of apple pie at Ashbary Coffee House every couple of weeks. But the quality of my coding experience might be different. Having fewer Teams meetings might or might not lead to greater raw productivity. But as is, I spend most Teams meetings doing at least one other thing at the same time, because otherwise I can’t get everything done. I’m pretty sure this is what most other people are doing too, and I also have a suspicion that many of them handle it worse than I do. It’s not my company though. This is what most companies seem to have fallen into, if they’ve had the sense to stay remote. Those that have thrown a fit and forced people back into the office… well, Ed Zitron explains all that much better than I can. Go read him.

Am I getting to a point? I think it’s that we’ve got a really messed up understanding of what work is these days. Not everyone, not everywhere, but, in simplest terms, work and production are not the same thing. Production is one of the desirable results of work, but not the only one (think things like professional development here). Work is a combination of input and process, an amalgam of the time spent and the way it is spent, not quite the same thing as “the journey” alone because it also involves the notion of investment, but much more than just a narrow means to the end of production. For people with a greater need to create most especially, the output of work needs to be understood not just in terms of product but also in terms of method and style… and maybe this doesn’t make a lot of sense to people for whom programming itself is already so abstract, or to people who see most any kind of work in the narrowest possible lens. Admittedly I’m someone who sees labor as something broader, as something which should be more than just raw toil, but also as someone who recognizes that sometimes raw toil is what’s needed (and should be properly remunerated!)

I think, like Temple Grandin, I’m just making a variation on the argument that We are not doing what We should to allow people to self-actualize. We’re not giving proper schooling, we’re not respecting different kinds of thinking and different kinds of work, we’re not emphasizing professional development, even when we’re giving lip service to some of these things. We’re always too willing to let Something More Important bump Something Less Important, like when we require kids to take more math classes (even if math is never going to be what they’re good at) and then don’t even offer them shop (which might be the only place where any of that math is actually going to click for some of them!)

For what it’s worth, when I talk about the creative impulse… I sat down a little over two hours ago with absolutely no idea what I was going to write about. The exercise here is crucial to my own grand journey. I would scarcely expect that writing this sort of thing is what most of you feel compelled to do or would divine any godlike understanding from. But I will bet you, you’ve got your own thing. And some of you got into the line of work you did because it at least satisfies a little bit of that itch. Good. Scratch that itch. And if you’re unsatisfied, grab a metaphorical backscratcher. Try several if you need to. And for those of us who have some ability to do so, let’s do what we can to limit the rash of Teams!

Yeah, I know, I’ve written enough this week. But I’ve got a little more.

This week the body of Hamish Kilgour, among so many other things co-founder of The Clean, was found in Christchurch. Hamish McNeilly, whose Substack The Mish I mentioned last week, pays tribute to Kilgour far better than I can. In one sentence he pretty much sums up my core musical oeuvre:

I mean, how much better could it possibly get than that?

Originally from 1981’s Boodle Boodle Boodle, “Anything Could Happen” is far and away the most popular Clean track on Spotify, and perhaps the clearest document available connecting what the Velvet Underground sounded like in the late ‘60s to what American indie-rock sounded like in the early ‘90s:

From 1990’s Vehicle, “Dunes” sounds like, to this ears, perfect pop music: jangly, propulsing, and ramshackle just the way it ought to be:

As if that wouldn’t have been enough, Kilgour was even the original drummer for Bailter Space, long and still my favorite band out of New Zealand. He didn’t stay with them long, but that’s Kilgour behind the kit on Thermos:

I am asked annually what I want for Christmas, and I never have a good answer. But here is a good answer: Anthology, which I shamefully still do not own, but would very much like to. (Many other delightful gifts for yours truly can be found elsewhere on the Merge Records shop, if you’re curious. Or, if you’re feeling particularly generous, I’ll still take that trip to Dunedin.)

This past week, I pulled Dump’s A Grown-Ass Man off the shelf. Dump is the side project of Yo La Tengo bassist James McNew, and this is all self-recorded stuff released in 2002. It ranges from wonderful to incredible.

Mostly they’re McNew originals, but my favorite song on the album is a cover of an R&B song released just a couple of years earlier, which I present to you here: Gerald Levert’s “Mr. Too Damn Good”:

Until tonight I had never heard Gerald Levert’s original version of the song. Funny how it works out like that sometimes.

Here’s the Dump cover:

A Grown-Ass Man also includes a cover of David B. Lyons’s favorite song, “Cowboy Song”, for those of you wacky enough to keep track of such things.

Now that I’ve gone on far too long about too many things I’ll throw just a couple extra things out about sports to see who’s still paying attention:

Fred McGriff in the Hall of Fame? Yes please! The Crime Dog has long felt like one to me and I’m thrilled to see him going in.

Like it or not… the Astros are still the clear favorites to win the World Series next year, aren’t they?

My prediction for Belgium to win the World Cup looks horrendous now, doesn’t it?

I explained to my pal Ramapithecus this past week that for those of us who genuinely believe that a lot of what America is about is bullshit, but also at the same time sincerely believe in a lot of what America is about - in other words, those of us who can think critically about our country, because our country is a place which at its best encourages critical thinking - soccer is one of those spaces where a “USA! USA!” chant actually feels very much OK. The USMNT looks like America - it’s a diverse collection of guys, and not just in terms of ethnic or racial background. Like a lot of other people I’m bullish on their chances come 2026.

And get this: next week, for the first time in my whole life, I’m going to an actual NBA game. I’ll just leave this teaser here for now.

Next week or the week after, maybe as part of Phthursday Musings or maybe not, I’ll have a long piece coming up about the Elephant 6 Collective, based on currently reading Adam Clair’s book Endless Endless. I know how riveted some of you are already, and how the vast majority of you are thinking, what on earth is he doing now? And you’re right to think that way, friends.