Minor Inconveniences
Bad design can ruin our entire day with one fell swoop. Last Friday, I went to Merrill Lynch to talk retirement funds and bonds and whatever else. When I got to the entrance, there were two huge wooden doors with large wrought-iron handles just begging for me to pull on them. I pulled.
Nothing. The doors didn't budge.
Okaayyyy. Push. Still nothing. Hmmm...do I have the wrong day? Are they closed? Nope, I can see through the windows next to the doors and inside, there's clearly the general bustle of workday activity going on in Merrill Lynch's own version of cubicle hell. Let's try again. Push then pull, quickly, and still nothing.
I started to think back to the opening scene of Hellraiser, where the guy is trying to crack that little cube puzzle, moments before the Cenobytes show up and rip him apart. What is the answer to this conundrum? As I started getting very annoyed, I looked down and saw, below those gigantic wrought-iron handles, a small doorknob on one side. I reached down, twisted, and voila! I headed inside.
In the case, the problem ended up being the ass-hat that decided the huge wooden antique doors, with their fancy wrought-iron handles, just had to stay, but they decided to put in a new doorknob, for some reason...I guess in order to stay current with the latest in doorknob technology that's been created by the advanced doorknobologists with their PhD's.
Whoever made the decision about those doors made a design decision: leave the old ones up, handles and all, but add the new doorknob. A fine idea that preserves the overall look and feel of the building from a great distance, but is terrible once any new person tries to enter the damned building. There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have been faced with this situation and embarrassed about not being able to figure out the door on the Merrill Lynch building. I would have slipped into the building with my head down, hoping no one saw me standing stupidly at the door trying to figure out how to open it, secretly worried that everyone was laughing at me for being so dumb.
Not anymore.
The decision to make the doors like that was a bad one. It was a horribly wrong one, and the person who did it should not be allowed near any place producing any product that's meant to be used by human beings, unless he's taken out back and beaten with reeds in a muddy ditch until he realizes his mistake. Better yet, let's stick him behind the wheel of a car on the highway, and the car has two different brake pedals: one that's huge and decorative but does nothing, and one much smaller but functional one tucked away below it someplace. Let's see just how much he likes being confused.
I've got nothing against ornate design. But don't let it interfere with anything functional that's tied to any task I'm trying to accomplish, and that goes triple for anything simple, like opening a door.
There's probably still a few people snickering at me. "Oh, Jim couldn't figure out how to open a door." And now I'm griping about it like some old man in a restaurant who's annoyed that the bread on his sandwich was a little stale so it hurt his dentures when he bit into it. Okay, fair enough.
But I really do think our lives are just swamped with little annoyances like the doors. Some engineer somewhere decides to create something a certain way, and even if it defies common sense, he says, "Screw people if they can't figure it out. What I created is fine." No, it isn't. People like you are making our lives borderline miserable in subtle, sometimes undetectable ways. You're creating small inefficiencies in a much larger system that are causing it to have more entropy than it should, and it's breaking down a lot quicker than it ought to. Thought you might like to know you're a detractor to mankind.
I've had only a couple of web development jobs in my day, but I remember when I lived back in the Detroit area, I had several technical interviews for software jobs. Sometimes people asked me theoretical questions about the nature of object-oriented programming, sometimes they asked me to write code, and two of them even asked me how I felt about managing a team (yikes, turn around and run in the other direction. Couldn't they tell I was only 24?)
There's one thing that I've never been asked to do in a job interview for a programming position, and that's read a big bunch of existing code. This is strange, because as developers working on a core product or websites, it's key that we're able to quickly take a massive load of someone else's garbage and decode it, to figure out what in the hell it's doing. Sure, I'll write a brand-spankin' new function for an HR person that does some simple addition, or whatever, but when you get right down to it, a lot of what we do is just reading someone else's work figure what functions have already been created so that we don't have to redo them ourselves.
This can get tricky very quickly, particularly if your programming language du jour is something other than Python. For the last two weeks at my new job, I've been thanking my lucky stars that I'm staring at Python code instead of something like Perl or C++. Python actually forces beautiful code, because it won't run properly unless you've got the indentations set correctly. This might sound like a trivial feature of the language, but the guy who created it realized that as developers, a huge portion of our time is spent reading existing code instead of pounding out new stuff, and wouldn't it be phenomenally easier if the interpreter for a language forced you to write code that was formatted in a way that was easily readable by other human beings? Yes. It's a brilliant addition to the language. If I'm speaking to anyone with the itch to create a new programming language, take note that this was the best idea that anyone's come up with, and implemented, in the past 20 years in the wide world of programming, as far as I'm concerned. Automatic memory management via garbage collection is a close second.
While no one outside of my friend Mark is probably still reading this post, this is the perfect example of someone who was dissatisfied with the status quo and decided to take it upon themselves to design something better.
I think that, no matter what position we are in, we have opportunities to change things for ourselves, and for others, all the time, just by making small changes to the way we do things. Even if you're working in fast food handing out bags of fries and burgers in a drive-thru, pack the bags so that when a person reaches in without looking and pulls something out, the container of fries doesn't invert and dump all the fries out into the inside of the bag. Or you could arrange the contents of the bag so that you ensure the fries do spill everywhere. Either way. People who are eating fast food and driving at the same time probably deserve that, a little. Just be very aware of the fact that you can effect a change, good or bad, on your surroundings and the people you interact with on a regular basis.
You may say that I sound like an old man because I'm whining about the way things are, but at least I'm not complacent and passively accepting of things that are clearly broken. I'm not set in my ways just yet, I'm making a conscious effort to be oblivious to things, and this is something we should all be doing, for all our sakes.
Nothing. The doors didn't budge.
Okaayyyy. Push. Still nothing. Hmmm...do I have the wrong day? Are they closed? Nope, I can see through the windows next to the doors and inside, there's clearly the general bustle of workday activity going on in Merrill Lynch's own version of cubicle hell. Let's try again. Push then pull, quickly, and still nothing.
I started to think back to the opening scene of Hellraiser, where the guy is trying to crack that little cube puzzle, moments before the Cenobytes show up and rip him apart. What is the answer to this conundrum? As I started getting very annoyed, I looked down and saw, below those gigantic wrought-iron handles, a small doorknob on one side. I reached down, twisted, and voila! I headed inside.
In the case, the problem ended up being the ass-hat that decided the huge wooden antique doors, with their fancy wrought-iron handles, just had to stay, but they decided to put in a new doorknob, for some reason...I guess in order to stay current with the latest in doorknob technology that's been created by the advanced doorknobologists with their PhD's.
Whoever made the decision about those doors made a design decision: leave the old ones up, handles and all, but add the new doorknob. A fine idea that preserves the overall look and feel of the building from a great distance, but is terrible once any new person tries to enter the damned building. There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have been faced with this situation and embarrassed about not being able to figure out the door on the Merrill Lynch building. I would have slipped into the building with my head down, hoping no one saw me standing stupidly at the door trying to figure out how to open it, secretly worried that everyone was laughing at me for being so dumb.
Not anymore.
The decision to make the doors like that was a bad one. It was a horribly wrong one, and the person who did it should not be allowed near any place producing any product that's meant to be used by human beings, unless he's taken out back and beaten with reeds in a muddy ditch until he realizes his mistake. Better yet, let's stick him behind the wheel of a car on the highway, and the car has two different brake pedals: one that's huge and decorative but does nothing, and one much smaller but functional one tucked away below it someplace. Let's see just how much he likes being confused.
I've got nothing against ornate design. But don't let it interfere with anything functional that's tied to any task I'm trying to accomplish, and that goes triple for anything simple, like opening a door.
There's probably still a few people snickering at me. "Oh, Jim couldn't figure out how to open a door." And now I'm griping about it like some old man in a restaurant who's annoyed that the bread on his sandwich was a little stale so it hurt his dentures when he bit into it. Okay, fair enough.
But I really do think our lives are just swamped with little annoyances like the doors. Some engineer somewhere decides to create something a certain way, and even if it defies common sense, he says, "Screw people if they can't figure it out. What I created is fine." No, it isn't. People like you are making our lives borderline miserable in subtle, sometimes undetectable ways. You're creating small inefficiencies in a much larger system that are causing it to have more entropy than it should, and it's breaking down a lot quicker than it ought to. Thought you might like to know you're a detractor to mankind.
I've had only a couple of web development jobs in my day, but I remember when I lived back in the Detroit area, I had several technical interviews for software jobs. Sometimes people asked me theoretical questions about the nature of object-oriented programming, sometimes they asked me to write code, and two of them even asked me how I felt about managing a team (yikes, turn around and run in the other direction. Couldn't they tell I was only 24?)
There's one thing that I've never been asked to do in a job interview for a programming position, and that's read a big bunch of existing code. This is strange, because as developers working on a core product or websites, it's key that we're able to quickly take a massive load of someone else's garbage and decode it, to figure out what in the hell it's doing. Sure, I'll write a brand-spankin' new function for an HR person that does some simple addition, or whatever, but when you get right down to it, a lot of what we do is just reading someone else's work figure what functions have already been created so that we don't have to redo them ourselves.
This can get tricky very quickly, particularly if your programming language du jour is something other than Python. For the last two weeks at my new job, I've been thanking my lucky stars that I'm staring at Python code instead of something like Perl or C++. Python actually forces beautiful code, because it won't run properly unless you've got the indentations set correctly. This might sound like a trivial feature of the language, but the guy who created it realized that as developers, a huge portion of our time is spent reading existing code instead of pounding out new stuff, and wouldn't it be phenomenally easier if the interpreter for a language forced you to write code that was formatted in a way that was easily readable by other human beings? Yes. It's a brilliant addition to the language. If I'm speaking to anyone with the itch to create a new programming language, take note that this was the best idea that anyone's come up with, and implemented, in the past 20 years in the wide world of programming, as far as I'm concerned. Automatic memory management via garbage collection is a close second.
While no one outside of my friend Mark is probably still reading this post, this is the perfect example of someone who was dissatisfied with the status quo and decided to take it upon themselves to design something better.
I think that, no matter what position we are in, we have opportunities to change things for ourselves, and for others, all the time, just by making small changes to the way we do things. Even if you're working in fast food handing out bags of fries and burgers in a drive-thru, pack the bags so that when a person reaches in without looking and pulls something out, the container of fries doesn't invert and dump all the fries out into the inside of the bag. Or you could arrange the contents of the bag so that you ensure the fries do spill everywhere. Either way. People who are eating fast food and driving at the same time probably deserve that, a little. Just be very aware of the fact that you can effect a change, good or bad, on your surroundings and the people you interact with on a regular basis.
You may say that I sound like an old man because I'm whining about the way things are, but at least I'm not complacent and passively accepting of things that are clearly broken. I'm not set in my ways just yet, I'm making a conscious effort to be oblivious to things, and this is something we should all be doing, for all our sakes.