Quit Your Job. Srsly.

Talks

Shane Becker

#software-development

#entrepreneurship

#personal-development

Quit Your Job. Srsly.

by Shane Becker

In the talk titled "Quit Your Job. Srsly," Shane Becker at LA RubyConf 2012 encourages attendees to reconsider their employment situations and the potential they possess. Becker asserts that many individuals are capable of achieving much more than their current jobs allow, emphasizing that professionals, especially programmers, often waste their talents on tasks that lack significance. He opens with a personal introduction and mentions his involvement in upcoming conferences, setting the stage for an engaging discussion on individual potential and the software industry.

The main theme of Becker's talk revolves around the idea that programmers are undervalued and that many are contributing to projects that do not meaningfully benefit society. He prompts the audience to reflect on their desires, asking probing questions like "If you were guaranteed not to fail, what would you do?" and "What is stopping you?" Becker makes several key points to support his message:

Potential and Capability: He believes that everyone in the room has untapped skills and creativity.
Value of Skills: Programmers possess valuable skills and should not underestimate their worth in the job market.
Cultural Impact: Software has become integral to every aspect of modern life, and those who create it hold significant cultural and societal power.
A Call to Action: Becker encourages attendees to quit their jobs if they are unfulfilled, clarifying that it’s not just metaphorically but genuinely considering leaving jobs that do not ignite passion or creativity.
Options Beyond Traditional Employment: He suggests various alternatives, such as starting a consultancy, creating something meaningful, or simply taking the time to explore personal projects.

Throughout the talk, Becker references historical figures in computing like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, highlighting how their groundbreaking contributions transformed society. He connects these historical achievements to modern programming's potential for societal change, pushing the audience to think beyond their current roles.

In conclusion, Becker imparts a message of empowerment, urging the audience to recognize their capabilities and prioritize meaningful work over mere employment. He emphasizes the importance of using their skills for greater impact rather than for projects driven only by profit, encapsulating the idea with Horace Mann's quote, "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." Keeping the focus on personal fulfillment and societal contributions, Becker's talk serves as a rallying cry for programmers to pursue their true passions and make a meaningful difference in the world.

00:00:25.199 Um, so my name is Shane Becker. You might recognize me by my avatar more than my real-life face. I go by Vegan Straight Edge, and I have a website, iamshane.com.

00:00:40.079 A couple of announcements. Ben Blythe and I are organizing a conference in Seattle called Cascadia Ruby. It serves the Portland, Seattle, Vancouver area. We did one last year in July and are doing another one on August third and fourth. We're signing the contract this week, so it's still possible, I guess, that the dates will change.

00:01:10.159 I'm doing another Farmhouse Comp in May, on May 5th, 2012. Like Kobe said, it's in my backyard, under a hundred-year-old avocado tree at my house, which is an old farmhouse. It's sort of like backyard TED talks. There's storytelling; there's no slides, there are no projectors, and there's no worry of anyone staring at the wall the whole time while they talk to you.

00:01:38.079 Like any provocative talk, this is more about some things than others, so I just want to clear up a couple of misconceptions here. I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake. I am not that different from all of you in this room. I think what I'm saying doesn't just apply to me and people like me. I'm not married; I don't have kids, and I don't have a mortgage. Maybe you have some combination of those, but I think what I'm saying now applies to Joe O'Brien, who spoke first and has all those things, as much as it does to anyone else. This talk is not an attack on capitalism, nor is it an attack on work—meaning not just the act of laboring to accomplish a goal, but the idea of going to a job to survive.

00:03:05.200 Okay, so real talk. If you were guaranteed not to fail, what would you do? That's the thing that underlines everything in my life. Put it another way: if you were to die right now, what would you regret having not done? The obvious follow-up question is always: what's stopping you? Why aren't you doing those things? You know, what's really stopping you? Just getting a passport is not something that stops you from traveling the world; that's just a thing you get to do. I don't know you; I don't know what kind of code you write, what project you're on, or what your day-to-day is like at work. I don't know how much money you make, your hopes and dreams, or secret desires. You always have to have a secret plan. Always have a secret plan.

00:03:56.959 But I do know this: you're better than you think you are. You know, in this room and in this community, I see some of the smartest, most creative people in the world. I see all this beautiful, amazing potential, and I see it squandered every day. There’s just an entire generation of incredible programmers building online advertising and the next mobile garden, data silo, social network that doesn't matter. As you might have guessed from the title of my talk, I want you to quit your job. And this isn't a metaphor.

00:04:50.960 Actually, as a quick survey, who is here whose boss is also here? Okay, sort of an opportunity! There are a multitude of reasons that I want you to quit. So who here is the smartest person on their team? Like, be honest. Okay, most of you aren't. Don't be so humble; it's okay to admit that you're smarter than most people. You know, like Joe was saying, you were bored in science class or math class because you were smarter than the teacher. You're probably not learning as much as you could be if you were on a better team.

00:05:08.479 I've had the great fortune of working with Aaron Patterson twice. Man, if you want to learn a whole lot real fast, work with that guy. I share my living room office with Evan and John in this book every day. You think you're nerdy? Try being the least smart person on a team or try being somewhere in the middle; you'll learn a whole lot real fast. I guarantee you're not making enough money. So we all do Ruby—who also does iOS stuff—and who also does Android. Okay, so you people can write your own ticket, work wherever you want, and get paid as much as you want.

00:06:06.080 It's ridiculous what it was, kind of what Joe was talking about, you know, the reasons why people want to work at a place and what excites them. At a certain point, money doesn't do it anymore. But we're in a boom right now—take advantage of that. Make a whole lot of money doing something awesome and bank a lot. I want you to think about your salary, whatever that number is; hold it in your head right now and give yourself a raise. So in your head, what is that new salary? Whatever that number is, your new salary, increase it again by 25 or 50 percent. Sincerely, I promise you, you are worth more than you think you are.

00:07:30.479 So, who here is hiring? We always hear at conferences about how Europe is okay. Keep your hands up for a second. Everyone who's hiring, keep your hand up if you're willing to pay big salaries to poach good people from other places. So after we're done here, that's just step one. That's just you know a better job; it's just making more money.

00:08:04.479 So maybe you quit your job to go do something fun, you know, like a social network for cats or video games for cats. Or maybe just to do something different—you've been at the same place for 13 months, and that's past your one-year limit. Or maybe to go do nothing at all, right? The work ethic in this culture is killing us while we toil away making stuff no one needs. There's nothing wrong with doing nothing. Maybe you go start your own company, right? Like Ron Evans and Dan Fisher—they run a consultancy and they love it—right? They are their own bosses. Maybe you go start a product shop because you want to build iPad games for cats.

00:09:06.720 Or, you know, maybe you start a collective with your friends and peers. Take co-working to the logical end. If you spend enough time in the same space with someone, surely you come up with ideas for something to do that you don't need a job for—a job where someone else tells you to do it. Or maybe you're too scared to quit your job because you're terrified of what lies just off the edge of that cliff. Maybe you do it to gain courage. I've quit several jobs, and I've fired several jobs, and I've had a few quit me, and that's the best moment ever.

00:09:55.440 You know, when you start a new project at a job or for yourself, you say, 'You know, blue skies and green fields?' Well, it’s really like clear eyes and cold hearts. Nothing is better than that moment, freshly out of the job, before you even start thinking about what's next. If you're in this room, you've got it worked out. What's next is easy at that moment when you're free for a few minutes.

00:11:45.760 Or maybe you're not proud of the work you do. You're not proud of the product that you build; maybe you're not proud of the company you work for. Those are the best reasons ever to quit. Maybe you quit your job and become a professional programmer. I don’t know; paint a self-portrait, build a house, you know, travel the world, throw down some cardboard, and do some old-school breakdancing. Just get wild. Maybe you quit because every day that you go to your job, you're quietly dying a little bit on the inside.

00:12:53.760 And one day you wake up, and you're in the middle of an iteration planning meeting, a cross-functional one, where you assign story points to the next feature, and you realize, 'I’ve spent too much of my life on this.' Or maybe you quit because you realize you have the skills of one of the most important crafts of our culture. Think about that for a second: software touches everything. It's not just in our lives because we're developers and obviously, we make the software we’re touching all the time, but the muscles walking around outside you have no idea what's going on in this room.

00:14:59.760 You know, even in their lives—computers and phones, obviously websites, but also our banks, our grocery stores, and this hotel. Everything about our lives is mediated through software. Our entire culture is arranging itself around software. You know, I’m not the only person to think that software is the new literacy. I think Matt Mullenweg said that first, but the idea that everyone should know some degree of scripting or coding—whatever you want to call it—you should all be able to build things because that's the new mass profession after farming and manufacturing and construction and service work. Programming is the next mass profession.

00:16:14.560 So we hold the skills of this craft that's so important, and we build the products that we build. Maybe you quit because you hold in your hands and in your brains the skills of this craft and you want to do something that is more meaningful. You want to build something that outlives you, that makes the world a better place, that makes lives better, and maybe transforms culture with that. This is the tallest slide I have, I’m sorry for the people in the back. So I'll read it to you. I want to do like a brief computer science history lesson here.

00:18:00.480 This is a brief and very complete history of noteworthy achievements in the field of computing as researched almost exclusively on Wikipedia. So, some day—like, C was invented in '72. Real means they've been working on it for a few years. In the 1830s, Babbage set out to build the first mechanical calculator and then later the difference engine. His friend, Ada Lovelace, gets involved and writes the first algorithm which was designed to be executed on a machine. That machine was never finished or built because she ran out of money and the political squabbling lasted years. Later, a science museum built the difference engine, and Ada's algorithm worked, so not only did she write the first algorithm, but she wrote it for a machine she couldn't test on. She was arguably the first programmer.

00:19:55.760 Alonzo Church invented lambda calculus in 1935. Grace Hopper invented COBOL and the first compiler in the 1940s. Can you imagine writing a compiler at all? It's still non-trivial. Then we had LISP in 1958. Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse, which was this wood block with wheels. What do you do with a mouse when computers as they were in the '60s were primitive? You could collect coordinates, but what the hell was a mouse for when there was no GUI? Engelbart explored the ideas of hypertext and hypermedia, which were first said by Ted Nelson, who was also independently working on those ideas with Project Xanadu, which never really shipped—it was the ultimate vaporware.

00:22:06.720 In 1968, Engelbart gets in front of a room full of people and gives the mother of all demos. He showcases video conferencing, document editing between machines, and a bunch of groundbreaking technologies that would shape the future of computing. The ARPANET, which was just one of the pieces that would eventually become the internet, had other networks worldwide using packet-switching technology.

00:24:12.960 In 1983, we finally got DNS. The list I’ve provided is mostly infrastructural achievements, and even if they weren't called that, they laid the foundation for what we see today. Regardless of the commercial aspect, these things changed the world. For instance, Apple made a ton of money from the Mac and the iPhone, yet they changed the world. Then we got GCC from Stallman, which provided the foundation for languages like Rust and many more. And here we are in 2012, thinking about why we do what we do.

00:25:38.560 You know, my life has been spent mostly building websites for other people. Most of them were just terrible ideas. Many no longer exist, and I wasn't smart enough to even save pictures of the ones that did.

00:26:14.720 So here we stand, in our passion for what we love, and we reminisce about our journey. You know, I really love the quote by Horace Mann—'Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.' That's a powerful message, and it often keeps me up at night.

00:26:32.000 I encourage you—don't waste time; do what matters. You're all very smart people, and being in this room is evidence of your abilities. So, whatever that thing is you're thinking of, you should do it.

LA RubyConf 2012