We talk a lot about vicious cycles, and how it’s easy to end up in bad places because the incentives are all bad, but let me tell you a story.
It’s a pleasant Saturday, my family is watching Star Trek: TNG together, and I’m in my home office, working on a side project and slightly resenting it. It’s the collateral for a workshop Carol Smith and I are giving at LISA about the non-technical part of interviewing, and we think it’s really an important part of helping people get jobs. So the workshop will be great and important, but I’m currently wishing I was doing something else. And then this comes across my twitter:
https://twitter.com/mariechatfield/status/909159623935934464
Marie says she uses the principles I espoused in that talk even when she starts side projects, like Call My Congress. Because she set it up to be easily localized, anyone could come through and easily add instructions in Spanish or Somali, without having to fight the project to do it.
I gave that talk 17 times. I took it to a different continent. I got most of my expenses paid, and I got an honorarium exactly once. I figure I spent 60 hours researching and writing it, and and 3-5 hours in prep and rewriting each time I gave it. I was working for myself, so no one paid me for that time.
A thank you note like this makes that all worthwhile. I give technical talks for the same reasons that novelists say they have to write – because it’s something burning in me, and I need and want to share everything I have learned the hard way so that other people don’t have to. In my grandiose moments, I think of it as reducing the entropy of the technical world, giving people a boost up the ladder. Most of the time I think it’s funny that all of my teacher-mother’s children have found our own ways to teach, far from school classrooms.
Now I have a job that pays me for development time for talks, and means that travel and conferences are not lost productivity for me, and that means the world to me, but most of the technical speakers you see at conferences are like I was — working evenings and weekends and taking vacation time to battle entropy with education.
I’m going to try to remember to do better about saying thank you, and thus spread the cycle of appreciation further and wider. A virtuous cycle perpetuates because the rewards are so good. Thank your mentors, and the friends who want you to expand your horizons, and the organizers who make safer spaces to speak in, and the bosses who don’t make you take vacation days. Thank them publicly and specifically.