The Hazard of Not Taking Things Personally at Work

-

Don't take it personally is an oft repeated platitude I hear repeated in the work environment. While I think it's unhealthy to take problems at work and things out of your control as personal affronts, I think a healthy dose of taking personal ownership of your work is "a good thing" (tm). I say this because the counterpoint to not taking things personally is not giving a damn and I think this is a far worse situation than folks who are personally invested and passionate about their work.

In my experience, the most successful folks I've interacted with take a very deep personal interest in their life's work. They are passionate, appropriately loyal, and care a great deal about the quality of the product or service they provide. Folks that punch the clock, point fingers, and skip home after their "8 (or so) hours of physical presence" are huge problem and all too often a key source of low quality work and cumbersome process. More dangerously this leads to a culture of "not my job" and causes folks who might otherwise be outstanding performers to ask themselves "why should I put forth any extra effort?" or "what's in it for me?".

So I amend the platitude and say this: Take personal ownership of your work, while I'm not about to spout phrases like "Arbeit Macht Frei", I DO think it is better if one approaches their work with a sense of ownership, responsibility, and a certain amount of pride in what they do for a living.

Comments

JT said…
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
April 22, 2015 at 10:59 AM
Anonymous said…
"Arbeit Macht Frei". You know that this sentence was used by the nazis, placed on the entrance of termination camps. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei

Else: 100% ack
May 31, 2015 at 12:09 PM
Mike Mainguy said…
@anon, yes, this is why I'm not about to spout it ;)
June 1, 2015 at 1:53 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Please use ANSI-92 SQL Join Syntax

-
Image
Way back in 1992, a standard was published for SQL. In it, the syntax for specifying joins in SQL Database was finally standardized. This was a good thing because (for folks who've been doing this a while), trying to decode the vagaries of how various Databases handled outer joins could drive you bonkers yielding different results depending on the parse order of things in the from and where clauses. Unfortunately, some DBMS vendors took a while to adopt this standard (Oracle didn't support it until 2001), but at this point if you're using a major RDBMS and NOT using it, you're probably mired in a tradition or habit that bears changing. As an example of what I'm describing, here are some examples of what I mean. Old School (no standard syntax + implementation and evaluation of predicates varied by vendor [and query]): select * from customer, order where customer.customer = order.customerid ANSI way (agreed to standard, predicate evaluation has some rules
Read more

the myth of asynchronous JDBC

-
Image
I keep seeing people (especially in the scala/typesafe world) posting about async jdbc libraries. STOP IT! Under the current APIs, async JDBC belongs in a realm with Unicorns, Tiger Squirrels, and 8' spiders. While you might be able to move the blocking operations and queue requests and keep your "main" worker threads from blocking, jdbc is synchronous. At some point, somewhere, there's going to be a thread blocking waiting for a response. It's frustrating to see so many folks hyping this and muddying the waters. Unless you write your own client for a dbms and have a dbms that can multiplex calls over a single connection (or using some other strategy to enable this capability) db access is going to block. It's not impossible to make the calls completely async, but nobody's built it yet. Yes, I know ajdbc is taking a stab at this capability, but even IT uses a thread pool for the blocking calls (be default). Someday we'll have async databa
Read more

The difference between Scalability, Performance, Efficiency, and Concurrency explained

-
I thought I'd give some explanation of the difference between scalability, performance, Efficiency, and concurrency. To make things more accessible (and because I'm watching a cooking show on TV) I'm going to use a baking metaphor to help explain the differences. In our case, the system in question is baking cookies for consumers. Scalability, is how well something responds to adding more resources. If we can double our capacity by doubling the number of resources, we've got linear scalability. In our baking example, if we add more ingredients, we can scale to a larger number of cookies. To contrast with our other metrics, this doesn't actually increase the performance of creating a single cookie (they still take 10 minutes to bake), and the efficiency is the same (we just have more capacity). We also cannot bake more cookies in a fixed time period, but over a larger time period we can produce more cookies. Performance is how fast something can get done, u
Read more