I recently chatted with a data science leader who described their company reaching this state. They couldn’t show any business impact from the past two years of their product releases, so the finance team identified a surefire way for R&D to make a business impact: laying off much of the R&D team.

Rick was a very talented developer. Rick could solve complex business logic problems and create sophisticated architectures to support his lofty designs. Rick could not solve the problem of how to work effectively on a team.

I dove into the source code. Rick was right: no-one could possibly understand what Rick had created. Except for Rick. It was a reflection of the workings of his own mind. Some of it was very clever, a lot of it was copy-pasta, it was all very idiosyncratic, and it was not at all documented.

Backpacker Jobs Backpackers and vagabonds do work that I’ll call “alternative” travel jobs. The type of work that may not require a computer or a college degree, but has a more hands-on approach. Think musicians, artists, or manual labor. Pay could be under the table. Examples: Street vendor, musician, farm work, etc.

If you lose the desire to be silly, the power to laugh, and the ability to poke fun at yourself, you will lose the power to think. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy for one reason: It kills off his imagination.

“I only dowhat is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If Ifalter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”(Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)[4]

Currently, I’m working on designing the interfaces and it’s real fun!

Writing documentation for the new website has been fun. Yes, fun!

People really don't stress enough the importance of enjoying what you're programming. It aids creativity, makes you a better teammate, and makes it significantly easier to enter a state of flow. It should be considered an important factor in choosing a web development framework (or lack thereof). Kudos!

In fact, work is meant to be fun and it has to be fun before anything interesting or investor-pleasing can happen. Every good manager knows this.