During the back and forth of exchange with a technical recruiter, he finally asked me what I was looking for. And so the floodgates opened.
This may sound weird, but I pretty much choose employment or position based on the quality of work I think I can do, alone. And when I say quality of work, I mean more than the environment, or the IQ of those I’ll be working with. I mean the opportunity to do what may lead to, first-class work, Nobel-prize winning kind of work.1 I look for places where I am upstream of technological change: that means, any deals with, say, old guard media companies or the Fortune 500, while they could be good, don’t really interest me. I want to work on what might become fundamental changes in the way people use technology to do things. But that doesn’t mean that I need to tackle the largest problems I can see right off. What matters is that I, personally, have a reasonable approach. I mustn’t forget to, as Richard Hamming says, ‘plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow’ — small projects can, strikingly, accumulate momentum and value.1
I find little value in submitting myself to some company culture, and more in preserving my professional ethics, ambitions, and goals concurrently: meaning, for example, I would like to be able to develop new methods, make them available by open sourcing them and popular by evangelizing them through my blog, and having the opportunity to teach them, given the chance. I think that the personality and ideas that excellent people bring to a community of makers will, naturally, evolve into a company culture worth having. But most big companies have grown too large to make this possible, much faster than they can reasonably build trust. And so this natural, enjoyable, healthy culture is replaced with a kind of proxy — virtual intracompany nationalism, fascism even. I not only find this distasteful, I’ve barely learned how to work within it at all — only if there’s deeply meaningful work to be done. And why bother?
Angling to be upstream of technological change, I find unusual answers: Given the choice between a VP position at a big five media company with oodles of benefits, and, say, work at an early netscape or google for a totally minimal salary, and I’ll choose the latter every time. I choose places that I can learn a lot about: where learning I’d learn about more than tradition. It is, for example, not important for me to learn about how to run a large organization: if I ever do, it won’t be in the way that most others are run. I do, however, intend to help grow large, leaderless, open organizations, and so I’d do almost anything for a chance to work with Caterina Fake, or Linus Torvalds.
I want to work on something I find deep personal meaning in. I strongly believe in supporting open culture. I don’t think I’d work for long in games or entertainment unless it would influence change in the social dynamic of collaboration and creation. I worked at MochiMedia because it made possible an income stream for small independent developers where none existed before. This finally opened up professional game development from bigbox studios. Now much of the innovation in gaming comes out of bedrooms. An independent game developer can now commit to their art in a way they couldn’t before.
Similarly, I’d work at YouTube rather than Hulu, even though one’s a startup and the other isn’t, because they’re more interested in involving everyone in the process. As Clay Shirky says, they’re interested in ‘finding the mouse’.
I want to work somewhere where I can really make a difference. Why am I working in technology at all? Archimedes once said, ‘If you give me a lever and a place to stand, I can move the world.’ Technology is my lever. I need only find place to stand. This makes me wary of startups that try to do good, but aren’t particularly focused on doing it efficiently. I wouldn’t work for most charities. There’s too little pressure on them to focus — the tempering influence of market competition is replaced by government demands for ‘accountability’, which isn’t nearly as powerful. And there are numerous ‘ecogreen’ websites out there that try to promote simple, green ways of living. These may be virtuous, however, in terms of minimizing environmental impact I think they’re somewhat irrelevant.2 Saving plastic bags won’t lift a toe on our carbon footprint unless we find ways to either cut down on air and automobile travel, or do it more efficiently. And on carbon footprints — global warming is, I think, a red herring — there are thousands of nasty effects of pollution from, say, coal-fired power plants that will hit even if global warming doesn’t occur (though I think, probably, it will). Too much of China now wears breathing masks.
I can see myself joining and dedicating myself to the right company, full-time, with the same goals and philosophies. These are quite stringent requirements. Therefore, I have so far found it necessary to preserve some of my energy from full-time employment, and concentrate what I have left for my own projects. This is why I need to be open with companies: with most, all I am looking for is consulting work, and I want to be completely, totally honest with them about it.
Sincerely,
Danielle
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Notes:
[1] - From the classic talk by Richard Hamming, You and Your Research. I don’t, particularly, apologize for my ambition here. Why shouldn’t I try to do first class work? The Nobel prize winning part is purely incidental. But this is the kind of work I mean — a significant contribution, one that people can build upon.
[2] - The free, online book
‘Sustainability - Without the Hot Air’ is an excellent read into environmental matters. And I shouldn’t claim that small contributions to green living is completely irrelevant — it does have some small effect, and perhaps raising the issue in our collective consciousness will have a greater second order effect than I imagine. But so many people, for example, go out of their way to buy ’sustainable’ products at Whole Foods, say, when in reality, longer vehicle trips do more damage than almost anything you could buy. Most of these things are just marketed in a way to make you feel good about them. They don’t have any real effect!
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Thanks to Alex Lang, Ma’ayan Bresler, Nick Pilon, Colin Percival, Michael Nielsen, and Joel Muzzerall for reading drafts of this, and Charles Beatty, for sparking it.
PS: Certain misconceptions have been raised. Some feel that this is one demand of an over privileged generation. I reply to this here. Additionally, I am not, in fact, abandoning my startup. But I do need money, and a visa, so I am looking into either employment or seed funding.






