Back when we thought office spaces were necessary, I used to run a small creative studio in Manhattan. Most days a bunch of us would cross the street to order lunch from one of those “we make everything” mega-delis designed to feed and siphon cash from midtown workers.
The highlight of the place, and its most popular item, was an endless (four benches!) salad bar.
“Food by the pound,” my colleague Mike called the endless, four-bench salad bar. He meant that quantity, and not quality, was what we were consuming. Which was something our taste buds already knew and our wallets had accepted as inevitable.
Code by the pound
The phrase stuck in my head and it echoed something I’d noticed creeping into our changing UX culture at the time. For instance, around 2015, I’d noticed it in GitHub, where cool people had dozens or even hundreds of checked boxes denoting shipped code, whereas pitiable bastards like me had only a few checked project boxes to our credit.
To offset the feeling of falling behind, and to assert the primacy of value over volume, I would ask myself (and my clients) “Which is more valuable to a company? Inventing the iPhone? Or shipping a million little bug fixes?”
volume and value
It was an unfair question, of course, because every little bug repair fixes user experience hiccups, and therefore every single one is important to a company’s viability and success. Moreover, few things most of us create in our work have the world-changing potential, for better and worse, of the major inventions of our time: your open web, your smartphones, and latterly, of course, your AI.
And just as no one person “invented” the iPhone, so no single GitHub item would have contained all the work that all the iPhone’s makers put into it. The comparison, if you’ll forgive an additional food metaphor, arrived slightly undercooked.
Still, my point in making the unfair comparison was that employees could look awfully busy shipping an endless buffet of itty-bitty fixes, but the prodigiousness of their output did not necessarily correlate to their significance to the company and its customers. Whereas the employees who delivered the next iPhone and nothing else might be stuck with a thin GitHub brag box, but would have a far greater impact on the world than their code-by-the-pound colleagues.
10X, anyone?
I think of this as I watch the industry fall in love with ideas like 10Xing, where how much, how many, and how fast become more exciting than what should we make, and why.
This is an arms race. What comes after those is almost always a war. It’s a war no tech company wants to lose. Hence the focus on output and tooling. In time, we will complete the transition and return our gaze to surprising and delighting the customer. Meantime, strap in, and wear a large bib.
Photo by Connor Scott McManus.