On Perfectionism in Decentralized Work

Yesterday, Chives was awesome enough to independently notice that the notes they prepared regarding the Syndicate's annual meeting were not properly added to the livestream replay comments. It was a minor Google bug that just didn't save the comment, a bug I experienced as well when trying to link to the Discord post on open-sourcing TAD3 and the subsequent repository transition dates. When Chives originally messaged me privately that they commented their timestamp chapter summaries on the replay, I knew that this had happened but didn't say anything.

Collaboratively Solving Shared Challenges

This was for a number of reasons, but the largest was that I was only on my phone at the time. Thus, I presumed that it would take a couple hours to show up across all devices, or more realistically, I thought it was just a local error. By the time I got around to checking it again on my laptop with the full video studio pulled up, I could tell the text just wasn't there in any form.

However, it'd been a couple of days at this point (I know, go faster), and so it didn't feel right to message Chives out of the blue about how this or that wasn't correctly done or shared. Generally, my strategy here has been to roll items up into a list of pending working tasks, and then bring that up the next time we have a synchronous discussion together. I find that this works really well for individualized work items that have specific authorship or backing because it doesn't frame you as a nagging manager-type directing people's working efforts.

Similar Parallel

Something else like this came up about a week ago in the 501(c)(3) messaging channel. I'd mentioned that we'd need to get our annual return in, and limegreencab generously offered to provide assistance given their accounting background. Publicly, they agreed to chat with Chives on this at a specified date.

About a week passed thereafter without any updates, unfortunately going against my one true harp on collaborative working: transparency. Transparency just solves all the internal challenges I'm discussing whereby you want to know the status of how something's going.¹ But it's something that's relatively difficult to implement come tax season, and I haven't seen any great tooling built around it yet because taxes themselves are so centralized and thus implicate extremely proprietary public service providers seeking profits.

Directive Timelines

I've generally found that the moment I try to ask someone for something (to see if it's done), that status check often comes just 10% before a natural submission. That is to say, the person in question would've finished the work by themselves (and to an exceptional degree) if I just waited 10% longer for their own internal motivation to cross the operating finish line. I cannot express how meaningfully important this is compared to asking if it's done, them saying no, and then them begrudgingly finishing out the tasks to your central deadline.

I just know so deeply that items completed on your own timeline are much more fulfilling than those completed according to the preplanning of others' agendas. It's the difference between true working freedom and a never-ending subservience to "the man" and the pressures that come with perpetually operating under the guise and control of other humans deemed "more capable" of deciding what you should work on. Fuck that, and just let people themselves finish things out by having 10% more patience to create work-products that are 20% cooler.

Automatic Resolution

Thus, I typed a status-check message into the Discord box to ask about the status of the year-end filings. However, I didn't send it because I just knew it would seriously cripple an already teetering relationship with someone innovating on a different front of the political ideas than myself. I firmly believe it only takes a few negative interactions like "do this now" to alienate a voluntary working contributor, including whether or not they're compensated.

Now a couple days later, Chives posted a message saying the return forms were not only completed but also submitted to the IRS! We had it all done and accepted with zero community prodding after that meeting. The channel was eerily silent while all this incredible hard work churned away in the rear.

Silent Dedications

That's why I find comprehensive non-drafted PRs so inspirational.² There's just so much untapped human potential hiding behind the mammoth amounts of public-service dedication pouring into these open-source repositories. I want so dearly a way to reward their work without taking away independent sovereignty, respect, or identity by means of central edicts.

I really think people will wake up excited to greet the working day once this is in place, because they'll finally have the opportunity to itch at what's been clawing away at their minds without a course of action to change over all these years. That internal vision is a very fragile figment of the future which could be shattered momentarily by any outside directive of working agenda items incongruent with one's own personal mindmap. And thus it's precisely the sort of permissionless innovation which requires market-based reward.³

What Happened

Just yesterday, Chives independently recognized this error on the watch page. It seems like it could've come from prodding via another community member who also linked to their work. I'm not sure, and I don’t particularly feel like asking, as it's again one of those observation effect principles on community organization which I find unworthy of the knowledge trade.⁴ They made a whole new thread in the Discord with the finished timestamping information, even leaving the door open for other contributors to fill in the gaps through the discussion.

It was entirely a better solution and one rooted in innovative, independent thinking on the challenge. At this point, I took the work and made a critical mistake I was used to from my freelance outsourcing days. This mistake was the inner motivation for this post, and it was a close call that could’ve begun the slippery slope of workplace demotivation I've experienced in past interactions with directive manager-types who privy themselves holistically above the working class they interact with in daily operations.

Working Credit

Much of these sentiments circle around the due-credit appropriations traditionally inherited by hierarchical leadership. To put it into a finance frame, an analyst might complete all the preparatory and presentation work for a particular investment, but it can often be the team leader (who didn't work on the PowerPoint) that submits the opportunity to some investing managers higher up. Thus, perhaps with a few formatting alterations for attractiveness, this local executive comes across as the genius introducing this great new concept, while on the backend it's really a select few dedicated members of the base engineering team who've put in all (or at least the Pareto majority) of the work leading to the final outcome.

Extrapolate that to any industry's leading company with a central leadership structure, and we work ourselves into the public-markets perspective that a CEO is responsible for the thousands of individuals putting their best foot forward each day. This isn't to say that the role exceptionally rewards justly those able to centrally plan and organize the distributed efforts of a dispersed independent-ish workforce. Rather, I posit continually in all my work that the workers themselves would be much greater organizers of their own labor in any tangible innovation matrix given their own intimate natural knowledge of daily operations, a social-capital resource often not internalized by the financial results of business.

I can think historically of many who'd find that perspective appalling given the quick results a central-planning structure had brought to certain American manufacturing industries now bankrupted. Before they ceased operations, it was the all-knowing edicts of the erudite managers planning across all plants which so easily lifted the results of all subservient plants. But I'm not convinced that approach works best for locally rewarding the collective efforts of a hardworking masses or the isolated societal advancements from a misunderstood Atlas.

Freelance Submissions

Thus we get to the start of outsourcing work in the organizational frame. The main point here is cheaply completing work which by and large then gets passed off as the product of some central actor. We've relatively hilariously seen this taken to extremes during remote working days where central employees pay remote developers to complete their daily tasks at a fraction of their payroll.

Thus, when we lose track of who's implementing the work by layers of people-management, we can end up with the actual labor being ignored when compensatory review comes up. And I'm just not convinced one person should reap the rewards for another's efforts solely by the entrenched positional responsibility entrusted to the former. Unfortunately, that’s the frame I grew up with, and it’s something I tried to apply to Chives’ work here.

Unedited Contributions

Basically, I spent half an hour tweaking Chives' descriptions to create a more isolated chapter framework with dedicated titles, which I thought would look better to the average replay viewer. But this was decreeing my own preferences on the working result, hijacking the last 20% of content presentation to suit what I personally thought would be the best result. Definitionally, that's centralizing and taking credit (by means of implementation prudence) for the hours of work by Chives to mentally summarize what happened throughout the stream.

A video, need I remind myself, where I was literally speaking into a camera for six hours: practically the definition of a central narrative. To think that I too would want control over how that story was interpreted really baffled me. Not to mention, my implementation went far beyond the 5,000 characters allowed in a video description according to Google's edicts.

Personal Fulfillment

Thus by having the raw submitted content published as the final public-facing media, I respected Chives’ independent contribution and let them enjoy the unilateral acceptance of their creative work. He can find the personal satisfaction I've seen so often in my open-source publications of having their name, efforts, and style showcased in the final product which he can unilaterally say he had a hand in making by the nature of his verbatim contributions. It's a meaningful level of internal recognition and professionalism that lets someone grow through their career by iterating on their own work, rather than having the efficiency narrative so often held by managing intermediaries who drastically revise the scope of submissions.

I know it can be a challenging task to accept all work in its contributed form, especially for coding projects which need proper implementations to prevent bugs. But this is what CI/CD automated testing is for in the most ideal scenario—to catch and let someone know about their deficiencies without an explicit human interaction and all the inherent interpersonal judgment that comes therewith. And to just give everyone the respect they deserve in contributing their time and efforts toward something they want to be a part of.

Remainder

Lastly and most retrospectively, I had no business justifiably using so much time to polish up the last tidbits of someone else's excellent work. That time is so much more meaningfully used preparing important written materials for the working SEC documentation I've found myself uniquely capable of doing. That’s got to be the ongoing case for so many managers who’d just produce so much extra work-product if they freed themselves of the daily drudgery of reviewing and centrally-editing the results of their former team-member peers. Might true trust in the output and integrity of others solve this conundrum by letting the public foot forward come from each individual's best efforts, rather than a monolithic eye?