I program computers.  That’s not quite right, I consider myself a “software engineer,” but in layman’s terms, I write software code.  Software is sort of a weird environment, and I say that in all earnestness because for the last 8 years I’ve worked in academia teaching music.  Now that’s a weird environment to start with.

But as a programmer, there’s something I’ve noticed at almost every job I go to.   I’m not sure I can nail it down in one sentence, so here’s a few.  There’s always that one guy: the “programmer.”  He might not be the only programmer at the company, but he’s the guy that people look at and say, yeah, he’s a programmer.  He’s the guy who is socially awkward, totally dedicated to computer code, and is convinced that he’s right.  Even if it’s just “technically correct,” he’s got to be right, at all costs.  Even if the cost is a job, a friend, whatever.

I’ve been a professional musician since my teacher in undergrad told me I was.  To paraphrase, he said in very firm terms, “You are a professional musician from the day you set foot on campus as a music major, whether you choose to behave like one or not.”  Much like my experiences in programming, there’s always some person in the ensemble who’s “that guy.”  Sometimes we refer to it as “trumpet player syndrome,” but there’s one person who has to be in charge no matter what, has to be “technically correct” at the expense of the ensemble, the piece, whatever.

I’m not saying that leadership is bad, and anyone with opinions is automatically wrecking things.  What I am saying is that there are stereotypes, and they come from somewhere.

I’ve been a professional programmer since I finished my first music degree and realized I could make mad-cash* playing with computers.  During my bachelor’s degree I learned to work like the devil for what I want, and old habits die hard.  Actually, old habits define us.  And the habits I’ve lived by as a musician define who I am as a programmer.

The two most important lessons I learned as a musician were: be prepared, and play nice.  You get your first gig by luck.  You get your second by recommendation.  Now I operate that way for almost everything.

In America, one of the enduring figures in personal and national lore is the Cowboy.  The Cowboy lives out on the open prairies of some windswept plain, with a hazy butte in the backdrop.  He lives by his wits, and doesn’t need another soul.  He is rugged, individualistic, handsome, immutable, un-corruptable.  You’ve all seen the Clint Eastwood westerns where everyone on screen is a bad guy, complicit with the bad guy, or a victim of some bad guy.  Except for the Cowboy.  He sets things right, even if it means he can’t maintain any sort of healthy adult relationships.

I see the Cowboy a good bit: in music, programming, life, everything.  And I wonder why on Earth people will let themselves become a caricature of a programmer, a musician, a lover, a friend.

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*Mad-cash = the ability to pay back the student loans which helped me get all my expensive degrees, degrees which sadly don’t yield a career that will pay for them.

I received a text message this morning from my old doctoral adviser at UNCG, Dennis.  Not old as in decrepit, but old as in I graduated, now he’s just a regular old-fashioned mentor.  And I’m blessed to have him, and especially blessed to have graduated.

Anyway, the text message read, “art of the problem.”  That’s a bit of a cryptic way to start a Saturday.  That’s not to say he and I haven’t shared our Luke-vs-Yoda moments.  But most of those mentor moments happened in the context of… something.

I stared at my phone for a second and realized that it, being legitimately old and decrepit, was just getting things out of order.  Sure enough, a few minutes later, the first half of the text message arrived, putting the fragment into perspective.  The sentence that got clipped was, “…that was part of the problem.”

But it got me thinking about my relationship with my mentors, my students, learning, and the world in general.  One of the things I’ve been taught, and try to pass on to those around me is perseverance through tough times.  Don’t plan to fail, but plan to recover when you do.  Recover and move on knowing that you can move on, and how to not fail the next time.

In some cases, not failing means just don’t do it again.  Like sticking a fork into an electrical outlet, as I did when I was about 5.  I don’t need to do it again to know the inevitable result. Other cases mean being prepared, doing something differently, or just knowing what to accept as normal.  Like knowing that when a girlfriend says she hates Valentine’s day, the guy should still do something nice.  Not that I’ve learned this lesson the hard way at all.  Ahem.

If you step back from it a second though, you realize that life will always have problems.  Even the most blessed and talented have to show up to work if they expect success.  So if life will always have problems, the solution isn’t just to avoid them.  If you do that, you’re avoiding living and learning.  Instead, a life well-lived is a life built on the art of the problem.

A few years ago, a robotic vacuum cleaner was released on to the market called a Roomba.  You put it in a room, and it periodically scurries around, sweeping up dust and crumbs.  It “learns” the layout of the room by bumping into stuff and remembering where its boundaries are.  Some people think that life is like that, but ignore that a Roomba never looks up.

I urge you to look up.  And accept when other people look up.  Sure, they might seem crazy.  Or even you might seem crazy.  Even to yourself.  But give yourself permission some times to see beyond what you’ve “learned.”  The art of the problem isn’t in learning your boundaries, it’s in looking up and realizing that your boundaries depend entirely on where you are looking and how hard you are willing to plan and work.

I finished grad school.  You might guess that I was busy during that experience.  If you did guess that, you are a very intelligent and beautiful person.  And gifted.  And certainly blessed.  But if you didn’t guess that, you’re probably right too.

I had a job interview in Winston-Salem yesterday.  I showed them my card, which lists some of the gazillion hobbies I have, and was asked, “How do you DO that much stuff?”  And I guess the answer is that up until recently, I took advantage of my unstructured time by structuring it.  I took up crafts like pottery, or learned to make cheese and beer and bread, or worked on my “vintage” motorcycle.  And yes, vintage is in quotes because the bike isn’t so much a collector’s item as it is an old pain in the ass.

But lately I have two modes: at work, and not at work.  I still do a good amount, but I waste a lot more time than I did in grad school.

This is a recent realization, and I think I want to do something about it.  Like, get back to pottery.  Practice tuba and or banjo more.  Or write on my blog more regularly. For instance, to tell you about my business card and why it’s so rad.  Or what I was doing interviewing in Winston-Salem.

But I guess the truth is that I don’t want life to slip away because I’m not paying attention.  Or because life has become too predictable. You can get your skills back at playing, pottery, cooking, etc.  You can’t get time back.

I remember in kindergarten I had a friend named Patty.  We were going to be friends forever, she and I.  I remember how all my best friends in high school were forever, though being guys we weren’t all sappy about it.  In college, those were my friends that would last a lifetime.  No, no, it was grad school where I met the friends who would be with me forever…

And in all of this prognosticating I failed to notice that the friends I was making that would last forever weren’t from a place, or a time.  They just happened to be at that place and time, but the ones who I’m still close with I would be close with if I’d met them at any time.

This isn’t really a blog post about friends.  I’m so very lucky to have the ones I have, and I can’t imagine my path being any different than the one I’m on.  Instead, this a post about predictions.  Like, stop making them.  They’re wrong.  Look around right now and enjoy it.

I went with Jenna to an alumni function of hers, and we had a really good time.  There were lots of good people there, and as much as we were there to see the game, we were really there to meet people.  And maybe something will come of those connections, maybe not.  We were there to open doors and to have a good time. And we really did have a good time.

I hate the term “network” when it’s used as a verb.  People go to functions to “network.”  I go for food or beer, or because someone interesting is speaking or playing, or my friends might be there… not for some abstract thing called networking.  Going to a place just to get ahead seems disingenuous.  Go because you want to get out of your shell.  Go because you hear good things, or you have something in common, or maybe just because you want something to do.

Go, do things and forget yourself.  Stop predicting how you’re going to be friends with so and so.  Or business partners with the other one.  Or even because you “should” go.  Don’t try to make connections like it’s a job.  It’s not a job, it’s biology.  You make connections because you’re alive.  It’s part of the human condition.  If you remember to enjoy yourself, you’ll start to discover just how much you have in common with the human being across the table.

I’ve been away from my blog for a bit.  It’s not that I haven’t had plenty to say, it’s that most of it involves whining.  And you, dear reader, deserve better than that.  You deserve whining with a MESSAGE.

Many of us are aware of the debacle about conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and his use of the word “slut” to refer to any woman who thinks about autonomy.  For those not in the know, he was basically an awful person.  He was an awful person to a (by all outward signs) nice person, on the air to his gajillion listeners.

That’s not new.  What is new is that his advertisers are starting to distance themselves from his rhetoric.  Maybe  he crossed some sort of line somewhere.  Some sort of line that is beyond the regular common-decency line.

And yeah, I have a lot to say about the whole situation, but what really gets me is how we as a society have stopped valuing “nice” as a core value.  I read an article on NPR about the disappearance of “please” and “thank you” from common language.  I know that I still make a point of using those words, but now that I think about it, I don’t hear them a lot in my day-to-day conversations.

One of the things about being nice is that you don’t get to win.  You don’t get instant gratification for being nice.  Maybe “we” get to win, which is better from many perspectives, but being nice means you don’t get to have it your way.  It means waiting.  It means not saying everything you think.  It mean you have to take the time to think about the value other people bring to the situation.

At the risk of sounding all touchy-feely, thinking about other people’s contributions is one of the most amazing acts of revelation you can undertake.  It gives you a different perspective on the world when you think that everyone is here trying to do the right thing.

Let me repeat that: everyone here is trying to do the right thing.  Granted, some might not be very good at doing the right thing, but no one is the bad-guy on purpose.

A saying I heard a while ago that keeps coming to mind is, “Never ascribe to malice what can more easily be attributed to incompetence.”  Basically, when your coworker acts like the devil, it’s because they don’t really get your viewpoint.  And maybe you don’t get theirs.

The friction between two or more people can be relieved with a little bit of “nice.”   An exercise I propose (and yes, I’m going to do this) is to say please and thank you.  With thought.  With purpose and intent.  And mean it.

Last Sunday night I drove to Asheboro to play with the Zinc Kings.  I didn’t really know what the gig was, just that I was supposed to be there.  So after my pottery studio meeting in the afternoon I packed up and drove.

One of the things that I find tremendously therapeutic about my schedule is it is regular and predicable.  It lets me do interesting things on my own time, like pottery, or hikes, or… playing gigs.  And it’s fun.

But this gig wasn’t like my other gigs. It wasn’t part of the predictable comforting routine. This one was a cancer benefit for a 17 year old girl whose parents have no insurance.  When she came in (on a walker) she was led to the center of the room, handed a microphone and spoke very briefly.  In less that two minutes of soft, compelling speech she had leveled me.

She wasn’t blindly optimistic.  Or even really that sappy.  She was matter-of-fact, thankful… and though resolute, serene.

Last week my brother sent me a link to a video called “Fire the Wrong People Today.”  In summary, he says that it’s as important to get rid of the lousy workers as it is to hire excellent ones.  I thought about this in a couple different contexts, among them office work, music, and education.  Here’s what I think:

I agree with him for the most part, but I’d like to talk about why and how.  I work in software now, though for the last 8 years academia has been my life.  In the video he’s talking about a business environment, and business environments have a very concrete measurement of success: money.  The bottom line of good leadership is financial success.  But what’s interesting, is that good leadership means getting the right people to do the right things. And he comments on it in the first couple minutes; highly qualified people will work together to get things done.  If they don’t, they’re not really qualified, and therefore not really a good employee no matter their individual skill set.

In a follow-up conversation with my brother, I said that the gist of the video is:

1. Here are your objectives and the metric by which you shall be measured
2. I see that you are not meeting your goals, so here is some support to help you succeed
3. You still are not meeting our desired objective, so you are not a good fit.

That seems cut and dried, and it’s never quiet as surgical a conversation as that, but it’s an interesting perspective to think about life.

I’ve seen that things are a good bit more difficult to pin down in higher education.  Sure, there are milestones such as completion of a terminal degree, tenure, advancement, publishing papers, etc.  But those tend to be subjective and different for each person.  Well-run departments are structured enough to handle some of the gray areas, and keep the right people.  But students know that bad professors get tenure and spend decades teaching poorly. That’s where Rate My Professors came from.

It’s not that universities are cesspools of incompetence, it’s that the gray areas are big enough that incompetence can slip in.  And education just happens to be one of those areas where people really remember incompetence.  People remember excellent teachers too, but like the old saying goes, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”  That is to say, complainers get more attention, and what’s worth complaining about more than bad teachers and managers?

I thought about the “fire the wrong ones” mentality about music, and that’s where I really think there’s some traction.  I’ve played with a good number of chamber groups over the years, and personal chemistry is nearly everything.  I’ve played with some mediocre players and made great music because of the fit.  I’ve played with some very strong players but struggled to get anything out of it because of poor fit.  At some point, you have to decide who in the group is the weakest link.  Who in the group is upsetting the chemistry. And who is in charge?

My last thought is thinking about firing in terms of habit.  If you are the CEO of “You, Inc.,” you are in charge of your own strengths and weaknesses.  Like running a team of professionals, you manage a group of skills and talents; abilities that allow you to get through your day.  Maybe you measure success in dollars, in a car, the size of a TV, or personal satisfaction.  Maybe your strengths have made some of your path very easy, or your weaknesses have made it hard.

But what I thought about in terms of “firing” was being aware of how your own employees work together, and how you need to pay as much attention to your weakness as to your strength.  In this case, I’m talking about habits.  Know what holds you back.

How often do we shrug off what we’re not good at and say, “Eh, that’s not what I do.”  How often do you hear yourself making excuses for something, or worse yet, just avoiding it entirely?

In the past I’ve told my students that the most powerful of human activities is habit.  Sometimes we choose good ones, but know that if you don’t, you have the option to fire them.

This last weekend I did stuff.  That’s what people in Asheville do: Stuff.  Stuff with hiking boots.  Stuff with mountains.  Stuff interspersed with glasses of beer.

A friend of mine invited me out to dinner to say thank you for dog sitting for her.  We ate at Asiana buffet, which was enormous.  It was a trainwreck of humanity, with a trough of food.  It was absolutely fascinating.  And more than a little disturbing.  I steered clear of the troughs of gravy-soaked-fried-meat and had sushi.  It was, despite the preceding sentences, quite good.

Saturday I was invited hiking with a group of new friends and we headed to Graveyard Fields.  It was a good, if slightly moist, hike*.  Then I took a nap.  To be fair, I napped before the hike too.  Two naps in one day?  Hell yeah.

Sunday my friend Jenna and I went to The Biltmore.  We work on the kiln at our pottery co-op, and performed some emergency surgery on it for the Christmas rush.  We got two free tickets in appreciation for our effort.  I’d never been there before, but it’s one of the major tourist draws in Asheville.  I usually don’t care for the touristy stuff, but whoa.  Just whoa.

I’m not going to tell you what to do.  But see it.  Seriously.  Or else.

We spent all day there just wandering.  Jenna made fun of me for my enthusiastic inability to speak in complete sentences.  I would point at things and gum a few syllables and look at her to complete my sentences.

Then we toured the winery and drank.  Just in time to pack it up and unload the kiln at the pottery studio.

Then… THEN I slept like a baby.

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*Yes. Moist.

Update: things are starting to work out here in Asheville.  I’m impatient sometimes.  Actually, I’m impatient a lot.  So it should come as no surprise that things worked out after I gave them some time.

If I were to give an exhaustive list of reasons things have gotten better, this would be a mundane and boring blog post.  I’ll summarize and just say that my job has gotten cool, I’m throwing well in the pottery studio, and I get a chance to make music periodically.  I’ve even made a couple people I’ll call friends.  And it’s the last bit that I thought was sort of interesting this evening.

A few days ago my boss asked if I would join him tonight at something called “Meet the Geeks,” which is a networking event for IT people.  I agreed.  And then my boss got an emergency call this afternoon, and I went stag.  I asked him what the event was, and he replied with a grin, “It’s like a meat market, but for programmers.”

“Sexy,” I grunted in response.

I asked why I was supposed to go with him in the first place, and it turned out to be a recruiting mission.  My company is hiring, so it seemed as good a place to go as any.

When I got there I was given a name tag and I met some recruiters, and a few pleasant-ish folks.  I also met some programmers, complete with sweat pants, food stains on the fronts of their shirts, and shifty eyes when asked about their line of work.  But I also met a couple professors from UNCA, and I hit it off with one of them right away.  He and I started talking about technical evangelism and advocacy, application architecture, and music.  We made plans to get together and get involved in something called the WNC Web Tech Network.

And as I was walking out of downtown back to my parking spot, it occurred to me that just 6 months ago I wouldn’t have guessed I’d actually be doing what I’m doing. Yeah, sure, I was talking about it, thinking about it, but it was so far away from what I was doing at the time. But then I graduated and had to face the “real world.”  And now I’m here, living this other life.

One of my new coworkers showed up at the “Meet the Geeks” thing and he said something to the effect of, “Don’t get too wrapped up in your own plans.”  A lot of good and bad stuff happens all the time, but I guess if you’re going to grow, it has to.