Readers Often Ask Me, “Should I Write a Book?” Here’s My Take

“Should I write a book?”  Someone asked me this today, and I rattled off an answer.

But as I was doing so, it occurred to me that I get this question frequently.  Probably a few times per month, at least.  And this makes sense, since I’ve written a few myself and I’m in the content business.  Heck, one of those books has even enjoyed more success, commercially, than I ever anticipated.

So, no-brainer, right?  Get out the digital quill, put on your frilly Shakespeare-style writing shirt, and let the art flow through your keyboard?

Answering the Reader Question, Should I Write a Book?

I’ll spend the post answering the question, but I can give you a pretty short answer and then let you read on below the lede, if you’d like.  The answer is, “ehh… maybe.”

I think writing a book can be a great exercise in personal growth.  I also happen to agree, at least anecdotally, with the wisdom that “everyone has at least one book in them.”  But that doesn’t mean that you should just sit down and start typing.

Should you write a book?  The short answer is this:

Yes, but only if you can articulate exactly who will read it, how, and why, and then you form a plan to make sure that happens.  If you do that articulation and that planning, and still want to write a book, then go to town.

So there you have it — the short answer.  The longer answer, and the remainder of this blog post, is going to by the justification of my thesis.  And, by way of support, I’m going to explain how I lumbered into writing a book in exactly the wrong way.

Think of this, then, as not just advice I’m giving to the various readers who ask about this, but also advice I’d give to myself 5+ years ago.

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If We Solve the Software Generalist Anti-Pattern, Who Writes the Code?

I am, strangely, not an expert in my own history.  Chronicling my own exploits through digests and Prime Photos have helped somewhat in this regard, but I nevertheless struggle to remember the sequence of my life.

So I think it was 2015 when I was writing about the tales of Emma in Developer Hegemony.  And I think it was a few months later that I first dreamed up the strange neologism of “efficiencer.”  I think, but I’m not positive.

What I do know, however, is that it was a few years ago now.  And I also know that my thinking has evolved somewhat since then.  So I’m going to answer a couple of reader questions today with the benefit of having acquired additional experience since writing the book.  I’ve moved away from management consulting, started a business, and helped a lot of nascent product companies with marketing and positioning.

I haven’t really made any reversals, so if you bought and enjoyed the book, don’t worry that I’m disavowing any points in it.  Rather, I’ve refined how I think so-called efficiencer firms should market themselves.  And, as you can probably infer from the title, it should categorically not involve any whiff of generalism.

Let’s Look at the Reader Question

Alright, so what have readers asked me?  Well, quite a while back (2017, in fact — yes, I have a long reader question backlog), someone asked me this.

The efficiencer model looks a lot like management consulting except the consultants here can do the automation as well. What has changed to make this path more suitable for developers to follow?

And, more recently, someone asked me a question in response to a post I wrote about how any firms that sell custom app dev are selling staff augmentation.  I see a logical progression for software developers, for the most part, moving from staff to staff augmentation to, well, efficiencers.  This prompted the question.

Say we work for an efficiencer firm, and we avoid writing code for pay. In the end someone needs to write code; who is that? Are we back to architects vs. programmers & UML handoffs? Or is this an interim solution?

So we have a question that is literally about who writes the code, and another that, at its core, really asks how software developers can be taken seriously offering consultative expertise.  All of this feeds into the general theme of the division between expertise and labor, and who should furnish each.

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Is It Possible to Have a Company with No Office Politics?

It’s been a little while since my last reader question post, hasn’t it?  Well, let’s do something about that today.

Today’s subject is office politics.  I’m pretty much always game to talk about this subject, as regular readers know.  Except, rather than dissecting them in-situ, I’ll talk about the idea of companies avoid them altogether.

The Reader Question: A Company without Office Politics?

I’ll talk about it because the reader question asks about it.  

Is it too naive to hope that there is that (perhaps small to improve the odds) company out there where a group of technical people work together to solve problems without all the politics and back stabbing?

Is politics unavoidable? Is it human nature?

I am still hopeful… Part of me thinks when it comes to companies we are still in Feudalism and time will bring about better forms of governance.

There is actually kind of a series of questions in there, and I hope to touch on all of them.  But it really comes down to a matter of defining office politics, for better or for worse, and then seeing if they must exist within a company. 

And, if they must, is that okay?  Or must it be an ipso facto problem?

What Is Office Politics?  And What is Politics, for that Matter?

Let’s get down to brass tacks here, and I mean way down to brass tacks.  And I’m not doing this to be pedantic, but rather because it’s important to frame the discussion.  First, a definition of politics, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Politics is the process of making decisions that apply to members of a group.  

Do you see now why I think it’s important to return to this definition? 

The word politics carries an amazing amount of baggage in the way of connotations: governmental, interpersonal, etc.  But, at its core, it’s about making decisions that affect participants in a group. 

The baggage comes from the means and nature of those decisions, as well as how the members receive them.

I’ve often quipped myself that you have politics anytime you assemble more than 2 people.  And, though I’ve often meant this to suggest that group size 3 is where complex persuasion begins, it applies to the simple, literal definition here as well.

1. With a single person making decisions, there is no group.
2. With two people, you either have consensus or stalemate in all cases, so there is no systematic means of making decisions (absent unequal distribution of votes).
3. But with three people, you have the means for systemic group decision making.

What, then, is office politics?  Well, let’s mark the wikipedia definition up slightly.

Office politics is the process of making decisions that apply to members of a group in an office setting. 

The Idea of Avoiding Office Politics is a Non-Starter

Through that lens, you can see that the idea of avoiding office politics is an impossibility.  What you probably mean is ways of avoiding toxic (or even unpleasant) office politics.  I especially believe this to be the case, given the specific mention of “back-stabbing.”

To find a company without office politics would be to find a company that made no decisions.  And that wouldn’t be a company for very long.

Now, I can empathize with the desire to avoid office politics, even in a fairly benign setting.  I tend to do a lot of lone wolf work, and I’m not really big on democratic groups or consensus. 

In school, my two preferred approaches to group work, in order, were “don’t worry, I’ll just do everything,” and “okay, you guys do everything.”  So I get it.  

But even for an avowed mercenary and lifestyle designer like myself, at least some collaboration is unavoidable, as are companies.  And so, politics are unavoidable. 

But I’ll go even further and say that they’re neither inscrutable nor as onerous as they may seem on the surface.

So while there are no companies out there without politics, there are companies without toxic politics.  So let’s look about how you find those.  And let’s do that by looking at heuristics for avoiding bad, stupid, or toxic politics.

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Are There Actually Companies out There That Write Good Code?

Let’s do a reader question post today.  It’s been a while, huh?

I’m now answering different questions in different forums, so it can be hard to keep track of.  But this one fits squarely in the realm of the DaedTech blog.

So let’s do it.

This particular reader question is quite detailed, so I’m just going to post in verbatim without adding context.  It doesn’t really need it, in all of its detailed, semi-depressing glory.

Are Good Teams Writing Good Code a Myth?

The short version. Where are these mythical companies where people write code like you read about in blogs?

I’m in an odd place. While I’m no rock star I feel reasonably skilled. I left a soul-crushing Fortune 100 company for a consulting company a year ago and I’ve found that in one engagement after another I can quickly get up to speed and be productive. I write decent, unit-tested code that works, and it usually takes less time than I expect.

But, to put it bluntly, more often than not I find myself working on crap. Either the code rotted years ago and no one wants to improve it, or it’s in an early state of decay. Our Scrum is flaccid. I can still do some good work and occasionally enjoy it, but most days I sense a huge gap between what I do and what I can do. (I don’t think I’m Dunning-Kruger delusional. But who does?)

Sometimes I spend more time reading and practicing, but after a while I realize that I’ve become two developers: the one who works forty hours a week and the one whose hobby is practicing for nothing. I enjoy it, but not quite enough to do it just for the sake of doing it.

Are high-velocity agile teams who write great code nonexistent like unicorns or the real man Esquire tells me I’m supposed to be, or just needles in a haystack? Is there a different city I should move to?

Social Media Envy, But for Careers

Let’s get this out of the way up front.

Social media envy is the phenomenon where everyone puts a rosy spin on their lives for public consumption.  You see pictures of them at the Leaning Tower of Pisa or doing WTF-ever “hot yoga” is on a beach somewhere with 12 hard-bodied BFFs.

And then you look at the Cheetos crumbs on your shirt and on the couch from your day of binge-watching Married with Children reruns, and you wonder where you went so wrong.

This is the classic parallel to the discussion here, I suppose.

But I actually prefer a different one.  One that’s more career-focused, and right in my lane as a business owner.

Go listen to entrepreneurial podcasts.  And you hear endless success stories.

“Oh, yeah, here’s how I grew my T-shirt side hustle into an 8 figure business in 6 weeks.”  They’re cool to listen to, but it tends to be some of the most intentional survivorship bias imaginable, coupled with the same “best foot forward” attitude you see on social media.

As a business owner, this creates a sense that I’m constantly doing something badly wrong.

Why did I just work a 90 hour week and we’re somehow on track for less revenue than last month?  That doesn’t happen in the podcast, so there must be something deeply wrong with me.

All of this is to say that these good teams writing this good software probably have skeletons that you don’t perceive.  You are seeing, to some extent, unicorns and lantern jawed Esquire models.

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Narrow Niche: When is Narrow Too Narrow?

I think I’m going to abandon the idea of “reader question Tuesday,” or any particular day.  I’ll keep writing reader questions, but, in keeping with my announcement of blogging for fun, I’ll just post them whatever day of the week I feel like.  So today, a Wednesday, let’s do a reader question about a narrow niche.

So, let’s get into it.  Here’s the reader question.  It’s in response to a point I made about how to build an audience.  Specifically, I said to find problems that people Google and offer solutions.  In response, a reader asked the following.

One of the issues I face when I think of writing anything on a topic is that I immediately find lots of other articles discussing the same thing. But if we write about a specific question we could have more [readers to ourselves].

However, how do we know if a question is common enough?

The Narrow Niche in Content and in Specializing

Let’s consider what he’s asking here.  Take a topic like, say, test driven development.  If you Google test driven development, it’ll seem like every imaginable topic has been covered.  But if you Google “cobol TDD,” the results quickly turn to the sound of crickets.  So write about TDD in Cobol and get readers, right?

Well, if there are any.  I say this because I have a number of tools that estimate the quantity of searches for a term in a given month.  And it appears that almost nobody is searching for posts about TDD with Cobol.  Hence the reader question.

How do we know if the question is a common enough search to be worth writing about?

Well, at the simplest, most tactical level, you could install the Keywords Everywhere plugin and see for yourself.  Here’s what Google shows me, for instance.

But that’s a pretty short-sighted answer.  The real question here is a deeper one.  How do you know if a series of topics is worth writing about, and how do you pick your focus for a blog.  And, for all of you free agents and aspiring free agents, how do you pick a specialty and competitive advantage?

You want a narrow niche, or you’re just a miscellaneous, generalist laborer.  But if you narrow it too much, you might have no audience or customers.

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