Monkeytreats

I’m kind of fried after spending all weekend staying up till 5 AM writing code. Code for a personal project, no less. I haven’t done anything like it in quite a while.

It should be a useful little app–it screen-scrapes our employee directory every night, stores the info in a database, and sends out an email notifying me (and ultimately whoever wants to subscribe) who’s left the company, who’s newly hired, who’s changed groups, who’s been promoted, who’s gotten married and changed their name, who’s converted from a contractor to full time, etc.

I wish I could work like this all the time…get the kernel of an interesting idea, and then just sit down and implement madly for a few days or a week. No boss to go ask for permission, no external groups that I’m dependent on for platform code, no waiting for people to email me back while I’m losing steam every second, no arguing over requirements, no meetings.

Given that the capitalist system is purported to be the most efficient, it’s bizarre to me that the corporation–the apotheosis of capitalistic structures–is such a staggeringly bad productivity killer.

Perhaps that’s not true in other industries. Maybe there’s something special about development as a discipline that doesn’t mesh well with the corporation…but I just don’t find that believable.

My gut feeling is that the world, or at least my little corner of it, is changing from an environment where a few huge corporations dominate to one where many tiny ones thrive. Instead of one massive body made up of thousands of contrary cells that each have their own agenda and their own purpose, those cells may split off singly, or in small groups of genuinely like-minded individuals, and prove to be more effective and productive than the huge body they left behind.

No one person wants to pick a fight with a whole 46-man football team, but if you’re in a footrace, not a fistfight, and all those huge guys have their legs tied together like some hideous extrapolation of a three-legged-race team, would you rather be on the team, or by yourself?

In a world of powerful open standards, I’d argue that the competitive landscape is much more analogous to the footrace than it is to the fistfight.

This has become entirely too serious and ivory-tower abstract, so let me conclude by saying that it would be God-damned hilarious to see a 45-legged race. I would pay to see that shit. It would be even better if they were required to all do a shot of tequila every time they fell down.