Don’t be Not Getting Fired

Sometimes I meet someone who looks at all the available evidence that is visible to them and visible to everyone else, and then makes an obvious choice. It is like going to a bank teller and saying “may I please have one hundred dollars”. Most of the time they are going to look at you and say “not exactly”. You will need to show them proof of id. If it is a big bank, you may be required to sign a piece of paper or even enter your bank PIN. Almost nobody in the profession of Bank Teller is just going to give you $100, regardless of how you dress, what you need it for, or what time of day or year it is. And yet, in some professions, that kind of decision making is a requirement. You do not have the convenience of waiting for validation by PIN, or fingerprint, or passport photo, or signature. Sometimes you have to realize that you have to make a decision based on imperfect inputs and just do something even if it goes catastrophically bad.

I love it when I meet people who make decisions on imperfect inputs. I think they are the most amazing people in the world. I also seldom meet them. Most of the time, I run into checklist-managing bank tellers who have the worst job in the world. Their job is “Not Getting Fired”.

This has become one of the most important pieces of career advice I have given people over the years, and the people who have taken it to heart have become some of the most awesome people I have ever worked with.

It is very easy to wait as long as possible to make a decision and to do something that is inherently obvious and safe and can pass agreement by committee. When I was running my own game studio, I would often be working with early publishers and there were few things I hated more than coming into a meeting to talk about upcoming projects and hearing that “we just instituted a new green-light process.” The first person who gets that job usually comes there from a larger and more comfortable company and is going to spend the next six to nine months making safe bets—probably while figuring out the machinery and sorting out how their processes work. If that doesn’t happen? That guy Gets Fired. And he was not hired to Get Fired—at least not right away. The problem is that sometimes they get stuck into that pattern and then they get really good at Not Getting Fired.

I think this is a problem. I have done a few projects with a few companies that do not make financially successful products. The people involved will say something like “I am grateful that we had the opportunity to try something different, even if the market is not interested in a game that deviates from the current crop of hidden picture games.” Sure we did not make money (I thankfully broke even on it) but that statement alone made the whole endeavor totally worth it for us because we took a risk and we tested some assumptions. We tried something different, and we learned something.

Software engineering and startups are inherently risky. Most investors like to see the entire proposition massively de-risked before they write checks. That is perfectly fair. They are playing with Other People’s Money, and quantities that Carl Sagan would appreciate. For the average entrepreneur, you are taking pretty crazy risks and persuading people to bet their livelihoods on ideas before you are putting that kind of money in the bank.

I think that there is probably a time and a place to play it safe. Software development, especially consumer-facing software development, is generally a hard place for that. I think that the bigger the risks that people take, the higher the rewards. I have been blessed to have pretty decent passive income in the past by taking some crazy risks, and I will probably do so again despite having kids to feed.

Every once in a while I run into someone and get asked “what does that guy do at that company?” I sometimes respond immediately with the statement “His job is ‘Not Getting Fired’.” I generally have to follow that up with a pretty lengthy explanation, but I think that imparting that understanding is key.

If enough people realize how sad and boring and predictable and uninteresting that job is, maybe people will catch themselves looking in the mirror as they think “If I Do What I Want To Do, I Am Going To Get Fired.” And they will do it anyway because it is likely that it could be the right thing to do in that position.

And if they don’t, they may discover that ten years have blown by them giving people $100 bills in exchange for proof of ID, entering a pin number, and going home at the end of the day. And all things being equal, on those terms, I would not want to live my life Not Getting Fired. And I seldom do.

I hope you never become the person whose job is to Not Get Fired.