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Pillows, Chairs and Mattresses

I spent some time this weekend assembling an inexpensive pergola that we purchased from Amazon.com. I will not link it here, it is functionally equivalent to a tattoo that says “NO RAGRETS.” As hard as it is to believe, I do not need to steal nickels from Jeff Bezos that badly. I wanted to compare and contrast this with a different purchase I made the week before. I purchased a fancy pillow (and yes, I will steal nickels from the fancy pillow).

The inexpensive pergola aims to provide photon shielding for my children when they enter the backyard. I have purchased enough backyard items to know that everything we leave under the California sun’s withering glare will be swiftly reduced to crumbling rubble. This is even before any planned obsolescence is taken into account. The opportunity cost of buying an expensive backyard item that gets destroyed in equal time is simply too much. You can buy two cheap things and get twice as much utility over time.

On the other hand, I purchased a very high-quality pillow. You will spend hours daily with your face mashed against a pillow. By the same logic, I also want to get high-quality mattresses and high-quality chairs. You will spend lots of time rubbing parts of your body on these items and something-something posture. I would love to take this moment to call out my fancy Secret Lab Co Chair. Unfortunately, none of Jeff Bezos’s nickels get stolen should you buy yourself one of these chairs.

When I said high-quality, you knew that I meant expensive. Some things are worth it at any cost. You cannot really put a price on the quality of your sleep or your posture.

What does this have to do with engineering leadership? Plenty. You will find that there are many things that fall into the same category of Pillows, Beds, and Chairs in the software world. You will spend many dollars on Slack, email, and GitHub licenses. When designing your organization and choosing the products you wish to buy, you must ask yourself, “Am I buying an inexpensive pergola, or am I buying a fancy pillow?”

That’s it. That is the whole post. This is small enough that I could make a TokTok on it and get huge on the socials. Just maybe?

A girl can dream…

See you next week.

By jszeder

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