Knowledge Work
Code School Book — Morgan Lopes and Tim Whitacre (3/30)
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In technology, the outward appearance fails to represent what’s happening within the minds and imaginations of those in front of the screen.
One winter, I traveled to Colorado for a snowboarding trip. Feet of fresh snow had fallen in a matter of days and the weather forecast looked beautiful. We met up with friends who lived minutes from the ski slopes. We were eager for a few days in the mountains.
In Colorado, one of my friends had already spent over 60 days on the slopes that season. He knew each route like the back of his hand. While we were gearing up, he turned to me and asked, “Where is your helmet?” Given my experiences snowboarding back home, I hadn’t even considered it.
Before this trip, my snowboarding experience was limited to smaller mountains on the East Coast. There, the snow is mostly fake, machine blown ice and the runs are a fraction of the length. Either due to the beach-like weather or carnivalesque lifts, snow sports in the southeastern United States seem low-risk. Things were different in Colorado, and judging by the look on his face after my response about a helmet, clearly my thinking was flawed. A fellow software engineer, he proceeded to explain, “We gotta protect our heads. As knowledge workers, our brains are essential.
It’s the only way we produce work. I could figure out how to work without my hands, but I am useless without my mind. Trauma to our heads could jeopardize our entire career. No brain, no work. The potential fun is not worth the risk.”
Our minds are our greatest asset. If you’re reading this book, that includes you. Coming from outside of tech, this line of thinking was new. The jobs to which I was most accustomed involved manual labor. Previously, I worked in lawn care, dinner theater, physical training, and food service. They operated under different norms. Within physical jobs, hard work looks like long hours, sweat, and physical fatigue. Your hands are more important than your head.
In knowledge work, effort looks different. There may be no signs of outward exertion. There is little movement. The value of our work comes from the problems we solve. Our minds are what matter.
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