Looking down at the drone, she grinned. “Anyway, time to start thinking like a suitcase, old chum. Make with a handle.”

“I hope you realize I find this every bit as degrading as you think I must,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said with quiet dignity, then extended a soligram handle from one side, and flipped over. Sma gripped the handle and strained at it.

“An empty suitcase, asshole,” she grunted.

“Oh, pardon me, I’m sure,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered, and went light.

– Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

Love this series, mostly because Banks does a great job of sci-fi world-building, but because he puts just as much effort into the actual characters and their interactions.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is a popular genre, and there’s no shortage of it. But from the books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched, most of it is set either during the early phases (pre-apocalypse) or years later, with people aimlessly roaming the countryside. Being fiction, and being meant to entertain, most of what I’ve seen has been lacking on the discussion of logistics. (Please, if you’ve seen books or movies that delve more into this, please let me know. This is fascinating to me.)

I initially asked this question on Twitter, but 140-character tweets aren’t really conducive to a proper discussion: What do you think would realistically happen if a pandemic wiped out 75% or more of the world population?

The key word here is “realistically“. Setting aside romantic notions of finding a secluded cabin stockpiled with food and water and “waiting for it to blow over”, what would actually happen in the immediate aftermath of a worldwide catastrophe?

(more…)

The Mega Millions lottery jackpot is now set at $500 million. If one person wins, that’s a $359 million lump sum payout, or the option of $19.2 million per year for the next 26 years.

So what would you do if you won?

I’d take the yearly payout. $19.2M, even accounting for a chunk taken by taxes, is a lot of money to a late-twenty-something middle class schmuck like me. And honestly, I really don’t think my basic lifestyle preferences would change all that much. Realistically, this is what I’d do.

• Obviously, step one is to find a good lawyer to protect me and my new fortune from ne’er-do-wells. Also, hire someone to punch me anytime I used a word like ne’er-do-wells. Question: what type of lawyer protects you from lawyers?
• Next step is to quit my job immediately. Nothing personal against the people I work with, but $19.2 million a year is a significant raise, one my employer isn’t likely to match in the near future.
• Buy a new car. I’ve currently got a 2004 Pontiac Vibe, which I bought used three years ago and still love, but let’s face it. It’s no car for a new millionaire. Though, I wouldn’t go all out and buy myself a fleet of Porsches – I’d most likely just upgrade to a new SUV.
• Buy a house. A modest house, somewhere in a nicer climate than Wisconsin’s. Maybe two stories plus a basement, a pool, etc. No 78-room Egyptian granite-floored mansion with three stables and a guest house. Obviously I’d get some upgrades, like super-bandwidth internet access, biometric-based access, JARVIS A.I., a shark-filled moat, and so on. Nothing fancy.
• Let’s say $3 million per year would be given away. Help out various charities like water.org, fund a few academic scholarships, (important note: academic scholarships, not “oh you’re good at sports so you get a free ride to college” scholarships), set up some scientific research grants.
• New wardrobe. No more shopping off the racks at Target and Kohl’s for me, though I’m not about to step up to wearing luxury Italian suits any time soon.
• And most of the above also goes for “upgrading” my immediate family’s lives. No mooching allowed, but I’m not going to be a complete Scrooge.
• Invest. Find a good investment firm to build and manage a portfolio so that my holdings grow beyond just the lottery payout.
• Hire @ashedryden to handle the disposal of my dishes. My solid diamond dishes rimmed with 24-Karat gold.
• Bodily upgrades. Some dental work for that perfect smile, LASIK surgery for perfect vision, forearm-mounted pulse laser and Adamantium-reinforced skeleton… just the basics.
• Enjoy myself. Do all the things I never had a chance to do for lack of time or money. Try some expensive foods. See the world. No more concern for using up precious vacation days to do that cross-country road trip or backpacking across Europe.

Really that last one is the big one for me. Yes, money changes people, and I have no illusions that I’d stick exactly to my current lifestyle, but I honestly believe my basic preferences would stay intact – I don’t like overly flashy things, or buying expensive stuff just for the sake of having it.

Photo by Pacdog

I have two simple rules for managing my work life:

• Don’t think about work after office hours
• Ask why, and don’t be afraid to say no

As simple as these two rules are, they’re invaluable for maintaining some semblance of sanity and a reasonable work-life balance. These were my only two pieces of advice to a new employee, and I wish someone had told them to me.

Don’t think about work after office hours

It’s important to “check out” if you’re not actually supposed to be working. Weekends, vacations, sick days, whatever. Don’t give your time away for nothing, because that’s what your time will end up being worth: nothing.

When I first started at my current company, it didn’t take long to get sucked into the department culture of working all the time. Emails from managers at 3am on a Sunday weren’t uncommon. It was exhausting, and burnout was frequent. It’s not sustainable. You have to set boundaries.

Unless lives are literally depending on you, your work can wait. Once you leave the office (or finish your set work hours), turn it all off. Don’t check your email. Set your work phone to silent. Do whatever you have to do to switch work off and your personal time on.

Ask why, and don’t be afraid to say “no”

If you find yourself having to do something that you honestly believe provides no value to the company or your customers, don't just go with the flow and do it. Ask why it has to be done. Ask why it has to be done that way. What value does it add? Maybe there's a good answer, maybe not, but you won’t know unless you ask.

If you do get a valid answer that justifies the task, make sure you document the why, not just the how. If no one can reasonably justify the task, find a way to kill it.

Sometimes the reason is that someone with a sufficiently large paycheck said you have to do it, and there’s not much you can do about that. But you should still ask. As long as you’re genuinely concerned about quality, and not just trying to get out of work, eventually this will (or should) be respected.

The second part of this is the importance of learning to say no. Sometimes you have to stand your ground and tell people “no, I can’t do that right now”. An inability to say “no” will lead only to overwork, poor results and eventually burnout.

→ Basically: Work to support your life. Don't die to support your work.

Documentation is important. Everyone knows this, everyone agrees with this, it’s not really a topic of debate. It’s important to have your processes written down in some format to make ongoing work easier. If Person X wins the lottery and promptly quits, never to be seen again, can their duties be picked up by someone else relatively quickly? If you have good documentation, hopefully the answer is yes.

Unfortunately, documentation is too often confined to the how of the work, and leaves out the why.

Sure, you can lay out a step-by-step process of how to do a given task. That’s easy. I’ve written a great deal of process documentation in the last several years, with the intent of making life just that much easier for “the next guy” who fills that role.

What’s too often lacking is an explanation of why something is set up the way it is, or why a process has to be done a particular way. Maybe there’s a lot of tribal knowledge in your organization that covers these questions, but until someone documents that, it’s essentially useless.

If we don’t explain why a decision was made that led to the current state, it becomes much harder to work towards something better. Maybe there was a significant problem discovered along the way that required doing it a particular way. Maybe it was a budget constraint or lack of available resources. Maybe it’s just that no one thought of doing it any other way and that’s the way it’s always been done.

If no one documents the reasons, you’re condemning the next person to re-invent the wheel, to catch Sisyphus’s boulder and roll it back up the mountain themselves.

// 
// Dear maintainer:
// 
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
// 
// total_hours_wasted_here = 35
// 

– “What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?” on stackoverflow, via the Internet Archive since the original thread was removed

I’ll be making an effort to include more of the why in my own documentation as part of my ongoing work, and for great justice the sake of your sanity and your successors, I’d encourage you to do the same.