Irrational Exuberance - Numbers go up. @ Irrational Exuberance

Hi folks,

This is the weekly digest for my blog, Irrational Exuberance. Reach out with thoughts on Twitter at @lethain, or reply to this email.

Posts from this week:

- Numbers go up.

Numbers go up.

There’s a genre of computer games called incremental games, whose entire design philosophy can be summarized as, “numbers go up.” These games focus on the fundamental gaming loop rather than plot, characterization or anything beyond the foundational satisfaction of numbers increasing. The initial idea here was social commentary exposing the addictive core of many games, but like all good commentary it’s also inadvertently spawned the genre of gacha games that focus on extracting revenue from addicted gamers.

I’m thinking about numbers going up, because I’ve been watching the number of Amazon ratings on Staff Engineer creep up over the past few months knowing that it would soon reach 1,000 ratings. Yesterday it hit 999, and today it turned over to 1,000. Amazon ratings are not very meaningful. Many authors ask friends to provide ratings, and I’m certain there’s an industry for purchasing ratings out there. Many amazing books have very few ratings, and many terrible books have a huge number of ratings. There’s a loose relationship between ratings and books sold, but it’s highly inaccurate. Even if there was a clear relationship between ratings and books sold, there’s certainly no clear relationship between a book’s impact on your industry. Or society, if one wrote broader books than mine.

Still, I’ve been watching that number creep up for months. Checking in on it every couple of days to see if I’d made it. This is personal vanity, I imagine it’s a fairly small club to have two books reach 1,000+ ratings (An Elegant Puzzle got there a year or two ago), but there’s something therapeutic about numbers going up. I think about that a lot when I lurk in Reddit’s r/fatFIRE where people debate whether or not it’s possible to retire on $10m–it’s clear that many folks in there are psychologically dependent on the comfort of numbers going up. Of the many things one might get addicted to in life, incrementing numbers are a fairly pure endeavor. That said, these numbers are perfectly meaningless, and provide remarkably little instruction on how to live a fulfilling personal or professional life.

Just think about the latest goal you’ve set at work, whether it’s hitting a certain revenue or reliability target, attaining the number rarely represents a state change in the system generating those numbers. The reward for hitting numbers is just a higher number to strive towards, because these sorts of goals are primarily mechanisms to align a group rather than inherently meaningful. The meaning has to come from somewhere else.

That’s a big part of why I started looking in 2022 for a more meaningful way to set targets for my work, and eventually landed on the idea of “advancing the industry.” That goal hasn’t been as perfectly illuminating as I’d initially hoped, but it has been useful. For example, my most recently published book, Engineering Executive’s Primer, is directly relevant to a smaller audience than my prior two books. This means it will probably sell fewer copies, but it’s also focused on the audience that I think can change the industry the most: current and aspiring senior leadership. Without my new goal of advancing the industry, I’d probably have worried a lot more about writing a book with a narrow audience.

Anyway, wrapping back to the 1,000 Amazon ratings, it’s a pretty neat milestone to hit. In late 2018 the idea of writing my first book came together, and in six years I’ve been able to publish three useful books. I could have never imagined that, and I remain grateful for how the small pieces have come together to make that possible. A thousand things had to go right along the way, and I’m so fortunate they did.

I’m someone who loves doing new things, so I’m not sure how many more books I can write while still believing that they have a meaningful opportunity to impact the industry I work in. It’s at least one more, as I remain very excited to work on my untitled book on engineering strategy. Until I finish that one, I’ll try to avoid getting too distracted by various numbers incrementing.

That's all for now! Hope to hear your thoughts on Twitter at @lethain!

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