Evenings Are the Day Job Without the Budget
I've been reading We Are Not Machines by Sarah O'Connor, and today one page stopped me long enough to photograph it and draft this blog.
Sarah O’Connor
Karri Saarinen's question is the same one I carry with me each day: why make something ugly when it could be beautiful? I see myself in my work product, and so I see his answer from the working world aligns with mine. Cost, time, skill. The spec, the deadline, and the budget belong to someone else, and speed and cost are the two things that fit on a spreadsheet to be managed by others. Quality doesn't fit cleanly into a metric. Doing the lesser version because it was cheaper or faster has never felt good, and I don't think it's supposed to.
The Hobby Is the Day Job With the Requirements Removed
Many technologists I know spend their evenings doing something that looks a lot like their day job. Home servers. Side projects. Scripts that automate a chore nobody asked them to automate. I'm one of them. A life dashboard, a video triage app, a home photo deduplicator for backups, a watcher for my systemd timers, and a memory system for my AI sessions, and not one of them has a customer but me.
A cabinetmaker who builds to a shop's price list all week goes home and cuts dovetails on a drawer nobody will inspect. The joint is for the maker. My evening projects are the same joint. I pick the feature, the design, the data model, and the standard. Nobody asks me to ship the ugly version by Friday, and the satisfaction in that is out of proportion to what any of it does.
Losing the Choice Is What Makes the Work Feel Mechanical
A machine runs someone else's spec at someone else's speed and has no opinion about the result. When cost and time strip the choices out of a job, the person doing it is left with the execution. That is the part a machine does. O'Connor's title lands right there. We are not machines, and the closer any job pushes us toward running a spec we didn't write, the more of us go looking for a workbench where the spec is ours.
🤖 AIL LEVELS: This content's AI Influence Levels are AIL3 for the writing, and AIL0 for the images. AI Influence Level (AIL) framework