TMI: Talk preparations

Today I worked a bit more on issue 5683 (which, for now, just means turning more of the rustpkg test cases into executable #[test] tests and not just English descriptions in a text file. We'll do something fancier later.

I attempted to figure out why my pull request for rustpkg versions failed tests on the Linux bot, but got nowhere, since the test that failed passes on my Mac, and rather than trying to remember how to ssh into one of our Linux machines, I decided to work on my talk instead.

My talk is in a little over two weeks. I got through about half the slides today, and will probably try to blow through the other half tomorrow. I mean just getting them into a rough form without any "fill this in" -- I expect to spend a lot of my time between now and June 19 working on the slides. I'm trying to turn off my inner critic and just write stuff down for now -- it's much easier to edit something that's rough than to turn nothing into something, which is what I'm doing now -- but it's hard, as usual. Also hard is striking the right balance between accessibility and realism with code examples. So far, I've found tiny examples to use from Servo, sprocketnes, and the Rust standard libraries. It's hard to find a non-trivial example that doesn't require explaining too many new concepts at once, though. So the ones I've pulled are very simple. Given that, I'm wondering how much it adds to be using real examples; I wonder if I should stick to using examples from Rust standard libraries or just make up my own examples. I originally thought the talk would be more interesting if I used examples from real Rust applications, but I just don't know if the details of those applications (not so interesting until you spend time immersed in them) justify the benefits of verisimilitude.

Step 1: Work oneself to physical and psychological exhaustion. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!

I read a tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson that someone retweeted in which he says: "Advice to Students: When choosing a career, consider jobs where the idea of a vacation from it repulses you."

I like snorkeling. My job doesn't involve snorkeling. Does that mean I should quit my job and find one that requires snorkeling? I don't think so, because there aren't too many jobs that involve both snorkeling and computer programming, and I like programming too. Maybe there's some marine biology job somewhere that would require me to do both. Well, what about riding my bike? I still wouldn't be able to do that as part of my job. I like many things, and am unlikely to find a job that involves all of them. On the extremely rare occasion that I'm allowed to take a vacation that doesn't involve having surgery, I do things that I like to do that I can't do at work.

I'm poly, which means that when I have relationships, I prefer them to be based on informed consent rather than rigid rules that originate in cis men's need to control everybody else's bodies. That's not necessarily right for everyone, I'm just talking about me. One of the great things about being poly is that I don't have to find a single person who can fulfill all of my needs. I don't expect to be able to do that. So why would I expect one job to fulfill all of my needs?

A worker who doesn't want to take a vacation is a manager's dream come true (and in the Bay Area, it's said that companies like Netflix that have unlimited paid time off actually exert intense informal pressure on workers not to use any of it). Such a worker can potentially make management very happy. I've never heard of a CEO who never took vacations. The people I know who measure their job satisfaction by the number of hours they work are usually software engineers -- people who labor so that other people, generally not working 90-hour weeks, may profit. (It's true that in a startup, people may work long hours in the hope of profiting themselves, but this certainly isn't the norm.)

The US provides workers with the least amount of vacation time in the world. For middle-class Western Europeans, a job with three weeks of paid vacation time -- considered generous in the US -- would be shocking. Does that mean that Europeans who are scientists, engineers, teachers, and doctors love their work less than American scientists, engineers, teachers, and doctors love theirs?

Neil deGrasse Tyson might love his job enough to never take a vacation, but I don't love my job less than he loves his just because I sometimes want to do things that aren't in my job description. Different people are different; liking more things doesn't make a person less virtuous than somebody who likes one thing to the exclusion of all others. Just as we create unrealistic expectations by enforcing lifelong monogamy to the exclusion of all other ways to structure relationships, and teaching young people that they can undoubtedly expect to find just one person who can give them everything they need, we also create unrealistic expectations by teaching the young that they can expect to find one job that they love so much they never want to do anything else.