Reflection on Values for Work

8 min readFeb 6, 2021

Introduction

As my 5-year-long anabasis at Avast is nearing an end, I’ve chosen to write a short reflection on personal values that matter during a career. The point is not to provide a directly followable recipe, but rather serve as an inspiration or guide for a similar reflection by the reader. Because I’ve occupied roles of individual developer, of architect, of manager, it should be of appliance at more stages of a career. Even though I’ve been focusing mostly on Big Data and Machine Learning, I don’t think that that has had any profound effect on this text. There is a danger of resembling a list-of-motivational-quotes article or a self-help book — however, I trust that the wisdom of mine and the sharp wit of the reader will allow a deeper and more meaningful experience.

Values

1. Reflecting

The first point is about reflecting itself. There is a known maxim of “If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it” — something I, because of its categoricity, disagree with. Many things are hard to measure, and a badly executed attempt to do so may bring more harm than good. However, I find some sort of reflection, whether based on numbers or feelings, crucial.

Firstly, human brains are subject to cognitive biases, and focus predominantly on the immediate. But if you want to improve over the long term, if you want to learn lessons from past mistakes, if you want to make good strategic decisions — you need to forcefully, from time to time, overcome the bias.

Secondly, it is natural to view things subjectively, solely from one’s point of view. Again, forcing yourself to look at things from the points of view of your thought opponents, allows you to come to better decisions, and builds objectivity as a skill in you.

I don’t have guidance in the style “do a personal review every month, for 30 minutes, in a dedicated notebook.” I myself have jumped from one method and frequency to another, never quite satisfied — but the fact that every time I was reflecting and thinking in a larger context was what mattered.

2. Cooperating

I found most joy in cooperations, especially across bounds and borders. A discussion with fellow engineers is surely nice, but being able to deliver a project where all kinds of work such as UX, Business-Market Analysis, Front End, Backend, ML, were necessary, feels much better. Especially if participants have to step out of their areas of expertise and resolve, together, problems that don’t fall neatly into a single existing domain.

I have drawn joy from this because, despite being introverted, I am a pack animal, and a common goal with my pack mates is important to me. If, on the other hand, I’m being delegated to, for example, “engineering role”, I’m feeling somehow devalued.

Additionally, if a group of people truly has a common goal in mind, not just “a shared OKR emitted by their superior”, they tend to produce better results, and mutually enrich each other in skills and knowledge.

3. Personal Glory

I was never really interested in personal glory and acknowledgment. I mean, yes, it does feel kinda nice to receive “employee of the month” shirt, or see your name in acknowledgment section in the slides — I’m not denying that. However, I felt more gratified when I knew I had impact, that I persuaded myself that my contribution mattered and was important, and that the thing we were working on was useful to the world.

Perhaps my certain reluctance of being publicly acknowledged comes from my shyness, or from my impostor syndrome. But regardless of that, I believe you will anyway accumulate more personal glory if you rather focus on impact, and on having a reputation of reliability and usefulness. Very often, you do encounter glory-first persons — but they are easy to recognize, even though it may take a long time until it becomes public enough. And if you feel there are just too many exploiters of others in your surroundings — well then, it is your decision which garden to plant seeds at.

4. Drive

Sometimes I say Drive, sometimes I use other words for the same idea — Focus, Energy, Thumos, Wille zur Macht, Grit, … It embodies the need to do something, to strive forward, to make progress, to end your day with saying “ok this is what I’ve accomplished”. On rainy days, you may hear those whispers to slow down, to “just work”, to lethargically and repetitively go through the motions — Drive is what makes you overcome those.

This one sometimes comes hard to me, and in this one I found the most motivation and inspiration in certain people around me. For some, their Drive is based on the need to do good and fix the world, for some it is based on competitiveness, for some it is based on their empathy. For me, it is mostly curiosity, or perhaps my opposition to boredom — falling into a lapsus is like a slap to me, and I jump up and smoke starts to rise from my brain again. The point here is — if you feel it hard to find your Drive, associate with someone who has it, and get yourself infected. And it does not matter if your source for Drive will turn out to be different than theirs — as long as it propels your engine.

5. Realism

Don’t succumb to grandiose plans that don’t have the first steps developed in great detail. Don’t hide behind eloquence, behind slideware, behind talks, behind posts on Medium. Work with your hands, create material things, design them in a way that allows them to be tested by others — and proactively ask others to test your work, while testing the work of others yourself.

Projects and goals are often uncertain — uncertain whether they can be actually delivered, how, and whether, even in the case of completion, they will be useful. Seek actions that reduce this uncertainty first, by delivering PoCs or MVPs, by testing out integrations, by doing experiments and market validations early; be pragmatic. An easy trap to fall into is that of engineering fetish — you focus on parts which pose a worthy technical challenge, which are of interest to you as a professional: but do not bring much uncertainty reduction for the project as a whole. In the same spirit, don’t stick to PocS and mocks only — be progressive and change your focus and style of work to wherever the most tackleable uncertainty lies at the moment.

And why do it this way? Because wasted work hurts. If you spend time on a project that gets cancelled or does not succeed in the end — you could have as well done something else. Of course, many projects ought to be cancelled and fail, that is the nature of innovative work. But if it is to be so — then let that happen as early as possible, to minimise the “lost time” downside, and maximise the “lessons learned” upside. And a second reason — every facade and ruse will eventually fall apart. Working in abstract, working without creating values, may feel a comfort zone to some as it does not encounter real world obstacles — but one does not need to be a trained category theorist to find an isomorphism to dreaming here.

6. Optimism

This is another one that I find, at times, hard to adhere to, and where I was lucky to draw inspiration from certain colleagues. Projects fall behind the schedule, teams have opposing views, lunch was not tasty, the political situation is tragic, and even nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. It is a lure to focus on criticising, to finding the bad, to give up.

Obviously, that leads to stagnation, and stagnation is death. But once one brave person attempts the leap of heart, and says “ok so what can we improve?”, all of sudden the mood improves and work is smooth again. It is one remarkable trait of the human mind to encompass all that is negative, but it is another remarkable one to be able to focus with all force on that single positive improvable thing. You don’t have to kill all the orcs at once, especially if you are a tiny hobbit. But every small step that gets the ring closer to the mountain is worth taking.

Of course, one has to be careful with optimism. To me, optimism plays a similar role as Drive, that is, enabler of work. One should not exploit it to rosify lack of progress and justify negligence.

7. Communication

If you are in a spot which requires cooperation with others (which you should be), then you need to communicate. And communication does not mean telling others what to do, communication does not mean participating in large meetings — while both are, in certain situations, important.

To me, communication always meant finding the right means for the situation at hand — and that usually leads to a lot of time spent talking with others. At times, what I did was called “working behind the scenes” — because, for example, for some business call of N people, I also conducted N-1 individual calls with each of them, myself. This was not because of any love for couloir politics, but rather it is an acknowledgment of differences among people, of the need for empathy when dealing with others. I am not able to truly understand the side of others if there are too many of them — I can empathize with one or two folks at once, but surely not with 10 simultaneously. Preaching to a large and thus muted audience is not communication.

The right means for a situation also often include some quid pro quo. You cannot just go to others, tell them “this project is important for the company, contribute”. Other people have their needs, priorities, problems. One could say that in well managed companies, there should be no deals of the kind “you help me with my project, I help you with yours” — but that is to me as paternalistic and as realistic as “no sex before marriage, hands on the blanket”.

Finally, remember — even though someone looks and behaves a Darth Vader to you, there may be good in him, and, if the situation unfolds rightly, he can be the ultimate savior.

Closing Words

This list could have go on for much longer — “be rational”, “tell no lies”, “watch out for burnout”, “sport while working”, “don’t just create lists”, “don’t engage in pseudoscientism and self-help”, “don’t try to be funny when it feels forced”, et cetera. I purposefully stop here — because those particular 7 mean the most to me, and to those particular 7, I felt I have the most to say. That does not mean that I don’t view other values important, or that those listed here are to be applied blindly in every situation. Don’t put a cat into a microwave please.

Your personal reflection should likely be composed of different ones, regardless of whether there will be 3, 5 or 15 of them. But not 16, that is already too much.