Refresh your baselines

A brief reminder

Thursday posts are mostly half-baked thoughts I have mulling in my mind that I want to get out and share with supports of the newsletter. Oftentimes they’re an invitation for conversation.

For me, this year was a year for a lot of old things around the house finally breaking down and needing to be repaired or replaced. Quick, without looking it, how much would it cost to replace the stove in your kitchen with a similar one? How much for a new washing machine?

I’m sure you’ve heard stories of people getting super fancy brand name appliances at fancy magazine-like remodels where a single stove costs like $10k, but think about the one that’s sitting in your kitchen, likely with just a simple oven and four burners. At my big box appliance dealer nearby, the not-bottom-of-barrel, I-wouldn’t-mind-using-one-much ones go for maybe $1000. There are cheaper stripped down ones, and of course a model for multiple price points upwards. And that price this includes free delivery, and haul away of our old appliance.

The desktop computer computer I’m typing on costs almost double that and I upgrade that machine 5-7 years. Some people’s iPhones cost more than that and they upgrade every 2-4 years. I’m sure my stove dates from the 90s, and I don’t really expect to have to replace it any time soon.

There’s plenty of people who’ve remarked how profit margins for appliances are razor thin compared smartphones or computing devices. I don’t need to go into that topic. But what I wanted to remind everyone is that our baselines are always rapidly decaying and becoming outdated.

Back when I was a kid, my parents buying a new appliance was a Big Frickin’ Deal — getting a dryer that we’ve never had before was both a significant expense that we expected to give us value for a decade or two. So when I had to buy my first appliance it felt sorta special… by the time I had to replace a third dying 30-year-old thing, it felt a bit like ordering pizza. Especially when the price was less than a fancy camera lens or maxed out cell phone.

Anyways, baselines. My experience with appliances just made me realize how unmoored my experience of rare events like appliance buying. Moreover, there are plenty of other events that I only experience rarely that should also have been completely divorced from reality now. It also means I need to be extremely aware of what kind of advice I give, what kind of judgements I make.

The most obvious one that comes to mind is “joining the job market”. That event happened over 15 years go and won’t ever happen again. The whole process and outcome barely made any sense back then and certainly has no relevancy now. A close second is applying for a job since I haven’t done that in almost six years now, under different market conditions.

Aside from these obvious things, there’s also a lot of work related skills that can get unmoored from reality. Back when I was actively running data systems, DAG tools didn’t even exist for data work. We’d either write our own hacks, or just ran things without caring until a conflict crashes the whole system. That’s hardly acceptable now for any kind of serious production environment. The list goes on and on, especially as practitioners around us find and solve problems we’ve never encountered before.

So today is just a reminder, to look around and try doing something you haven’t done in a very long time. Try not to do it in the way you’re used to, but in the way that people seem to be doing it currently. It’s probably different from what you’ve learned. The base assumptions going in might be significantly different.

Maybe it’ll help give you an interesting perspective on things.