1. About the Service Industry
The primary sector, represented by agriculture, solves the problem of survival; the secondary sector, represented by industry, solves the problem of efficiency; the tertiary sector, represented by services, solves other people’s problems.
Unless some factor puts people’s physical existence under threat, the service industry has extremely broad room to grow. Human desire has no ceiling, and people exist in a complex state of serving and collaborating with one another, enough to keep development going indefinitely. At the same time, only the tertiary sector can absorb enough of the workforce, and governments encourage its development too β the prospects are excellent.
Altruism is the core idea of the service industry. It is also the fundamental tenet of Mahayana Buddhism, which enjoys broad popular recognition domestically. In helping others succeed, you succeed yourself. Here it coincides exactly with the sharing that the internet advocates.
No industry is more enthusiastic about sharing than IT. Some of it is free services β DNS resolution, code hosting, search, and the like; some of it is emergency supplies β bicycles, umbrellas, power banks, and the like; some of it is an exchange of ideas β tech talks, industry conferences, and the like.
2. An Open Mind
99% of the useful documentation in the IT industry can be found on the internet; the remaining 1% is the part about to be abandoned.
Content nobody uses and nobody knows about is quickly replaced; content that is flawed but useful and known keeps getting improved and helps more people. This is a process of spontaneous evolution.
IT engineers should keep an open mind and let more people know about what they produce. It could be a document, a piece of code, a design, a tool, a thought β anything you know that others do not should be encouraged. The flow of knowledge nourishes the team’s growth and deepens your own understanding as well.
3. A Culture of Tools
Emphasizing altruism is about making the starting point of your thinking clear; an open mind is about strengthening the team’s fighting power; but the endpoint still has to be a real product.
Technology companies usually have a strong culture of tools. Facebook, for instance, assigns its best employees to tool development. Hiring an ordinary employee is addition; hiring an employee who can build tools is multiplication for everyone else. Good tools raise efficiency and get twice the result for half the effort.
Tools should be used to codify skills. Human strength lies in continually adapting to change, facing challenges, and solving problems creatively. For process-driven skills, we should codify them. For an individual, that is a chance to sort out your understanding and empty your mind; for a team, it is an accumulation that can multiply returns.
So R&D can consider writing a scaffolding generator for some solution, testers can consider writing an automated testing pipeline, security engineers can consider writing a middleware that blocks attacks β just express your skills as tools.
Do not worry that tools will diminish your own value. Tools need people to maintain them, and the more people use them, the more valuable they become.
4. Feel Others’ Urgency, Share Others’ Worries
“Okay, now I know: be altruistic, and find or build tools. But which tools, specifically?”
Feel others’ urgency, share others’ worries. Empathy drives you to discover needs; “Don’t Make Me Think” makes you build better tools β or rather, products. “Don’t Make Me Think” is a book title, and I think it fits very well here.
If you can do it in one step, do not break it into moves; if it can be automatic, do not make it manual.
Helping others solve problems β saving them a trip, some money, some thinking β that is service. If this became a collective behavior, humanity would develop even further. It brings to mind the long spoons.
“Both heaven and hell eat with long spoons. In hell everyone eats with a long spoon, and the spoon is longer than an arm, so it never reaches the mouth β ravenous, miserable beyond words. In heaven everyone eats with a long spoon, and the spoon is longer than an arm, and they feed each other β joyful, endlessly happy.”
