dubious.biz(ness)

I’m feeling reflective and rather than actually doing the cleaning that I need to do to get ready to leave, I’m going to write a bit.

Life is metered out to in fixed durations. You don’t get a life, you get a sequence of years, months, weeks days. It’s rather frustrating that summer internships get metered out over a summer, but perhaps that’s good. Last year, while I enjoyed my quiet summer in Cambridge, I perhaps realized that living quiet summers in Cambridge isn’t for me. I wasn’t being utilized fully, I wasn’t challenged, I wasn’t happy. I did sleep a lot.

Today, for the first time in many weeks I slept more than 8 hours. To be exact I slept 23 hours. Nearly a day. The day before I stayed up more than 24 hours in the culmination of a summer’s work.

But these times are pretty ridiculous aren’t they? Days, weeks, summers are arbitrary measures and I spent a summer working my ass off and a day of sleep catching up. I devoted my time to a thing that I’m passionate about, and the price I paid was lack of sleep.

As with most of my rather ridiculous undertakings, I have neglected various parts of my life. Alternately friends, family, tidying, and my hair have all lacked attention, but overall I’ve done what I can. I am slowly realizing that I have a relatively good system for cutting certain aspects out of my life, I simply neglect all that can be easily neglected. Obviously the trick here is not letting anyone realize that this is what I’m doing, i.e. bothering to call my parents rather than waiting for them to call me, likewise with friends, getting my hair cut before it’s covering my eyes.

Google, ironically, does not call your parents for you. They do feed you, clothe you, and coddle you but they leave it to you to take care of your personal affairs. So perhaps it’s the least I could attempt to do. Ah well, live and learn.

It is the unfortunate side effect of respecting the restrictions of a company that would like to keep its software a secret that I can’t actually say what I’ve been working on (it’s unfortunately not done after the 24hrs of straight coding) but I do hope that the team finishes it soon, even if it is after I’ve left. I’ll be the biggest user if they do.

And I hope that I’ve been of some use. I sometimes feel like I’m not very effective and I believe that there are two things that drive me to work so hard, one being that I don’t feel effective and the other being that I love what I’m doing. It’s passion combined with puritanical values. I feel it most strongly when people I respect are reviewing my work and using it, which leads to a bad trait for a PM: I don’t defend my work and decisions as hard as I should. The upside is that when I do defend my work I usually win because it seems out of character.

I will answer the bigger question of “do I like this job?” and “could I do this job for a living?” and most importantly “where shall I go next?” in the next two posts. I think the final question, in the sense of physical place, is particularly important for me. I have established loose ties nearly everywhere, and any choice of location will have it’s downside. I will consider these in view of my readers because I reason best while writing.

As for how I liked the experience (rather than the job itself), I loved it. Google is an amazing place to be, it’s the right place at the right time. It is bursting with talented, passionate, and driven people, and best of all most people are all three. If there is a killer feature, a “sustainable competitive advantage”, it is that Google gets and keeps the best. The massages that I haven’t taken advantage of, the wide array of food choices, and so on are nothing compared to the opportunity to work with the people I have had the opportunity to work with.

And I save the best praise for my boss. He is the type of person who you want on your team. First because he’s the sort of guy who you’d hate to have on the opposing team: he’s aggressive, smart, and can read the competition like a book. Second because, despite his love of shall we say intellectual battle, he’s sensitive enough to take time to give people what they need to get their goals done and turn a conflict in to a collaboration. There are a lot of “types of people” that make good product managers so I can’t say he’s the best type, but he’s definitely the best of the type he is, if that makes sense. It’s rare to be able to meet someone like this, rarer still to work with one on a day-to-day basis, and rarest of all to have one take you under his wing and give you advice, and I’m very grateful for it because I’m a better PM for it (hell probably a better person). Now I hope he doesn’t read this blog. I told you I was feeling reflective.

This is my last week so the entire week will be a reflection on my time so perhaps I’ll have yet another sappy post to write after I leave. But I will hold myself to the promise: three questions will be answered in the next two weeks, before Cambridge pulls me off to craziness.

I sometimes make a joke about how often I’m right: I usually rattle off a 3-digit number which is my current streak of rights since my last wrong. To some it implies an arrogance, and for others it seems to lend credence to my intelligence, and for many more it is a needle to annoy them with.

In reality I know exactly how long my streak is, and it’s rarely more than single digits (joking again). In real reality, I am very often wrong, but rarely do people actually push me to making a verifiable statement which can be proven wrong. I usually can weasel out when I know my chances of success are low.

At any rate nearly two years ago I made stupid and arrogant claim, partly just to continue an argument, that debt forgiveness for foreign nations was a stupid idea and one that was likely to harm macroeconomic stability as well as imply that countries could borrow without penalty of foreclosure. I don’t strongly believe that, but for whatever reason the particular person I was arguing with pushed me far enough that I staked that claim.

Well, I was wrong. Not just technically, which I pretty much knew I was from the start, but also morally. My main evidence is actually from my own thoughts, ones I had after the discussion about exactly what the effect of several nations defaulting would be. I determined that in fact the nations who had been loaned money were in fact not expected to be able to pay them back at this point and thus were not overleveraged unlike American homeowners which as a source of credit are so overleveraged that even the least likely to pay are highly levered. So in reality I privately conceeded a long time ago.

However, more compelling (and more recent) evidence is anecdotal, from a book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins which I suggest anyone mildly interested in global politics and developing countries read. In it Mr. Perkins describes his life as an “Economic Hitman” which is essentially an agent of the government and/or corporations who works deals with developing nations to put them into economic servitude by loaning them money for works projects. He was, in essence, the World Bank’s combination Loan Officer and Kneecap Breaker, keeping countries on the hook for amounts of money that would never be able to remit so that they would instead be forced to concede their (far more precious) natural resources and labor.

This pretty clearly points out the real value of these loans, and indicates they were loaned not for their low probability of default (as the banks maintain) but for the favors they buy. And access to resources like oil, minerals and people is far more valuable than any dollar amount on a promissory note. According to Perkins most of these loans were structured so that as a stipulation of the loan only American contractors could be used for the construction of these public works projects, meaning the dollars never left the US. I could easily go on in a conspiratorial tone about how these people were manipulated in to giving up their own country and people to further the US’s demand for cheap resources but Perkins does it in a much more convincing fashion. I’m not usually fond of work like this which seems to border on paranoia but to be honest most of it seems more than plausible.

All of which would bolster the case for something that two years ago I said I was against: forgiving past debts to the World Bank and other heavy lenders to impoverished nations who have very little to show for their heavy burden. And to me it’s not even a case of how much that interest could be used for something else any longer, no we should be giving these countries real, useful money with no strings attached, in the amounts that we promised to “loan” them so many years ago. It’s quite literally the least we could do.

One of my original arguments was that we shouldn’t give corrupt governments more money to fuel their corruption, but it sounds as if we were the corrupt government in this case by scheming against the very poorest nations. And if even a quarter of Confessions is true, debt forgiveness is only the beginning of the solution.

My concession is, I hope, thorough enough. I now reset the counter to zero.