Boosters and Builders

I think I have thought of the world of work as being populated by boosters and builders. Boosters sell, cajole, convince, promote, and coerce. Builders turn raw materials, whether physical commodities or data, into things of use. Boosters accomplish things by manipulating human emotions and social relationships. Builders do not encumber their human relationships with self-interest and are therefore are able to interact with others more honestly and freely. Sales and marketing departments are filled with boosters. Engineering, manufacturing, and accounting departments are filled with builders.

Obviously, in this, I favor the builders. Authenticity is on the side of builders. Artifice on the side of boosters. (Yes, I too noticed that artifice, as a word, relates to building.) Builders deal with solid things, boosters with spun threads of cotton candy. Engineering managers, usually coming from a technical background, inevitably turn more and more into boosters as they move up the corporate ladder. I think of this as their route to the dark side.

I realize this is a simplistic model, but it, I think it has informed a good many of the big and small choices I have made with respect to work, especially in recent years. Several times I have turned down management roles. I try to avoid meetings that involve marketing people. I have become more iconoclastic.

In my present company (and, in all likelihood, in many tech companies of a similar age) the divide between the boosters and builders is particularly well defined. The boosters, the marketing and sales types as well as the executive staff and most managers are freshfaced and white. They jog on their lunch hour. They talk about golf. The technical and accounting staff are almost always Asian and with young families.

I think, in part, that my view of the work world and my poor attitude towards big parts of it have led some social skills and sensitivities I may have once possessed to atrophy. I see marketing and sales types like they are spiders traversing with ease strands that are invisible to me. This may be the basis for the mistrust I feel. I do not understand how they move, why they do what they do, where they will go next. I become anxious among them.

I am not sure where these remarks lead. I have been living with this model of the work world for some time. It has become an unhealthy and self-limiting way to regard the world. In the abstract I can see its flaws. Yet, at this time, I am not entirely ready to throw it over. We shall see.

- J

(Image of bee hive is from wiki commons and is in the public domain.)