Is Employment about Benefits?

Mark, a friend of mine, was lamenting at lunch the other day, "Oh, I really want to just write code - but they only let me do it a little." He's very good at his work, so they made him a development lead, and now he spends a lot of his time managing other developers.

I suggested a couple ideas which seemed obvious to me. How about an individual contributor job, say in the Windows Shell team, where he could crank out code all day and they'd love him for it? The response, "The Shell team scares me..." didn't really make much sense to me. So I pointed out that we could leave Microsoft and start our own venture. Success in my consulting business would have been much easier with a great developer who wants nothing more than to write code on my staff. That one met with a concern about benefits - health care, vacation, and the like.

Adam was there, too, and asked, "So, Aaron, what benefits do you offer?"

My defensive, and perhaps flippant, answer was, "An opportunity to work with others that don't think about benefits first." After that, the conversation turned to how the best way to get ahead at Microsoft is to pick a team and "camp" there, effectively staying with that team as long as possible. I couldn't really get into the idea.

There's nothing wrong with how Adam's view or Mark's view. Those are safe views that will achieve almost guaranteed success in the long run. It probably won't be phenomenal success, but certainly comfortable success. I'm just more interested in phenomenal success even if it means phenomenal failures along the way. For me, employment isn't just about the benefits, at least in the traditional sense. Benefits include excitement, opportunity to learn and explore possibilities, and the chance to be the guy on the cover of Wired or Business 2.0.

I doubt the guys that started Kazaa and are now building up Skype ever asked up front about the benefits. I'd like to be like those guys, and I will be someday. I'm working toward it even now.