I went back to manual labour for a week — Here’s what I learned.
I took a week off from being a software engineer and went back to the building site.
I’ve walked many paths in my reasonably short time on Earth. I came to software engineering quite late in life. Being self taught, I’ve always sought to work with the smartest people I could find so that I could draw on their experiences to continue to improve my own knowledge base. I like to think that my unique work history has helped others too, it’s certainly helped me in ways higher education couldn’t. I recently decided to use some holiday and travel back in time to go and be a labourer for my Dad’s building company for a week. Here’s what I learned.
The brain is a muscle, rest it well.
Manual labour is often physically demanding. I carried scaffolding around, I mixed concrete for 8 hours, I moved materials around. All these things left my body aching by the end of the day but at the same time I felt refreshed. What struck me was that I was simply tired in a completely different way. Writing code, planning and running an engineering team all require massive levels of focus. It’s stressful at times and there are days where you will feel utterly exhausted. And yet I’ve never really treated the feelings of mental exhaustion in the same way I have the psychical.
Life is like music, you must play the silences as well as the notes otherwise you’ll end up with a horrible noise.
I tell people all the time about the importance of giving your brain time to recover from 8 hours of intense use but I’ve been terrible at heeding my own advice. There’s often so many things I want or need to do that I simply can’t do it all in an 8 hour window. To be honest that’s just fine, there’s nothing wrong with working hard. It’s a prerequisite for being successful in anything you do but my big take away is you don’t need to do it every single day. Life is like music, you must play the silences as well as the notes otherwise you’ll end up with a horrible noise.
Being outside is a great way to relax.
Working in an office or from home means it’s often all too easy to forget about going outside. It was lovely working outside again. Even when it was pouring with rain (for the first minute at least).
I guess actually going outside is not mandatory. If you can’t physically go outside at least attempt to step away from the environment you’re working in. There’s hundreds of productivity hacks, like Pomodoro, whose foundation is built on the idea of taking regular breaks. For me something as simple as not eating my lunch at my desk just so I can send that email or fix that test would be a positive change.
I used to cycle a lot. After my week as a labourer I plan to get on the bike more and head into the office as much as I can. This comes back to my point above, but it’s an important one so I’ll make it again. Allowing yourself to switch off is SO crucial. For me it’s most prominent at the end of the day, going straight from work into home life is like smashing two blocks together and hoping they’ll stick. It just doesn’t work. Taking the train or cycling home gives you that much needed buffer.
Loops loops and more loops.
Programming has changed the way I think about everything. On the third day of my working holiday I was asked to mix 12 tonnes of ballast and concrete. This is a job I hated doing when I was young. Despite it being fairly tough physically, it involves precise ratios of concrete and sand which means that your workflow is constantly interrupted by the need to get more water or open more bags of cement. Without any kind of conscious decision I immediately set about optimising the process so that I’d have less decisions to make and I could just focus of the physical activity of shovelling the sand into the cement mixer. On reflection I’ve realised that this tendency to think in loops to optimise everyday tasks is something I do a lot. It’s interesting to think about other ways that software engineering impacts our normal day to day decision making.
The comfort zone.
Complacency is like rust on a sharp mind. Stepping outside of your comfort zone every once in a while is important. That’s certainly part of what I did physically this week, but it’s something I’m going to aim to do more mentally too.
The first day of my week moonlighting as a labourer involved painting the side of a really lovely Georgian manor house owned by the Army. I’m not sure when this fear developed since my teens, but I quickly discovered that I’m not keen on heights anymore. At all. Especially when standing on a self erected platform working with my brother who found my new fear of heights hilarious. So what does this have to do with stepping outside of your comfort zone? I’m telling you this to make the point that stepping completely outside of your comfort zone is not required. Perhaps you dread the thought of public speaking. Deciding to present to a room of 200 people might be a step too far for you. Presenting something you’ve been hacking on to your peers at work might be enough of a step to force you to find the tools to deal with something you’d normally never dream of.
My week as a labourer has reminded me that keeping things fresh in your personal and working life is something that’s all to easy to become complacent about. Variety is the spice of life, as they say.
Be grateful.
We software engineers are a privileged bunch. We pick our chair after careful consideration, we ensure that our company provides only the best hardware for us to do our jobs, our desks are set up just right so that distractions are minimal and we are always comfortable. We’re right to expect that. I’m a firm believer in doing as much as you can to provide yourself with the best working environment. But take my word for it — you can take the shrine to comfort that you’ve built for yourself and chuck it right in the bin, when it comes to working on a building site you get on with it or you go home.
So what do I mean by that? You cannot control the environment you’re working in on a building site. No two jobs are the same. Sometimes the water you need for the concrete will be 500 metres away and not right next to where you are working. You might even have to mix the concrete by hand on occasion. Things like these remind me how grateful I am for the opportunities that our industry has given me. So the next time I feel like complaining the internet is too slow or the ergonomics of my £400 chair aren’t right I’ll try to remember, I could be working in the pouring rain with a stinking cold cleaning concrete off a foot path because I just accidentally tipped a wheel barrow over. #trueStory 🙈
So am I going back to building full time?
Hell no. I’m old(er), my bones are weary and my hands are soft from years of sitting behind a desk. I love working in the tech industry and I’d never leave it but I’ve certainly come to understand that there’s elements of other jobs I’ve had that could be used to make my work in software even better.
Thanks for reading and don’t forget to hit the 💚 button.
