Standards, progress and Sisyphus
The story of Sisyphus, the cunning yet deplorable king of Ephyra, is one of the more prominent tales of Greek mythology. Having cheated death twice, the Gods wanted to see him pay for his guile. So, upon arrival into the underworld, he was tasked with rolling a large boulder up a steep hill as punishment. Zeus, however, had enchanted the boulder so that it would always fall down when it got near to the top. This was to be Sisyphus’ eternal torture. When we describe anything as Sisyphean, it immediately suggests connotations of fruitlessness. But what else can we glean from this story?
There are many interpretations. The French philosopher Albert Camus wrote an essay on the subject titled “The Myth of Sisyphus”. One particular quote stands out for me.
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
I believe this completely flips the tale on its head. We understand that whilst Sisyphus has not once successfully completed his task, his belief in achieving it does not falter. In Stephen Fry’s book Mythos (a retelling of the myths of ancient Greece) he adds that Sisyphus is promised that if he completes his task he will become a god himself. At this point the tale of Sisyphus, for me, becomes an allegory not for futility, but progress in the face of adversity. Now I understand that using the word ‘progress’ is a bit bold, but bear with me.
It is the very nature of pushing the boulder that is inherently emblematic of progress. More specifically (and unfortunately for poor Sisyphus) the mindset of progress. The man had a simple objective. Push the boulder — push it to the top. An eternity of failed attempts and Sisyphus still continues to push. I like to think that it’s because with each failed attempt he believes he’s improved — that he’s one step closer to success. This is where standards come in.
When I started out as a programmer, I can say with some confidence that the standards I held myself to were located somewhere near the bottom of the hill. Everything was so new and confusing that I often had the “just make it work” mindset that I’m sure others can empathise with. The problem with this method is that it’s short term in its successes. The amount of bugs and scaling issues that eventually boomerang back, give you a case of blunt force behaviour change. So then you say to yourself “ok we need some rules” and your journey of self improvement begins.
These “rules” come together to form your standards. They are what you expect from yourself. But, as previously said, this is a journey — not a destination. You do not create standards, kick your feet up and put on Love Island. They are constantly improving with you. And the interesting thing is that their only real goal is towards a notion of betterness. Much like our friend Sisyphus, this is not something that has a tangible end. There is no point, or at least there shouldn’t be, where you say “ok, I’m good enough”. You should be constantly pushing that boulder fully in the knowledge that there IS no end.
Just to run this in parallel to my own experiences, I’ll use my time at Birdie as an example. Now we’re a very young company, so in terms of product process we are still making many discoveries. We started out with a simple reviewing system for our code. One writes, another reviews and if that person approves, the person who wrote the code merges it. The issue with that was that we didn’t have any defined rules for what should “pass” a review. So, we started creating rules but found that there were just so many elements of judgment that creating all the rules from scratch would be a waste of time. We now, for example, mark our JavaScript quality against AirBnB’s JavaScript style guide. Its opening description also resounds with what I’m saying
“A mostly reasonable approach to JavaScript”
The modesty of this statement is in line with the “pushing the boulder” mindset. AirBnB is a hugely successful company and I have no doubt that their developers are of the highest calibre. Yet, even they are aware that there are no perfect answers when it comes to standards. All we can do is make things better — there is not top of the hill. This is also why we do not hold this style guide as an absolute truth at Birdie. Because there are no absolute truths regarding standards. What matters to us is that everyone in our team is in agreement that the work that is up for review is pushing our codebase up the hill. That’s why we now have everyone review the code, and someone else other than the writer has to merge it. This has taught me that if you want someone to effectively read and understand your work, make them responsible for it. By making the reviewer responsible for the merge you’re making sure that they won’t let it pass without being able to understand every last bit of it.
So, we have improved our standards to a respectable level but the important thing is not to let the hubris get in the way. Just because you are doing better than yesterday does not permit you to be the same tomorrow. This is where I believe Sisyphus is most useful to us. Not as a device of off hand negativity, but as a motivational metaphor for improvement. Your standards are representative of the level of quality you hold yourself to. They are an empirical metric of your improvement. Ask yourself, “Am I pushing the boulder?” because if you’re not then you’re not progressing. There is no top of the hill. At no point should you be content to the point of stagnation. Push the boulder to the point of struggle, maintain that and, in the words of Camus, your heart will be filled.
“It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.” Aristotle
It is as true of self improvement as it is of anything else to be desired. You should never be satisfied with your standards. Satisfaction will only leave you part way up a hill with nothing to show but a boulder.
