Optimization and the Standard Deal

Somewhere in the middle of college I started to get the feeling I was being ripped off.

Admittedly, I am the canary in the coal mine over this kind of thing, but having reached the point where one starts to contemplate career choices (for which I had been prepared by my philosophy major, har, har) I found everything that could be construed as a standard choice a kind of raw deal.

Not to be all Karl Marx about it, but I started to feel that the educational system and awaiting employment market was trying to shape me into a cookie-cutter worker-bot, ready to take my place in the cubicles of the world, and do stupid meaningless things, never really capturing any value for myself, regardless of effort.  By value I don’t necessarily mean money; rather the degree to which your situation changes to move you towards the goals that are important to you.  For many people and most institutions this often does mean money.

In time I put a name to this phenomenon: optimization.  It’s so vast and all-pervasive that it’s difficult to even talk about it without sounding like Captain Obvious.  Essentially, it breaks down to two crucial ideas:

1. Institutions optimize to capture value for themselves.
2. Therefore, any “standard deal” offered by such an institution has been optimized towards their benefit, and away from yours.

It’s easiest for me to discuss this in career terms, although I believe it’s considerably more far reaching than that.  Typically institutions (companies, governments, schools and so forth) present individuals options that require much effort from those individuals, but provide limited upside in return.

In my grandfather’s generation he could at least get a tradeoff concerning stability: he could take a job and expect to keep it throughout his lifetime, receiving a pension when he retired.  Then came institutional optimization.  Corporations discovered they could improve their bottom line if they simply normalized a behavior that was previously considered anathema: the regularly occurring layoff.  Now routine and barely newsworthy, it is a regular occurrence to hear of companies laying off huge numbers of workers at the slightest economic contraction.  Even in boom times benefits are cut, and jobs are eliminated through re-organization, outsourcing, automation and so forth.  As individuals it seems naive at best to assume we can count on capturing any real sustainable value from a job.  Jobs are not engineered to deliver value to those who hold them.

Of course, optimization can face resistance occasionally.  In the area of software development, despite some extremely powerful and sustained efforts to commoditize (and thus reduce the cost of) development, software developers have stubbornly retained high value and are considered a critical resource.  This shows in their salaries, benefits and work environments.  Developers have captured value.  However they are the exception; just walk into any big chain pharmacy to see the opposite situation.  There you’ll find miserable, interchangeable, valueless workers, slowly being replaced by automated checkout machines.

This treads on the political.  Depending on your political leanings you may or may not think this trend is a good thing, and you may or may not care too much about it at a societal level.  However, my point isn’t that institutional optimization is right or wrong, it’s that it is predictable, natural and inevitable.  Institutions will always optimize value towards themselves, and the optimizations will always be most pronounced when the power relationship with the other party strongly favors the institution. Usually this means that it manifests where institutions intersect with individuals, because institutions are usually more powerful than individuals.  Think of you versus the cable company.

And that is what leads me to the second part of the idea: the Standard Deal.  The Standard Deal exists in so many aspects of our lives: it is the job we hold, the cable package we subscribe to, the political party we vote for, and the news we consume.  Little consideration is required in our adoption of the Standard Deal, because it has already been structured for us.  We sign on the dotted line for the same package as our neighbor.

The problem with the Standard Deal is that it’s optimized to take value away from you.  That’s why it’s a standard.  Following the natural process of institutional optimization, any situation in your life that has been worked out by some institution is specifically designed to move value away from you, and towards that institution.

The Only Winning Move is Not To Play

The Standard Deal is your enemy.  The only way to capture value about things that are important to you is to get out of the deal you’ve been handed, and forge your own path.

Now this (like most things) is a tradeoff, and getting out of the Standard Deal has a definite cost.  Specifically, you are taking on more risk, you are setting the barre for accomplishment higher for yourself, and in absence of the roadmap that comes with the Standard Deal, you will spend a lot more time figuring out what the hell you are doing.

Additionally, because of the pervasiveness of the Standard Deal, you will have to pick your battles.  For example, I certainly don’t need to “have it my way” when it comes to selecting socks.  The impact of stocking selection to me is so minimal that I’m happy to accept the Standard Deal in this regard.  (However the opposite is true for a neighboring issue: “time spent shopping for socks”.   Because I place a very high value on my own time I’ve switched to manpacks.com.)

For me the issues that really burn have to do with how I spend my time, and with my lifestyle.  The way I like these things is certainly not for everyone, but they are highly significant to me.  I view time as my only real resource, and a finite one at that.  Activities that feel like a waste of that time (bad jobs, too many unpleasant obligations etc) are unjustifiable in my mind.

Now that puts me at odds with the Standard Deal in many cases.  For example, I absolutely hate commuting, so I’ve made arrangements so that I can walk to work.  I spend about an hour each day walking, giving me the benefit of exercise and some home/work separation, but without the mandatory time sink of a commute.  Additionally I’m obsessive about autonomy, so I’ve attempted to push my career towards ever-increasing autonomy whenever I’ve been able.

As a result I probably spend more time than average trying to figure out what to do next, and wondering whether I can keep things going.  This is an acceptable tradeoff to me.

Your deal is probably different.  Perhaps you want to maximize the time you spend with your family.  Maybe you want to earn as much cash as you possible can for the next decade.  Or maybe you want to work on fascinating and challenging problems.  For each goal there is a path out there that you can cut through the jungle; a path that will optimize things so you can achieve that goal.

However, no one will ever hand it to you on a platter.  None of the Standard Deals being offered will, on their own, let you accomplish your goals, because that is not how they have been optimized.  Instead, you have to pick your battles, reset the situation, and come up with your own way of doing things at critical points in your life.  Then you need to have the courage and fortitude to see it to fruition.  With that your life can be optimized for you.