Newsletter: What is "Dirty Work"?

A new format where I decoupled the newsletter from the post of the week

Entrepreneurial Engineer This Week

What is "Dirty Work"?

This week’s post has been several years in the making. It all started a few years ago when I solved a seemingly impossible problem for a customer by performing trial and error over 5 hours. The result felt like magic.

A few years later, did I begin to understand that I had channeled something I would describe as “embracing Dirty Work”.

Dirty Work is painful work that people avoid that’s necessary for growth, produces seemingly magical results, and is opposite to the kind of Technically Difficult work that’s catnip to engineers.

What helped me to come up with this term was that I discovered posts from different people talking about a similar phenomenon of embracing Dirty Work to solve Really Dirty problems in different domains.

They don’t all use the same name for it. Nor do they use the exact same description. But, they overlap enough of it. And now, I feel ready to share a rational definition of Dirty Work which is why I wrote this post.

Second, avoiding Dirty Work is, in my opinion, the most common blocker for anyone looking for breakthroughs in their career or business. Why? Because avoiding pain is deeply human. Hopefully, my writing about Dirty Work can help more people to get unstuck in their businesses and careers.

Finally, I wrote this because embracing Dirty Work is hard. Super hard. By writing this, I hope to practice more what I preach.

I expect to write more Dirty Work related pieces in the near future.

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Elsewhere on the internet

Since I am on the topic of encouraging people to embrace Dirty Work, here’s something that’s the complete opposite — people repeating Very Hard Work unnecessarily.

Amy Hoy @amyhoy

@KimStacks @robfitz hmmm i can think of stories i’ve told about people but maybe in talks or podcasts. this is the closest thing i’ve written.

Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz

@amyhoy @KimStacks The line I recall (& mentally attribute to you) was positioned against the "project portfolio" approach: ~"It's way easier to go from $1k to $10k than from $0 to $1k." (On the basis that improving one semi-working thing is preferable to making 10 more semi-working things.)

These two tweets are part of a conversation prompted by a zoom call I had with Rob Fitzpatrick. He told me about how Amy Hoy mentioned the tendency of some people who spent a lot of time to build a product from $0 to $1k, then promptly stopped growing that, and repeat the whole process to build a separate new product.

I find that story totally unbelievable.

I had a hard time growing my one-person software service business to my current stage and I still hadn’t figured out how to have a product business.

So, to hear that there are people who rather start from $0 repeatedly despite getting to $1k each time meant I had to ask Amy about it. Which led to the conversation above.

I Learned About "Process Strategy"

I was reading

The Uncertainty Mindset

newsletter this week and learned a new term I have never heard before: process strategy.

Several years ago I watched a good cook making a luxury of ratatouille. Though there are ratatouille recipes, the dish in original form is a process strategy not a recipe: A combination of aubergines, courgettes, peppers, tomatoes, and onions, each cooked to different levels of softness and caramelization.

2804m above sea level

I googled to learn its definition and it’s apparently an operations management term. Since operations management is concerned about “the set of activities that creates value in the form of goods and services by transforming inputs into outputs”, that naturally appeals to the engineer in me.

Engineers like to think in terms of transforming inputs into outputs.

When I asked

Vaughn Tan

more about "process strategy" in the comments , I got an analogy a software developer would love.

I’m still a bit unsure what “process strategy” means, but I expect to use it in my writing in the near future since I write for entrepreneurial engineers.

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As always, I wish you and your family good health and good fortune.