Book Review: Nine Lies About Work

A few years ago, I read a New York Times article that changed my life. That may sound overly dramatic, but the effects of it show up repeatedly in my blog posts, including My Yearly Reflection and Planning and Writing and Labeling in a Journal. It’s why I knew Cookie Club was so important to me and it’s why I knew I should stop being a manager.

While writing one of those posts, I discovered that the article was based on a book. I was more than a little embarrassed to realize that I wasn’t crediting the ultimate source, and worse, that I hadn’t read that source.

I have finally rectified my mistake by reading the book Nine Lies About Work, and I’m so happy that I have. In this post, I share some of my notes from the book. Nine Lies About Work is nominally aimed at managers, but I think it is also useful for anyone who has a manager. Most importantly, I encourage everyone to read chapter eight about love in work.

Creating and Fostering Communities at Work

Some days I feel that the most valuable thing I’ve done at MongoDB has been to create slack channels. 

I know that may sound absurd to those who know me professionally (I have done a lot at MongoDB, for example, developing our performance testing infrastructure and changing the way we spot performance changes in our testing environment), but bear with me for a moment. I have started a lot of slack channels, such as: #fountainpens, #greatoutdoors, #cookie-club, #staffplusengineering, #academic-research, #writing, #performance. And I spend time on those channels sharing pictures and stories with colleagues as well as talking shop.  My wife has said she wants to join MongoDB just so she can join the slack channels. However, the channels themselves aren’t important – what’s important is creating and fostering communities.