Within the first couple of days that Kelly and I were in India, I became painfully aware of the fact that my little job managing a team in India doing IT stuff for back end business processing at a large corporation was relatively meaningless. Insignificant.
That was an interesting conclusion to reach. I'd gone from being a poor kid who made a meager musician's living in Memphis to being a powerful (by Indian standards) executive, running a software center for a fortune 10 company. I was leader to eventually over two hundred people and had regular dealings with Indian government officials and CEOs of neighboring companies. Kelly and I lived in a palatial house on a street lined with government leaders for the state of Karnataka.
But every single day, on the way to the office where I would play another game of business Monopoly, we would stop at one of the many beggar-lined red lights in the city where a young girl carrying a dusty, naked baby would come tap on the windows of the car and motion to her mouth. We would hear the moaning of the lepers on the corners---people too sick to stand at the car, so they had to moan to make up for the lack of an attention-getting tapping sound. People whose limbs were amputated or mutilated and usually covered with bandages.
It's pretty easy to let yourself go numb to this kind of thing. Especially when you're not in a car, and they're chasing you down the street and---God forbid---touching you. You just want to get away. You just want to go about your business. The people become pests to you. An annoying part of the scenery. An obstacle.
Kelly and I now live in Colorado. Near Boulder. We're right at the base of the mountains. When we moved here (a year and a half ago) we said something like this: "Do you think people who live here ever get tired of looking at that view? Do they ever forget how amazing this place is? I hope we don't. Let's not. Let's vow to not get numb to it."
That's the same thing you have to do in India with the poverty and the sickness. You have to resolve not to go numb to it. Even if you're a compassionate person. Like the mountains in Boulder, the constant landscape on a daily commute in India is decorated with images of poverty and sickness.
The amazing thing about each one of these beggars you see on the street---and there are a lot of them---is that I have enough money that, without too much effort I could completely change one of these people's lives. I'm not saying I'm rich. But in Indian terms I am. And at this level of the Indian economy, I'm like a king. So knowing that, it becomes difficult to buy a computer or a car or a house or a really nice piece of clothing or a big meal without thinking about the difference that money could make in a family's life somewhere else in the world. Even in the US, as it turns out.
Since leaving India, I've changed my focus a bit. Instead of working within the confines of a single company, I've turned my attention outward. I've written a couple of books, spoken at quite a few conferences. Written some open source software. That kind of thing. I believe that at least one of my books has had a somewhat profound impact on many of its readers. This is nice.
I'm sure that this change was at least partially inspired by the epiphany of insignificance which came over me on the Indian streets. But now, several years later, I can look back and see that if I were to idle at one of those street lights now, sitting low in the back seat listening to the tapping, I would realize that my accomplishments still pale in the harsh light of reality. What I'm doing now matters more than what I was doing then in the same way that eating 95% of a cheeseburger will make you less fat than eating the whole thing.
We in the Ruby on Rails community like to get gung ho about being on the leading edge of change. We even like to say the phrase "change the world" in reference to the things we're doing with the framework and the applications we're building with it. It's not just us tooting our own horns either. Business 2.0 named David Heinemeier Hansson one of their top 50 people "who matter now" last spring, citing world-changing ideas as a major criterion for inclusion.
It's fun and feels good to think of yourself as a world changer. But every time I hear the phrase, I think about those street corners and back alleys, and I feel a little cheap.
The easiest way to really change the world is to find a charity you believe in and start sending some money. We Americans have a lot of extra money, so it's not too hard. In fact, I think it's too easy. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but that at least for me, financial contributions are so easy and faceless that I will forget about them. They also have very limited impact. Even if I were to donate 10% of my annual income, the net possible impact is limited to that amount of money. That'll help an organization toward its goals, but I think I have a lot more to offer.
The real treasure I have to offer is my passion. I almost said "my time", but I'm not talking about picking up garbage on the side of the road for an hour a week. I'm talking about "flow time". Passion-infused time that grows into the evenings and early mornings because I'm on a roll and I just can't stop. I've been known to do some really smart stuff when I'm in that kind of mode. And, of course, when I say "I", I mean me and my friends and family. The people I know. You too (if you're not already in that group). We're all capable of actually changing things if we dedicate ourselves to really changing things.
Back to this Rails thing again. If you really can develop applications ten times faster with Rails than with other technologies, and you really can develop them so fast that throw-away applications are even OK (you can), Rails itself makes for an excellent tool to facilitate real change. The scope is limited, but where people have brilliant ideas that involve making a positive difference to the world using web applications, passionate Rails developers can get them to their goals faster than ever before.
I have some specific ideas about how I can start at least trying to make a real difference using my skill set (programming---these days in Ruby/Rails). They're half-baked so I'll go into them a different day. But...
Instead of being a community known for being arrogant and self-congratulatory, imagine if we took this energy, passion, and (at the risk of sounding arrogant) raw badassedness and actually started changing the world? The Rails Guidebook was an excellent start, but it wasn't as infectious as we might have hoped. If we can manage to easily raise thousands of dollars to write documentation for Rails or to have a designer create a logo, surely we can turn this machine toward some tangibly world-beneficial cause.
What next?
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.
May 19th, 2007 at 10:22 PM
We should probably think in small steps rather than expecting to do the one big thing saving the whole world. So, what about writing blog posts like this and keep on opening minds? Let’s talk about things not going right, and start developing ideas and solutions to the problems we have! Thanks for the nice post!
May 19th, 2007 at 10:48 PM
“Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.”
“Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God – the rest will be given.”
-Mother Teresa
BTW, thanks for doing such a great job organizing Rails Conf. Lovin’ it.
May 19th, 2007 at 11:56 PM
Chad, it sounds like you are struggling with some things that I’ve struggled with for years now. I have a regular dialog with some friends on this sort of thing, and sometimes they think I’m crazy, sometimes they convince me that I can make the world a better place without doing anything radical, and sometimes I believe them. But I seem to always come back to what you say about finding it difficult to spend money wastefully (when I too can afford it) when I know how much others are suffering around the world. Then I start wondering how can I truly make a difference.
Thanks for posting this, and thanks for pushing the attendees of RailsConf to contribute to charity. I like to think we’ll raise more than $100,000 before the end of the conference.
May 20th, 2007 at 01:07 AM
Very nice post. Sometimes money isn’t everything, and contributing some of your free time to a random cause can help a lot. Of course you need to do something you like and you’re good at. Programmers doing free software are definitely changing the world, it’s thanks to the free software community that the “One Laptop per Child” project exists.
On the other side, your “My job went to India” book definitely changed the mind of many people, including me. I keep recommending it to people who are either afraid of the outsourcing phenomena or who are in the opposite situation (remotely working for big US companies). It was one of the (very few) books that really changed the way I work.
May 20th, 2007 at 06:10 AM
I found it odd to solicit at the conference … why wouldn’t railsconf just be free then and ask people to donate…or why doesn’t o’reilly donate the conference fees on behalf of the attendees.. but it was a good thought no doubt!
To me the question is not really charity, I am in favor of habitat type projects. Most charity is about “giving fish” instead of “teaching how to to fish”. And most charity and government aid is “connected” to “the accepting country” must do something in “return” it is often called “aid diplomacy”. Furthermore if one would want to evaluate a charity org you should always consider how much money they spent “to keep them in float” i.e. operating cost. Some of them are as high as 50%. So 50 dollar of my 100 stays in the country i donate.
Chad no doubt you have good intention and good thought. But frankly I don’t buy charity business of just giving… I would rather see empowering projects where a group of folks helps another group with a define set of tasks like… habitat, doctors without borders..
Cheers
May 20th, 2007 at 10:56 AM
Chad,
We are currently using RoR to fight HIV in Africa. There are 1 million HIV positive people in Malawi (where I live) and just 150 doctors. So we write touchscreen based web applications (in rails) that help poorly trained health care workers deliver high quality protocol driven health care. We think our approach can help mitigate the crisis that is killing 100,000 people per year here. We also get to write interesting code and do some hard core hardware hacking. Check out our website http://www.baobabhealth.org if you are interested in learning more (and helping!).
Wednesday we are doing a “beta test” with the ministry of health and if approved our pilot will begin within a few weeks, with a national roll out happening soon thereafter.
Changing the world with rails…
May 20th, 2007 at 02:59 PM
I’ve felt the same things Chad, I’m sure most people have. One of the ways I’ve found most effective in using money to help lift up people in other countries is through micro-finance, specifically with loans through http://www.Kiva.org . They’re a great group, with a pretty good site (for PHP ;-) ) and 100% of what you loan goes to the entreprenuer of your choice. The NY Times and PBS have had very interesting stories on Kiva and I regularly add a loan to my “portfolio” whenever money comes into my hands. http://www.kiva.org/lender/codepoet
I wish Kiva had been one of the options for the Prag donations, but I picked the available one that most closely matched my charitable goals. I look forward to seeing what we’ve raise.
May 20th, 2007 at 06:16 PM
Chad,
Congrats, for not being so comfortably numb. Being an Indian, I should say, I am confused, its VERY hard to help people with just money. I have a very good friend, his name is Amit(although this doesn’t matter), now we graduated from a top notch engineering college in India and this guy chose not to get placed in any of the companies and decided, he would do social service.
Now this guy, did some small work with NGOs and turns out, politics prevails there. Everybody is scrambling to make his own commission out of charity. So this guy is not into any NGO and is on the streets actually and is still looking for an NGO that respects his ideology and ethics.
This may be a single isolated case and I really hope that. But somewhere down the line, we Indians can only do a thing. But guess what,we have become comfortably numb, really NUMB.
May 20th, 2007 at 10:41 PM
Thanks for this inspiring post. I feel that we who work with technology have a lot of power in our hands which can (and should) be used to make things better for others. I’m glad that open source has so much momentum behind it; anyone producing open source software is already helping those less fortunate simply because the software is free and readily available. I particularly admire Mark Shuttleworth – I think he’s done a great thing with Ubuntu, investing his money where it can potentially make a huge difference all over the world, rather than where it will necessarily produce the highest return.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:02 AM
A while back, I was moaning that too many people on Agile teams don’t have the skills they need and don’t have the opportunity to experience Agile done right. Chet Hendrickson had a charity-related way to help with that: set up an Agile project to build software for a charity, get companies to donate help (who are surreptitiously there to learn, overtly there as charitable help of the sort that gets good press for corporations), top it off with consultants who would donate their time, and accomplish both good work and good learning.
<http: />This is not the kind of thing I can organize, but I’d donate my time for at least one two week iteration.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:03 AM
Let’s try that URL again, shall we?
http://www.testing.com/cgi-bin/blog/2007/02/17#hendrickson-idea
www.testing.com/cgi-bin/blog/2007/02/17#hendrickson-idea
May 21st, 2007 at 12:41 AM
Great post Chad ! Actually my happiness doubles at reading this cause I’m also from a third-world country, Sri Lanka.
As gnufiled said this change should not just happen with charity. How about teaching how to fish rather than giving the fish ?
Currently we are developing applications using Ruby on Rails here in Sri Lanka, which we target to empower the society. We feel we could use technology to make the lives easy. Education, Public Services, Self-Entrepreneurship are some areas that we feel could bring a change to the lives of these people. Internet and web apps could be the enabling technology for many of these areas.
So the role framework like RoR could play in this context is just enormous.
May 21st, 2007 at 02:29 AM
Very interesting and open post, Chad, very much appreciated. It’s a topic close to my heart, although I don’t have any answers.
One thing one of my old bosses would say though (and he’s moved from a consulting company to being COO of World Vision Australia), is that the tools don’t matter that much. While Rails is fantastic, it’s just a means to the end of making a difference.
Not that I don’t feel you’re really pushing Rails as the focus over changing the world as the focus, this is just what came into my head after reading the post. I guess what I’m also looking for is discussions on how we can have an impact, without caring too much about whether Rails is involved or not (because let’s face it, we’re going to use Rails if at all possible).
Wishing I was at RailsConf to continue this conversation (and be part of all the others).
May 21st, 2007 at 02:41 AM
Chad, thank you. This makes me proud to be part of the rails community.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Great post. Living in India all my life yes, I have become numb to the poverty that surrounds me.
However, there is another side of the beggar story (i dont know where exactly you lived, but in Mumbai, where I am, this is true). The beggars on the street are often not the poorest people you see. They do not always beg because they have no choice, but because begging has become lucrative in several parts of the city, at least compared to the wages an ordinary labourer might get. So we have a theatre of sorts in our streets. Lepers who aren’t, lame men who can walk when no “customers” are looking, the innumerable fake transgenders, and all sorts of concocted ailments and sufferings. There are territories marked out, with people who enforce these, and a fee required for the right to beg in someone else’s territory. This compassion for beggars and sympathy for their poverty, has created an industry of beggars. A strange kind of proof, if one was required, that giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish are not the same.
Of course, I do not mean to imply that all beggars in India or even Mumbai are the same and always “fake”. Nor am I belittling the immense problem of poverty that faces my country, and in general, the world. On the contrary, the point I trying to make is that this problem is not going to go away if we always try to take the easy way out. We cannot just pay off our duty to our fellow human.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:29 PM
So great – you have stirrings of compassion and humility. Let them inform your whole character, then you’ll make a difference. And even litter picking done in the right heart can make a huge difference.
I’m not sure about the grand gesture by the RoR community idea though. You could find yourself on a hiding to nothing.
IMO, the Mother Theresa quotes are along the right lines.
May 21st, 2007 at 01:53 PM
Good post. Here’s one suggestion to change the world: one child at a time. There are many organizations, such as Compassion International (http://www.compassion.com/), that are trying to break the impact of poverty on children. Find an organization you like and sponsor a child. It is easy and doesn’t cost much (maybe one less trip to Starbucks per week) but the impact to that child’s life is huge.
May 21st, 2007 at 02:04 PM
I’m from India as well, and my parents’ organization works among HIV/AIDS patients. Sometime back, a little girl (about 5 years old) was brought to our home. She was literally skin-and-bones, and died a month later. There was nothing we could do. It’s so heartbreaking to see this kind of suffering. We do what we can, but that is so limited in a country with over a billion people, and with millions of people suffering in abject poverty and rejection.
May 21st, 2007 at 05:05 PM
Thanks for the great post. I too, often feel that what I do for a living (Rails Developer), is relatively meaningless and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It’s nice to hear that you have had those same thoughts. I often struggle with the question: “How can I use my skills to make a positive impact on the world?”. It will be interesting to hear your “Half-Baked” thoughts.
May 21st, 2007 at 07:13 PM
Chad,
As always you inspire and challenge me to think, and for that I truly thank you. Here’s my take on this topic for what it’s worth:
Sometimes challenges are so daunting that we essentially give up all hope of overcoming them. An example would be starting a job at a large company. As you learn more and more about the systems you realize that the wheels are about to fall off the bus. At first you speak out in protest. You make passionate pleas to address the problems you?ve discovered but no one is interested. So the more they refuse to listen the more data you collect to convince them you?re right. Only once you really dig into the problem you begin to think that the issues are too deeply rooted and far too numerous to really fix. At this point even thinking about how you would undertake meaningful change becomes overwhelming. So what do you do? You resign yourself to forgetting all about it. Then someone else joins the company and the cycle repeats itself. Only this time you are among those refusing to listen.
When it comes to changing the world I think this process is true on a much larger scale. When you were driving through the streets of India I bet you were thinking that you could feed that little girl today, but what about tomorrow? What about next week? What about all the other children and adults? How could you possibly help them all or even just a significant portion of them? When thoughts like these travel through our minds we too often become paralyzed by them.
The problem is that we don?t fully comprehend the power of the collective. It is true that one person can make a difference, but generally speaking most of us don?t see ourselves as that one person. On the other hand, we all instinctively know that a large group of people working as one can more readily tackle these overwhelming problems. But simply knowing this often doesn?t result in any meaningful actions. It seems that we just float around waiting for the crowd to form so that we can join in. Without a catalyst or a visionary, however, this may never happen.
Hopefully you and other like minded individuals can be a catalyst for the Ruby and Rails communities. This is why I applaud your efforts to speak out on the subject. You have visibility in these communities and have thankfully chosen not to squander it. Please keep reminding us that together we can do so much more.
On a related note I wanted to share a story from my work experience. As the leader of the IT group for my company I organized an off-site for the IT leadership team. During this meeting we established our 5 core values, one of which was respect. As we began to think about how we can instill respect within our organization a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson came to mind. He wrote, “Men are respectable only as they respect.” So we decided that the best way to show respect for others was through volunteer work. I?m proud to say that we have set aside money each quarter for this program. The rules are that we have to support a local charity, donate our time and energy outside the office, and invite the other business units within our company to join us. So far the idea has been very successful. We feel like we are making a difference, we are connecting with our community, and we are truly gaining a greater respect for each other.
Those are my thoughts for now. Thanks again for sharing.
Steve
May 22nd, 2007 at 09:10 PM
Get real. I don’t mind if you guys are famous, in fact the more fame the better. Make these Rails faces famous so that I don’t have to use Java webapps or MSFT ASP.net. That’s the reason you guys are here. Get over it. :-) Be inspiring leaders. Please make the other guys in my org interested in using Rails.
May 24th, 2007 at 06:50 PM
Your post reminded me sharply of my very first job experience. Fresh out of college, a certain idealism intact, and I had Gumped my way from my home in Little Rock, AR, to a job in the White House.
My idealism cracked as I daily stepped over homeless people on my way to work. I’d come off the metro, scoot past people begging for money, people covered with papers and asleep in an alley trying to stay warm, and I’d go into my protected little world in the Old Executive Office Building. I’d feel frustrated, impotent. Being overwhelmed by the scale of the problem would war with my efforts to turn away from it, to become jaded almost as a defense.
It was cold that March, and a man I walked past every day froze to death in that alley near the Farragut West metro. I heard it from a co-worker who knew someone from a local shelter who had gone around the city that night trying to get people indoors. The man was very mentally ill, and he refused. And he died.
Surely I could change this. Surely I was in just the place to make change happen! But I was a lowly junior staffer – a tiny little fish in the biggest pond I’d ever seen.
A decade later, I found out, purely by chance, that I’d done something in my job that had a huge impact on the homelessness situation. I’d seen a fax from a woman to President Clinton detailing a plan to use former military base housing for homeless people, with a whole transitional program that really helped people who’d fallen down get back on their feet. It was in the system to receive a form letter response – our correspondence team was crushed under the weight of mail as we received in the first 3 months more mail that Bush had received in his entire term in office. I yanked it out, took it to my supervisor (who put it back), then took it to another supervisor, then to a director, then finally around the system entirely to a friend who knew the President personally and would put it in front of him. On my way home that night, I’m sure I walked past homeless people on the street, probably even the man who would die later that month, feeling like a hippocrite, trying hard not to see them.
I’d forgotten this until 10 years later I was listening to a program on NPR about a successful homeless-to-base housing program. The lady was talking about the people in the housing, the sense of community that had grown up…and then she talked about her surprise after she’d sent just a single fax with her plan to President Clinton, and he’d responded so quickly! She’d been prepared to mount a mailing campaign to get through to him… It slowly sunk in that she was talking about “my” fax, the one I’d annoyed all my co-workers with.
My point is that we do have an impact, sometimes greater than we imagine, greater than giving up a bite of the cheeseburger. If we’re very, very lucky we get to see the results of that impact. But mostly we don’t, and we’re just people, and we do grow numb to what we see every day, whether that view is stunningly beautiful or appalling. Every once in a while something jolts us and reminds us to pay attention…
Thanks for the reminder.
May 24th, 2007 at 09:56 PM
Most excellent post Chad. Definitely keep us posted on your half-baked ideas. Nothing to lose and all to gain by throwing them out there.
Muhammad Yunus, Ghandi, Mother Theresa… etc, all had half-baked ideas at one point :)
June 6th, 2007 at 06:14 AM
OLPC! Besides the laptop itself (which won’t have Ruby on it), there’s a huge amount of infrastructure required for the project. The includes services on the school servers, and global infrastructure. A lot of it is nothing incredibly new or novel, but it needs to be done, and even parts that aren’t novel deserve to be done well. It might be support services for people deploying the software, infrastructure to help translators, inventory tracking, web-based educational software, software to connect pen-pals… any number of things. There’s some very concrete and direct things that can be worked on right now.
June 18th, 2007 at 08:03 PM
Excellent post. I particularly agree with your point that time is probably more important than money. I find giving money to be too impersonal; it is difficult to give regularly to something without relationship, or seeing a tangible result. I have a small idea which I haven’t yet got off the ground for helping people like me find ways to help others. One of the first rails projects I did was www.meetingneeds.net. It is an attempt to organize helpers and connect them with people who need help (mainly targeted at churches for the moment). The dream would be for me to be able to say “I can help with x, y, z, and I am in this area”. Then if someone nearby has a need, one day I might get an email asking if I could help so and so with x. Simple.