Background Work

First published Dec 8, 2021. The topic of background work came up in the context of the way LLMs make such work so much cheaper than it used to be. The same rabbit hole that would have taken a week to explore can now be excavated in an hour or a minute. Background work should become more prevalent.

A student had a code review where the reviewer said, “This variable needs to be explicitly initialized to nil.” The usual course for a junior engineer would be to change the code. Instead, the student did some research, then responded, “According to the language spec, the variable is initialized automatically.” That research was more work than strictly called for but it created value for both parties.

“Background Work” is the work you do over and above what is strictly required to complete a task. It may be done for learning, to satisfy curiosity, or just because you forgot to stop working when you were done. I’ve noticed that the most accomplished programmers make a habit of background work.

When I saw the exchange above it brought to mind times when I have seen engineers I admire dig into the background of a topic. “I wrote a little prototype PHP-to-JavaScript translator and here’s the performance data,” “I thought this might come up, so I re-read Knuth on the topic,” “I wasn’t sure what I thought so I wrote this essay.”

At first I was going to call this, “extra work,” conjuring visions of late nights and weekends, but on reflection that’s a misleading name. First, leaders seem good at managing their energy, so if they do some background work “off the clock”, they find ways to recharge. Background work also has a habit of paying off quickly, so that the leader accomplishes more in the ensuing day or week or month.

My own experience of background work, though, is that sometimes my curiosity gets the best of me at inopportune times, like 4 AM, and I need to just go do the work. Greek rhetoric teaches that persuasion comes from a combination of ethos, logos, and pathos, appealing to listeners on the basis of personal credibility, logic, and emotion. Background work levels up logos but I think its biggest effect is in establishing credibility, ethos. Someone who habitually digs deeper than strictly necessary is worth listening to. When they know, they will speak with authority. When they don’t know, they’ll say so and then, if they are curious, go do the work to find out.