Jeff Atwood doesn’t like meta.
Meta-work becomes a reflex, a habit, an addiction, and ultimately a replacement for real productive work. It’s something I think everyone should watch out for, whatever walk of life or career you happen to have. In fact, I’ve come up with a zingy little catch phrase to help people remind themselves, and their coworkers, how toxic this stuff can be — meta is murder.While Jeff lists quite a few compelling examples of unproductive meta-work, I would argue that successful meta-work is the driver for leaps in productivity. In fact, I’ve come up with a zingy little catch phrase to help people remind themselves, and their coworkers, that stepping out of what they’re currently doing and thinking about how to improve it is how change happens – meta is progress.
For example, most software is the result of meta-work for its underlying problem: you could just go and do the work by hand. Instead of writing blogging tools, people could just have edited HTML and put it on their web servers. But some folks did the meta-work of coding WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, etc. and made life easier not only for themselves, but also for me, for Jeff, and for countless others.
When you solve the meta-problem really well, the underlying problem becomes trivial (e.g. using computers for calculating) or at least becomes easier by orders of magnitude, so that you can take it to levels that seemed unrealistic before (e.g. programming in high-level programming languages).
I agree that many (possibly most) meta-discussions are fruitless. It is hard to see how debating the politics of a podcasting gear site is going to lead to significant advances in podcasting technology. Sometimes meta-work is indeed about procrastinating and not about actually changing something, but I wouldn’t condemn all things meta as toxic because of that. As with drugs, the dosage (i.e. how many people spend how much time on it) and how it is applied (what problems are we talking about), determines if it’s a cure or a poison.
How much meta can you take?
"Drawing Hands" by M.C. Escher
