I found The Year Without Pants super bro, and despite the subtitle containing “the future of work” didn’t really feel like it said anything about the future of work. It’s a memoir of a year spent working remotely and a snapshot of a point in time at a particular company, and I found it a bit too rosy and self-congratulatory. I wanted to know what was hard? What was unexpected? What would he have done differently? And there wasn’t really anything like that.
The most interesting part of it for me was learning about how a super useful plugin I use on my blog – Jetpack – came about. Software is built in context, and the what and the why of Jetpack was fascinating and insightful into what it means to build a company around OSS.
I found it pretty self-congratulatory, too. I agree it would have been like to know what didn’t work, but I found the successes instructive, too. Particularly some of the internal communication processes. The internal blogs area great idea that I’m trying to get implemented at my job.