The output matters

It's not very often that I get feedback on the blog posts I write. Some of my friends have the distinct privilege (or curse?) of hashing out my ideas over the course of days, weeks, months, sometimes years before they ever become posts, if they do at all. This one has been boiling slowly for a couple of years now, a reaction to a shift in how the work I do is perceived, and in how I perceive myself doing it. So, let's try this again, a little less polemic this time. The output matters. The biggest criticism I received for the last post was that my argument that the output didn't matter was fundamentally flawed. As someone who proposes to care deeply about what they do, who is spending time to think critically about it, and then engaging in Socratic debate about the merit of that position; the output obviously matters. And to my friends who have tacitly argued this, I must acquiesce, they are correct. The output matters greatly to me, but not for the reason we're focused on. When a…