On my weekend long run I was listening to this interview with Stewart Brand, amongst many other things the author of Maintenance: Of Everything, a book I read last month and highly recommend, since maintenance matters.

The whole episode is worth a listen, but what jumped out at me most was a discussion about the right to repair. The thought I had was not about the traditional sense of a consumer right relative to a manufacturer (though that’s important too), but for an employee relative to the equipment provided by their employer.

When a person is given the capability, and indeed the responsibility, to care for the tools of their trade, it sets individual ownership of outcomes as the standard. Excuses for not using the very best fade away. Denying that responsibility leads to blameshifting, “not my problem”-ism, and an inevitable regression to median (read: middling) results, and that’s if you’re lucky.

Being good at maintaining and tools is also a decent heuristic for whether a person is good at creating what those tools are designed to produce (not foolproof, but probably better than this one). “Tell me about 3 ways you’ve customized your development laptop and how they’ve made you better” is an interview question rich in signal.

We haven’t even talked about the “actual work” having the right access to tools empowers. It’s hard to dive deep when access to all but the kiddie pool is roped off. It’s even harder to experiment. Discouraging both behaviors is a cultural failure with tremendous cost. Not just to a company’s ability to innovate, but in their engineers’ ability to learn. So much of the breadth of skill I’ve picked up over my 25 years has come from solving ancillary problems related to tooling. To offload that burden would have been pedagogically disastrous. Perhaps yak shaving shouldn’t have the negative connotation it usually gets?

I realize there are situations where giving full administrative power at scale isn’t feasible. The blast radius of a laptop is quite a bit wider than a toaster, and compliance regimes have guardrails for hard-earned reasons. Nevertheless, I believe the risk is worth the reward.