The Problem with Fair

Is that it doesn't feel fair. What's actually fair feels unfair. What feels fair is actually unfair. There's a perceptual filter that makes this impossible to align. Let me explain.

Back in the early 2000's, after my disastrous first stint at an indie studio that closed, I ended up at Red Storm, which is where I really learned how to make games. After a pretty rough and crazy start, my wife (not married yet) and I were finally starting to get our feet under us. We both had jobs. We had a new car that we shared. We were living within our means, paying off student loans and building a rainy-day fund.

It was a lovely little life, but we kept running into this friction point - house work. As a wanna-be progressive couple, we tried very much to divide the work evenly. If one person cooked, the other person cleaned up. If one person did the cat box, the other person ran the trash out. If someone ran the vacuum, the other person would straighten and dust.

But, in spite of all our efforts to be equitable and share the work, we kept getting into fights about it. Someone would come home grumpy and get pissed off that something hadn't gotten done, and we'd spend half an hour yelling at each other.

After one of these fights, as I was grumpily cleaning the dishes, I had an epiphany. As I worked my way through the sink full of dishes, each one required action - to be rinsed off, placed in the dishwasher, put aside for handwashing, rinsing, placing in the drying rack - it was a meticulous process. It had dozens of smaller parts.

For me.

While I was doing it.

For my wife, it was just doing the dishes. In the same way that for me, she had done the laundry, but for her, every article had needed to be sorted, and then washed at the right settings with the right cleaners, then dried or hung or laid flat or folded and put away.

No matter what we did, the work that we did individually was real, immediate, and tangible to us, but distant and abstract to our partner. Even if we were doing exactly half the work, each of us would feel like we were doing more than our fair share. Once we understood that, we stopped fighting about it. We agreed that we were just going to have to accept that doing more than was fair was okay. That's part of being a good partner.

It's a hard problem, because the subjective truth and the objective truth don't align. But, it helped me to do some important self-calibration. Just because I thought I had done an adequate job of communicating to people how much I appreciated them or valued their work, that was probably not true. They had probably put a lot more time and energy into making the thing that good than I had spent giving them meaningful feedback about it.

This gets even harder with all-remote teams, where people are more distant, more separated, and the work that everyone does to produce the results that everyone sees is largely invisible. There's a lot of value in being socially connected, especially in times of high stress. While crunch is unhealthy and unsustainable, it was definitely a bonding experience for those who suffered through it together live and in person.

So, especially if you're working in a remote context. Give more than is fair. Give more praise; give more feedback; give more guidance; give more leeway; give more ownership. If it feels fair to you, you're not doing enough. Remember, if it feels fair, the reality is that it's balanced in your favor.

The only way to truly be fair is to do more than you think is fair.