What else I hate about Microsoft "programming"

Answer: I never know what's actually going on!

I work with some guys who are pretty knowledgeable about Microsoft development, very solid guys.

Still, when something goes wrong -- the data load craps out, the website doesn't show some reports, the reports server doesn't respond quickly -- the usual answer is to simply restart. "Restart IIS" or "delete the reports and then re-deploy them" or "delete all the data from that table and reload it from scratch". Sometimes, I'll have an error that will persist for half a day and then suddenly disappear, and they'll say, "Yeah, that happens sometimes, you just keep trying."

Restarting frequently works. If you've ever worked on a support desk, you know that one of your friends is the "restart your PC". That often resolves whatever weird error your user has.

But that isn't solving the problem, it's just erasing the situation that created it, in the hopes that it doesn't occur again.

I think part of the problem is that Microsoft targets users (in this case developers) who just wants to get it done, and not users who want to know the dirty details. Creating anything involves going through a wizard process. They spend lots of resources making sure things happen automatically.

What they don't spend their resources on is making the underlying mechanics visible. Typically, you'll get an error, and then the strategy involves looking up the cryptic error message in Google. From that, many different suggestions will be returned, and you look through each one to see if it applies to you. This is not debugging.

As a result, I never feel confident that things will work correctly. I never feel confident that when things fail, I will understand why they're failing. I never feel confident that if I don't know why things are failing, I can debug it to the point where I can find a root cause.

It takes impressive effort to automate so much, and for a lot of people -- Microsoft's target audience, presumably -- this gets them to the point they need to get to. So, this is not intended to be a Microsoft bashing exercise.

At the end of the day, though, as I mentioned before, if all programming was strictly programming on the Microsoft platform, I doubt I would have lasted long as a programmer.

What I hate about Microsoft "programming"

Answer: it doesn't feel like programming!

For the first time in a very long time, I'm doing development on a pure-Microsoft app: sql server, asp.net front end, sharepoint, etc. This is all new technology to me, though of course it is similar to other things I've done.

What's brilliant about Microsoft stuff is it can generate a multi-layer, multiple-technology application in a very short time.

Along the way, I write a few queries and such, but mostly I find myself configuring. Configure the reports server to talk to the database. Configure the web server so it doesn't have port conflicts. Configure the deployment tool to generate to the right location. Draw lines between two tables to configure the data mapping.

I'm not suggesting this is easy. The details behind each configuration holds many hours of potential problems, and expertise pays for itself.

In the end, though, I feel more like a sys admin than a programmer. Perhaps it is a compliment to Microsoft that entire apps can be built without knowing much about code. But, just as I was never interested in being a sys admin, I never would have become a programmer if this is all it consisted of.

Return of the bonus

After all the recent talk about remaking Wall Street and changing the culture of greed, the bonus claws back.

[Goldman Sachs], which nearly halved its compensation last year, set aside $4.7 billion for worker pay in the quarter. If that level continues all year, it would add up to average pay of $569,220 per worker — almost as much as the pay in 2007, a record year.

Not to pick on Goldman -- they're just the example -- but crazy, out sized bonuses create the wrong incentives. Especially in a culture of money, they distort the entire system.

Yes, these people work hard, and they generate a lot of money for their companies. I call that having a job. The vast majority should get a reasonable salary and then a very modest bonus. Then, by all means, give a bigger bonus to reward the high producers to separate them from the middle of the pack. But the middle of the pack guys make huge money. That makes no sense.

According to the article above: "Historically, investment banks have paid workers about 50 cents for every dollar of revenue." If that doesn't shock you, then nothing I could say could change your opinion.

Just keep in mind that the bankers in Iceland didn't do anything worse than what happened here in the U.S. The only difference is, their economy wasn't large enough to bail out their financial industry. So, before we return to "normal", don't forget how bankers are viewed in Iceland!

Firing up the troops

A friend of mine works at a financial firm that had big layoffs last week. On Friday, after 4 brutal days of layoffs, the COO held a town hall with several hundred people at the corporate headquarters.

Out of that speech, here's the line that my friend remembered:

"As you know, we have a lot fewer people now, so everyone here will have to work harder and longer hours."

Message to COOs (and other executives): if that's what's in your head, better to keep your mouth shut. All the time you and your staff spent putting the powerpoint together, arranging the room and AV equipment, and assembling everyone for the town hall would be better spent focusing on business problems.

I'm sure nice words surrounded that sentence -- things like "Our people are our most valuable asset" and "Market conditions forced us to make these difficult choices" -- but none of that rings with authenticity. The bit about working harder? That sounds very real.

I doubt many people physically walked out, but I'm sure a large percentage mentally did. As soon as the market turns, those people will walk out. They're fired up all right.

A speech like that isn't communication and it isn't leadership.

Swimming is Agile

I've now swam 1 mile -- 32 times up and back in a half-Olympic sized pool -- 3 times in the last week. Today I realized that I organized my swimming routine iteratively: each set builds on the last and accomplishes something new.

1. 5 laps doing the breast stroke (aka frog kick) with little effort. The main point is to limber up.
2. 5 laps doing the breast stroke with effort.
3. 5 laps doing the crawl (aka freestyle) with only leg effort. I keep my fingers separated to minimize any temptation to pull and don't do any reaching with my arms, focusing totally on leg technique. Some people use a kickboard for this kind of practice, but I'm too lazy to stop.
4. 5 laps doing the crawl with leg effort and arm technique. I add arm technique, but my arms don't really do any pulling, just go through the proper motions.
5. 5 laps doing the crawl with leg effort and arm pulling. This might be called real swimming.
6. 5 laps doing the crawl with leg effort and fast arm pulling. My arms are a blur (I like to think), pulling non-stop.
7. 2 laps of my choice: either continue with the crawl or backstroke.

Two advantages become apparent. First, the last two laps are a freebie, even though they're not; the fact that I choose keeps them from being a chore. Second, breaking it up makes it feasible; if I started on set one and had to count to 32, the goal would be too far ahead to mentally grasp. I can count up to 5 comfortably. I never, ever think during my 5th set, "Wow, this is my 25th lap!"

Note that I didn't plan it that way. Before I reached a mile, I had similar divisions, with fewer laps.

Perhaps iterative development infects everything you do, or some people just think that way.

Don't let the uncertainties stop you

I might agree with just about everything Johanna Rothman has to say about the Big Agile Survey, such as:

Surveys about any practices without considering the industry, the products, and the management don’t tell you much. People lie to themselves about what they are really doing.

but I still think it's a good idea. I'm sure Jurgen will get the most benefit, so that's point 1. Point 2 is it doesn't really harm anyone. Point 3 is that things that might benefit you a lot and don't hurt anyone else are worth trying at least once. He might get some interesting insights into the Agile market. At worst, he'll learn something about running surveys.

Some things should be implemented with extreme care and well-understood benefits. Much of software development falls in this category. But most things in life don't, and that includes everything that happens on a blog.

Comprehensive Agile survey

Jurgen Appelo is running a big survey to try to identify what Agile practices actually get used.

I like the idea of the survey because I've often wondered how much real pair programming actually occurs. I've never run into it personally, nor have I run into someone who had done it.

Mostly, I wonder how many implementations match what I read to be the definitive way to do it: 2 coders partnering, then switching partners, and thus tasks, every 4 hours. Everyday, a coder would have 2 partners and up to 2 tasks. I believe I read this in Robert Martin's Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices (one of the best programming books I've ever read), though I could be wrong. 2 partners and 2 tasks everyday seems crazy to me.

Unfortunately, after taking the survey, it doesn't seem like I will get a good answer to my question, as the questions are not that granular. I will note, however, that pair programming seems to have one of the lowest adoption rates among the well-known, often-mentioned Agile practices (e.g., user stories, scrum, TDD, etc.)

But that's okay, it's still useful to take the survey, so go ahead.

Make it easy

When I started graduate school, I could do about 12 laps. Yesterday, after almost 3 years, I swam a mile for the first time: 32 laps. As you might imagine, it took lots of work, and regular "practice", 2 or 3 times a week.

This might paint a picture of me as a very driven person or someone very conscientious about healthy living, but the fact is, I had help from external forces: free use of the pool for students, availability of the pool during late hours, cheap locker rental and towel usage fees.

Take away even one of those factors, and it's likely I wouldn't have done it.

Many times as development managers, we like to create laws that result in good code. "Check in all your code immediately, create unit tests first, indent your code" etc.

That's fine, as far as it goes, and then the second thing that has to happen is the manager needs to make it as easy as possible to obey.

I find agile methods help in this area. An experienced developer, who already believes, can set up the continuous build environment or create the TDD base modules. The others, who need coaxing along, can then participate with little, or at least much reduced, effort.

Management tools include the carrot and the stick, but for "good health" processes and admin, I suggest taking the time to make it easy.

Estimations and deadlines

One critical division between mid-level coders and seniors coders: willingness to set a deadline for themselves.

"When do you think you'll have that done?"

Senior developer: "Next Friday, assuming there's no surprises with the vendor feed."

Junior or mid-level developer: "Um, I don't know yet."

I understand the reluctance to give a date. I understand that unexpected problems arise. I also understand that managers often try to hold you to your date, even if it's a "wild guess."

Here's the deal though:

1. Your manager should help you create more time if you need it.
2. The more skilled you are, the better able you are to anticipate currently unknown but potential problems, and build that into your time.
3. The more skilled you are, the better able you are to articulate what potential delays might occur such that your users, fellow developers, and manager understand why you're saying the work will take two weeks instead of one.
4. The more skilled you are, the more likely you are to give deadlines that you can meet or beat most of the time.

Don't fall into the trap of believing that being clever enough to wiggle out of giving a due date is a skill that shows your experience. In fact, the opposite is true: strong developers give dates.

Job losses

A friend pointed out a verbal fight that broke out at a financial firm. The head of the division has an internal blog, on which he wrote something like "as widely reported, additional job losses will be coming in the next few weeks".

Many people commented on the blog. One person took great umbrage at the word "job losses". Her point was that losses are accidental, mistakes. Because the head of the division was directly responsible for cutting staff, and, as a senior executive, possibly involved with the strategies that led to the debacle that led to the need to cut staff, she felt he was trying to use language to wiggle out of any responsibility. (I can't help but note her "bravery," since her name was posted next to her comment.)

I do have some sympathy for the executive. I think the tone he attempted to convey was the seriousness of the situation. You might say, "I'm sorry for your loss" at a funeral, and the emotions at the firm are funereal.

On the other hand, the whole language around layoffs has gotten far too soft and annoying.

When I started my career, companies regularly called layoffs either layoffs or terminations. Laid off employees regularly stated, "I was fired." If you wanted to be doubly sure no one thought you got canned for cause, you said, "I was laid off."

Since then, execu-speak has gone wild. In the late 80s, we started calling it "downsizing" or "trimming". This parallels the time when workers stopped being people and became "human resources". Later "right-sizing" tried to replace "downsizing", but thankfully failed. Around the turn of the century, "cutting" or "reducing headcount" dominated.

The one I hate the most is "redundancies". To me, the word is a joke. Redundancies occur when two firms merge; as a result, some people are laid off. At some point in just the past few years, it became applicable to all layoffs. If a company decides to cancel a product line and lays off the 500 employees that worked on it, they'll say they had 500 redundancies. Redundancy means you had 2, so you got rid of 1. In these cases, they're left with 0.

The old words remain, but the new words become widely adopted. They seem softer and, because they're impersonal, you can say them without feeling insensitive. And, I do believe that much of their appeal comes from the fact that it indicates that the executive who makes the decision had no responsibility in the matter.

The woman's real message is: if you're going to fire people, own up to it. Hear, hear! Being so wiggly about it can be, in itself, a form of insensitivity.

Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun

I basically picked it up Scott Berkun's Making Things Happen because I enjoy Scott's blog, and some other writers had good things to say about the book. When I started reading I couldn't understand the hype. How did this get a second edition?

After a while, I realized the book shouldn't be read cover to cover. Or, rather, that's only part of its value.

It has a second use as a desk reference for all those problems that a project manager or team lead might run into, almost like an encyclopedia. He covers items big and small, over an extremely wide range, such as:

• What's the best way to run a meeting?
• What should you do if you've tried everything and you can't get someone to respond to your request?
• How can you improve your decision making?
• What's the best course of action if you're the new PM on a project and the Coder Who Knows Everything seems disrespectful of you?
• What options do you have if higher-ups require the team to follow processes that you disagree with or the team hates?
• Are work politics evil?

I particularly enjoyed Scott's war stories from his time working on Microsoft Explorer. He didn't really start rolling those out until a third into the book, and that may have contributed to my initial ambivalence about it.

In the end, the breadth of the material, delivered succinctly but with personality, impressed me. The book offers a comprehensive list of real-life issues and strategies.

New managers could read the whole thing and use it as an initial template, weeding out what doesn't work for them. More experienced managers can dip into it when needing guidance on a particularly thorny project.

Making It Happen is a practical guide for project success.

Give the country singer the writing tasks

I'm still watching Celebrity Apprentice. In fact, it's the only show I watch -- not because it's the best show on, but it comes on at a convenient time for me, and after following a show for a while, it's more interesting.

The show offers numerous examples of bad project management on a weekly basis. Donald Trump may be the worst manager I've ever seen.

One trend I noticed: Almost every week, someone says something like, "I hate [Bob]. He's a useless slacker and an idiot." This usually happens on the team that loses. Then, the next week, Bob will be a shining star, usually if that team wins.

The key to a contestant's output almost always revolves around the task(s) they're given. Did they understand what's expected of them? Did they feel the task utilizes their skills? Did they understand the value of it? Did they feel they could contribute more? In many cases, contestants weren't even assigned tasks.

Country singer Clint Black pisses people off regularly, but this week, everyone loved his ideas involving clever text snippets. Herschel Walker alternates between being non-existent to highly useful, depending on how straightforward the work is. As a counter example, Jesse James, of West Coast Choppers fame, makes heavy contributions in design and marketing, but this week he held back valuable donors from his team (so that he could save them for his own use).

That guy on your team who you hate because you think he's selfish, a slacker, and an idiot? If you're the project manager, maybe that's your fault.

So influence me already!

Personal note: I have to admit, my job over the past several months has been a challenge.

For the past several years, I ran teams of various sizes, 4 - 16 people. But, since a major change last year, no one has reported to me. Everyone that I worked with reported to someone else. My role, on several projects, has been basically that of an "advisor". I was expected to have expertise, and to utilize that expertise in these projects to help guide them to success.

In other words, I generated my own responsibilities. My job was to identify work that needed to be done, and then convince others. If they agreed, they committed their own time or that of team members; if not, they could just ignore me.

My responsibilities have thus been entirely about influencing others. It's a role that requires my active effort. As with a lot of coders, my first instinct is to identify something that needs to be done and then just do it myself.

Once, on a big testing day, I felt we needed a central command point. I wasn't sure why. But, I arranged for an all-day open conference line, and told people I'd just wait there in case issues came up. Then I sat on the call, not really sure if anyone would need it. Over the course of the day, many people popped in and out, and we resolved a lot of problems quickly.

All of this has convinced me that managing requires fewer direct commands and more persuasion, motivation, selling -- various manners of putting oneself out in public in a vulnerable way. By this demonstration of beliefs in action, one can influence others. That's really what the game of management is about.

How compensation can be strategic

Every company pays people. How strategic can it be?

One strategy: pay everyone a lot of money. In theory, money buys the best talent. In practice, it may just buy expensive talent. What kind of people does a company with huge pockets attract? (And don't forget: Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos says frugality helps to drive innovation. For my money, Amazon.com is the most innovative large company today.)

Lots of Wall Street firms have paid lavishly for short term results. What kind of behavior did such a pay system encourage?

Many companies just pay people the going rate when they're hired, and then hope to keep raises down. Eventually, current workers can earn more money by quitting and applying for the open positions. What kind of people stay at a company that pays them less than new hires, who know less than they do?

As I've written about before, a system like Fog Creek's tries very hard to signal that merit will drive all pay, by being as explicit as possible about the differences between levels. Everyone makes the same as everyone else who works at the same level. What kind of incentives are created when a company focuses so intently on merit?

At companies like Google, the differences in levels may not be as specific, but in order to get to the next one, employees have to "apply" for it. This involves writing a resume and gathering letters of recommendations from others in the firm. Anyone can nominate themselves, and one's manager cannot prevent it. What kind of message does the company send to its employees about who is responsible for their career? What kind of people would be attracted to such a system?

In the end, a company's strategy relies on having the right people to identify, develop, and execute it. To tweak an old saying, a company full of guys carrying hammers will see everything as a nail. A company's compensation system attracts people with certain tools in their toolkit.

Big companies with few compensation levels?

In my last post on Fog Creek's 9 compensation levels (everyone in the company makes one of 9 numbers), I said that a bigger company would require more levels, which complicates the whole matter.

What about big companies that seem to defy this rule? Goldman, Sachs, for example, proudly has only about 3 titles. Google is another big company with a flat hierarchy. Both companies are hugely successful.

If a company grows but keep only a few number of levels, then it needs to offer big bonuses. Big bonuses are a back door way to differentiate compensation while maintaining a simple base structure.

Goldman, Sachs has done this for years; there aren't many promotions, but bonuses vary wildly. Google provides big bonuses through stock options.

Joel alludes to "a generous profit-sharing plan", but offers no other details. Does everyone get the same share of the profit? Or everyone at the same level? If not, are the bonus numbers still made public like the salaries? How does the size of the bonuses compare to base compensation? Answers to these questions make all the difference.

Then, the bigger question remains: what happens when profits slow down? If the company is bonus dependent, sometimes looked like an "incredible company culture" disappears along with the profits, and just as quickly. GS is about to find out; super-sized paychecks have gone the same way as trans fats at McDonald's. Google is about to find out; while they already repriced everyone's underwater options, stock market doldrums means compensation will basically be declining.

When the bonus pool runs dry, people start wanting more explicit ways to estimate their annual income, and managers need new tools to differentiate the strong from the weak. All of which means more compensation levels.

How to get paid at Fog Creek

Joel Spolsky shared his company's compensation system in one of the "serious" April Fool's Day posts:

In Fog Creek's system, every employee is assigned a level. Currently, these levels range from 8 (for a summer intern) to 16 (for me). Your level is calculated formulaically based on three factors: experience, scope of responsibility, and skill set. Once we determine your number, you make the same as every other employee at that level.

I always appreciate companies that try new compensation schemes, and even more if they share it with the world.

Compensation is one of the critical levers that contribute to the culture of a company. At the same time, the culture of a company will greatly affect how compensation gets interpreted. Different sized companies with different cultures in different industries need different compensation systems. There's no one right answer.

Joel has clearly thought a lot about what he wants compensation to say about and how he wants it to affect his company. That, in itself, is at least half the battle.

The best part of Joel's system is that it prevents newcomers from making more money than the existing employees, which I see all the time. Most companies I've worked for just hire people, and rising market prices force salaries higher for the last one in the door -- even if people that already work there have equal skills, not to mention that they already understand the specific intricacies of the application and company processes.

Another underlying principle of Joel's system is to make everything transparent, so that everyone understands how their compensation is set. Lack of objectivity (or just the perception of it) really angers employees, either killing their motivation or resulting in their departure.

His system also removes favoritism, or at least discourages it by forcing it out to the open.

Two things prevent this structure from being more widely adopted:

1. Small companies usually spend little time thinking about organizational issues. They're completely focused on staying alive by developing new product and new customers. But that's a bit like not implementing daily builds or automated testing because the focus is on writing new code.
2. As a company grows larger, it requires increasing numbers of levels. Fog Creek currently has 9 different salaries in any given year. Given that they probably have less than 200 people, they might have 25 people in a level. Now imagine they have 2,000 people, resulting in over 250 people in some levels. The range of skills at each level will vary much greater; i.e., Ann, a level 11 who just missed getting level 12, will be closer in skill and contribution to Bob, who just barely made level 12, than to Clark, who just barely made level 11. The problem with having more buckets, though, is that in makes the gradations harder to define in a simple chart like Fog Creek's.

Fog Creek will eventually have to re-tool their compensation system, either because of growth or lack of it. But, I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that a lot of their success comes from strategic thinking about organizational issues such as compensation.

No kidding

April Fool's Day means some serious posts get dismissed as jokes, while joke posts receive serious attention. The world has enough opinions, running the full spectrum, that it can be difficult to tell. Good fun!