Know the business

Financial markets continue to plummet.  Apparently.  I had no idea until someone mentioned it.  I've been avoiding all info about markets and financial turmoil, though I didn't realize how out of it I had become.

Which is odd because all my life I've preached that coders should deeply follow what's going on in the world of our users, which in our case is the financial markets.  It's a requirement for being effective.

I guess this proves, once again, the wisdom of the old adage, "There's an exception for every rule." 

I followed the previous meltdown, late 2008 through early 2009, intensely.  My workload was pretty light those days, so I had plenty of time to read everything about events as they unfolded.  On the day before the unveiling of TARP, I felt genuine fear for perhaps the only time in my adult life.

As a result, my productivity plummeted.  For months after things leveled off and things returned to normal, I struggled to regain my balance.  I had developed bad habits.  (First thing to do when arriving at work: catch up on all the financial blogs!)

I don't want to be trapped in that hole again, so I learned to ignore the daily ups and downs, and maintain a narrower focus.

And I was reminded that even immutable requirements need to be open to re-evaluation.

Hiring anti-pattern: Don't break the build

A job posting on a mailing list mentioned that the applicants should not have ever broken a build. Not that I am looking for a job, but that certainly ruled me out as a candidate. That's not the first time I've heard such message

Well, reading about it on Venkat's blog was in fact the first time I'd heard of it, and it shocked me.  Breaking the build just happens, for reasons that Venkat succinctly describes.  As he also mentions, most important is having a culture that makes fixing the broken build the top priority.

Hiring only non-build breakers shocks me because we need to encourage people to take risks.  Breaking builds is not a requirement for taking risks, obviously, but an environment where everyone has to be perfect on secretarial matters smells badly of a place where everyone just focuses on avoiding trouble, and not on getting things done, not on trying new things, not on taking risks.

Risk-taking leads to more innovation, and innovation drives everything having to do with success.  Research shows this repeatedly.  If you ever hear any interviews with Jack Welch, the great GE businessman, he constantly talks about encouraging risks, and therefore having to also accept failure, despite being incredibly bottom-line, results oriented.

As a hiring qualification, it is at best pathetic, and at worst an anti-pattern.  They might as well have a requirement that only people who haven't had any bad ideas or made a fool of themselves in public apply.

It's easy to forget

When reading about guys like Saul Griffith -- who has had, in half the number of years, more amazing ideas than I ever will -- it's easy to forget the origins of greatness.  He lives up to his reputation as "an invention engine": factory-less eye glasses manufacturing, solar energy-collecting roads, power supplies for the One Laptop per Child project.  He seems to spin out new ideas effortlessly.

But, if you have access to the full article, you also realize (once you stop being amazed) that he works on new ideas constantly.  He devotes his life to it.  Even his kids are involved: a hybrid bicycle he made short-circuited, setting fire to the seat that his infant son had just been riding in.

In the end, he represents another example of the hard-work principle, also known as the 10,000 Hour Rule.  Most of the research today on extreme performance and super achievement comes back to the fact that the achievers put in the time, day after day.  Slate offers a nice round-up on recent books on the subject.  (Via Ben Casnocha.)

You don't have to be the greatest programmer walking the earth.  And if you decide equally balance devotion to the craft with your family and friends, hobbies, and health, that makes a ton of sense.  The point is to realize that "greatness" lies within you; how much of it you want to unlock is up to you, and involves, as the Slate article points out, some amount of negative effects.

"So long, sucker!"

That's Jurgen Appelo's reaction to news that iPhone OS slipped to third in the US smart phone market.

The Android operating system (OS) continued to shake up the U.S. mobile phone market in the first quarter (Q1) of 2010, moving past Apple to take the number-two position among smartphone operating systems, according to The NPD Group, a leading market research company.

Yes, that means there are more Android phones out there than iPhones.  Right on time.

Apple can easily replace Blackberry as number 2, but they will become an increasingly distant #2.  (Blackberry can survive as long as they continue to be the 21st century version of the corporate pager.)

Eventually, we'll see sites filled with Android user angst over mismatching OS and apps, the unnecessary complexity and fragmentation in the Android market, etc.  Compared to the harmonious, unbelievably serene life for all Apple users.  All of which will be based in truth (though not exactly true), none of which will help Apple ever lead the phone industry again.  It really is the PC game all over again!

Can you catch Alzheimer's from someone else?

Your spouse having dementia increases the likelihood you'll develop it, according to a new study:

seniors had six times the risk of developing dementia if they lived with a spouse who had been diagnosed with the condition.

The current best theory suggests that the stress of caring for someone with dementia ends up causing dementia.

My theory is that it's another kind of social virus: the same thing that shows you are more likely to smoke if your friend's friend smokes, eat healthier if your friend's spouse starts eating healthier, etc. -- even if you've never met.  Similarly, men experience "sympathy pregnancies", actually undergoing biological changes.

I'll bet if they look at friends of people with spouses who have Alzheimer's, they'll find an increased probability of developing dementia.

Is this the future of journalism?

We usually associate crowd-sourcing with web-based software, such as Amazon's reviews and Wikipedia.  These applications would become useless if not for the free contributions of the crowd.

Now the public sphere is getting involved:

• A US government site helps sniff out fraud in the current economic stimulus by urging online visitors to provide tips about suspicious spending and vote on whether projects appear to be worthwhile and properly sourced.  Stats and rankings of individual projects in all states can be browsed.

• Meanwhile, ProPublica labels itself a "reporting network".  They use reporters, but most of the work relies on local readers.  A recent undertaking found out which elected officials had free tickets to the Super Bowl (a common perq paid by lobbyists).  Over 500 officials were tracked down and questioned, which would have been a mammoth job even for The New York Times. 

My question: why don't big businesses do this internally?  A smaller crowd limits what you can do a bit, but with no anonymous members, the results would likely be more accurate.  Or, maybe you leave it anonymous to encourage more boldness; you still know that the commenters aren't total strangers.

The point remains that upper management has no idea which applications are justifiably hated by its users, which support teams have improved the most, which business teams act like a**holes, which company benefits are most valued, which processes stultify productivity.

As the overseer of the stimulus spending put it, "Only local folks can connect those kinds of dots."