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.

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."

Too much of a good thing

This description blew up all the ways I usually think about team culture:

Despite his forty-year police carer, [John Guido] was never part of the NYPD culture...  "The Irish thought the job was a calling," Guido liked to say to me.  "To me, it was just a job." ... the consummate outsider, he did not mingle with colleagues.  He refused to attend formal police functions like retirement dinners or testimonials staged by wealthy police buffs."

Sounds a someone you don't want on the team.  Not a team player!

But the reason he kept his distance was to avoid the sleazy side of the job.  By keeping himself clean, he eventually became Chief of Internal Affairs, and earned high distinction.

"There are many cultures in the New York City Police Department, but corruption is the strongest one," he said.

A group like the NYPD has the opposite problem of most organizations: too much sense of team and identity.  Corporations would kill for that kind of loyalty.  We usually think of a strong culture as being good, but in this case, Guido points out that it can easily work the other way.  They're so loyal to each other, even the clean ones won't report the dirty ones, sometimes known as the Blue Wall.  As a result, many of them succumb to the temptation of power.

In a job like the police, with its danger and also the dual role the "policed" play as both customer and problem, the cultural problem isn't generating camaraderie and team pride, but doing the opposite -- without killing the pride that you still want good police officers to have in their job.  After reading NYPD Confidential, it clearly isn't easy to do.

 

Would you be happy to skip your review?

At my friend's company, no one had mentioned anything about having a review this year.  Finally, my friend asked his boss, "Are we having reviews?"  The response: "Well, last year, we did all the reviews, and HR was supposed to signoff on them all so we could pass them out, but they never even returned them.  So I figure, why bother?"

See anything wrong here?

If the manager values the review only for the HR documentation, then the manager's response was perfectly rational.  But, the only value of an HR signoff on a review is for disciplinary purposes.  99% of your reviews, therefore, won't really need an HR signoff.

The real value of a review is feedback, thereby helping people grow their skills.  One of the most productive review comments follows the lines of "you are good at X, and are ready for the next step, X+1 or Y".  A good review enlightens and energizes the recipient at best, and focuses them at the least.

Of course, we don't always have managers who are good at giving reviews.

Learning to do that is a critical skill that a manager should develop, and that takes practice.  (Hopefully, the manager gets that feedback in their review!) 

You could also argue that you don't need an official review, that you could and should provide feedback everyday.  Which is true.  But 1) what are the odds that someone who doesn't give a productive annual review is going to be good at giving regular, on-the-spot feedback?  And 2) just as people go to church / mosque / etc to pray (they could be equally spiritual in their own home anytime), blocking out time away from the daily fire-fighting and distractions helps you focus on the subject at hand.


I thought about telling my friend that he should say to his boss, "Even though we're not having reviews, could you give me some feedback on how I'm doing, what I did well, and what I could do better?"  Better still, he could write up his own thoughts, give them to his boss, and ask for comments.  But given his boss's view of what a review is, why bother?

The Year in Ideas

Toward the end of every year, the New York Times publishes a magazine dedicated to interesting ideas of the past 12 months.  It's a wide-ranging list, with lots of things you'd never think about.  Here were my favorites from this year:

* Randomly promoting people gives better results than the system you have.
* Printable batteries.  And you thought e-ink was pretty impressive.
* Older workers are just as productive.  Equally important: age-mixed workforces outperform homogeneous ones.  So don't staff that start-up with just college kids!
* What Google search teaches us about species preservation.
* Your yearbook photo predicts your likelihood of divorce.
* "I will regard the experiment as a success," he wrote, "if [comments on my blog] leads to anything that could count as genuine progress toward an understanding of the problem." Six weeks later, the theorem was proved.

Here Comes Everybody

Could the giant corporation become a thing of the past? You might reasonably reach that conclusion after reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.

The logic runs like this: thanks to new digital communication and organizing tools, the cost of organizing has dropped close to zero. Self-organized people will inherently rally around the "right" things (serving the interests of the most people). Most attempts at starting movements and clubs will end up dying to do a lack of interest. However, a few will hit a goldmine of unmet need and succeed spectacularly, usually in areas that surprise us (otherwise the need would have been met). Stay-at-home mothers are one of the most popular groups using Meetup. Who knew?

In this way, we get "failure for free" on our way to identifying unmet societal needs -- a truly hyper-efficient market.

In contrast, large corporations often organize around the wrong things (serving their own interests). They fund a big staff of marketing and sales people to generate interest in products and services they've created. Failure for them is most definitely not free. A big bet placed on a software roll out (uh, Vista?) or blockbuster movie can be devastating.

Google seems to be doing the best job of becoming a big company while still maintaining an entrepreneurial attitude. They put out beta products frequently, some of which fail. How long can they keep it up?

They maintain a high organizational cost by necessity. At some point, an organization becomes risk-averse, and tries to protect its gains for itself (employees, managers, shareholders, brand image). Hiring lobbyists is usually a first step in that process. Next comes predatory or monopolistic behavior. Who does that sound like?

The brilliance of Here Comes Everybody is that it talks about lots of little things that you know already, and makes you think about them in new ways, or generate new thoughts about them. Clay Shirky never says the corporation is dying, but it sure made me think that way.

Why are you still here?

Before my boss announced her departure, my question to her would have been, "Why are you still here?" The question had stirred in my mind for a while, but I rarely voice such things.

Her career is still going up -- the opposite direction of the company.

I typically think people give up too soon on their companies or departments or on the role they've landed in. Usually, it just feels easier to jump to an already rising star than trying to create your own.

Sometimes, of course, the company reaches a point of no return. The game that enabled it to succeed has changed too much, or things have just gotten too broken.

Small companies just wheeze and die quickly. But larger companies, with long histories of success that led to their large size, bruise and bleed and try to re-invent themselves a hundred times. The company may survive, but the journey will be like walking on broken glass.

The current financial crisis has created a few of these companies. If you're working for Citigroup, UBS, or AIG, it's time to get out. What do I predict for people working there? "Pain." The only reasons you should be staying are if you have nothing more you want to accomplish in your career or there's some financial handcuff keeping you there.

Our company is in a similar situation. Thus, my wondering about my boss. And then, she dropped the news, which, painful as it was, at least confirmed what I believed.

Dead zones

Dead zones occur when the app you work on or the business you support stops growing and starts shrinking.

At first, it's not too bad: there's too many people, and so plenty of hands can help with any problem. Occasionally turf wars break out if people find others encroaching on their traditional area.

Then, inevitably, layoffs reduce the numbers, and the survivors take on larger work loads, usually involving mundane tasks far below their pay grade. Prospects for promotion or developing on new technologies plummet. Morale suffers. Welcome to the dead zone.

The first instinct is to run to your headhunter. I recommend regularly evaluating one's position for learning opportunities and career growth, so this obviously is as good a time as any.

But I also maintain that a dead zone offers some interesting aspects that can be learned from. Here's a brief list:

1. refactoring. During growth times, everyone pumps out code quickly. Slow times can be useful for revisiting things and doing it right.
2. good coding methods. While refactoring, basically you're learning how you should have done it. Next time you build something, you can now do it correctly from the start.
3. processes. What could have been changed in the org so that the "right way" could have happened the first time? Code reviews? Automated unit tests?
4. innovation. During growth, the solution to almost every problem is more people and more code. With strictly limited money and people, think of elegant and creative solutions.
5. expectations management. "No, can't do it" may become the answer to an increasing number of work requests. Learn how to say it while maintaining good ties with users and your boss, and without becoming Mr. or Ms. Negative.
6. team motivation. A stock-picker finds out how good they are in a down market, not by making 30% when everything's up. Same if you're a leader: are you really a good leader or just been getting by because things have been going well? Time to find out.
7. org experiments. Often, org resistance is down because people are trying to figure out what's going on. This is a good time to suggest things you haven't tried before, for example, iterations or daily scrums. Or, more radical things like combining the QA and analyst roles. You can sell almost anything as long as you can make a plausible argument around "efficiency" or "new skills".
8. new responsibilities. People will leave, responsibilities will open up. While some might not be that desirable, and some are, and can be claimed just by doing the work. Should things turn around in the group, you'll emerge as one of the veterans.
9. recharge. The overall pace may slow a bit. Invest in yourself: sleep more, read books, learn new technologies or skills.

The financial world, in the absence of being able to create new financial products, is creating lots of dead zones. They go by the name of wind-down groups and "bad banks". Other industries face similar situations.

Do not stay in this situation out of laziness! If that's in your nature, then force yourself to leave. But if you're a naturally ambitious person, this can still be an interesting, educational time.

Good is bad, better is worse

The economy seems getting better. The markets the past couple weeks might even be called good.

All of that is bad news for my company. I will not mention my company's name, but suffice to say that it is a large Wall Street investment bank.

Here's my company's current plan: cut costs, avoid losses, reduce risk. This is, I think, a recipe for disaster. An investment bank only grows by taking risks. That's what you get paid for! The idea that you could back into profitability by reducing losses goes against the business model. It's tantamount to not servicing the airplanes in order to save money.

The worst part is, an almost tangible sense of disillusionment is settling in among the troops. Last week, I felt surrounded by it. Two things always happen in these situations:

1) First, the best people leave. So far, that hadn't really happened, mainly because the economy stunk. Now with growing hope at the macro level, people realize they have options. I only know of a little turnover, but I can seriously feel it in the air. A flood of exits wouldn't surprise me at all.

2) When the best people leave, the good ones follow. The company that remains resembles the decrepit local mall, where no one really shops anymore, and the staff of teenagers doesn't care about the store, service, or customers. They're just drawing a check. I've personally seen increasing evidence of this.

If you're a manager or have any personal influence, you can do something about this. But, as with many situations, if you're someone who might try to do something about this, you'll most likely be one of the flood going out the door (see #1 above).

When things getting better are bad for the company, the game is surely up.

Strange days

This is a weird time on the job. I work in the financial services industry, which gets hammered daily by new layoffs -- jobs that have disappeared and won't be back for many years, if ever.

And yet, right now there is a labor surplus. Because of all the uncertainty, many people don't have projects to work on, or their manager has been canned and no one's setting priorities.

Usually, people take an opportunity like this to relax. Phone's ringing? There's 3 other guys who can get it. New work request? I'll take a look after a long lunch, or maybe tomorrow since I'm leaving early.

Not these days.

Everyone senses that their job is tenuous. And for the first time in many of these people's careers, there's nothing to jump to.

So, instead, when the phone rings, it gets picked up during the first half-ring. I put in a PC service request that would usually take a few days to get responded to, much less resolved, and someone called me within a half hour, and then sat at my desk for the next 3 hours to solve the problem. People are helpful and polite.

Not to say that it was a bad work environment before. Just that people were very busy, and things often took a long time to get through the sausage grinder.

Just noticing the irony that the appearance of things getting done quickly and working especially well is actually being driven by things not working well.

Open office spaces reduce productivity?

A recent study finds that open office space reduces productivity, results in more illnesses, and is universally disliked.

I'm going to take the unpopular side of this argument (with one caveat). I'm a strong believer in the social life of information, and I think cubes are a great way to facilitate that.

When I started working, everyone had their own office or shared one with one or two other people, similar to what Joel Spolsky advocates. This worked well, or maybe it just seemed normal because that's the way it was.

Sometime in the 90s, everything changed to cubes. I hated them. All cubes were the same then -- about 5.5 feet tall. They are the tall ones with the overhead storage in this picture. You could only see the tops of people's heads when they stood up. I would frequently think about how to enclose the roof and add a door. The lack of privacy really bothered me.

Then, around 2002, my new job had cubes about 4.5 feet high. It was a lot more open -- and I liked it a lot more than the taller cubes! If we had a production emergency, everyone could stand up and talk to each other. Communication was a lot easier. At some point, I was offered my own office (which had a good view), and I turned it down because I would be less productive: if I wanted any information, I would have to go around and ask people. In fact, I thought the partitions should be a little lower, maybe 4 feet.

Last year, I moved to a new location. The cubes here are about 3.5 feet high. Too low. You can see the person on the other side of the partition even when sitting down.

Based on these experiences, I think the optimal height is tall enough to not see anyone when you're sitting, but low enough to let everyone see each other when standing.

The caveat to this whole thing is that conference rooms that can also function as private phone rooms should be plentiful. Plentiful enough so that teams can usually meet at a moment's notice without a reservation. This alleviates the privacy issue and further encourages collaboration. You can actually take a tour of Joel's new digs.

Not having access to the study, it is difficult to know what it really studied. It's not clear whether loss of productivity is just self-reported, due to time out due to sickness and turnover, or actually quantified in some official economically measured way.

I'm also willing to bet that most of these offices didn't have enough conference / private rooms.