Metaphor of the day: antibiotics and software bugs

If you assume your app will have bugs -- a wise assumption, I would say -- how should you respond? Hire a lot more debuggers? Budget longer testing cycles?

As a metaphor, ask yourself this: if we assume everyone gets sick, what should we do? Invest in researching stronger drugs? This post argues that doing so may solve the short term problem, but makes things worse in the long run:

[Modern medicine] tried to deal with a too-fragile system by killing bacteria. Bacteria, like financial bubbles and fads, are part of life. We need to make our bodies more robust to them. Fermented foods do that. By killing off bacteria inside our bodies, antibiotics do the opposite: Make us even more fragile.

Eating healthier (this doctor suggests specifically fermented foods) is a systemic, pre-emptive effort to minimize the effect of getting sick.

When I read that, I thought, "Agile processes!"

So much of Agile practices are oriented to creating systemic, preemptive efforts to minimize the risk of bad code. The aim is to stop bad code is stopped at the door, when it's cheap. Automated builds, automated tests, daily scrum -- the list goes on -- all work together to create a robust ecosystem that produces good code.

Agile doesn't have a lot to say about the actual QA cycle, except in how it impacts development. That's not an accident.

It's no surprise that the metaphor is apt. A software application is an organic, breathing thing in many ways.

How to make great software

It's just a spreadsheet, but it's been programmed to answer, with startling accuracy, questions like, "Is Iran going to build a bomb?" and "Which financial firms will commit fraud?" It's a fascinating piece of software, but this quote underlined a critical point:

I think the model is, I’m sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I’ve said that flat out to him, and he’s said, ‘Well, anyone can do interviews.’ But they can’t.”

The software's creator performs the interviews to generate the inputs for each prediction.

As developers, we often get caught thinking it's the technology, it's the algorithm, it's the technical expertise that makes or breaks our software. Sure, that's important. If that stuff didn't work, it'd be useless.

But that's not what makes it great. It's talking and listening to the users and finding out what they really want. It's understanding the domain space so well that you pull in the important variables.

Anybody can do that stuff. But, as is constantly proven, they can't.

Misincentives

These aren't about software, but they speak to the difficulty of creating the right incentives, whether for a team of programmers or a team of doctors. Sometimes, even small incentives can backfire:

When day care centers fine parents who are late to pick up their kids, lateness increases. Why? Because the fine turns a moral obligation (come on time!) into a service for a fee (we'll take care of the kids if you pay us more!). Another example: When Swiss citizens were offered an incentive for agreeing to have a toxic waste dump in their community, their willingness to accept it fell by half. Why? The offer of an incentive induces them to ask What's in my interest? instead of What are my responsibilities as a citizen? And when people offer a stranger a token payment for help unloading a couch from a moving van, strangers are less likely to agree than if offered nothing. Why? Because the offer of money has turned the assistance from a favor into a job.

(Via Seth Roberts.)

And you'd think a program's success paves a road to its expansion. But the success of Medicare may actually create incentives against universal health care.

If I were a progressive I would be wondering right now whether Medicare was a tactical mistake. The passage of Medicare meant that most old people get government-provided health care coverage. Yet the way to get things done in this country, politically, is to get old people behind them. Further health care reform doesn't now seem to promise much to old people, except spending cuts on them.

The lesser of two evils

Managers at all levels often feel obligated to say something when things are going badly. Part of the job description is to get in front of the troops and rally. They commit to being a positive source of energy only because they feel obligated to, and not because they truly feel they can live up to it.

But what about managers and executives who are feeling equally demoralized? Feeling equally uncertain about the future? Have lost their loyalty to the company and the cause? Wondering what the strategy is and whether it makes any sense?

This is surely a common situation these days. The reality in many of these situations is likely that the company is actually in trouble, senior management has no clue or has suffered too much turnover, and the future is as bleak as it seems.

I think the worst thing leaders can do is to try to bluster their way through it. Because if they can't convince themselves of any glimmers of hope and commit to it 100%, either they will do a terrible job and spread their own ill feelings, or they will do a predictably mediocre job and everyone will see right through them.

If they keep your mouth shut and hide away, everyone will just think they're lousy managers. "Doesn't he know he should visible, trying to calm the crowd? What's wrong with him?" But taking a personal reputation hit is serving the company's cause better than trying to BS through some crap they don't believe.

It's like riding a bike

Think of your career as though you're going on a bike ride.

During the uphill stretches, it's tough to pedal, each crank a real struggle. Other times, coming downhill, it takes no energy, and you just enjoy it.

How many times have you heard about a friend of a friend who works at the cushiest job, comes in late, leaves early, takes a long lunch, works out and surfs the Internet for long stretches of the day, basically does his job in an hour or two? Naturally, your first reaction is, "Wow, that sounds awesome."

This guy is coasting downhill -- fun times, indeed.

Your second reaction is, "Why am I working so hard?"

Coasting is a blast, but every moment spent going downhill is an uphill climb you'll have to make later.

Meanwhile, if you pedal uphill, you know you can look forward to some relaxation later. Too much hard pedaling all at once, though, you'll get burned out, so you have to mix in a some easier times -- patches of level ground or slight downhill grades. Too much coasting, and you'll end up with a deficit to make up at the end.

Some people have coasted so long, they can't even contemplate making the uphill climb. You know some of these people, perhaps not personally, but you see them at large corporations or government agencies. Their only hope is to ride their current job and pray it doesn't go anywhere. When they're 50 or 60, their worries multiply, as they become less physically and mentally able to do something new, even if they could muster up the desire. They might hate their mind-numbing job by then, but what else can they do?

So, if you're pedaling hard, take comfort that you're building muscles and saving up for a nice, pleasant ride later.

Common knowledge that needs research

We already know this:

New research shows that 13 of 14 common workplace-relationship problems, such as broken commitments, mistrust and misrepresentation of information, occur more than twice as often with virtual teams, as opposed to teams located in the same building.

In short, the survey finds that distance ultimately does more harm than good.

We know this from experiences with off-shore development, which usually fails not because the workers off-shore are dumber or unskilled, but mainly because they are so far removed from the users and the power center.

I feel the gap of distance when half the team sits at a different location only a few miles away, and even though we all speak the same language and meet every couple weeks.

If the guy is next to me, I can see when he's got a free minute and I'm not interrupting him, so even though I might interrupt him constantly, it doesn't feel negative. He'll feel more interest in working on a problem with me, because I'm right there and we're talking, not some nagging email, another task to check-off.

Frankly, I notice the difference even between the guy sitting next to me, and other coders who sit a few rows away.

We know all this, so isn't research like this ridiculous? Sadly, no.

Managers like to create stories about how technology and virtual teams enable cutting costs, with no downside.

We developers like to believe we don't require personal interaction with our users, we can just send an email. Or we don't really need to collaborate, we can just work on our own hours at home.

Yes, some of the trouble can be mitigated with superior technology and tools. But there is always a cost.

If you're someone who works at home regularly, understand that it will be very difficult for you to grow your career. Perhaps you are looking for more balance in your life anyway, so that's fine with you. But if you still want to be on a growth track, you'll have to outperform by double or triple people who just show up.

Software wants to be free

In the not too distant future, there will be two price points for software: customized software that you have paid someone to build just for you, and free. Everything not customized will be free.

Right now, we're at the transition point. Software is lagging newspapers, but people are starting to notice and have various reactions. Jeff Atwood celebrated more software at lower prices, but recognized that some disparage this as a "race to the bottom". Another columnist noted that the next Office will have a free online version, and blamed Microsoft's desire to push Silverlight.

I disagree that moving to very low cost software is a bad trend. All digital media -- newspapers, magazines, music, phone calls -- is moving to free. Free is the future. Why should software be any different?

Frankly, Microsoft faces a real threat to Office. One day, within three years or less, a free, on-line spreadsheet and document app suite will challenge them*. Gmail is the first breach in the Office product line. If you could get apps that supported Word and Excel formats seamlessly, cost you nothing, and did a few other things like enabled on-line collaboration and integration with IM, gmail, etc., how quickly would sales of Office fall to zero? Microsoft has to make versions of Office free, because someone else will. Silverlight is just along for the ride.

The question remains: how do you make money on free software? No simple answers have emerged. Giants such as Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook haven't quite got it figured out, though they're working furiously on it. Even Apple doesn't make much money on the apps; the apps drive sales of the phone.

It's safe to say that the survivors will have figured out how to compete at the free level.

*Edited on Sept 8: Just to clarify, of course we have Google docs and some others today, but I'm talking about a competitor taking significant market share like Firefox takes from IE.

Absence

I'll be tied up for about 2 weeks, so see you then!

Competence

Just an example I ran across in a book recently of how circumstances can make someone seem excellent or incompetent.

He lay there feeling sorry for himself, musing on how being around a bunch off twenty-five-year-olds made him act like a twelve-year-old, whereas when he was working across the river, truly working, he felt centered and unself-conscious, his deepest talents sometimes emerging quick and true.

- From Clockers, by Richard Price.

A manager's job is to identify and try to create the context that enables people's excellence to emerge.

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.

Software in the news

Your credit card company knows you better than you know yourself. "Anyone who purchased a chrome-skull car accessory or a 'Mega Thruster Exhaust System' was pretty likely to miss paying his bill eventually."

Stealing ATM pin codes from within the ATM app. "One of the risks of using a commercial OS for embedded systems like ATM machines: it's easier to write malware against it."

The same tools that allow history to be erased also help preserve it. Via Lauren Weinstein, who is optimistic about preventing this form of censorship. Others are less so.

Starve the beast

Pay is strategic. How a company pays its executives, and everyone else, says a lot about what kind of company it is. Many companies don't think a lot about it, and that says something about them, too.

These days, we hear lots of talk about whether the government should cap executive pay at the companies we bailed out. We want these companies to be different, and so controlling the pay at the top seems like a good lever to use.

But putting shackles on just these companies would be the kiss of death for them. More importantly, there's a much more effective way to deal with pay at financial companies: starve the beast.

The term applies to politics, but the strategy can work very well right now with the financial industry.

Pass a few laws: ones that we need anyway to keep these financial companies from threatening our global economy again, such as limiting leverage, regulating or outlawing some products, and separating some businesses. The result: the industry will shrink naturally, eventually fitting in like a regular citizen with the other sectors of the economy. The longer term result: salaries will normalize, and fall in line with jobs in other fields.

Some people will still make a lot of money in the financial industry, and this plan won't address the universal problems we have with executive compensation in the US. But this one beast will become tamer and thinner.

Another way to know you have a great boss

You have a great boss if, when she tells you she's leaving the company to take another job, you suddenly get the same stressed-out, gut-punched sense of despair and pain that you would if your best coder were to say the same thing to you.

Change that to: had a great boss.

You did what you could

You yelled and threw furniture, but couldn't convince anyone. Or, you cajoled people until you ran out of breath, but no one was swayed.

Who's fault is it, then, when that thing you said would happen -- the database crashed, the big feature didn't work, version 2.0 came a year late, whatever -- actually happened? Not your fault, right? How could it be? You did what you could.

Still, the blame rests partly with you. Not entirely you, of course, but still partly you. You were part of the team.

More to the point, clearly you weren't effective. Your own ineffectiveness comes back to only you. Unless you believe (and surely you don't) that not a single person in the company or on the planet could have made a difference -- gotten the right people to listen, convinced a few people to act differently -- had they known what you knew, then it comes back to you.

A bit harsh, perhaps. But not unreasonably. We see it everyday. Here's a recent example involving former President Bill Clinton.

Wirth noted the recent momentum on climate change, then turned to his former president.

“Why did this take so long?” Wirth asked Clinton pointedly. Clinton looked a little peeved. “We didn’t have the votes before,” he explained.

Later in the program, Podesta returned to the subject. “I want to come back to the question you posed to President Clinton, which is what’s different than the last 35 years,” said Podesta, who most recently served as Obama’s transition chief. “And I’d say after this beginning, it’s that we have new leadership to move the issue forward.”

...some Democrats blame Clinton for being too tactical and hope that Obama will achieve what his predecessor failed to do in remaking health care and reining in climate change. “So why didn’t more happen?” Wirth asked, repeating his own question when I tracked him down after the forum on climate change. “That’s the first question that has to be looked at. It was not very high on their political list, and I think they were somewhat afraid of the issue politically.” Clinton was right that he did not have the votes, Wirth said. “But they didn’t try to get the votes,” he said. “When we were doing Kyoto, they weren’t really helpful in driving the issue at all, the White House. We were sort of hung out there on our own at the State Department. So we lost all those years.”

Failure to convince is still failure. You'll feel more comfortable and look better owning up to it.

If H1B ends, should we be happy?

H1B whacked?

A new bill in Washington aimed at tightening the rules for companies in the U.S. that hire skilled workers from abroad could threaten the business model for outsourcing firms... Top executives at [Indian outsourcing firms] say the legislation could also escalate into a trade dispute between India and the U.S.

I'm not a big fan of the H1B. Most people don't like it because it seems to take US jobs from us locals, especially IT jobs. I also think it puts the H1B workers in a bad spot where their sponsor wields too much power over them.

But, think about general immigration policy. If you could design a policy that carried high economic benefit to your country, it would only bring in these kinds of people:

1. highly-skilled professionals. This helps our companies bring better and more innovative products to market. From the perspective of the countries that these people leave, this is called a "brain drain".
2. people from middle- and upper-classes. These people would have more safety cushion, meaning little likelihood of needing public assistance and more likely to be able to go back if things went very badly.
3. people likely to work steadily. This derives from 1. and 2., and of course the fact that they have to leave if they stop working. As a result, these workers will pay a lot more in taxes -- funding roads, schools, bank bailouts, etc. -- than they take out.
4. people likely to speak English and assimilate. I don't really care too much about this, but as a long-term criteria for succeeding in this country, speaking English and getting along with people who are already here help a lot. People in categories 1. and 2. have greater likelihood of meeting this criterion, not to mention that most H1B's come from countries that speak English as one of their national languages.
   

Guess what program hits all these notes?

I'm not saying that, because it's powerful economics, that justifies the program. I am suggesting that in aggregate we all get a lot more out of it than it costs us. The IT industry mostly takes a combative view of the H1B program, but I think that's short-sighted.

And, to put a final point on it, if we didn't bring all the professionals here to fill the jobs, might more of the jobs go out to them?

Leadership comes from the top (it would be nice)

Morale at my company is getting crushed. Everyone has to work to fix that, but senior management plays the biggest role. So, how are they doing?

My boss's boss: MIA. I haven't seen or heard from him or saw his name on an email or in an email in months.

My boss's boss's boss: disaster. He had a video conference call with us (he works in London). First, he postponed it 2 times. On the call, he had no message to impart, just went straight to Q&A. Then, he answered every question with evasiveness and generalities. He looked defeated and energy-less. Some commented that they felt more optimistic before the meeting.

He clearly felt that just showing up was all that he had to do. Frankly, we'd have been better off if he'd taken the same approach as my boss's boss.

My boss's business face-off: mediocre. Kudos for providing beer, traveling an hour out of the way to meet the team in person at their work site, and imparting how much he appreciated the hard work. Unfortunately, the meeting was preceded by 3 cancellations. He also didn't bring much energy and offered no vision for how business might proceed.

All told, the message was: please look elsewhere for leadership.

Perfectly stated

Penelope Trunk says:

A hallmark of talent is loving to practice.

She's talking about laboring at a hobby, but it certainly applies to good coding. The best coders I've worked with go the extra step -- creating unit tests, writing quality code, etc. -- not necessarily because it's the right thing to do, but mainly because they get satisfaction from it. Penelope captures the sentiment perfectly.

Watchmen

How people get paid drives much of a company's culture.

Despite requiring taxpayer bailouts, Citi's CEO earned $38mm last year, according to Bloomberg. That only made him 3rd on the financial service. Number one was the CEO of Goldman, another taxpayer bailout recipient, at over $42mm.

CEO compensation, as a process, is fundamentally broken.

The reason my boss doesn't pay everyone who works for her enormous amounts of money is because she's on a strict budget. Her budget is set by her boss, who received a number from his boss. And so on, until you get to the top, where the executives act as "the watchmen". They decide what's right for everyone else.

At the top, the CEO gets a number from the board. Boards only have incentive to raise, and not rein in, CEO pay. Why would you want to upset your CEO? And who's watching them anyway?

Government controls and independent board members can't solve the problem. They have the wrong incentives.

I think the only thing that might work is shareholder approval of CEO pay. I might go farther and say shareholders can also make proposals for CEO compensation, as they can with other corporate resolutions. Shareholders are the only ones whose incentives are perfectly aligned to paying the executives correctly. Too little, you'll end up losing your CEO; too much, you're taking money from yourself.

Supposedly, shareholders get their say by electing board members. If you own stock, can you even name any board members of any companies you hold (excluding CEO + Chairman title holders, which of course only exacerbates the problem)? How are you therefore supposed to know which ones are doing a good job in general, much less what their involvement is in executive pay?

However, you probably know most of the CEOs. And you probably have a strong opinion about the job their doing.

Let's hope companies give shareholders a chance.

The limits of software

At the margins, the limits of software get exposed, even in areas you'd expect software to excel. This site went to a mechanical solution to overcome random number generation limitations (via Bruce Schneier):

Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the dice rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.

Jeff Atwood recently talked about famous math errors. What do you do to fix those?

What do the Google, Windows, and Excel (pdf) math errors have in common? They're all related to number precision approximation issues. Google doesn't think it's important enough to fix. They're probably right.

As he alludes to, the answer often is: you don't. Almost all human activity is not at the margins.

Good developers and development teams know where to stop engineering and accept the flaws, based on the code base, user skill level, and anticipated future requirements. (And, if you have mechanical skills, maybe you also know how to create a giant machine to handle the exceptions.)

Passion and motivation

Philip Broughton, in Ahead of the Curve, goes on an enjoyable rant about our current obession about:

Why was it then that every speaker who came to Harvard Business School demanded we be "passionate" about our work? ...[Perhaps] the word passion was just another form of corporate coercion. It was no longer enough simply to do a job that you found okay for a reasonable financial reward. You had to say you were passionate about your work even if you found the work meaningless and unsatisfying. And then, of course, if it was your passion, why wouldn't you want to stay in he office until late at night and all weekend long? Didn't you say it was your passion?

...[Another] explanation was that businesses used the word passion because it reflected what they wanted their employees to feel. Work at its best should be about passion, not just drudgery. A few lucky souls might feel genuine passion for their work, but companies used the word so freely, I sensed, because it set a loftier goal for their activities than mere profits. To be in the business of business was not enough. You had to be about something bigger. [Emphasis his.]

"Passionate" is just the modern lexicon for "self-motivated". After everyone figured out that they should put "self-motivated" on their resumes, similar to how everyone puts "good communication skills", the verbal bar had to be raised to separate the herd again.

Having employees with motivation solves a lot of problems. If you can hire self-motivated people, then the company needs fewer managers, and the managers look better.

However, I maintain that motivation equally comes from the managers and the company as much as it does from the individual.

If you've got unmotivated employees, it may not be the hiring practices that need re-working. Motivating employees is one of the most difficult and central tasks that a manager does.

Illicit sleeping

Here's a thought experiment for you.

You're working in your cube. Your boss comes to the guy next to you. "I've got some drugs for you. These will help you work better, faster, especially if you're tired. Safe, no side effects. Hold out your arm, I'm going to inject you." Now your boss turns to you.

Most likely, you're thinking, "Get away from me!" It's freaky even if you knew the drugs to be safe, and regardless of how you feel about steroids in baseball.

Yet, most of us do exactly this, willingly, everyday -- even spending our own money because the company-provided stuff doesn't meet our standards.

None of that bothers me, except now suppose I were to take a 20-minute nap at my desk, during lunch. Go for a walk, fine. Browse the web, fine. Call your mom, fine. Take a nap, people would be all over me. At first, they might think I was ill. If it continued, it would either turn into an office joke or someone would try to put a stop to it. If the practice spread, someone would definitely try to put a stop to it.

"Geekapolluza" asks:

I wonder about the social stigma of napping during the day at work - how in the world did it occur? Why does it exist? ... It is something unthought of in our culture - it is taboo. Instead, stimulants are the first choice, and completely accepted and even encouraged.

Geekapolluza is experimenting with "polyphasic sleep cycles". He sleeps only about 4 hours a day, which includes several very brief naps during work hours. Because he builds his entire day around this lifestyle, his work has been accommodating to him, which is also very fortunate for him.

But we shouldn't have to be sleep experimenters to be able to get the benefits of a 20 minute nap. I have, on very rare occasions, managed to sneak in a nap at an isolated desk. I do it more frequently on the weekends. It always leaves me profoundly more alert and productive for the rest of the day.

Isn't that what companies want from their employees?

(Not to mention a double win for companies who are actively slashing their coffee costs -- you know who you are.)

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.

How to say good-bye

Don't screw it up at the end. I've been thinking about this lately given all the turnover going on around me. It sounds easy, yet there seem to be a lot of ways to do it badly.

I had one boss who was extremely well liked by his business users and his own staff. He flubbed the good-byes, and that's what everyone remembered. When staff members would leave, he would frequently miss the good-bye party, and that soured their memories of him later. When he switched to a different project, he never again stepped foot near his old users -- not even to tell them that he'd been given a new project -- and they felt completely abandoned.

Another guy I worked with adamantly refused to allow or participate in any kind of farewell party or drinks for him on his way out. Obviously he didn't want the attention, but how hard is it to grant this simple request? Up until that point, we all thought he was a normal, good guy. Only someone who was pathologically self-conscious couldn't bear to stand around for an hour smiling at people, so we started wondering.

Finally, there's the old standard, whether you've been laid off or are quitting: the good-bye email. Unless you have an axe to grind AND you intend to use it, keep it simple.

The greatest example of having a serious axe is Ken Hamidi. The legal battle over his "good-bye emails" to Intel lasted 8 years. He complaints were serious and real, he refused to settle, and he ultimately won several lawsuits Intel filed against him.

Most of us just have small gripes and complaints. Keep them to yourself. Send a kind, professional email to the co-workers you liked, then leave the bad feelings at the door on your way out.

The weirdest email I ever received came recently, when two people were quitting on the same day. The first guy sent a polite, professional email. The second sent his email about a half hour later -- the same email, but with a few phrases and adjectives moved around. Apparently, he found sending a simple email so difficult he had to plagiarize someone else's!

Pride

After I recently graduated with my MBA, my dad said, "You must be proud of your accomplishment." My response: "Actually, I'm probably more proud of being able to swim a mile everyday!"

Over the past 2 years while in school, I went from being able to do about 12 laps max, to doing 32 laps on a regular basis.

In school, the curriculum was set up; I just followed the path. It takes work to get out, but it takes true incompetence and an unwillingness to make an effort to get bad grades in b-school. At graduation, they give me a fancy diploma and a big ceremony.

Meanwhile, the swimming was completely optional. Everyday, I set my own goal and then decided whether to meet it. Nobody else cared. Because of that, the swimming required real mental effort, real commitment.

Your job is the same way. Your boss and co-workers require things from you. But what are you doing that you're proud of?

Crisis management by being visible

Being visible is often encouraged during a crisis. When the software isn't working right, I try to next to my business users, take the heat, then figure out how to can make a quick improvement.

Similarly, when a company is doing badly, the leaders need to get in front of their groups. The leaders showing their faces can help rally the troops.

It's sad to report, then, that the opposite seems to be happening in my group. While the CEO has done a good job with his emails, our group leaders have really botched it.

The head of the business unit has scheduled, canceled, and rescheduled his meeting with the IT staff four times. The CIO has scheduled, canceled, and rescheduled his meeting with our IT staff three times. Both of these meetings are now scheduled for late this month. We'll see what happens.

Meeting the "people", spreading optimism, sharing a vision -- this is one of the completely free things that a leader can do that can make a big difference. It assures people that their work is important and valued. Canceling, on the other hand, demonstrates that many other things have priority.

Yes, I'm sure both of these men are busy. But they also surely know the importance of keeping commitments. If their schedules prevent them from making a one hour commitment, they shouldn't do it. At this point, we'd be far better off if they'd simply never bothered.

If being visible helps with crisis management, what does being noticeably invisible do?

Slow software practices

Alex Tabarrok highlighted this chart about eating. Somewhat paradoxically, more time spent eating actually resulted in lower obesity.

I wondered whether a similar effect might exist for software.

It's easy to think of a hypothesis where this could be true. Quickly built software, with fingers flying, usually allows little time for planning. The goal is to get the code out as soon as possible, and lots of code is what happens.

All that code begets more code fixes. Also, the code likely doesn't involve a lot of abstraction, having been built for some specific cause, the emergency of the day. Thus the next emergency requires new, specific code for it, as well.

Perhaps a slow software movement is what we need. Of course, our company owners and business managers would freak out if we started saying that we're adopting "slow software practices".

So, of course, we call it other things -- requirements gathering or architecture review or quality control. But at the heart, one of the main elements of all of them is to slow things down, to create room to stop and think.

Keep that in mind the next time you're facing a project. Yes, it needs to get done right away, but invest in yourself and the project, and slow down.

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.

Bruce Eckel, publishing revolutionary

According to my recollection, Bruce Eckel put out the first digital book for free at the same time he had a best-selling hard copy at the book store. I believe the free version played a big role in Thinking in Java selling so well. At my dot-com, everyone who learning java started with his book, being free, and then eventually most of us bought it.

He made his book not only free on-line, but downloadable as both pdf and html. He didn't try to ramp up website stats by making you read the html on his site.

I actually thought that Bruce's successful example would herald a new day when free digital versions of book would become more common. Trying to break through a cluttered market can be difficult, and offering a free version might be the answer.

That day never came. So Bruce remains an anomalous experiment. I'm glad it paid off for him.

Bruce's latest idea (part of this interview) is equally brilliant.

I hope to make [the latest version of Thinking in Java] a community effort, to be published electronically under the creative commons.

Not that we need intro to java books so much these days -- but all the more reason to embed it into the landscape permanently. Give it to the software community, who knows what it will turn into. At the least, it could become the final, definitive book on learning java as a beginner.

A truly radical and fitting end to a book that started radically as well.

Everyone becomes incompetent

The quote comes from this chapter in Scott Berkun's book Beautiful Teams. I particularly like the first and last sentences of this excerpt:

If enough big things go wrong, everyone becomes incompetent. Everyone gets ugly. People quit. Despair rose. Managers stormed out of meetings and heavy things were thrown across boardrooms. Months flew by and therapy bills rose. As other parts of the project were completed, we tried not to notice the gaping Channels-shaped black hole at our center, slowly pulling everything inside.

I remember Channels well. I never used it, and always disabled it immediately, and occasionally it would reappear again. It was intrusively annoying, much like Windows Messenger now.

Bad projects take on a life of their own, and even good people can get taken down by them. We like to believe that good project and team management and solid developers prevent or overcome bad projects, but that's often not true. Bad things happen to good people all the time.

Everyone, to a person, will end up working on a fair number of bad projects in their careers. In some cases, there's nothing you can do about them -- except learn from them. Figure out what made them bad, understand the warning signs, and consider what might have made a difference.

From reading Berkun, I get the sense he does this very well, which make his Microsoft anecdotes very powerful.

Excellence is the best job security

A few months back, a friend asked me a question.

He was in the middle of developing several new major features for his application at his investment bank. Meanwhile, he expected layoffs within a few months. As a result, new features weren't being discussed until the layoffs occurred. Was it wise to finish off his work, even though that would leave him with nothing to do at the time that layoffs were likely? Isn't that like asking to be laid off?

Situations like these make me re-examine my motto "always put yourself out of a job." Maybe this -- a crisis of a lifetime in his industry -- was the exception to the rule.

But I told him that he should continue to work at his best rate. By pushing himself, he'd keep his mind sharp. He'd get to finish the project and understand it thoroughly. He'd burnish a reputation as a professional programmer who did excellent work. Whether or not his name ended up on the list, all of these factors would make him either a stronger developer at his current place of work or a stronger candidate for the next one.

Last week, his company did have those layoffs. But, we'll never know if he was on the list, because a couple weeks before, he accepted a great new job. Some of the experience he earned in his last project made him very attractive to his new employer.

I take no credit for his success; obviously, he did all that on his own. But it is nice to see one's personal theory get validated in real life, especially in a tough market like the current one.