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.