“How Hard Could It Be?: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers”

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Joel Spolsky has a new Inc. article online now, about how he was kind of forced into implementing middle management at Fog Creek Software, the company he co-founded and runs. I must admit, I greeted the title of the article with some skepticism.

Like him, I have unpleasant memories of middle managers. I worked for ten years at the Post Office as a maintenance technician. The building was divided in two, once side for first-class mail and the other for what was euphemistically referred to as “bulk business mail” (we weren’t allowed to call it “junk mail”). It was a seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day operation, with three eight-hour shifts. Each shift, on each side of the building, had one or two supervisors, and the people who worked on that shift reported to them. They, in turn, reported to an extremely large fellow by the name of Big Bill, who was the only one who reported to the plant’s maintenance manager.

I was never able to figure out what Big Bill really did. He showed up on whatever shift he wanted to, usually the day shift or half day-shift and half evening-shift. When he was there, he would just sit in the supervisor’s office and bore the shift supervisor(s) who were on that night with talk about inconsequentialities like his fishing (from the ones I discussed it with, all of them despised him). When he got bored, he would walk to the cafeteria, or to the other side of the building. And that was all he did, day in and day out.

He couldn’t fix anything. Even if he knew how (which I never determined), managers and supervisors weren’t allowed to do non-management work, by union rules (the Postal unions were another sore spot with me, but that’s a subject for a different article). He didn’t make any decisions, because most of the shift supervisors were former maintenance workers themselves, and were mostly very competent. And the workers — the ones who chose to work, at least — were also generally competent. The only purpose I could see that he served was to take issues from the supervisors to the maintenance manager, and to serve as a whipping-boy when something went wrong.

His position was entirely political; if it was eliminated, no one but the shift supervisors would even realize it (and then only because he wouldn’t be around to bore them). And he knew it, you could see that in how he would sweat when he was around people of a higher grade than he, and in his obsequious attitude toward them, hoping that they wouldn’t realize how unnecessary he really was. You could really see it when “Carvin’ Marvin” Runyon became Postmaster General and started cutting the fat out of the organization… somehow he survived those years, much to everyone’s disgust.

I’m a results-oriented technical guy. I have no use for purely ornamental fripperies or purely ornamental people. I judge a person’s professional worth by the value that he adds to the company, and Big Bill was professionally all but worthless. As he’s the only example of middle management that I have, you can probably see why the title of Spolsky’s article generated a raised eyebrow. But the article does make a good case for a limited sort of middle management, so I’d recommend it to anyone in business. Especially management.

“Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2’s (Familiar) New Features”

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I like this review, especially the somewhat-snarky paragraph at the end:

All in all, IE 8 beta 2 sucks a lot less than one might expect, given IE6 and IE7. It feels like the product is truly catching up to the current state of the browser art, and the fact that my brother-in-law will get advanced features on his Windows desktop is exciting.

“Dancing Baby v. Universal: Baby wins!”

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The DMCA (the Draconian Media Clobbering Act… sorry, I mean the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) has been used for some pretty jaw-droppingly stupid things since it was passed. This is just one of them, but it’s an important one, because the court just told copyright holders that they will be punished if they demand that something legal (under fair-use laws) be taken down under the DMCA.

In other words, copyright holders can’t just set a program to automatically scan everything on the ‘net and issue take-down notices under the DMCA for anything remotely similar to something they own — one of the most blatant abuses of the law, and apparently a very popular one until today.

As the first comment says:

A fair decision in a copyright case? I think this is one of the signs of the apocalypse… (I’ll be under my desk if anyone needs me)

🙂

Film Quote of the Day

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I ran across this quote on the Tools For Thought blog (which is rapidly becoming a new favorite of mine):

From the film Roger Dodger: Nick: Like, what do you do all day? Roger: What do I do all day? I sit here and think of ways to make people feel bad. Nick: I thought you wrote commercials. Roger: I do. But you can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad. Nick: Why not? Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that there’s something missing from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right? Nick: Well, yeah, I guess. Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you can convince them that your product is the only thing that can fill that void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they run out and buy a stupid pair of cargo pants.

Possibly exaggerated, but true nonetheless.

If the human brain were a piece of computer software, this would be considered a critical security vulnerability. The company responsible for it would be expected to patch it as quickly as possible, security software packages would add features to detect and prevent it, and the people exploiting it would be considered criminals. But since it’s human nature, the victims are expected to block or patch it themselves, and the people exploiting it best get six-figure salaries and corner offices in New York City.

Is it any wonder that logically-minded people (including us computer geeks) tend to look askance at the rest of humanity?

GTD: Interim Update

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I’ve only been back on the Getting Things Done (GTD) wagon for one week now, and I’m simply awed at how much I’ve gotten done, and on how many different things. Although I’d been using GTD before, it’s now painfully obvious that I wasn’t using it properly.

In my earlier attempts, I never quite grasped a couple of the essentials of GTD. For instance, I thought I had to plan out all of the major steps for a project up front, because I confused GTD with some other systems I’d studied before it. That’s not the case though, I only have to figure out what the next immediate action is on each project at any particular time. Correcting that misunderstanding alone has helped immensely, I don’t feel like taking on a new project is such a chore anymore.

The idea of breaking out actual physical actions has helped too. For example, I had several things on my actions list that were described as “Research X.” That’s all well and good, but I never made any progress on those items because “researching” something is too nebulous for a next action — when I went to my list to see what I should do next, I unconsciously skipped right over those because they weren’t things that I could do immediately. I had to break each of those down into actual physically-doable steps, such as “see what Google says about X” or “check out book on X from library.” Once I realized that and re-worked those nebulous action items, I rushed through them so quickly that my head was spinning.

(Both of these are described, at length, in the Getting Things Done book. I’d read it several times, but for some reason neither one sank in properly until the latest reading.)

One specific improvement to MonkeyGTD has also helped a great deal. When you put in a “tickler” as a future reminder, and the day you said to remind you of it rolls around, a flashing *ticklers* appears at the top of the screen. I normally hate things that flash or move on the screen because I’m very easily distracted, but this is good because I can’t ignore or forget the ticklers anymore — so long as I look at MonkeyGTD (which I do every morning, and throughout the day), I’ll be reminded to do whatever thing was listed. It’s better than my old Palm’s calendar alarms, because it’s day-specific and not time-specific.

Another thing that helped was setting up a physical tickler system. I never thought I needed one before, but this time I realized that I was already using a disorganized form of a physical tickler system anyway — I would put things that physically required my attention soon (such as bills) on my laptop’s keyboard, where I had to move them several times a week in order to take the laptop anywhere. (I use an external keyboard when I’m at my desk, it wouldn’t work otherwise.) It wasn’t a very good system, because when the pile was more than a couple items deep I wouldn’t immediately see anything below the top one, but I was regularly reminded of it, so I was able to limp along with it.

The physical tickler system that David Allen describes in GTD is far superior. It splits things up into the particular days and months when I need to be reminded of them, and a MonkeyGTD tickler reminds me to process it each morning. I still use the laptop’s keyboard, but it’s my in-box now, and it gets cleaned off daily. 🙂

The result: I presently have twenty active projects, everything from a research project that I’ve been working on for five years now down to identifying a particular song. Five of them are repairs, most of which have been on my to-do list (and immobile as a boulder) for months or years. Three are urgent government paperwork things that I previously would have left until the last minute and then scrambled to finish in time. I’ve made progress on every one of them in the last week.

Even better, five of my active projects are new, things that I would have thought myself too busy to consider before, but that I can not only consider but also complete now. 🙂

And the best thing about it is that it’s almost effortless! Whenever I find myself at loose ends, I pull up my MonkeyGTD page and look it over, and dig into whatever catches my fancy at that moment — whatever I have the time, energy, and interest to do. I find myself making progress on things without ever having to invoke willpower or trick myself into doing them. I wish I’d known about this system when I was in school. I’d have had a lot less stress and a lot better grades. I wish I’d gotten it right when I first read it, the last few years would have been a lot more productive and enjoyable. But I know it now, and now that I’ve gotten it right, I won’t have any trouble keeping it up.

He learned from me?!

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The head of Project Badger (at the much larger company that bought it a few years ago) recently moved on to other duties in the company. We talked briefly just before he did, and he said that he’d learned a lot from me.

I was startled, but I figured that was just a stock corporate-speak phrase he was using with everyone. It didn’t seem there was anything that I (primarily a hobbyist-turned-professional software developer) knew that would be useful to someone like him, a corporate manager. But later I got to thinking about it.

When we first sold Project Badger to that company, I had to adapt quite a bit. I’d never dealt with a large corporation before, and didn’t understand the culture. I thought the Dilbert comic strip was an exaggeration. It is, but not by much.

For example, soon after we sold it to them, they asked us to embed their help-line 800 number into one of the error messages. Several months later, a customer who got the message actually called the number and got a big surprise — it was a phone-sex hotline. It turns out that the phone number they’d given me was wrong in one digit.

It was a simple and innocent mistake, and one that was easily corrected (though not quickly — there were a lot of products incorporating it by that time). But I watched in amazement as they assumed that it was deliberate attack on them, and paranoidly tried to find some conspiracy. No doubt they discussed whether we were working against them too, though they didn’t let us know that. I hadn’t noted which one of them had given me the number, and after several months I couldn’t remember for sure, so they were looking cross-eyed at each other too. I know corporations have to be concerned about that kind of thing, but they took it to a ridiculous extent. My feelings are plainly read on my face (I’m no good at poker), so I’m sure my stunned amazement showed; maybe it helped show them how badly they were overreacting.

As another example, different people would load a different project onto a single person at each meeting, and a few days later ask why this task or that one wasn’t done. It was just like college, where each professor assigned you enough work to keep you busy until the next class, deliberately ignoring the other classes you were taking. It was ludicrous, and no one seemed to be able to see that it was a problem, let alone do anything about it.

I can only concentrate on one thing at a time, so I came up with an aikido-style solution: whenever someone tried to give me a new task, I would agree to it, then immediately ask that person to clarify which one was the priority, the new one or the one I was working on already that was assigned by person X. If they felt that they had the authority to override person X, they could give their project priority; if they didn’t, then they would realize that their project was on the back burner. Whenever anyone started playing the blame game, or confronted me about not having something done, I could give a logical and air-tight reason for it, and one they couldn’t argue with. I think that earned me some grudging respect.

Then there’s e-mail. When someone asks for my analysis of a situation, I assume they want to know it, so I try to give them the whole thing. I quickly learned that when I did so, the management people didn’t bother reading it — they wanted a quick yes or no answer. So after writing my full analysis, I went back to the top and added a one- or two-sentence “executive summary”:

Subject: Preventing the sharing of licenses Executive summary: don’t do it, it would cost us more, irritate our legitimate customers, and do nothing to stop the abuse. Long answer: > This is an old subject that for some is unpopular, however this > addresses the problem of customers sharing their keys with contractors > and associates despite the fact that our EULA specifically forbids it, > and I think it’s time this was addressed. […] Sorry to do this, but I have to disagree. [Long analysis with example follows.]

The management people could quickly see the results, and members of the team who were interested in the reasons behind it could see that too.

I’m not even going to dig into the culture of having hour-long meetings about even the most minor things, and requiring the developers to attend them instead of getting any development work done. I’m sure I stepped on more than a few toes while getting that straightened out, but I can’t apologize for it; it’s a ridiculous practice, and a waste of valuable programming time.

So in the end I think he was telling the truth: he did learn a lot from me, and I just didn’t realize it at the time.

iPod Touch, Part IV: Apple Screws Linux Users Again

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At the end of my last iPod Touch entry, I mentioned that I was going to try jailbreaking the Touch so I could load music onto it from Linux, instead of relying on a VMware Windows machine.

I did so. Everything seemed to work with no problem, but after I loaded any song into it, the Touch claimed that it had no music on it at all, and iTunes said that I had to restore it to factory settings before it would even look at it again (which involves rebooting into the full version of Windows, and about 45 minutes of restoring various things). After the fourth failed attempt, I stumbled across a note on the Ubuntu forums that explained the problem: Apple has changed the hash algorithm they’re using for the database. Again.

Why? I don’t understand the purpose behind it, since it does nothing but cause problems for people (their customers!) who are trying to load music onto the device without going through iTunes, and pretty much the only people who want to do that are people using Linux. If it were Microsoft doing it, I’d understand it — discriminating against anything non-Windows is part of their culture — but Apple already supports Windows as well, so it can’t be a matter of OS snobbery. I know Apple is a control-freak about some things, but that doesn’t sufficiently explain it.

In any case, someone will figure out the new algorithm soon, and update the Linux software to account for it. Until then, I’ve found a way to move my playlists from RhythmBox (my Linux music player) to iTunes* to get them onto the Touch, so I suppose I can keep using iTunes for now. It’s just an extra (and unnecessary) step.

[* It requires exporting the playlists to m3u format, running sed over them to change the filenames to Windows drive-letter format, then importing them into iTunes, which is using the same on-disk music library.]

“Windows XP crashes out of Olympics?”

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If you have any sympathy at all for Microsoft, you’ve gotta wince at this story. It’s not the first time something like that has happened either… on a trip to Toronto a few years ago, I saw an absolutely HUGE electronic billboard — which was showing a gigantic Windows error message-box instead of the ads that it was supposed to. Not a Blue Screen of Death, but just as embarrassing to the owners, and to Microsoft.