Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Regardless of what Excel tells us, significant digits (remember that?) tells us otherwise.

Recall something called significant digits from high school math?

Consider calculating something with two numbers. One number has two digits while the other number has three digits. The answer can only have two digits.

For example, 23 x 123 = 2,829. That’s what Excel tells us and what the calculators tell us. Significant digits tells us the answer is 2800. So what? So, plug this overly precise number into a long chain of calculations and the error grows until one day we wake and wonder how we got it all wrong.

Too nerdy? Perhaps, but sometimes math, and other fundamentals, are just that way.

Always, always, always remember the fundamentals.

by Dwayne Phillips

Magic happens in fairy tales, not real life. Stop wishing for it to appear. Do the work instead.

I don’t want to manage the work and lead the people. I want magic to happen. I want someone to create a self-managing organization. oooh aaah this is special.

Grow up folks. Magic is in fairy tales, not real life.

by Dwayne Phillips

My customer pays me for a product or a service. I provide it. I do not, however, have to allow my customer to be my teacher.

My customer is my customer. They pay me for a product or a service, and I provide that.

However, I don’t have to:

• act like they act
• talk like they talk
• treat people like they treat people
• hate like they hate
• ridicule like they ridicule
• and so on

I don’t have to learn from them.

Not only does this apply to my customer, it also applies to my employer and a lot of other persons I meet each day.

by Dwayne Phillips

Yet another new occupation comes from yet another bad practice.

For the past several years surveying the job market, I kept finding ads for a position called DevOps. Some reading and discussions sort of brought me to an understanding of what that is.

Once again, I learned that I did this new job some 25 years ago. Back then, however, it was known as managing the work. It seems that a number of managers managed the work so poorly that someone created an occupation to do this work properly so the managers wouldn’t have to try in vain to do it.

A generation ago I managed the work of two dozen persons who were swirling all day. Some were developers, some were system administrators, while some were users of the computers and software. I recall pacing all day behind the cubicles off all these persons asking some to wait a minute or two while someone else set up the system for them. Then I would ask an administrator to wait a minute or two while a user’s task finished. Then I…eight or ten hours went by quickly.

This managing the work wasn’t easy. I felt unprepared to do this, but I did it, and we all worked together to do our jobs.

What happened? Why did we create an occupation to do the job of the managers?

My guess is that managers didn’t want to manage so we whined enough that senior managers hired someone to do our job for us. Eventually, a new occupation was born. These new DevOps persons do our job for us. If they fail, we can fire them and hire someone else to do our job for us.

Perhaps we could just do our job ourselves no matter the difficulty. Then again, I am somewhat naive about all this.

by Dwayne Phillips

I emphasize fundamentals in my work. One such fundamental is the old cliche about planning and working (see title). I find it still applies—even with “new” methods like Agile.

Plan your work, work your plan

I heard that a lot in the 1980s. I find it to be one of those things that are just true or “no duh.” If you pour water on something, that thing will be wet.

“But,” some say these days and the past 15 years, “we are Agile, we don’t plan.”

The Agile Manifesto states, “We value responding to change over following a plan.”

That statement is itself a plan. The plan is to have a plan, but be ready for change and respond to those changes. The plan is to be flexible or agile.

The “work your plan” part of Agile is to actually respond to change. Don’t just say you will respond to change, respond.

Plan your work, work your plan. Still true.

by Dwayne Phillips

Forget the old cliche about stupid questions. There ARE stupid questions, and hiring managers have asked me a bunch of them.

I’ve been interviewed for jobs a dozen times There are stupid questions, and hiring managers ask them all the time.

First, don’t ask the person to solve your problems. This is a job interview, not a free consulting session. If the person solves your problems, pay them. If the person gives you alternative ways to attempt to solve your problems, pay them. If you aren’t going to pay them, don’t ask.

Second, don’t ask puzzle questions.

“But, I want to see if they can think on their feet.” That is a tired, lazy, cliche. What do you want? Ask about that.

Here are a few, specific, STUPID questions (so stupid they are not in the form of questions):

• Describe a situation where you had to communicate with difficult people and what you did.
• Describe a situation where you had a complex problem and what you did.
• Describe a meeting with a brain-dead interviewer and what you did (oops).

Let’s talk substance about the job. For example, “What methods, tools, and techniques do you use?” If they answer something like, “Gestalt round-trip development” and you don’t know what that is. Pause and look it up on your own personal Google machine before you move on to the next not-so-stupid question.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes we are stuck with a bad customer. We still choose how we live and work.

Alright, our customer is bad. They gripe all the time, show no appreciation for our efforts. They are, however, our customer and they pay our bills. So now what?

We will:

• work everyday
• work smart
• have a good attitude
• do our best
• be respectful
• smile and be happy regardless

• ruin a vacation
• work weekends
• work more than 40 hours a week for 40 hours pay
• get divorced
• get sick
• get hi blood pressure
• die

by Dwayne Phillips

There are many almost insurmountable jobs out there. Are any of them, however, your job?

I my current search for employment, I talk to people here and there about jobs. Several of the people I have met describe their jobs as the most impossible in the universe. The jobs they describe are truly daunting, yet I have one question for them:

But is that your job?

Let me try to illustrate this with a conversation I have heard:

Mr. A: Gosh, we have so much work to do. We’ll never get it done.

Mr. B: Really?

Mr. A: Yes, our customers are killers. If we don’t do everything they want, why, they’ll, well, you don’t want to know what they’ll do.

Mr. B: What does your contract require you to do for the customer?

Mr. A: The what?

Mr. B: The contract. You have a contract with your customer. What does it require you to do?

Mr. A: Contract? Contract!? You don’t understand our customer.

Mr. B: What does your contract require you to do for the customer? There is a contract. Let’s read it and see what we have to do.

…the two look at the contract and find a list of 12 things do to…

Mr. B: Well, only 12 things to do. Can you do them?

Mr. A: Sure, but, you don’t understand. Our customer wants us to do a lot more than that.

Mr. B: We should do what the contract requires. It was agreed to by us and the customer. It is their wishes.

…end of conversation

Of course this is a simple situation. Of course we can find lots of things our customer wants us to do that is not in the contract. Of course we can find lots of things on planet earth that should be done. Of course many of those things are practically impossible. Of course we can try to do them…

But is that your job?

by Dwayne Phillips

New deep learning tools have turned a technology field into a general-purpose programming language.

I worked with neural networks 25 years ago (yes, I am that old). Recently, big, big neural networks have returned to favor as deep learning. Clever techniques have reduced this to a programming language instead of an area of technology.

For example,

FORTRAN: crunch numbers in banking, image processing, signal processing, etc. There are many different things you can do with the language.

Deep Learning: “learn the computer” to recognize things in images, understand speech, recognize faces, understand text, play chess, etc. There are many different things you can do once your have your deep learning system created. Point it a large data sets, and viola.

Perhaps those who are at the forefront of deep learning made a mistake in making it so easy for everyone else to use.

by Dwayne Phillips

Life is much easier when I distinguish myself from things that I produce.

I write. I write blog posts, books, magazine articles, and lots of documents at work. People tear up some of the things I write. That can hurt, if I don’t know the difference between me and something I wrote.

Things I write are just that—things I write. They are not me. People shred things I write. People don’t shred me (that would be quite painful). If someone hates something I write, that is okay. (If someone hates me, that is okay too, but not quite as okay.)

Life is much easier when I understand this separation between myself and the things I produce.