Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Often it is better to let people watch a game show at work while they eat lunch.

Here is a sad but true story.

In the early 1990s I worked in a big computing laboratory. At one end of the multi-thousand-square-foot facility we had a “conference” room. This room had a sink, a refrigerator, and a TV. Yes, people used the conference room as a lunch room. They would turn on “The Price is Right” back in the heyday of Bob Barker. They would spend an hour each weekday eating together and watching a silly game show.

These people became friends as they would eat together and idly watch Bob Barker and overly excited contestants. Side chatter wandered to side topics. These colleagues became friends who knew one another as real people—not just boxes in an org chart.

There is a funny thing about friends, they tend to help one another and grease skids so that things get done much faster and much better.

People who are friends tend to work together.

Someone, who didn’t like Bob Barker and also didn’t like the people who would watch Bob Barker, learned of this daily gathering. It is unfortunate that this someone had been mistakenly elevated to a position of authoritative management.

That someone declared with great authority and zeal that, “We’ve got to put an end to this!”

That someone proved their authority and had the “Price is Right” and lunch banned from the conference room. The persons who had watched the show together remained friends, but gradually moved to other jobs and were replaced by people who weren’t friends—they were boxes in an org chart.

Please refer back to “People who are friends tend to work together” and notice the last two words: WORK and TOGETHER. Those two habits vanished from the computing lab. The results were predictable and predicted. Work and quality fell.

That someone, who didn’t like Bob Barker and also didn’t like the people who would watch Bob Barker, moved on to another position of management to wreak havoc there as well for years to come.

I suppose it is time to summarize this story and find a moral or something. If you have read this far, you have probably drawn your own conclusion, but here is one or two of the conclusions that have come to me in the 20 intervening years.

1. Let people at work become friends—it pays.
2. If you find someone who wants to end friendships at work, move them out quickly before they ruin everything.

by Dwayne Phillips

Probably the best preparation is to be prepared to be unprepared.

I prepare. I plan. I am ready. I drive some people nuts with these habits.

Somewhere along the line I learned that I was never prepared for everything. Hence, I became prepared for that, too.

I learned to be prepared to be unprepared.

This is actually easy to prepare. (confused yet? I am.) All I have to do is be ready to say, “That’s a surprise. I am not prepared for that.”

This is actually almost impossible to do. I have to stand in front of a group of people and admit that I have lots of flaws. Yikes. That is tougher than it sounds for many of us.

by Dwayne Phillips

Here is an exercise that may help you learn what you want to be or learn what excites you.

Not sure what you want to be? Have someone say, “You will one day be a fill-in-the-blank.”

For example, have someone introduce you to a stranger by saying:

• This is Dwayne, he will soon be a novelist
• This is Dwayne, he will soon be journalist
• This is Dwayne, he will soon be college professor
• This is Dwayne, he will soon be high school coach
• This is Dwayne, he will soon be our R&D lead
• This is Dwayne, he will soon be our consultant on technology

Some of these may cause your spirits to rise. Some may cause your stomach to churn. Viola, you may have just learned what it is you want to be.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes the arrangement of furniture in an office is far more important than a first glance indicates.

Once upon a time, I worked in an organization that moved into some office spaces that were previously occupied by another organization. We inherited their office furniture and their arrangement of office furniture.

In the center of the offices sat a round table with half a dozen chairs encircling the table. Half a dozen of us would gather at this table each day at lunch time, eat, talk, and generally come to know one another.

That round table with its half a dozen chairs was beneficial to the organization because it was where persons from different and differing parts of the organization came to know one another as persons. For those who speak of such things, this table is where a group of persons became a team that was greater than the sum of its parts.

In time, senior managers in our organization began to exert their influence on the inherited office spaces. One influence was a decision to fill the center of the offices with cubicles. The round table and its half a dozen chairs would be no more.

Several of us pleaded with our senior managers for the round table and its half a dozen chairs. We pleaded repeatedly but vainly.

Community lunches ceased. Differing persons returned to our differing attitudes about “them” (the universal label for differing persons). The organization returned to being one where the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes a table is not just a table. Sometimes a table is a force multiplier.

Please consider this is someone tries to replace a central table with cubicles.

by Dwayne Phillips

Being a computer programmer does not make me a software engineer.

Deep sigh before I begin. This is yet another post borne of frustration in talking with recruiters and hiring managers. Now that the sigh is out of the way.

A computer programmer is not a software engineer.

There. Wrote that bit.

Software engineers do a lot of tasks in addition to programming. Please see:

• The Wikipedia article on software engineering
• The IEEE’s Software Engineering Body of Knowledge
• The Encyclopedia of Software Engineering

Once you have finished those, perhaps you will agree that being a computer programmer does not make me a software engineer.

by Dwayne Phillips

All writers should read. This goes for technical writers, too.

Writers should read. Writers should read good material. Writers should read several hours a day.

Fine. What about the technical writer? That is all non-fiction. There are plenty of good non-fiction books to read. I recommend the Pulitzer prize winners. I also recommend technology history magazines like that from the Smithsonian.

There is plenty of other non-fiction technology writing out there (this blog is one source). Many, however, (this blog included) are a bit sloppy. Find high-quality non-fiction materials and read them several hours a day.

Don’t have time? Yes, we do.

by Dwayne Phillips

The single worst possible change in pose I can do is when I point a finger away from myself and towards another person.

by Dwayne Phillips

I encourage managers and other influence-rs to speak to their colleagues in the place where the colleagues are most comfortable.

I encourage managers and other to speak with each of their colleagues. I find two points here:

First, speak to your colleagues everyday. If nothing special is happening, talk about “the weather.” I use this expression to mean talk about anything. Your colleagues will learn that you like to talk with them. Those folks who study this type of thing call it “establishing a relationship.” I call it being neighborly.

Next, speak to your colleagues in their place. They are comfortable in their place. Look at their desk, the walls, everything. Notice what is present. Talk to them about their life, their interests, anything you see in their office. Again, this is being neighborly.

The opposite this visiting a colleague only when you want something from them. Some bad event has occurred and you need your colleague to do something for you. They learn that you only show your face on bad ocassions. You only bring bad news.

Who wants to be that way? Not very neighborly.

by Dwayne Phillips

I have been interviewed for jobs several dozen times in the last three years. Most “interviews” became free consulting sessions.

The past three years have not been good for me and working at paying jobs. I am over age and over qualified. At least I soothe my feelings by telling myself these things.

I have been interviewed for several dozen jobs in this time. Here is the story of one such interview:

The hiring manager asked me what I knew about Amazon Web Services. I told him about attending several AWS conferences and trying AWS cloud computing in several experiments. I explained how the AWS system works and how Amazon has been able to make piles of money with it and how and why others have struggled. I also explained how AWS fits into the history of computing in the last 30+ years (my work experience) and where this would go.

The hiring manager then asked me about Agile Development. I walked him through the history of software development from rapid prototyping to the agile manifesto through spirals and Vs and other such models. I also told him about how nothing works for everything and how Agile worked in some situations but wasted time in others. I cut through the hype and explained what really happened and why it worked in some situations. I also explained why government contracts often asked for Agile when what they wanted was everything but Agile.

Throughout all of this, the hiring manager took furious notes and interjected questions like, “but what if…so if that is true, then what…” and so on.

I explained to the hiring manager what traps existed in these technologies, how to recognize the traps, and how to avoid them at minimal expenditure of resources.

So, why would they hire me when I had just told them how to do all their work with minimal expense?

They didn’t hire me, and they didn’t pay me for the one-hour consulting session that solved most of their vexing problems.

I felt like asking them the question that is the title of this post.

Do you interview job applicants?

Do you interview them or pump them for information so you don’t have to hire anyone?

Are you honest with people about these questions?

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes projects “lose their way.” Of course that is impossible as what really happens is that people come and go and change their minds.

In government, we had a phrase about projects that seemed to go forever and consume every penny in sight and produce nothing:

They lost their way

Some of these lost projects found their way again. Most, however, continued to wander and eat everything in sight.

Of course all this talk is silly. Projects aren’t real things. Have you ever held a project in your hand? Not the product of the project, but the project itself. Of course not. Projects are concepts. They can’t lose their way.

What happens is that the persons working on the project wander. Persons leave the project to be replaced by new persons. Someone—one of those mysterious creatures that seem to walk the halls when no one is watching—bumps into one of these new persons and says something like,

“Well, you have to understand. The R E A L requirement of that project was X. No one really cares about Y, so you should change direction, forget Y, and work towards X.”

Well, if that is true, the proper course of action is obvious:

Cancel the project and start over with the right project

Some organizations can do this. Some organizations have honest persons who realize what is happening and take logical steps. Many other organizations, however, well, they don’t have persons who are brave enough to be honest and do the right things. They tend to float along the path of least resistance regardless of the consequences.

Persons who float along tend to find themselves on projects that have lost their way. Funny coincidence, huh?