Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Author and consultant Ed Yourdon is updating his book “Death March.” He is working on the book online as a type of blog. You can participate by reading and commenting. The instructions for joining are here.

I have joined in the discussion. I like this type of thing – reading something written by a smart person and commenting. Some of my comments so far:

Types of Death Marches: One form of Death march is one where everyone hates to come to work. The office is toxic, people distrust one another, and everyone would rather be somewhere else. This atmosphere is usually created by a manager or several managers. Years of improperly handling disputes, dysfunction (and any other dis-whatever) have led to this.

People won’t leave because the pay is too good, the commute is too good, or they are simply insecure in their ability to find another job. This personal and widespread insecurity also adds to the death march.

Causes of Death Marches: When pointy-haired-bosses read about advances in computer technology and the newer collaborative tools in the airplane magazines, they figure that their people should be able to do twice as much in half the time.

Then there are the economic woes (higher unemployment) and outsourcing to other countries. The PHBoss tells the people, “there are lots of unemployed programmers out there who would be thrilled to be working on this (death march) project. Besides, I can always send this work to India.”

The (death march) programmers understand that this reasoning is probably true, so they put their heads down and trudge onwards.

Somehow, economic misery emboldens managers of death march projects.

I think that one of the causes of death march projects are death march projects. We work on a death march and survive, but we are exhausted. We need recovery time, so we come into the office in bodily form, but only as mind numb zombies.

We are now prime to be hit by the unexpected things you mentioned in the text. We don’t think ahead for the next thing that could surprise us, because we cannot think.

by Dwayne Phillips

Games can be great teaching instruments. Some people are able to use computer games as education tools. Computer games, however, are costly to create. Simulations of real life can be created with far fewer resources. I recommend two places where you can experience such simulations.

I just finished reading an article about education through games (see reference below). The authors exhort computer science and engineering schools to use video and computer games as tools for educating programmers and engineers. That sounds like a great idea, and the authors present evidence of its benefits. I, however, see one big problem:

It takes a lot of money, time, and expertise to make a good computer game.

I don’t have any of those resources. I don’t know of any universities that have an abundance of those resources.

I do know of another source of such educational games. Games are simulations, and simulations of real life are not difficult or costly to create. I write that with confidence as I have created many such simulations of real life.

Later this month (March 2009), several acquaintances of mine are running a week-long seminar known as PSL (Problem Solving Leadership). PSL is a seminar that was taught for many years by Jerry Weinberg and a number of colleagues. Weinberg is now running PSL a few more times with Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman. I highly recommend attending PSL to experience simulations. What you will learn from PSL will far outweigh its costs.

Another excellent opportunity to experience simulations is the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference.  This occurs in November of each year. So you know, I led simulations at the AYE Conference for several years. Every session at AYE is centered about simulations.

Reference

“To Game or Not to Game,” Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim and Forrest Shull, IEEE Software, March/April 2009. pp. 92.95, http://computer.org.

by Dwayne Phillips

I just got a job through LinkedIn. That Web 2.0 stuff may actually work.

I retired from my government job several months ago after 28 years of “government service” (as we fondly like to call it). I had some skills and qualifications and wanted to work a few more years, and my wife didn’t want me hanging around the house all day. I did all the right things:

• went to job fairs
• scoured the Internet
• put my resume on a few dozen company web sites
• went to careers.you-name-the-company.com
• worked with a professional recruiter
• gave my resume to all my personal contacts in industry

Nothing of substance happened. Everyone I met was courteous and professional. I really met a lot of good people. Everyone I met loved my qualifications; you should have seen their faces light up. Everyone I met assured me they would put my resume in front of their customers; I trust they all did that.

No one I met called me back with a firm job offer; they all called back with “contingent” job offers.

In the midst of these months of searching in vain, I weekly updated my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn sent me emails about this person and that person who I may know. Most of these had something to do with the geographic region. I always clicked the button to invite these people to be my “friends” or “contacts” or whatever LinkedIn calls the people it links you to.

One of these LinkedIn linked-to-or-whatever-you-call-them people emailed me asking for my home phone. I sent it back to him. A few days later he woke me from my afternoon nap (a perk of retirement) with a phone call. He wanted to talk to me. I remembered him from a few years ago, but couldn’t understand why his company would want to talk to me.

We met for a few hours. He called me back. We met again for a few hours. He called me back. I got the impression he wanted me to come to work for him. He sent me a real (not a contingent) job offer. I accepted on Friday and went to work yesterday.

So, maybe LinkedIn and these other Web 2.0 concepts work. I was surprised. See me on LinkedIn under “Dwayne Phillips.” LinkedIn didn’t ask me to write this blog. They didn’t pay me anything to write this blog. It is okay with me if you show this blog entry to LinkedIn as then perhaps they would pay me something 😉

Managers and others in high position don’t “just know” how to work well with people. They have to learn it. Some of the rest of us have to learn that the managers have to learn.

by Dwayne Phillips

I kept my four-month-old grandson for a couple of hours yesterday while my wife and daughter-in-law went to lunch. He is an exceptional kid. (By definition – he is the only grandson in the world that is related to me. Hence, he is an exception to the rule.)

While entertaining one another, my grandson would smile at me. That is a great thing to experience – a baby smiling at you. I am quite proud of my son and his wife. You see, babies don’t inherently smile. Somone teaches them to smile. They mimick the facial expressions they see. My son and his wife have done a lot of smiling at my grandson during his four months of life. I hope the trend continues.

The connection with anything of import? Babies learn to smile. Babies learn to experience happiness. They don’t “just come by it naturally.”

The vast majority of managers learn to be happy at work. It doesn’t just come naturally. Someone shows them the benefit of being happy and other good things. This simple thought did not come naturally to me. I have often felt that “people just knew these things.” And “he couldn’t possibly have acheived his position in the organization without knowing such these things.”

I was wrong.

Some people don’t smile at their new-born baby.  Some people never give their secretary flowers. Some people never buy lunch for their employees. Some people never bring fresh-baked cookies in to the office.

Some people achieve high position without knowing that people are important to them.

If you meet with one of these people, gently point out that babies learn to smile. Someone has smiled at them over and over and given them corresponding hugs. Gently help them learn that flowers and lunches and cookies and smiles go a long ways toward success in management and projects and all sorts of human endeavor.

If you meet someone who was like me and is convinced that Mr. so-and-so knows we like appreciation, but chooses not to give it – well, gently tell me that I am wrong. That people have to learn these things. Then encourage that person like me to do his best to encourage the manager to learn to smile.

by Dwayne Phillips

I had an enjoyable evening yesterday. My son was working on a programming project for a freshman-level computer science class (college). I – after being asked – jumped into the problem. Several observations.

(1) Computer science professors aren’t any better at creating meaningful programming assignments than they were 30 years ago.

(2) Programming assignments are strongly dependent on the programming language being used. In this case, Python is the language being used.

(3) Methods of problem solving are “caught” after a lot of instances. They are not “taught” by themselves.

I guess it is this last observation that bothers me the most. I watched my son struggle with what statements to type in what order. I grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. The assignment showed the input data and the desired output data. I filled in half a dozen data structures that lay between the original and final data. We worked step by step to create each of the interim data structures. Problem solved.

How did I know to do that? How did I know to do it? I guess I “caught” it over the years. Drawing the interim data structures is one method of solving a problem. I suppose there are dozens of other methods. Experience brings them to the surface.

I still find it a shame that the problem solving methods are not taught directly. That finding is some manifestation of my personality – I guess.

by Dwayne Phillips

It seems that many knowledge workers “work” four hours a day (and are paid for eight). This merely highlights our ignorance of what comrpises work.

Slashdot recently surveyed 24,000 workers. 40% said they worked four hours a day. Another 24% said they worked maybe four to six hours. This means two-thirds of those surveyed worked less than six hours a day.

Who is Slashdot? Well, its headline proclaims “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.” That pretty much says it all. These are knowledge workers with most of them under 35. How can these highly educated and highly paid kids be goofing off so much every day? Are they all playing video games or something?

The answers are confusing, but I contend the questions are just as confusing. We have been doing intellectual work for several decades – the information revolution. We have been doing manufacturing for several centuries – the industrial revolution. We have been doing agriculture for several millennia. Is it no wonder we are a bit confused? Management schools with their hoards of MBAs streaming out onto the streets each year don’t really understand what they are trying to teach – yet. Maybe in a few centuries or millennia they will. Then we can have some valid surveys and results.

I have written several books. A common question is, “how long does it take to write a book.” One answer is, “one year.” Another equally valid answer is, “20 years.” The experiences, examples, and learnings in one of my books took 20 years to accumulate. While accumulating, I was also doing a few other things, and for the most part I didn’t realize that I was writing a book. It has only been recently that I realized that I am noticing things 24 hours a day, and hence gathering information for the next blog, essay, and book 24 hours a day.

During my last year in government, I worked about two hours a day – or was it about 22 hours a day? Sometimes I’m not sure which is closer to “correct.” Sometimes I am not sure there is a “correct.”

Since retirement at the end of November, I work about 18 hours a day. I have cut back from 22 or 23. I hope to find employment soon. Then I can go back up to nearer 24 hours a day of work. The six or eight hours I am not working are boring.

by Dwayne Phillips

What do Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) have to do with engineering, project management, systems development? I am afraid that the answer is “too much.”

Intellectuals are taking PEDs. College professors are the latest to join the crowd. They are using ritalin to extend and focus their concentration. I suppose the professors are merely learning from their students who were given ritalin in the first grade. Caffeine isn’t good enough anymore.

Well, that’s just college, and colleges have long been the place where people experimented with things that no one else in society would touch.

Wrong again. How much Red Bull have you seen in the cubicle farms? Why do they sell Red Bull and other “energy” drinks in office building cafes? I have yet to see someone run a marathon in an office building. At least Red Bull is not amphetamines or something really strong. Amphetamines have their history in the office and the lab.

One of my sons worked in restaurants in the fast-paced Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. while earning a degree in Biology. The connection? Trace amounts of cocaine are common in the bathrooms of expensive restaurants in the area. The movers and shakers of business and finance need a little energy boost now and then as well.

If you thought this blog post was going to be about Alex Rodriguez, I am sorry to disappoint you. A-Rod is paid a lot of money to go to a park every day and play a game. He and hundreds of his colleagues have set a bad example for kids, but again, he just plays a game. He doesn’t build and maintain the technical threads of today’s society.

I hope that the people in the cubicle farms, meeting rooms, and class rooms will stop using PEDs. That isn’t easy in our world full of chemical synthesis, but it is worth a try.

by Dwayne Phillips

I have seen many “critical” systems built with commercial products that are available at the mall, Best Buy, Circuit City, you name them. The result can be disastrous. Please be careful.

About ten years ago I worked on a small project that built a data link. We were sending short, simple text messages through a satellite. This was an odd situation that used a low data rate – a couple hundred bytes per second – on an almost-forgotten side channel of the satellite. The engineers built a circuit card that had a serial data port on it. The trick was that it used a precise data rate – one that you could not buy off-the-shelf.

The idea was simple: build this serial port on a circuit card ($20,000 in precision parts), pop it in a basic PC, connect that to a satellite communications system, and go. It didn’t work. The PC would not recognize the circuit card. Days of wrangling and experimenting were in vain. As a last gasp, the engineers put the circuit card in another PC – voila’ everything worked. They repeated the experiment a dozen times. Some PCs recognized the circuit card while others did not.

PCs were not standard devices. They had many variables in them – variables that we could not predict.

Move forward a few years. An experienced and smart engineer built a special-purpose data recording device for us. It used SD cards for storage. A key parameter was that the device had to run X hours on a single AA battery. The engineer researched, experimented, designed, and built a dozen prototypes. In testing, he discovered a wide variance in the amount of time his devices worked on a single AA battery. The variance in the batteries had to be the culprit, so he moved testing to a high-quality bench power supply.

He measured the current each SD storage card used. The variance was huge. These storage cards were all from the same manufacturer, all had the same storage capacity, all had everything the same except for the variance in the critical area of current draw.

I can repeat many other similar stories. The moral is always the same:

Take care with things that you can buy at the mall.

Consider the commercial SD memory card. A manufacturer designs an integrated circuit to hold 8GBytes of data. The manufacturer pumps them out of the foundry and then tests them. Some cards hold 8GBytes as designed. Some cards have a bad section that kills half the storage, so the manufacturer stamps it as a 4GByte card. Some cards have more bad sections, so the manufacturer stamps them as 2GByte or 1GByte or whatever works. How much current does each device draw? Who knows.

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) has long been hailed as a savior to those of us who build low-volume specialty devices. Just buy the parts, plug them in, and go. Save huge amounts of money in design cost.

Yes, there is much good in COTS parts, but there are also traps that are hidden, unless you test the parts. You test and test and test and use the parts that perform to your specifications. You find yourself trading design cost for testing and selection costs. The test and selection is usually cheaper, but it is not zero.

Go ahead and use parts and pieces that you can buy at the mall. Don’t, however, do this blindly. Plan to buy two or three times the volume of parts you need and also plan for the time and labor needed to test and select parts that meet your specs. A 2GByte USB thumb drive may cost $20 at Best Buy. It will, however, cost thousands of dollars by the time you put it in a critical system.

by Dwayne Phillips

Knowledge is difficult to obtain and precious to me. Therefore, I write notes in notebooks and I keep the notebooks.

This photo shows my notebooks (click photo to enlarge). I have filled these with various types of notes since 1984. Yes, that is about 25 years of notebooks.

I use three types of notebooks.

The first and most used is the Steno Pad – those tan, spiral-bound things on the right. I keep one on my desk at work. I jot short notes of what I do during each day. I get three days per page, and the standard-size Steno Pad lasts one year. I have kept a Steno Pad on my desk since June of 1984. Ask me what I did on any day since then.

The second notebook is the Computation Notebook. That is the large brown thing in the left center of the photo. I use the National Computation Notebook model 43-648 (Google “Computation Notebook 43-648” to find them). I have used these since 1990. I think the National company has been bought and sold several times since 1990, but the notebooks are still available.

I have two uses of the Computation Notebook. (1) My personal work log at home. I have the dates and amount of time I spent writing 100+ articles and four books. (2) A record of meetings at my day job.

The third notebook is my personal journal. That is the pile of brown and then black notebooks stacked in the center of the photo. I started writing a journal in December of 2000 (see my blog post on journals). I started with a brown hardback book, but the company quit making those, so I switched to the Moleskine black hardback book. I find the hardback book works much better in my lap than the softback book.

I find one indisputable advantage to paper and pencil notebooks: they are all backwards compatible. I can still read my notes from 1984. I cannot read my 5 1/4″ CP/M floppy disks from that date. Several people I know at work keep their notes on the office computer system. They have lost years of notes due to technology changes.

Of course, you can’t grep trees. I can, however, find what I want. It seems that just looking at the pile of notebooks helps me remember things. I cannot explain how that works, but it does.

by Dwayne Phillips

I believe in employing specialists – people who really know what they are doing.

I had an experience with experts this past month. Several of my friends have been working on another friend’s home for several weekends. I am not a carpenter, a plumber, nor an electrician. Regardless, I showed up and did as much as I could, and the other friends did the same.

Now and then, a friend had specialist come to the house – someone who actually had skills and experience. These specialists would accomplish more in a few minutes than a handful of volunteers would in a day. Last Saturday two general contractors finished a tricky toilet install in half an hour. The rest of us had been contemplating the problem for three weekends. The weekend before another specialist completed some dry-wall patching that  had frustrated me for a month.

So much for volunteers and home repair. I had a similar experience several years agao when I was monitoring a $100million project. There were ten different team leaders trying to coordinate their teams into one large team. Each team leader had his and her team’s schedules in Microsoft Project. The project manager linked the different team schedules into one master project schedule. Well, he tried to link them. Nothing ever quite worked.

Enter a specialist – a women who was expert in the use of Microsoft Project. She sat with each team leader for one hour. She changed all their Project preferences so they would be the same. I didn’t know their were such things. Once finished with that, she linked all the team schedules, found major holes in the project, and went to work fixing them. One and a half days on the job and she fixed a project that had been struggling for three years.

Specialists know the solution to a problem in the blink of an eye. They can start implementing the solution in minutes.

I am trying to be a specialist now – otherwise known as a consultant. I have tried in vain for years to have my managers employ specialists. I suppose what I need is a specialist in convincing managers of the benefits of specialists.

Any nominations out there?