myShoggoth

Communication and Ownership

I've been thinking about how software is built, and why small nimble teams seem to outperform massive teams on a regular basis, both in terms of getting interesting products to market and mind-share.  You would think that a bigger company with more resources, more stability for its employees, and significant infrastructure should be able to move faster, but it is taken for granted in the industry now that that isn't the case.

I believe it comes down to two core issues which have huge effects by themselves and also interact with each other to amplify those effects: Communication, and Ownership.

Communication

Software development is all about effective and efficient communication.  The requirements needs to be created, turned into a product design which then needs to turn into technical design, that needs to be turned into code and tests, the results of the tests and other usage are turned into bugs which are then triaged, investigated, and resolved.  One the appropriate level of quality is achieved, the product is shipped.

A Team of One

In a team of one, there is no communication overhead.  That one person determines what problems the product will solve, how to solve them, how to implement that solution, tests it themselves, and fixes problems that meet their own quality requirements.  When she feels satisfied that everything is good to go, she releases the product via whatever channel is appropriate, gathers user feedback and fixes issues, releases updates, etc.   In the case where she is also the only user, she can determine precisely what is worth fixing and how fast that needs to happen, and act on that.

In that degenerate case, there can be no miscommunication or misunderstanding... well, unless there is some sort of multiple personality disorder thing going on.

If you get beyond that, the cost of communication is now added.  The other extreme is an everything-by-committee situation:

Everything By Committee

A large marketing team goes out and gathers customer requirements for a potential product.  They gather their results, negotiate with upper management, go back and forth many times to make sure everyone is in agreement.  There is a VP review, where the busy executive who in theory was being kept up to date on everything going on throws everyone a curve ball, because in fact he had not been keeping up to date on anything.  He's very busy, can't read every email, is scheduled 10-12 hours a day in meetings and doesn't have time in the day to prepare for them (unless they're with management higher up the food chain than him, of course), so the entire proposal is actually brand new.

Yes, I could go on a rant about executive reviews and their cost alone, but I won't.

You can see where that's going, let's skip ahead.  Specs are created, and now they need to be reviewed by assorted management, every other PM on the team, every tester, every developer.  In this spec review, the way to make the time worthwhile is to try to differentiate yourself from your peers by explaining, mostly, why none of it will work.  Due to miscommunication and misunderstanding, the spec itself will never fully address the product requirements (which never fully address the real customer problems), and will fall short in some places and add extraneous stuff in others, and only a few of these issues will actually be found during review.

Some developer is assigned to implement the spec, so they create a technical design, and... have to get it reviewed by every PM, tester, and developer on the team.  See above.  The technical design will naturally not implement the spec exactly, it will fall short in some places and go beyond the scope in others.  Some of those issues will be found in review.

The tester takes the spec (and technical design) and creates a test plan, but again the communication overhead means it will get farther away from testing for what should have been the product requirements in the first place.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader, but the main point I'm making is that the more communication that has to happen at each step of the process, the more miscommunication and misunderstanding will warp the product.  This is the classic game of telephone, where a simple message at the beginning of the line gets warped beyond recognition by the time it reaches the end.

When considering team structure, processes, tools, policies, etc. the overriding concern should be the total team communication overhead.

I can readily tell when a team has major communication issues but doesn't know how to solve it, and they often work hard to make it worse.  Any time I see a team declaring parts of the day or certain days of the week for No Meetings,  I know they're getting totally bogged down in over communication.

When people reflexively add more process (forms, Excel spreadsheets, approval processes, etc.) because of misunderstandings or miscommunications that caused major issues in the past, and what they're actually doing is making the whole thing worse by adding to the problem that caused the issues.

My theory on why Pair Programming seems to work so well (when it does): because it simplifies the communication structure for that part of the team.  You rarely have Pair Programmers who constantly need to check in with other parts of a larger team, they are a self contained unit and the point of it is to have them there to double check each other, so everyone else leaves them alone.  It isn't that it is ideal, it is that by creating an accepted pattern with a relatively low communication overhead cost all the more expensive and hazardous models are avoided.

So it comes down to this:  Pick the team size, structure, tools, processes, and policies that are the best fit for the product you are creating, and make those decisions based on minimizing the communication overhead overall.  There is no one correct answer, there is no one perfect team size or set of processes, it requires skill and experience to know what is best, and even then it will likely change over the course of the project.

Making changes is fine, as long as the act of making those changes doesn't create more communication overhead than the changes themselves are meant to fix.

Effective, efficient communication is crucial to a successful product, but most of what happens is not even close to that.  Minimizing overall communication overhead and focusing energy on what is truly valuable maximizes the productivity of the whole team.

Ownership

I'm going to say something heretical now, hopefully I won't get blacklisted from the industry for it:

Passion is overrated.

More to the point, passion is used in most cases as a substitute for what should be the most important thing, a well designed structure of ownership.  In many cases the people you're hiring don't have any real say in what's going on, but are expected to do great things anyway.  That's not really possible, and yet managers have seen people do it anyway, even in environments that are poisonous to initiative and creativity.  Those who rise above it and make it happen are extra passionate about what they're working on (or working in general), and so the manager naturally assumes that hiring passionate people is the win.

That's not the right fix, the best fix is to fix the poisonous environment so even people who aren't Type A personalities can make the same impact.  This is pretty classic W. Edwards Deming stuff, you're looking at a problem and blaming the people for all your woes, but it isn't the people, it is the environment/process.

Microsoft Classic was an organization that empowered the rank and file to make the critical product decisions, and the job of the management was to clear obstacles for them.  This meant that the responsibility was clear: if you own this feature, you own it.  You can get input from others, but the final decision rests with you.

If you don't actually own the decision, then your customer is not the product's customer, but rather the person or people who do own the decision.  You're trying to make them happy, not the end user.  If you combine this argument with my views on Organization Entropy, you can very quickly see what direction this takes any product.

Interaction

The interaction of these two issues only compounds both.  A bad ownership model will cause significant communication overhead as the person who has the responsibility but not the authority attempts to convince those who have the authority what the right decision is.

When the ownership model is particularly bad it can create a need for everyone involved in even the most minor details to feel like they need to be directly involved in the decisions for those details.  This can get worse when someone is passionate, but not informed.

Finally, the ownership model directly dictates a lot of the communication that is required to create a product, and what patterns that communication will have.

How Old Am I, Really?

(This is a heavily edited version of an email I sent to a very close friend, posted with her permission)

When my wife and I lost our cats I tried to put into perspective the amount of our lives we had shared with them (11 years and 14 years respectively), and I thought about how the first 5 years of life barely count for the person themselves (although they certainly count for the adults raising and caring for them).  You're still learning the basics of having a body and mind, learning to form memories, work the different parts of the body, going through a bunch of basic behavioral development stages.  I don't think my earliest memory is that far back.

Prior to being a teenager you're starting to socialize, learn the basics about the world, about yourself, and setting the stage to develop a real personality.  Some of this counts, but I claim you're not you yet, you're a pre-you, trying to determine who you really are.

In the teenage years there's a lot of exploration and more learning, trying to differentiate from parents, trying out a number of different personalities to see which one feels right, different social groups, different experiences.  Wanting desperately to be an adult but not being one.  You're starting to get a real education, but it isn't truly practical at this point, just the basics.

The 20s is about really starting to be yourself, developing a personality (or for some, still trying to find it), learning what it really means to be an adult and trying to adapt to that world.  Making the fundamental transition between what you thought the world would be like and what it really is, and trying to adjust to live there.  Here you're getting a real education you can actually put to use, both formal and in real world experience.

The 30s are about (not for everyone, of course) becoming comfortable in the that world, and comfortable in being oneself.  You've found a spot, although it may not be comfortable you know what it is and how it works.  You know who you are, and are comfortable with that.  You make adjustments to your situation and personality but it isn't about wholesale change like it was in the teens and 20s.  You're now truly you for the first time.

What I've heard recently and find fascinating is that some consider the 40s the time for women to really shine.  You're not just truly you, you're not just comfortable in your life, you're now comfortable making your life what you really want it to be.  You spent your 30s figuring out who you are and what you really want, and in the 40s you are confident and powerful enough to go get it.  Many of the most successful businesswomen really explode onto the scene in their 40s.

The 50s is supposed to be when men do the same.  I haven't figured out yet why we're delayed that way, but again there seems to be a pattern.  I think men hold on longer to what they think society says is success, so in their 40s they really make a break for that, and in their 50s figure out what it was they really wanted all along and change and go for that path instead.  Speculation.

After that is almost unpaved territory.  40 used to be old, now I don't really even think of 50 as old.  Around 60 is the starting point.  A lot of that is because of health.  By the time I'm 60 stuff that's deadly today won't be, things that are untreatable now will be easily prevented, and as they get a deeper and more real understanding about how our bodies work we'll be able to be much healthier, more active, and happier for a lot longer.

I turn 36 in two weeks.  I claim that I have been really myself for a little over 20 years of that.  So between now and 60, even though I won't double my age from the womb, I'm going to more than double my actual real life experience, and in fact that experience will be more lived and more important than the previous 36 years.  Further, I think the 20 years I'll have after that will be great (maybe better), so that's more than two more full lifetimes of great experiences ahead, with a very real chance of more beyond.

I don't know what that time will hold, but there's too much of it to take it for granted or give it up because I'm too old or middle aged or things aren't what I wanted them to be today.  When I really thought about all of this I started rededicating myself to my life.  I'm exercising a lot, trying to get back into shape for health and generally feeling good.  I'm eating a lot better, losing weight.  I'm getting back on track with yearly physicals, immunizations, preventative testing, etc.

I want the next 20 years to be the best in my life, and the 20 after that to be even better.

The Beauty of ExitProcess()

I had to reinstall my home computer's 64-bit XP Pro because it had become essentially useless (seems to be doing much better now), and in the process I found out that recent installers for Windows Live Messenger don't install on 64-bit XP Pro.  They just don't.

I know the dev lead on that team, so I gave him a piece of my mind on that.

Instead I'm using Windows Messenger from the XP SP2 install.  I worked on that code, I was the lead developer for that release on that product.  I made the painstaking modifications to Windows installation to get it working, ported the code my team had been working on for months and months, went through the assorted nightmare overhead of being a part of that mammoth release.  We spend more time than I like to remember combing through every line of code by hand and with automated tools trying to make sure there was no security bugs.  We changed and fixed a lot of code to make that happen, the devs working with me kicked butt and took names.

I logged in and things worked.  Lots of features missing relative to Windows Live Messenger, but it is usable.  The people I IMed with tonight don't know I was on a much older version, and didn't care.  I watched the working set for it, and felt a lot of pride and how tiny it is an how few resources it takes away from the actual primary usage of the computer.

Then it reminded me of a pet peeve that I have about traditional desktop applications, and as I related this peeve to friends I realized I should write about it.

Why does any application on the planet ever take any time whatsoever to shut down?  There is one good reason: the user has some data that needs to be protected.  That's it, that's the only reason.  You should make sure you save the data, let them know what's going on if it is going to take more than half a second, save their data, then get the fudge out.

If there's no data, just. shut. down.

I've worked with teams that demanded that we ask permission from servers that could be on the other side of the planet with heavy packet loss whether we were allowed to shut down.  No, just get out.

I've worked with people who want to make sure that the process exits by having the program execution perfectly work its way until the end of the main function, and slide off the end in the glorious sunset of well designed code.  No, just get out.

I've worked with people who want to do some amount of memory sanity checking even on the retail builds that are sent to customers, rather than just the debug internal builds.  No, just get out.

Program startup should be instant (I'm talking to you, Adobe) and should be all about getting useful UI in front of the user as quickly as possible.  Microsoft Office apps are awesome at this, so good you don't even notice it anymore.  Launch any Office app next to an Adobe product.  Hell, launch all of the Office apps next to Photoshop at the same time.  Twice.

But that is relatively understandable (only relatively) next to taking any time whatsoever to shut down.  The user wants you gone, do the minimum cleanup you can get away with and then call ExitProcess().  If you're doing any more, you're sacrificing the user experience for... what again?

No, just get out.

Physical Results Part 1

BP: 120/82

Pulse: 68

Tetanus Shot (actually the DTaP), no idea how long overdue it was, possibly not measurable in human time.  Apparently my left arm will be sore for a week or so, which at least means I'm piling on to a shorter period of misery instead of serial miseries (the bits that were frozen off are still painful).

Weight needs to come down, no surprise.  Exercise is very important, again no surprise.  Actively and seriously working on both.

I generously gave them some blood and urine and they're going to get back to me with further results.

High heart rate that was quick to increase and slow to go away when working out with my personal trainer?  Yeah that's probably because I was incredibly out of shape.

Nothing irregular found, feeling pretty good about it.  Went to Wibbley's afterwards to celebrate with a fish burger (after about 14 hours of fasting I was ready. to. eat.), it was around 1pm so the place was just getting over their lunch rush and it took quite a while.  Delicious, though.

Health Updates

A prescript:  I'm considering moving the more personal stuff off this blog and onto another one, and keeping this more businessy.  Not sure, if you have an opinion let me know.  I've thought of it previously as 'me' vs. 'us', and I still like that model.

This morning I weighed in at 200.2.  That's a little misleading, since I think I've put on a fair amount of muscle in the last month and a half.  Once I get a chance to work with my personal trainer again (after the whole gym saga is over) I'll ask him to do the body fat measurements again, so that at least the same methodology is being used and apples are being compared to apples.  If I suck in my gut now, instead of it looking like I have less of a gut, I can see the bottom of my ribcage.

I went to my dermatologist for the first time in eight years Friday morning and he essentially froze off pieces of flesh I didn't want.  My wife said "so he gave you controlled, severe frostbite?"

Yes, yes he did.  And it hurts.

The sleep on the new mattress is still going great for me, but not for my wife.  We need to figure that out, she's pretty miserable.

I'm Famous!

Well, I'd better be.  Soon.  Go make that happen.  I'll wait.

A good friend of mine referenced my musings on the future of Hollywood and the Internet and the Writer's Strike in the new episode of his podcast Sturgeon's Law.

The strike itself is over, but the causes of the friction are just beginning.

His podcast is great stuff, highly recommended.

Making Friends at Work

I just read this article at physorg.com about how in the United States co-workers are less likely to socialize beyond work hours, and that it is trending down.

It got me thinking about a problem I've noticed with myself and working life.  I don't tend to make close friends at work, although plenty of casual ones.  This is a shame, I've met some really great people over the years, and I've been making a half-hearted attempt to reconnect with some former co-workers recently (especially with the help of LinkedIn and Facebook).  Hell, I'm trying to reconnect to old friends I've lost contact with over the years, for that matter.

I'm pretty introverted in general, I love socializing but it takes a lot of energy for me to do so.  I'm not sure if that has to do with it, if I give off surl-ons, or what.  Some of the recent positions I've had for work (manager and senior dev) tend to create some distance from other people in the group, as well.

My current day job of consulting to Microsoft is pretty bad for it, as well.  I share an office with four others (so far) and while we're all friendly there's no connection, I'm pretty much hacking code eight hours a day so there's no much interaction with others either.  This will very likely change over the next couple months as I wrap up my current work and move to more complex design and coding that requires coordinating with many others in the larger business group.

To those of you I've worked with before: do I come across as unapproachable or uninterested/uninteresting?  Or is it just a general cultural thing about the US or the pacific northwest?  Maybe I'm just too old for all you young people with your music.

As evidence the other way, I had beers the other night with two former colleagues from TalentSpring and had a blast.  Most of the talk was work and industry related, of course, but that's to be expected.  We're planning on making a regular thing of it, and I'm looking forward to that greatly.

I play in a regular Thursday night poker game (not so regular the last few weeks), and although many of the players are current or former Microsofties I didn't actually know any of them professionally before I joined the game.

Anyone want to grab some coffee or drinks sometime?

Anonymous vs. Scientology

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I've read in a long time, and I'm very very sad that I wasn't able to see it in person.

This is probably a better form on politics than traditional democracy anyway: Mockocracy.

How Microsoft Should Re-Invent Itself

I really wanted to spend more time researching and getting details and financial reports and so on to make this post, but a certain *cough* deal has forced my hand.

All of this is my personal opinion and in no way reflects any views of my current or past employers, and in fact I would expect many or most to disagree wholeheartedly.  I'm not in any sort of position to do more than talk, not even influence.  This is me.  Okay?

Microsoft needs to turn into a spin-off machine.

There are a ton of reasons for this, I'll get into as many as I can remember and think of, but the core is that Microsoft's current way of doing business is fundamentally not working, and the recent announcement of the bid for Yahoo! for $44.6 *billion* could be the nail in the coffin.  MSFTextrememakover has a wonderful item-by-item post on why it is a horrible idea.

More importantly to my way of thinking, this deal will increase organizational entropy in a big way.  And that's death.

On the other hand, spin-offs are a wonderful way of resetting entropy, mostly for the company being spun-off, but also for the spinner.

The core of the idea:  Retain and invest in the two cash cows, and use their profits to fund a program of:

1. Spinning off all the existing businesses outside of those two.  Try to figure out what products, suites, and current businesses would work the best together.  Find the right people to lead them (not in terms of internal politics, but as business leaders).  Packaging them will be difficult and time consuming, but I think it would be startling how much value there is.
2. Incubate new ideas and products, focused on bringing them to the point where they can be spun off.  Lots of thought needs to go into how to find people who are ready to be executive management teams for these new spin-offs.  If the idea can't stand on its own as a separate company, cut it and reinvest.
3. There is still plenty of room for acquisitions in this world, but the mindset is totally different.  Now the idea is to buy complimentary businesses to work with incubated products, shoring up their weaknesses before spinning them off, or to dedicate enough resources to take a great idea, repackage it, add significant value, and then spin it back out into the world.  Almost a VC or private equity type of a role.

In fact, that's a great way to think about it in general:  Microsoft becomes a private equity company where the funding comes from the two most successful products ever.

Pros

• Career advancement, and reward paths that don't involve massive bureaucratic politics.  You can help create a new, successful business, and get rewarded with options and new opportunities when the business is spun off as its own company.
• Huge recruiting power due to the above.  You're not hiring into a faceless corporate black hole, you're being recruited into a very entrepreneurial company that is all about incubating and spinning off new businesses.
• By changing the focus of the company, you change the culture.  Things have coagulated, everything is about safety and step-by-step career advancement.  In a more entrepreneurial culture, taking risks is expected and rewarded.
• Most importantly, in this world the reward is tied to the business, not to the chain of command.  You're working to create a successful new business that you want to be spun off, the big rewards come from being a part of that success, not just convincing upper management that you're better Partner material than your peers.
• Get away from the myth of synergy.  A lot of time, money, and careers have been wasted trying to figure out a way to tie everything Microsoft does into a nice package that will magically make a huge multiple more money for the company than the individual pieces.  This has mostly failed, and will continue to fail, and the few successes will not even pay for the costs of the failures.
• Increased focus on the bottom line in all aspects of the business.  Every new business is seen in the light of its potential to create a new, separate company, rather than how it fits into arbitrary goals or organizational politics.
• Managing the company's billions is now an exercise in return on investment, rather than a shotgun of attempts to recapture the old Windows/Office magic.

Cons

• It really hasn't been done before that I'm aware of, it isn't clear the model will actually work.
• The entire management team and organization for the company is ill suited for this kind of a change.
• The company's goodwill and reputation are both pretty well in the toilet, and it would take some time before acquisitions could be made at favorable costs.  Right now it seems like their only leverage is overpaying enormously for what they want.
• It isn't clear that talent the company has attracted/retained over the past half dozen years or so would thrive in an entrepreneurial culture, nor is it clear the culture could make such a huge change.
• Probably plenty more, that's all I can think of immediately.

Epicenter Bellevue Closes (Poorly)

Our damn gym closed, suddenly, and with about three hours warning on Thursday night.

I had an appointment with our personal trainer that night, and my wife was there for her yoga class.  Everyone was running around trying to figure out what was going on, very little was clear, and the staff who were naturally upset themselves at their own predicament had to try to deal with a large number of members who were upset and trying to figure out what they were going to do.

We went to Wibbley's right after to console ourselves, and the woman we know who works (well, now worked) at both was working there and we exclaimed "OMG!  I KNOW!"s at each other.  Another former Epicenter employee was eating and he joined in with his own "WTF!?"s  and we were all like "OMG! I KNOW!"s at him, too.

No warning, very little notice, and hardly any organization.  The management at Epicenter should be just damn ashamed of themselves for their piss poor professionalism at how they handled it.  The Seattle location will remain open, just the downtown Bellevue one has closed.  I note that even two days later now the website has not been updated in any way, still shows the Bellevue information, etc.  I notice that the About Us section has no information about the upper management, owners, etc.  That's probably because they know they have nothing to be proud of.

L.A. Fitness off of 106th bought? was given? all the memberships, so everyone has a membership there now and all their paid personal trainer sessions etc. will move over.  In another prime example of Epicenter management's "uality is job #1" attitude, the head personal trainer at L.A. Fitness (Matt) showed us the printout he had been given with all the information about the clients, the trainers, number of sessions paid for (although this is incomplete).  He was trying to make sense of it while at the same time having to calmly deal with hordes of very angry customers that had been dropped on him in a horrible way.  ETA for the data to actually be successfully transfered to the new gym is Wednesday.  Yes, almost a week later.

It seems like a nice facility with quality people, but that's hard for us to see right now when our vision is pretty much clouded red.  We pre-paid a bunch of personal trainer sessions because our wonderful trainer, Bo Jin, had been working with us for long enough that we felt he was the right guy for us.  He's very unsure he wants to move to the new club, and is looking at assorted options.  If you're looking for a really great to work with personal trainer in the Bellevue area, send me an email and I'll give you his contact info.

We went to the new club earlier this afternoon to see what our options were for the pre-payment money (the membership is not an issue, we're fine waiting until that runs out and decided whether to stay with L.A. Fitness or not).  We want to work with our trainer, but more importantly we feel like we paid for those sessions with reasonable assumptions at a time when the management knew those assumptions were likely to be false but didn't tell anyone.

It isn't L.A. Fitness's fault that Epicenter management handled everything so incredibly poorly.  On the other hand, if their goal is to try to retain the greatest percentage of transferring members for the long term I think they should be extremely gracious about refunds whenever possible.  If I don't feel like there's a risk, and that they're there to help me and not just figure out how to monetize me (this is usually how I feel about gyms, especially dens of scummery like 24 Hour Fitness), they're more likely to have me:

• Give them a honest try as a new gym, and keep me as a member.
• Tell others in the same or related positions that I know who also transferred that they're worth giving an honest try.
• Spread good word of mouth to others in the area.
• Not take action with the credit card company in order to try to get the money back.

Like all customer service, the short term bad choice (give up money you don't legally have to) is often a great long term choice (customer loyalty and advocacy).

Right now they're clearly overwhelmed by the position they're in.