Office fauna

November 25, 2009

During my ten or so years in the corporate world I had the distinctive pleasure of observing and occasionally meeting some fantastic creatures. Being part of IT companies it would be very easy to single out the “geek” persona. These and other corporate characters (suck-ups, rebels, smellers) you already know pretty well. I’m going to direct your attention to other types you might already know, but didn’t quite figure out how to name, let alone understand their behavior. Hopefully my musings here will help you deal with these creatures when you next encounter them.

Corporate Copycats

Suck-ups are a dime a dozen in any company. It’s safe to say wherever there’s a boss, someone’s face is attached to his ass. The copycat is a different creature. You might say copycats are enhanced versions of suck-ups. Their utmost desire is to become a person other than themselves, so they pick their target (usually his / her boss or a member of upper management) and basically copy their behavior to the extent of their possibilities.

I’ve come across these creatures in more than one occasion. They not only back-up whatever their bosses say, no matter how stupid or unreasonable it might be, they usually adopt it with a passion and blind eagerness to obey more suited to the military than to a business environment.

It is a very dangerous thing to follow rules without thinking, that’s why copycats are potentially dangerous individuals. In case you encounter one and you happen to disagree on a particular subject, be mindful that since copycats have no mind of their own their mind cannot be changed. You will never succeed unless you manage to convince their object of desire (i.e. the person they emulate) of changing his mind instead. This strategy could mean jumping the chain of command, so it must be used wisely.

The Un-feedback-able

I’ve spent half of my professional life as a manager, and as such delivering periodical feedback has always been one of my duties. In all of my teams without exception there has always been a person that no matter how much I tried to explain things to, would always wind up not listening or not caring and ultimately doing whatever they wanted to. Also, they would rebut every single piece of negative feedback, finding a very reasonable justification for every single thing you dare consider a flaw in their performance. These are the un-feedback-able.

Coincidentally or not, in my teams, these were always brilliant people with authority issues and stubborn to the bone. I remember dreading the moment in which I had to deliver them feedback and in more than one occasion I would purposely schedule the appointment at the end of the day because I knew my mind would not be good for much after it.

Finally (after a few years) I came up with the formula to deal with the un-feedback-able: pulling rank. If you know me or have read my previous post on management you’ll know that I discourage this type of method unless necessary. This is one such occasion.

I found that time and brain cells could be saved by using phrases such as: “I can see you are not in agreement with my position, but I’m your manager and I will be evaluating you according to what I just told you.”

Sadly, most times they carried on doing exactly what they wanted to, but at least, if on their next evaluation I had to shave points off their final score I could do so without so much as an “I told you to do things in a different way”.

Showoffs

In a recent comment to one of my posts, one of you inspired the species I’m about to describe. The comment described those developers that just can’t do something in a straightforward fashion and wind up unnecessarily complicating things in order to prove to others their vast knowledge. These are the tech showoffs you can find in almost all development teams.

The behavior of these creatures is clearly derived of insecurity. Not long ago men resorted to their cars to make up for their shortcomings elsewhere. Later, cars were replaced (or accompanied) by gadgets such as laptop computers, cell phones or smart-phones. Nowadays, for developers, penis size can be measured by the amount of unnecessary frameworks they are able to pile up in order to create a single “Hello World” application.

It doesn’t matter if something that could be done in fifteen minutes took five months to build, or that it has the hardware requirements of an electric power plant; showing off to your peers justifies almost anything.

When confronted with one of these creatures you need to know this is almost always a sin of youth and will eventually fade away. Anything you can do to speed up the learning process could help, but remember no matter how much you try to teach life experience, there is nothing like experiencing by one-self. Working a five-day rush will teach any showoff that sometimes a smart architectural or design choice will pay off big at a later stage.

Self Promoter 2.0

I know self promoters are no novelty, but social networking has helped engineer a completely new breed of this fascinating species. They don’t just brag about their accomplishments (whether real or invented) in office halls anymore. They have expanded their domain and now spend most of their time building their 2.0 personas to be the very reflection of the perfect professional, something of course they could accomplish by doing some actual work once in a while, but… why bother?

This creature is cunning, let’s face it, there is no way a person with no smarts can pull this off. However, they tend to build as much enemies as fans, since subordinates or peers of these individuals often feel social self promoters are full of it and take credit when they don’t deserve it or just plain don’t do the job they are supposed to and more work falls on their laps.

I have yet to figure out a way of dealing with social self promoters. I can’t say I have had direct interaction with any of them, but I keep hearing about them from acquaintances. Boy, do they sound pissed off. I eagerly await to see what happens when one of these individuals falls from grace. I believe that given their exposure they could immediately become pariahs. The bigger they are…

Flavor Combination

Any one person could simultaneously be more than one of the creatures described above. Surely a showoff has some traits of an un-feedback-able individual, and a traditional suck-up or self promoter could easily have the characteristics of both a copycat or a social self-promoter.

If you see a person that combines the four, please send a picture to both me and National Geographic. You could have an amazing discovery on your hands.

Shuje

On my next post I will explain why you should not feed developers after midnight. In the meantime, I would very much like to hear about the fauna in your workplace. Any creatures I should know of? Comment below or e-mail me at shuje@holoom.com

16 Comments | Management, Office Life, Social Miscellanea | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shuje

Search stuff

November 17, 2009

Dave Matthews wrote a fantastic song for his first album for which he did not have a name. Since his sister liked the song a lot, he entitled it “The song that Jane likes”. I did not know how to express that this post was about a lot of stuff happening in the search business, hence the illuminated title. Although I’m not as bright as Mr. Matthews I am better looking, or so my girlfriend says. Take that DM!

Wolfram’s Computational Knowledge Engine

Ok, it’s old news, I know. A while ago Wolfram, one of the brightest and kwaziest people I know of, presented us with his Alpha search engine. It holds a poop-load of pre-processed information and it presents it in very slick ways, as opposed to Google that just indexes whatever is out there to index, not caring if some of the information is completely bogus. For instance, someone could write an article stating that 1 + 1 = 5. You would find that in Google, but not in Wolfram.

The existence of Alpha will not modify my search habits a lot. At best, I can slowly introduce it in my searching on the rare occasions in which I need historical, statistical or mathematical facts as an extra, but I’m too lazy and my usage of Google is too rooted to make that shift immediately. That’s the beauty of Google, if Wolfram is, say, a Library, then Google is that same Library + all the other libraries + all the newsstands + all the personal diaries + all the sex shops + etc, etc, etc.

The curious thing about Alpha is that the search results are copyrighted because Mr. Wolfram feels that although the facts are well… facts, the way the information is presented was previously nonexistent, so, Mr. Wacko is basically copyrighting the presentation. That is something we need to watch closely since it could introduce some serious changes to copyright laws.

The Bing Experience

Ay Microsoft. Eventually I will comment on my profound dislike of their creativity (or lack thereof). To me MSFT is looking more and more like a rich kid that envies other kids’ toys. I have yet to say “Wow, Microsoft did that? What a creative bunch!”

Anyway, a few months ago we were blessed (?) with Bing, Redmond’s attempt at robbing Google of a portion of the search market. Google positioned itself at the top of the search industry by re-inventing search and later started making humongous profit off search advertising. Greedy MSFT cannot let that one slide so they have been struggling to eat some of that cake for over ten years now. These are the highlights of Microsoft’s search extravaganza:

  1. First there was MSN Search (circa 1998) powered by Inktomi (later purchased by Yahoo) and Altavista and later by their own search technology.
  2. In 2006 they dropped the MSN Search in favor of a search feature within the Windows Live toolkit which was powered at one point by the Yahoo engine but later by their very own technology.
  3. In 2007, they separated the search feature of the rest of the Live products and launched Windows Live Search.
  4. On June 2009 Bing replaced the Live brand while a deal with Yahoo is in the making to give Microsoft Yahoo’s share of the search market (about 20%)

So far, Bing on its own has not managed to harm Google significantly, so they are trying everything: UI improvements, deals with Facebook and Twitter, adding delicacies provided by Wolfram Alpha, etc. It’s building up to look more like a bad soap opera than a well thought out business strategy.

I know we users stand to benefit from decent competition in any market, even one as clearly dominated as the search market, but nonetheless I find myself very tempted to say: “Get your own toys Microsoft! Leave the other kids alone.”

Google Caffeine

Be it the inevitable result of the competition with Microsoft or their very own will to constantly out-do themselves, Google is ready to launch in at least one data center in the very near future (late 2009 or early 2010) their Caffeine project.

Caffeine is Google’s promise of a faster, more accurate, more temporarily relevant search. It was opened as a beta for a while and rapidly closed due to an apparent very positive outcome which indicated all systems go. You can find a test drive review here.

This could very well be the spin-off of that competition I was referring to before, but call it what you want I will call it a very welcome effort that will undoubtedly benefit me as an end user.

That in my book is a lot of potatoes.

Shuje

On my next post I will show you how to survive a month with only 10 dollars … and a shotgun. In the meantime, if you feel I left out any interesting stuff regarding search, please comment below or e-mail me at shuje@holoom.com

1 Comment | Trends | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shuje

To be or not to be… agile

November 3, 2009

Whatever happened to Agile? Remember when it was the IT word du jour? The focus of our industry seems to have been shifted to other hip terms and topics: social networking, cloud computing, the browser wars, the mobile OS wars, green IT, slow IT, etc. Anyway, since I started this blog only recently, I’m going to pretend it’s still a hot topic and ramble about it a bit.

Having worked almost all of my professional life for outsourcing firms I’ve seen clients fall in love with the concept of agile, but not be truly prepared to deal with it in one or more ways. More often than not, their projects failed in at least one aspect (budget, timeline, product quality) or simply crashed and burned.

Agile is not a silver bullet. Nor is it the source of all evil. It’s just a methodology, and as such it should be used if the project calls for it. If you had to chop down a tree you would not use a screwdriver, but an axe or a saw. Unless you are Chuck Norris, in which case you would probably just glare at the tree and it would fall of its own will.

The IT world is full of stories of Agile projects gone awry, which leaves all parties wondering if Agility is not a cleverly thought out pyramid scheme. Most of those cases started out with an environment that called for a different approach and people unwilling or unable to detect it.

There are a number of factors that must be weighted in order to decide if a project is agile friendly. I can think of the following:

  1. Budget constraints: If you are about to undertake a project you could opt for agile if all parties agree upon a flexible budget. Fixed cost projects are not agile friendly. When doing outsourcing your client will love the concept of agility, but he will not always be willing to pay for it. The same applies for the internal client (i.e. the business) if you run the IT department of a company.
  2. Time constraints: Time boxing + agile = train wreck. Just as with budgets, you cannot set a strict deadline on a grassroots agile project. Instead you can wise your client to the fact that he will be able to progressively converge on the end date, with more visibility than that of traditional approaches, but still, it is pretty much impossible to have a clear view of the end line at moment zero.
  3. Client culture: The older and bigger the company, the more rooted its methods are, and the more difficult it will be to convince them of changing ways. This cultural inertia will probably make them a poor candidate to adopt agile methods. In these cases gradually introducing some agility will work best than going from dinosaur to gazelle in zero seconds.
  4. Requirements’ stability: The more volatile the requirements of the project, the more justified is using an agile method. The key is to determine a coherent way of measuring volatility.  A note: While the previous elements were potential deal breakers on their own, this one is more of a complementary variable. For instance, if a client has no idea of what he wants but still has a fixed date and money, you should steer clear of agile, whereas if culture, money and budget check ok but he has a great requirements specification, you could still opt for doing the gig in an agile manner.
  5. Project characteristics: No matter what analogies you might have read… Please do not build a bridge using agile methods.
  6. Client Participation: The whole point behind agile is having the client steer the wheel so the project can deliver business value fast. The client should participate on a regular basis in stand up meetings, or frequent update sessions; alternatively someone on the team could be empowered to act as his proxy. If none of these occur then you might want to consider other options.
  7. Business value: Will an iterative incremental approach deliver business value faster? This one might be another complementary decision item. If the answer is yes then agile will probably be a better approach, if the answer is no, then you could go either way depending on the other factors.

You should only use agile methods after conducting a positive health check following the above items and / or other factors you consider relevant in order to make an informed decision. Shush the extremists… don’t let anyone pitch you agility is hip, that it’s a unique and sexy lifestyle, the solution to all problems or a recipe for success. This is only helping accumulate failure cases.

An end note and my personal standpoint regarding this: Traditional development as we know it will slowly fade away. At least some lean concepts should be introduced in all methodologies. For instance traditional artifacts mixed with sprints, using an agile analysis stage followed by traditional development, whatever blend suits you. Agile was born for a reason: our collective failure as an industry to deliver what the client wanted (or a very low success ratio at least). That is something that cannot be ignored.

Shuje

On my next post: Why selling adult diapers at airports would be a huge success. Thoughts or comments on agile experiences? Post below or send them to shuje@holoom.com

6 Comments | Methodologies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shuje

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 158 other followers