It’s all about the people

September 3, 2011

Writing code is great. You can sit for hours at an end with a sore neck, coffee, an ashtray full of dogends (for smokers) and depending on the amount and quality of progress a feeling of despair or exhilaration.

Against the collective desire of the development community, I still, every now and then, do a bit of coding. It doesn’t happen all that frequently, but when it does… I enjoy it very much. I enjoy the thrill of the chase. The relentless pursuit of the binary state of done.

However, since I wrote my first line of code my career had a bit of everything and eventually landed in management. And that was it for me. Although I’m not particularly fond of all management work, I thoroughly enjoy dealing with people.

Smart, silly, hateful, passionate, lazy, dumb, lovable people.

When dealing with people you seldom have a state of done or even know what the state of done is. You can never consider all variables because variables become infinite. The human being is not only unpredictable per se but is also affected by a millon contributing environmental factors ranging from weather to a sports result. Nothing prepares you 100% for the task of managing people.

I find that fascinating.

That is what I love the most about my trade and generally about anything in the world. For the most part, I love people. I ocassionaly hate them. But I always love working with them.

It’s unpredictable, brillant, capricious, endearing people that makes it all worth while.

Shuje

PS: On my next post I will show you how to make a sound in a frequency that only dogs and Lady Gaga can hear.

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Cultural clashes and smashes

November 10, 2010

Our dear Peruvian brothers take “fashionably late” to levels never seen before. In Perú you never show up at the appointed hour; you show up an hour later. So much so, that in reality an hour later is actually the tacitly appointed hour. But if you make that new hour the official meeting hour, then you are actually making an hour after that one the new appointed hour. Did you get it? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.

Although we in Argentina make a habit of being fashionably late, we are usually punctual to serious affairs like a doctor’s appointment, a business meeting and such. So, when we travel to Peru on business, the locally called “peruvian hour” shakes us a bit, and might affect our business.

Different degrees of compatibility between cultures like the one above can make a business deal sink or swim (or secret option number three: paddle doggy style in circles). This is not limited to things lost in translation, like the marketing myth of the chinese “Coca Cola” which apparently in mandarin translates to “Bite the wax tadpole” (not a very attractive name for a canned product).

For example, Argentina has beaten India to business in more than one occasion due to the “excessive politeness” of Indians. Clients have told that “They keep saying ‘yes’ in conference calls, but two weeks later when delivery time hits you realize they did not understand the requirement”. That is a huge cultural gaffe and a sure advantage for a more feisty competitor.

Not to worry my Indian friend, we have flaws of our own.

For instance, we tend to take things overtly personal and that sometimes poses a serious problem when interacting with, for example, the US. Business in the US is conducted by straight shooters. They use small talk because it’s appropriate, but there’s rarely genuine interest there (“How’s the weather and who cares?”) They much rather jump straight to business but because they are excellent at business ettiquete they will put up a reglamentary amount of small talk. Then after asking you about your kids and husband they will shoot “Your work sucks”. You must not take this personal. It’s business; when the clock strikes 5 pretty much as in the cartoon of the wolf and the sheepdog they will offer to buy you a beer.

The above mentioned behavior clashes with Argentine culture. We tend to have a mindset in which “If you like my work you like me, if you don’t you hate me and why would you hate me if I bought you beer?”

Consequentially, people in Argentina have trouble giving negative feedback. They will tell you you’re doing a great job and then recommend you are fired. This happens. A lot. Everywhere. It has nothing to do with douche-bags who tell you one thing and then do the other, it’s a genuine shortcoming of ours. We need to get past this. Business is business.

Somewhere in the middle of the US culture and the Argentine culture lays the ideal path: Telling things like they are, but with a humane approach.

Brazilians of certain regions tend to take things too easy; people in the UK are very respectful of the clock. Scots are friendly and germans are rigid. The list goes on.

It’s a good thing for people trying to do business offshore to understand and adapt to the clients’ culture. Sometimes you are already a match made in heaven, sometimes it will pay to make an extra effort; whatever you do, do not overlook the fact that culture can make or break deals.

Shuje

PS: On my next post I will present the spring collection: As I suspected female street nudity is making a comeback.

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Shut uppa your face (body talk stories)

March 1, 2010

Don’t mind the title. I have not forgotten my English and I’m not on drugs (most of the time.) There is a saying in Spanish that loosely translated goes something like: A man is a slave to his words and master of his silences.

The saying means that whatever you choose to disclose, you must later live with. However it is incomplete. Whoever coined it forgot to mention that you do not only speak with words. Your body also talks.

Awhile back, in my project management years, while negotiating the completion of some requirements for a turbulent project, I noticed the client’s counterpart (a very senior guy who had been CIO of huge financial firms) knew exactly when to push for me to cave, and when to hold back because I wouldn’t budge.

Naturally negotiations went extremely well for them, he tossed a small victory my way once in a while, but I was never in control and we ended up doing a lot of extra work for the remainder of the project.

After doing a victory dance on the meeting table, the guy called me in private and said: “Dude, you wear your emotions in your sleeve”. He went on to explain how he was able to read me like an open book and that it was a sin of youth that I would eventually overcome. I appreciated the fact that he took time to encourage me and explain what had transpired. I understood perfectly, because as it happens it used to be a trait of my personality to have an awfully bad, nearly nonexistent poker face.

A sales guy I used to work with despised doing sales pitches with tech guys. He felt they were overly honest and borderline naïve and jeopardized his craft (i.e. bullshitting the bullshit out of bullshit.)

Sins are context sensitive. While lying is bad, lying in sales is generally accepted as a necessary evil. Tech guys with little or no sales experience are about the purest thing in our craft and often have aversion to lying, especially the youngest ones.

Eventually my sales friend learned to prep them before meetings. Still he could not do anything about their faces. One person in particular was so face-honest that one time a client representative said “You don’t seem to agree with what your friends are saying, care to give your opinion on this?”

My sales buddy opted to never use him again, in spite of him being brilliant. Sales pitches and negotiation instances are places where you want a good poker face and a quiet body.

If you are new to the concept of body language, on the next few meetings you have, be in the lookout for crossed arms, finger tapping, sudden face shifting, restlessness, and any other telltale sign that the other person is harboring an emotion triggered by something that happened in the meeting. You will slowly learn to identify patterns that will help you interpret what your counterpart is feeling.

As a for instance by looking at you right now, I can tell you are bored beyond belief. I will now shut up. Sorry about that.

Shuje

On my next post: A blue pill that makes your pants shrink! In the meantime, please tell me your poke-her face stories by either posting below or writing to shuje@holoom.com

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Antibodies for your job

December 21, 2009

A good friend of mine in the project management business once told me that each time you get a promotion (i.e. new responsibilities) you might suffer the adaptation until your body builds the appropriate defenses to deal with the pressure. She called those defenses “Job Antibodies” which was rather amusing but very true.

I experienced this when I was appointed manager for the first time. I certainly didn’t feel like a manager – I had yet to build the confidence – and although I had had the de facto manager status before, the actual title conferred a very palpable accountability. Since the manager inside of me was still crouching, naturally everything about anything regarding the job made me nervous: team meetings, one-on-one conversations, reporting to upper management, etc.

Although my team (the functional analysts) was a very cohesive, extremely skilled, high performing group of people (actually it might have been because of that) those were a shaky first three or four months until I grew the antibodies for the job.

However, antibodies are not needed exclusively in the aftermath of promotions, but rather to cope with any situation that you have not faced before and for which your emotions are still unprepared. Again, I was able to experience this, fourteen months or so after that first management appointment, when I faced the first resignation on my team.

To give you some background let’s just say Argentina is a very sweet country for IT job hopping and since this occurred way before the sub-prime crisis surfaced, it was even sweeter. Our universities cannot produce enough professionals to cope with the demand of the market which results in a very interesting battle between companies trying to best one another based on salaries, advancement opportunities, benefits, etc. Think of it as a reverse game of musical chairs, only when the music stops, everyone has a seat and there are a couple thousand extra ones available.

So rotation levels were high but I felt very proud that during that first year and couple of months my team held strong and did nothing but grow in number, even amidst some pretty big attrition numbers in the rest of the company. Intimately – mostly to myself – I wore that record as a badge, so when one of my analysts told me she was leaving it hit me pretty hard.

The month or so that passed after I got the notification I was decreasingly miserable. My misery of course peaked the few days after I found out: I was a nerve wreck, I felt incredibly guilty and I could not face upper management with a straight face although everyone was supportive and pretty much casual about the situation.

It was in that coolness from upper management that I ultimately found peace. My mind put two and two together and realized if they were cool about it, it was because they have lived through the experience over and over. It’s a fact of life that people are going to leave your company at a certain time, and although it’s reasonable to have a grieving period about it, you cannot have it paralyze you.

I found a great statement in a very crappy movie (Top Gun) that illustrated this clearly: Tom Cruise character’s co-pilot had just died and Commander Big-Moustache comforted him by telling him that “First one dies, you die too. But there will be others, you can count on that.”

Since I was then and I am still a touchy feely person who does not relate with subordinates exclusively at the professional level I grew antibodies of two types: Type A to deal with the personal loss of a person I cared for; and Type B for dealing with the professional loss of an excellent analyst.

Eventually more people in my teams left and although it is something I never enjoy, I am now able to deal with it in a more professional manner aided by the antibodies I built way back then.

Bottom-line: Emotional intelligence is a great ally in the workplace; do not build yourself to be a cold-blooded old-school business type. Embrace the small amounts of grief that accompany learning and let your antibodies thrive. You will grow with them.

Shuje

On my next post I will give you a sneak peek of the screenplay for Harry Crapper and the Malfunctioning Toilette.

Recently grown any antibodies? Post below or email me at shuje@holoom.com

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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

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Death, taxes and bad managers

October 7, 2009

The title for this post is what I like to call life’s “crap trifecta”; eventually all of us have to endure the three of them. Since I can’t find anything interesting to say regarding death and taxes, let’s focus on bad managers.

Being a manager is not as simple as having the granted power that comes with the title.  I’ve seen and suffered awful managers that got picked for the job just because they were suck ups to upper management or lucky or political or a number of reasons that had nothing to do with being qualified for the job. Don’t get me wrong, a reasonable use of politics and luck are always required, but they cannot be the pillars for career advancement.

On the other hand I’ve seen great leaders become not so good managers. The reason is that leadership is derived from charisma, superb skills in one’s turf, seniority or some other trait that generates peer respect, but not all leaders are cut out for management (i.e. they do not have the people skills, administrative skills, desire, etc.)

The interesting thing is that good leaders do not require a title. While people will not always respect their managers they will always respect a leader.

So, what does it take to be a good manager?

In theory there are three types of management styles:

  1. Autocratic: The decision making lies in the manager.
  2. Democratic: The manager includes the team in the decision making process.
  3. Laissez Faire: The team has complete control over the decision making process.

A very important fact underlying all of the above: No matter how the manager chooses to delegate, he or she is always responsible for the actions of the team.

A good manager switches between management styles according to the situation. The rule of thumb for managers is asking where the expertise to make the decision lies. Is it oneself, the team, or all? Personally I’ve used the following criteria:

  1. For critical decisions or manager appointed tasks such as evaluations, setting of overall goals, career advancement, raises, disciplinary actions and such I use an autocratic approach.
  2. For everyday operative decisions or decisions that will affect the whole team, the best thing to do is be democratic.
  3. For stuff that is so every day that you lost the grip and the team clearly knows more about it than you do – and probably will get twice as affected as you by the outcome – let the team choose what is best (laissez faire)

By using these criteria I found that my style was a blend of approximately 60% democratic, 20% laissez faire and 20% autocratic.

Why this entire preamble when all you are looking for is somewhere to buy a sawed off shotgun to get rid of that bastard boss of yours? Because I believe that for the most part, bad managers are those who have a malfunction in the management style gland.

There are those who follow strictly one style and are dictatorial for the most part. There are those who are completely absent and leave the team meandering without goals or supervision. There are yet others who indeed use a mix of all three styles but make a poor choice as to where they should exercise which.

Some examples of bad management I experienced:

  1. Manager too busy or too careless to even set goals for the team (chronic laissez faire)
  2. Boss setting out to vote on a collective decision then just because the outcome of the vote is not the one he wanted vetoes it (phony democrat)
  3. Manager who won’t listen to anyone’s opinion for any matter (excessive autocrat)
  4. Boss who seemingly lets people work alone but then sneaks in an reads the e-mails his subordinates write (hidden autocrat – micro manager syndrome)
  5. Boss who lets the team make a decision then blames the team for a bad outcome (douche bag)
  6. Sadly a long list of etc.

This theory does not void other potential causes for a bad boss-subordinate relationship (often times “my boss is an idiot” is the only plausible explanation) but the next time you are confronted with a manager you dislike, try to analyze his actions in light of what I posted here. You will find that more often than not, what you don’t like about him lies in his management style. This, in turn, could help you try to modify things a bit.

Shuje

Disclaimer: No managers were harmed during the writing of this post.

On my next post I will show you how playing a Milli Vanilli record backwards uncovers a recipe for brownies. In the meantime if you have bad manager stories to share, or would like to discuss shotgun rentals please post below or contact me at shuje@holoom.com

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