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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IT Horoscope for 2011

January 5, 2011

So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different. That is actually the opening line for a Death Cab for Cutie song. It is also a metaphore for things not changing.

Around this time of the year anyone with a keyboard and anything remotely resembling a blog starts churning out predictions for 2011. It’s actually a very cool thing to do, because generally speaking, no one will ever revisit what you said a year ago because… well.. who cares? And even those wise people that say they analyze how their predictions did last year, find a way of lying themselves into a winning position. “I said the iPad was going to be used a lot and I was right!” said someone who predicted iPads were going to be used as paper-weight.

I for one, did no predictions. I openly mocked the iPad and I still stand by the idea that it is something that Apple pulled off because it is Apple (which is awesome by the way.) Imagine instead of the Apple iPad the “Microsoft Brick” with all of MS credibility (not!), spot on aesthetics (not!) and great eye for usability (not!) and (mal)functionality.

But enough with paralell universes. Since I do not like predictions I’m going for something entirely more sophisticated… a 2011 horoscope for IT personas. It kind of resembles the chinese material / animal approach, but not quite.

Fire belching steel dragon (i.e. Security engineers). This year you will hate everyone that holds a computer within the organization you work in. They will still all be dumbasses that do not care for the safety of the network. The ones that do not hold a computer, are also dumb asses, but less hazardous at that.

Floor crawling crap weasel (i.e. Social Media Guru). People will start demanding some return on the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Facebook and Twitter that have not rendered them a single penny still in ROI. Be in the lookout for payed hitmen.

Java spewing dirt goat (i.e. Backend Developer) The world will continue to deny you the glory you deserve for being oh so great and having the solution to all problems. They will complain about how complex and ugly your interfaces look and how long it takes to process something and all because you had to add 19 layers of framework upon framework to produce a hello world application in record time (2 and a half weeks).

Excel wielding stone fox (i.e. Old School Project Manager). Things will be exactly as they should be. Always. Things will happen for a reason and when they happen they will be dealt with accordingly, always in time and within budget.

Smile faking poop hiena (i.e. Sales Representative) People in your company still will not understand your sales strategies. So what if your company sells software and you struck a deal for five thousand flat screen TVs? How hard can it be?

Table pivoting cardboard rat (i.e. CFO) Everything and anything will be overpriced and unnecesary. The organization will still try to spend money on superfluous things such as toilette paper and surveillance and you will be the only voice of reason.

That’s all I have for now.

Happy new year everyone!

Shuje

PS: On my next post a picture of myself in my cutest jammies. It’s all for charity people!

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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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Office fauna – The rock

March 8, 2010

Inanimate objects can be part of the office fauna too. Rocks are individuals so stoic that no amount of crap will alter their state of cool. They make for excellent storm pilots, something I am particularly weak at if you consider that my first action during a crisis is usually to hide under the desk curled up in a ball and wait for everything to fix itself.

Rocks are almost never charismatic leaders. They are almost never going to throw a hoedown or tell jokes, but they will get you safely to the end line of the project. You can usually find them in management positions and yet they have probably taken longer to get there than outspoken charismatic (and maybe less talented) individuals, because they are not as noticeable to their bosses as the latter.

I worked with rocks in the past and we usually complemented very well.

I remember one time, minutes before delivering a crucial sales demo via webex to a Fortune 500 company our network crashed. Some misconfiguration on sub-networks or something. 5 minutes before the demo was supposed to start, we had to cancel it, which was pretty embarrassing.

My reaction was to decapitate an innocent chair with a swift kick and to start cursing. My technical partner for the presentation happened to be a rock. He looked at my antics but never moved. Once I had finished he simply looked at me and stated: “We should check out what went wrong, and make sure we test for that before we re-schedule the call, then test prior to the call”.

Excellent approach to things. I had to deal with my nerves and then with the network issue. My buddy there just had the one problem of fixing the network in his head. So much more efficient.

If I had a wish, I would wish for a rock in every project.

Ok, maybe I would wish for a lot of money and girls, but my second wish would be for a rock in every project.

Shuje

On my next post I will explain how to decapitate chairs using the Chuck Norris roundhouse kick. Comments? Do your thing below or write to shuje@holoom.com

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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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Office talk

February 15, 2010

Inspired by Bob Lewis’ excellent blog, particularly the Management Speak snippets, I present you with a number of office sentences that conceal an entirely different meaning, and their corresponding translations:

1. Manager to subordinate: “Instead of giving you the solution, I want you to figure this out”
Real meaning: “I don’t know what the hell you are talking about, but it looks like a lot of work and I don’t want to get involved. So you do it and let me know so I can take credit for it.”

2. Manager to subordinate: “I have to give you credit for this”
Real meaning: “Because there are witnesses that saw you perform the job, I have to give you credit for this. Otherwise I would keep the credit to myself.”

3. Peer to peer: “I always knew you were the right person for this position.”
Real meaning: “I fought teeth and claw so that you wouldn’t get appointed to this. But now that you are doing a nice enough job, I want to stay on your good side.”

4. Peer to peer: “My boss is an idiot.”
Real meaning: “My boss is an idiot.”

5. Subordinate to manager: “My biggest defect is that I demand too much of myself.”
Real meaning: “My biggest defect is my total lack of self criticism.”

6. Subordinate to manager: “I need to talk to you about my responsibilities.”
Real meaning: “I need to talk to you about my salary.”

7. Shuje to you: “Inspired by Bob Lewis’ excellent blog.”
Real meaning: “Blatantly plagiarizing Bob Lewis.”

Shuje

On my next post I will explain why Buzz should remain a mating call for mosquitoes and nothing else. In the meantime, I would really like to hear your examples of Office Talk. Post below of email them to shuje@holoom.com

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Office fauna – Wandering meddlers

January 11, 2010

Ever since I wrote my post on office fauna a considerable number of readers (i.e. two people) have asked that I deliver more descriptions of the creatures that haunt the IT hallways. Instead of doing another big delivery I decided to deliver installments with one creature per post. I’m going to take this approach for several reasons, the main one being that I’m extremely lazy. Today I’m going to talk about the wandering meddler.

Meddlers are predators that feed on the attention of others. They usually hunt during office hours looking for conversations that are happening between two or more people and when they find one, they patiently await a cue to jump in uninvited and participate.

There are social meddlers who like to jump in mainly into social conversations; work meddlers who mostly feed on conversations regarding professional activities and omnivores who will break into whatever is happening as long as they can grab the limelight for a few moments and dazzle you with their wonderful worldview (not!).

They are extremely territorial and dislike the presence of fellow meddlers since they tend to compete for the attention they so eagerly seek. They are usually obnoxious people that would otherwise not be invited to participate in the conversation to begin with. They also lack self criticism or they would realize they are not welcome.

Depending on the rank of the person, they could be extremely hard to avoid. High-ranking meddlers are especially difficult because it could prove a career faux-pas to tell off your boss or superior.

To effectively deal with a meddler one must cultivate patience and the ability to simulate a cell phone call to extricate oneself from a conversation without arising suspicions.

Shuje

On my next post I will explain why I use words such as “extricate” and “faux pas” without knowing what they mean. In the meantime, post your thoughts, suggestions and experiences with office fauna below or mail them to shuje@holoom.com

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Talking is not the goal of a meeting

January 4, 2010

If there was a tool that could monetize the time wasted on useless meetings I assure you CEOs everywhere would go berserk and start punching people. The fact is the higher up the chain of command your resources are the more likely they will spend a lot of time in meetings, and the more their wasted hours will cost you.

The title for this post is worth emphasizing: Talking is not the goal of a meeting.

Meetings have specific goals. These are not always tangible or even measurable but very real nonetheless. Although there are several types of meetings with several purposes, they all usually fall under one or more of the following:

  1. Informative meetings: The goal is to communicate something. Examples of these are one-on-ones for communicating a promotion, status update meetings with clients, corporate gatherings to communicate news, sales pitches, etc.
  2. Decision making meetings: These are held to discuss certain topics and make decisions for later action. Examples of these are board meetings, management meetings, etc.
  3. Social meetings: After office parties, office-hour lunches, birthday celebrations, etc. Although one would be tempted to say that these meetings are just for talking, the goal is to build team spirit.
  4. Work meetings: Working together is better than pulling the cart alone. Working in the same room or getting together to tackle something with a team, could prove very useful.

You will probably find more categories or a different way or categorizing them. That’s fine; I wasn’t trying to set a standard.

As an example the goal for a sales pitch is to ultimately sell your product or service. The goal can be easily ascertained: At some point in time it’s either you’ve made the sale or not.

A meeting for team building has no measurable goal. Hopefully once it’s over you will notice some improvements, but it is never as tangible as the previous example.

The following is a brief list of common setbacks I’ve come across when participating in meetings:

Lack of proper facilities: You would not believe how many times I had to improvise because the meeting organizer forgot to book a conference room or a phone bridge. Also projectors, white boards, presentations, everything required to carry out the meeting should be prepared with anticipation.

Misunderstanding the goal of the meeting: If the purpose of the meeting is deciding budget cuts for next quarter and someone brings a beer keg and party hats things are bound to go to the crapper. At the very least, the meeting organizer should understand what the meeting is for and try to set a proper tone.

Lack of an agenda: Let’s leave social gatherings out of this one. For the rest of the meeting types a meeting roadmap, usually represented in the form of an agenda is a great aid. Even for one on ones, having some predefined structure can help direct the meeting. Agendas should not be improvised as a last minute thing. They should be prepared with anticipation.

Absence of a moderator: In every meeting someone has to moderate. Usually someone handles the timing, the agenda, the action item list, etc. The moderator could be appointed formally or tacitly. Often times when no moderator is appointed someone takes it upon himself to naturally lead the proceedings.

Compulsive talkers: I knew a manager that was so enamored of his voice that meeting durations invariably multiplied tenfold and nothing useful came out of them. He would go on and on for hours not even scratching the surface of the predefined topics. Everyone would leave the room a bit older and a lot dumber, wondering how he / she could make up for the lost time and what on earth was that all about.

Meeting output: Some meetings have a byproduct called the action item list. This is a set of tasks with a deadline and the person accountable for executing it. If decisions are made but there is no proper action item list as the output of the meeting, and moreover, this action item list is not periodically revised, then the meeting might as well not have existed in the first place.

Distracted participants: This one I never figured out how to solve, mainly because I’m part of the problem here. People will read e-mails, answer cell phone calls, chat, etc. Smart-phones and laptops are so common in everyday corporate life that having everyone focused on the meeting is almost impossible.

My favorite meetings are those in which everything is prepared with a reasonable degree of anticipation. They have an agenda, all the facilities necessary to carry it out, a moderator, an action item list as output and a minute of the meeting to set everything in stone. These meetings leave everyone with a sense of accomplishment. Sadly, most meetings I’ve been a part of, are nothing like that.

CEOs everywhere: Start punching and always remember what Dwight from The Office said: “The eyes are the groin of the head”

Shuje

On my next post I will show you very graphic evidence as to why banana hammocks should be banned. Until then please comment below or send me details of your bad meeting experiences 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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