My Life Blog

I used to work for Graham Glass in late 2001 — but only for about three months. I was struck with one of his statements in my interview whereby he said code should be a work of art — it should be elegant.

I agreed then and I agree now.

Unfortunately, back in that time period, my mind was fairly scattered with a few other issues and I just wasn’t performing as I should have been. I had been through three companies within the past two years and had my confidence badly shaken. But that’s not what this post is about.

He would review my code and among the many changes and suggestions he would make, he would point out extra spaces or blank lines. I hadn’t realized that I was so inconsistent and basically careless. I learned and that stuck with me.

Now my code looks purposeful and consistent. EVERYTHING is thought out. Its a house with all its dishes put up (unlike mine currently). Its a house with books in shelves and not lying idly on a counter (unlike mine currently). Anyway, you get the point.

And so now I’ve gone native.

I now don’t really understand why everyone isn’t like that. As much time as we spend coding, we should all have our simple coding patterns under control. When I review code these days, I judge people based upon these little things. I don’t know if its quite fair, but if code is inconsistent, it rubs me completely the wrong way. It makes me question focus and one’s passion for their work.

In a recent experience, we had an “external” take on a project of moderate complexity that was pretty self-contained. We let him riff for weeks on end, but took no incremental checkpoints. Bad idea, by the way. And I take the blame for believing I was too busy to look in on the code. Anyway, when I finally checked it out, it was complete stream-of-consciousness programming! It was Jacob’s Ladder meets Vanilla Sky. It was as if he drunken-dialed in over the VPN!

The least offensive items were unused imports, parameters, and variables. Though I call those pretty offensive these days since our IDEs point those out for you these days. But beyond that, the logic was unbelievably scattered. Methods were long. Snippets of code were out of order. Exceptions were being eaten. I could go on.

So what did I do? I elbowed him off the project. That’s a weakness of mine. As Steve Macquire says in “Debugging the Development Process”, I flipped the bozo bit on him. And unfortunately, I’m complaining a lot because I’m now doing the development work that we’ve already paid for and are now late on.

My code? Well, of course, it reads like “The Da Vinci Code”. Well, perhaps maybe a little less intriguing…

Have you witnessed this phenomenon?

Phase I:
You perform well and are recognized as a dependable performer. Others, well, not so much. Consequently, you get all the challenging projects — sometimes two and three at a time. Others, sitting around while you work your ass off.

Phase II:
You harbor resentment at having to pull your weight and some of the weight of others. You get weary and disenchanted and you wonder what’s in it for you. Why not become one of them? And yet you are driven — you can’t become one of them.

Phase III:
You leave the company in search of an environment where you can work with others and grow. You crave a level playing field and a learning and inspiring organization.

Phase IV:
Sometime later, the phenomenon tips within your former company — the good people have left and the ones that remain are incapable and disinterested. Productivity declines. Work quality declines. Stock prices fall.

I have this feeling this is a very real anti-pattern. And I think I’m in Phase II.

Do I take the red pill or the blue pill?

I rarely watch commercials these days because I record everything with my Tivo-like technology (UltimateTV). However, I enjoyed the new Madden 2005 commercial with Ray Lewis.

The commercial is set on the football field and its Ray and his team trying to defend another team from getting a first down. You can see the virtual yellow first-down marker on the field — and its not so virtual. Ray bends down and picks it up and says, “Is this what you want?!” And then he moves it several yards down the field.

Very creative…

I am struggling with yet another work dilemna — am I the biggest complainer lately or what?

Have you ever been asked to do something with full knowledge that that is the wrong thing to do? I’m in that situation right now. And we’re spending LOTS of dollars and euros to do it.

For example, we’re co-developing part of our web-based web registration process. My team is doing the backend, while the team elsewhere is doing the front-end. They have put into place some business rules that make no sense:

- Different customers can have the same e-mail address. And if they do, they must have a unique password in order to uniquely address them. Believe it or not, Amazon has this model.

- At login, they want to be sure they know that you are the one who REALLY has that e-mail address, so they want to scan the entire database for duplicates. All this in order to force you to update your information in the database so that THEY (we) can have an accurate address to send e-mail to.

I think the people who have conceived of these rules are so misdirected. What we want to do is make it easy and painless for our customers to register with us. Then once they do, they should be able to get in easily and without a wait. We want to be selfless for the most part to enhance their experience. As it is now, we selfishly impose our business rules and make them wait while we perform our housekeeping.

So, my opinion is that while the sponsors believe we are building a system that will net us more consumer registrations, in fact we are doing the opposite. My source of pain is that I have no channel to the sponsor to ask if they really know what they are doing.

Its stuff like this that makes it hard for me to bear to work the overtime necessary to meet a deadline. In my opinion, we are better off the longer that this stuff does not go online. Sad, but true.

Suzanne and I were discussing all the movies lately that have involved super heroes and their villains. There’s Batman, Spiderman, Catwoman, The Hulk, etc. And now the trend is to combine them to make super-movies — kinda like Alien vs. Predator. So it led me to wonder are we very far away from having a Super Friends movie? And even moreso, where are the Wonder Twins in all this? And more fun than that, who would be cast as the Wonder Twins?

You see the title and wonder how can Aliens vs. Predator be a blast from the past. Well, it reminds me of my college days when my dorm buddies and I would gather in a dorm room and play a little game where we’d debate who would win if you threw two or more “bad-asses” into a room and locked it up.

The favorite match-up then was John Wayne vs. Clint Eastwood — we had a guy who was over-the-top on John Wayne so he could usually argue well that John Wayne would come out victorious.

But it makes me wonder now who the amusing match-ups would be. The obvious ones come from the political ranks and sometimes I think it’d be more fun to settle things that way. Can you imagine pay-per-view of Bush vs. Kerry?

I also think we should put our terrible criminals in a room and have them help offset the money that they cost us in bringing them to trial. So I’m calling for Scott Peterson vs. Mark Hacking.

And by the way, if your daughter ever wants to marry a guy with the last name “Hacking”, please consider whether that’s really a good idea.

My company, heretofore nameless, is moving to a modified outsourcing approach. I say “modified” because they are planning to buy deliverables instead of outsourcing complete projects. I am not completely sure what the motivation is for this new approach. And I’m not convinced that the right issues have been thought through.

I will freely volunteer that I miss the “good ole days” where I worked with a tight-knit group of similiar-minded and motivated performers. These days it seems like we’ve moved to augmenting staff where needed and in doing so not even bothering to ensure proper levels of competence. What I’ve experienced lately are dysfunctional teams that never gell — they never converge. And further, we disband the team and people go their separate ways after benefiting from the experience that we provided them.

The outsourced deliverable mode will be even worse. Now we will have to thoroughly define what we want, painstakingly keep tabs on the progress (not an altogether bad thing), and keep up constant communication to a group working offsite. To me, this adds a lot of “motion” to the project. And another set of communication paths — we all know what can happen with those, right?

So I wonder, if this is the right thing to do. Is it efficient? Does it save us money? Do we get what we pay for? What about those who must manage the process? Is this what we signed up for?

I personally am quite concerned about my role within the company. I like the engineering process and I like the team camaraderie. It appears that those aspects of my job are quickly fading into the past. But of course, I’d have to say they were only mildly present even in the early days of my career at this nameless company.

So what to do now? Clearly my niche in life is to participate in a team-oriented environment which builds an interesting system. In the past, I’ve found product-oriented companies to be the most fun, but unfortunately the least secure. I’ve also never had a good experience with the kind of work you get within an IT organization. However, they are the most secure. So I will be introspecting some in the coming days to see what changes I need to make to ensure that going to work is a pleasurable and rewarding experience.