My Life Blog

Suzanne has been making fun of me for not blogging after posing the question: does anyone read this anymore? In that post, I believe I alluded to writing a bit more. And then promptly I disappeared for several months. What can I say? Guilty as charged.

So what’s new?

I’m still going it on my own work-wise. My tiny one-person LLC is doing fine as in November, I landed a contract with the world’s search engine company of choice. I can’t really say what I’m doing and for whom within that company due to non-disclosure legalities, but I can say that I’m working with a talented group of folks in a skillset that I’ve adopted in the past couple of years.

I can also say that I’m enjoying a telecommuting existence whereby my commute only involves walking up a flight of stairs. I manage my own time and live a VPN-connected existence. The obvious downsides are few daily interpersonal interactions and life in a bandwidth-constrained environment. The upsides are pretty obvious, the work is interesting, bozo-free, and I’m nicely paid for my contributions. I’m hoping the arrangement lasts for a long time.

I’ve also recently released a side-project of mine. I’ve been a fan of SportsRadio 1310, The Ticket, a local sports talk radio show for a long time. It was the first of its kind when it started in 1994 and it provides a combination of sports talk and really just guy talk in general. After all these years, the on-air staff are nearly family. Their site absolutely sucks, so I thought I would create a sort of unofficial fan site to extend their brand elegantly into the web world. Who knows if it will catch on, but you can take a look at my creation at Ticketheads.com. When you go there, just know that the site is meant to appeal to men between the ages of 25 and 54. As such, the content is calibrated to that type of audience.

Otherwise, Suzanne and I are doing well and are looking forward to our next planned trip to Hawaii. This time, we are splitting our time between Maui and our beloved Kauai. There are still many months between now and our trip, so it will be a while before we can tell you how cool Maui is. Let us hope that I blog before then.

I have been told by many that I need to blog more.  I’ll admit I go through spurts where I write a lot and then go dark, so right as I reclaim some readership, I leave them high-and-dry.  What can I say?  Sorry about that; let me make amends by offering up somewhat of an update on things.

So let me start by recounting some goings-on from the last six months or so.

In mid-April I was notified that I was being laid off by Nokia.  There was no rhyme or reason for my being selected as I was a top developer integral in several projects.  But for me, it was a “free at last” kind of moment.  While the technology and experience were great and very relevant, the corporate dysfunction had greatly diminished my enjoyment of the job.  Fortunately, Nokia is a very generous and humane company and so my employment didn’t end until the end of June and I was paid a severance package and my first-half bonus.  I was, at first, pretty bitter to be selected and then given no reason, but I’m convinced it was best for my career.

Meanwhile, Suzanne had an upheaval with her job a few weeks after I got my layoff notification.  The attorney that she works for decided to leave the firm after some 22 years there.  Since they’ve been working together for 7 years, he really wanted her to go with him.  And so after some time to think about it, Suzanne decided to go.

But here’s where it gets funny.  She and I had a previously-scheduled trip to Kauai set up for mid-May.  As terms of my layoff, my last day to report onsite to Nokia was in mid-May.  And as luck would have it, Suzanne’s last day at her old job was that same day.  The next day, we went to Kauai for two weeks both with no jobs; though hers was lined up for her return.

Kauai was great as usual and that’s been well-profile on here, so I won’t say much about it.  In late June, I ended up temporarily contracting with a company called Click Here which is an advertising agency.  I then transitioned into being a full-time employee.  I was lured there by the prospect of working on great websites, with talented designers, and using Ruby on Rails while working on my Mac.

Also in late June, Suzanne and I went to The Police concert.  They were awesome!  I was so in awe when I saw Sting take the stage — what fabulous shape he is in!  I told Suzanne that I was completely letting her down in that regard.

The rest of the Summer was rather uneventful, but I was growing disenchanted with the new company I was with.  There were many reasons for this, but I won’t go into them here.  So after about three months, I decided to leave the company to strike out on my own.  I’m currently working up my own little freelance development company.  So these days I’m busy planning, marketing, and doing client work as I have it — and for now, I’m doing so from home.  I can’t tell you how nice it is to work at home.

So now we’re mostly caught up, I’ll try to blog more often with smaller tidbits that are hopefully more interesting and more current.

This goes in the we-do-everything-together category.

In early April, I was notified by Nokia that I was being laid off. In February, there was a meeting called suddenly on the day after Valentine’s Day to notify all those in the IT area that layoffs would follow within the next couple of months. No criteria was given, we just knew it was 700 company-wide, 90 within IT, and our best guess was that up to 40 employees outside of Finland would be affected.

I never expected to be one of the affected ones. I’m highly productive, am 100% utilized, and am on two important projects both glowing hot right now. But logic (the kind I understand, anyway) does not always apply to layoffs. On April 12th, I was notified I was affected. My pride was hurt for 10 minutes and then I realized that I was being paid well to leave — something I was going to do when I returned from vacation. It was the best possible scenario for me. My last day as a contributing employee with Nokia is Thursday, May 17th — the day before our vacation starts.

On Monday May 7th, Suzanne’s boss of 7 years pulls her into his office for a private discussion. These are rare and thus unusual. Something was up. His news was shocking — he was leaving the firm after 23 years. With such history between them, Suzanne was encouraged to follow him to his new firm. So after a few days of thinking about it, talking about it, and waiting on certain details to become evident, she is indeed following him. Her last day? Thursday May 17th.

So if you haven’t put it together yet, both of us leave for vacation having served our last day at our respective former employer. I cannot tell you how weird this is. We have often threatened that we will leave for Kauai and never come back and now we are to be taken seriously. I jokingly mentioned that I might interview while we are there. I would follow through on that threat, but that would mean I’d have to pack interview clothes, so that’s not going to happen.

This does set us up for an interesting June (and beyond). Suzanne will report to her new job and I will continue the process of looking for my new gig.

On June 26th, we go see The Police when they come to town — Synchronicity…

You are wondering where I’ve been, no?

As of Monday morning at 1:30am, I completed my 80+ hour work week which included a joyful tour of duty on Independence Day.  There’s something ironic about that.

But alas, I need to step into the Confessional today and seek forgiveness for all the programming and system atrocities committed over the past 7 days.  The fact that I’m moved to do so should be considered exceptional as I’m not even Catholic.  And to be honest, I’m not sure there really is a God that can hear these tales; the God of Systems never answered my prayers.

To set the stage, for months I’ve been working on a project where there have been no requirements other than the implicit "build what we already have" directive.  We’re migrating off of an old, delapidated  platform onto the newest app server.  It must be stated emphatically that these sins were committed under duress.  And so we begin:

• I did knowingly avoid TDD (test-driven development) and check stuff straight in under the naive assumption that some development time could be saved.  To those who don’t know, this is always Fool’s Gold.

• I did knowingly allow non-semantic and table-based markup to be allowed into the system.  It must be said that I wrote none of it myself.  Zeldman would be proud.  Of me, that is.

• I did knowingly sleep at night even though our organization did not choose to set up a QA group to test the application.  If bullets one and three scare you, well, welcome to my world.

• I did knowingly vehemently complain to management on too numerous times to count.  I became an outspoken, worse-than-a-squeaky-wheel bi-atch.  The approach appealed to my passive-aggressive tendencies, but has done little to progress my "career".  Yes, the word must be quoted at this point.

• With mild regret and some strange element of power-tripping, I did knowingly code entire features after UAT and after go-live was in progress.  To compound the sin, the code bypassed testing and our QA environment and went straight to Production.  Hey, when in Rome…

• I did knowingly substitute brute force for design elegance as the aggressive timeline approached.  I’ve noticed no one cares about elegance in IT anyway.  But parts of me died with each rustic piece of code that I added.  I think I’ve paid for this sin already. 

• And saving the worst for last.  Over the weekend, I ate 2 packages of cheese and crackers, three bags of Doritos, three pieces of pizza, 8 Hershey’s bite-sized bars, four Ding-Dongs, 1 piece of blue-icing cake, and food from Chic-Fil-A, Pei-Wei, and Celebrity.  I also drank a Sprite and several Diet Cokes.  Oh…and I brought my guitar in and demonstrated to everyone that I still can’t play the damned thing.

I could go on and on, but they say you should keep blog posts short. 

I stand waiting for my judgment and am down on my knees begging for forgiveness. 

"Forgive me Father, for I know not what I do…"  Obviously.

Speaking purely hypothetically, of course.

An employee is gifted an item from his / her company.  The item is received with no guidelines, advisements, or paperwork; it is mentioned that it is for personal use.  The item also happens to be a coveted new product produced by that same company.  As such, the item has some temporary heightened value.

The employee decides to sell the item versus keeping it as he / she does not attach the same value to the device as others.  The item is placed online for sale.

Days later, the company discovers the item is for sale online.  They do so because items are apparently stolen and sold often enough to warrant this kind of sleuthing.  In this case, there is no theft.

The employee’s manager calls the employee into an office for a private chat.  The item’s online sale representation is displayed.  The manager without saying so, in so many words would like the item taken off sale. 

Again, there were no advisements prior to the change in possession.  Should the employee take the item off sale?  If the employee does not, what repercussions could there possibly be outside of the off-the-record score that managers keep?

Hypothetically, of course.  This could never happen in real life…

Yesterday a meeting was called and a select few of my team members were invited.  The meeting was billed as a refocusing meeting.  In that meeting our deadline was extended one week.  So now they want to go live on the weekend prior to July 4th.

But something else happened.  They gave all in attendance a Nokia N90 phone.  These are some of Nokia’s best phones and they appear to be coveted in the United States. 

It would be a nice gesture except that they left out several members of the team.  One in particular was more deserving than one in attendance.  But in my opinion, no one should be left out.  So now I have to reconcile my feelings about being one of the chosen ones.   I don’t feel good about it and neither did a buddy of mine who tried to give his back.  His attempt was denied.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why our management would want to create a situation where some of our team will feel left out.  I think the reward stands to do as much damage as good.  So in my opinion, even in trying to do something good, our management still screwed it up. 

On my part, the phone means nothing to me.  Its nice, but more than what I need.  And honestly, I’m not really moved by this gesture.  What I really want is more meaningful work, a chance to succeed, and a little bit of fun.  That would be a reward far beyond any material possession.

In the weeks prior to my vacation, I worked on average 55 hours per week.  In the week before I left, I worked 72 hours.  I don’t mind working, but I must believe in the cause and I must feel like I can be successful.

But this silly project fails on both counts.  The root cause is really that our management allowed our business partners to engage us without being responsible for providing us requirements.  Think of it as if you were given a picture of a location, but no map.  There’s a lot of wandering that can go on in a case like that.  And so it is, we wander, and we have no contract with our business partner.

And yet despite having no requirements and no project plan, we do have a due date.  And despite obvious scope increases (we think, anyway) the due date doesn’t change.  I’ve already eclipsed 40 hours this week.  And these are hard, stressful, filled-with-panic-and-chaos hours.  We have been doing this for months.

So as our due date looms and many of us have given it all we’ve had, our management is trying to go to the whip, but in the strangest way.  Today, we received an email which incents us with money to close out defects.  There are stipulations about the idea of close-out, but suffice it to say that the money is not bad.

But I’m sickened and offended by this.  I do quality work and I have worked the long hours.  I can interpret this new incentive program to mean that we aren’t working hard enough or conscientiously enough.  After all, they have to resort to money now since our professionalism isn’t enough.  I have never heard of such a thing and am embarrassed that my company would condone such a program.

So I have already let my management know that I will not be accepting any money that comes as a result of this program.  I suggested that we should have invested the time and money into improving our process.  All this will get me is the reputation of a non-team player.  But alas, my check-in rate ranks second on our team, so I know I’m carrying my weight.  That may not be the definition of team player, but I’m contributing heavily.

So the result of this program will have the opposite affect on me.  I will not be working any additional hours as we are being encouraged to do.  If you can’t thank me in any way but a last minute lame incentive program, then I don’t need your thanks period.

For now, work is my day job that pays the bills.  My off time will have to provide the interesting projects where I can manage myself.  Now if I can just make it pay so that I can remove the day job from my life. 

Needless to say, it took two and a half weeks for my vacation buzz to dissipate completely.  Is it too soon to book tickets for Kauai again?

I have just about hit a career low in terms of how I have felt about my work.  Ideally, you want to do meaningful work that is interesting and have some fun doing it.  Unfortunately, it seems the environment I find myself in is so far from that.

In the information technology business, you do the work some business entity needs you to do.  At Nokia, it seems each business entity seems to run their own little company with the budget they are given.  Some play nice and work maturely.  Others are completely unreasonable.  Our small organization meanwhile fights and scraps for work, so it cannot be choosey about the work it gets.  Sometimes these factors combine to form a very bad situation.

The business we are working with grew their own software internally, but has recently turned it over to us in IT to maintain.  Their system is built poorly with now-obsolete technology and has little documentation.  It also is quite unstable keeping our fledgling staff up until all hours to keep running.  Fortunately, I am not one of those people.

Due to one of their vendor packages no longer being supported, it must be replaced.  As such, they chose the replacement and negotiated the contract without IT involvement.  They also chose to swap out another knowledgebase type of product.  And at the same time, they wanted their obsolete system replaced. 

Of course, they wanted all of this done in three months.  They also wanted their existing system maintained.  No, they did not want to document the requirements for the new system.  No, they did not want to put a testing group in place.  No, we don’t have much leverage over the vendors in doing their package implementations — those agreements were done without us.  No, we don’t know the details of the 26 integrations required.  No, we didn’t have our outsourced team up to speed yet.

Our architect arrives to work at 3am and sometimes doesn’t leave until 5pm and works through lunch.  I’m an architect too, but playing the role as developer on this project.  Others work 10+ hours between developing the new system and supporting the old system.  Prior to the Christmas break, it was suggested that we limit our vacation.  Two and a half months later, the pace continues.

With the lack of documentation, it has been difficult to estimate the work.  In addition, the one vendor has not kept to their schedule.  In both vendor cases, the integration approaches are sub-optimal.  As you might imagine, we’ve had several deadlines along the way, but missed each one of them.  Given all that I’ve represented, is there any wonder why? 

With all the schedule slips, our business is rumored to have inquired about our technical competence.  Our management doesn’t seem to understand the scope of the project, the resourcing shortages, the vendor relationship challenges, and the affect of long-term heroic measures.

I go to work every day feeling that the business doesn’t respect us and views us as slaves who should not have lives.  I lose respect for my management every day for not stepping in to provide us a sane working environment with realistic and attainable project goals.  I view the situation as hopeless and given that our competence has been questioned, I’m not inspired in the least to give any of my personal time to benefit the unappreciative business. 

As an additional point, our bonuses this half were cut because the business rated us poorly.  And yet, this is the same business that puts us in these situations.  Of course, our own management perpetuates the problem by enabling the business to do so. 

All these factors have me questioning my value system and wishing that I had a job which complemented what I think my value system really requires.  Its less about money and more about doing something that matters and sharing the experience with people you enjoy and respect.  And working with leadership that respects you, inspires you, and places you in positions where its possible for you to succeed.

• You attend 3 1/2 hours of meeting in the first half of the day and management wonders why deadlines aren’t being met.

• You are asked to build an application, but provided no requirements or testing community.  And technical resources who know the application are largely unavailable.  Not to whine, but see above point as a glorious side-effect.

• You have a desktop computer, but aren’t provided admin rights necessary to install additional programs or even create folders.  And the request for those rights has to go through formal channels with over a one week response time.  Ridiculous.

People may/will disagree with me, but I think outsourcing has watered
down the average competence of people within my discipline.  As such,
there’s more opportunity for new team members to threaten project quality. 

I have long struggled with the value propositon for outsourcing.  My theory was that you’d get what you paid for.  To me, outsourcing is the elusive silver bullet tactic employed by a myopic management with no concept for a software team’s operational concerns.  They look only at their staff costs.

As we are faced with outsourcing, its thus becoming more important to be extraordinary at evaluating talent.  And yet we aren’t.  At my company, I’ve seen new technicians arrive having only passed a 30-minute phone interview.  And once they are on-site, they are very difficult to remove.   In the more strenuous interviews, candidates are still made only to answer questions and potentially draw on the whiteboard.  The trouble is, some of those doing the interviewing aren’t particularly skilled and thus the gradual decline as the company eventually fails altogether to recognize good or bad talent when they see it.

The most difficult interview process from my experience was with a now-defunct company called ObjectSpace.  It should be noted that they no long exist not because of their engineering staff, but rather due to a faulty strategy of accelerating marketing spending in anticipation of a money-infusing IPO that never happened.  But I digress.

What ObjectSpace did right was to invest time, money, and training in a recruiting process which enabled them to hire with precision.  The process started with a 45-minute phone-administered object modeling session.  The candidate was requested to think out loud and justify their design.  In my case, I was asked to model a subset of the game of Monopoly.  That may sound trivial, but there’s a lot you can learn in such a simple exercise. 

Many developers completely lack modeling skills.  Their instincts are just completely absent.  They seem to know the syntax of the implementation language, but they have no idea how to partition responsibilities into reasonable designs.  So in my view, the modeling exercise is really critical.  I have since tried this exercise (when I’ve been provided the latitude) and asked candidates to model the phone that appears in front of them in the conference room.  Invariably I’m astounded and incredulous at the same time as candidates cannot even suggest something simple like a button hierarchy.

After the phone modeling discussion, ObjectSpace would conduct an in-person programming test.  More specifically, they provided any of several available problems and a computer and the candidate was given an hour to complete the task.  The problem was documented in words and in diagrams.  You can tell a lot about someone’s ability to contribute from such an assignment.  At my company, we have never been permitted to administer such a test.  I view the test as a sort of audition for the job.  Just as an actor reads for a part, I think developers should show us what they’ve got.  All too often we see what they have (or more often, don’t have) after they are already wearing a badge and its too late.

ObjectSpace would end the process with a whiteboard session in which additional technical questions would be asked and a hiring manager would evaluate fitness for the team.  After I was done with this process, I felt like the company owed me a day of pay.  It was hard to get in.  But the ObjectSpace approach ensured that for the most part, the engineering staff was above average. 

My point to all this is that companies who dare to outsource should consider fully what that means from a variety of perspectives.  Hiring is critical.  Over and above hiring, there are a multitude of logistical problems to solve, but I’ll leave those for some other discussion.  For me, I’d just like to see my own company move to a more rigid, standardized approach.