The Bloj

Sometimes, leadership is pulling the sled

Posted on March 1st, 2009 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, General/Misc..

There will come a point in your job when you’re pulling a heavy weight, and it’s not you.

Teams can basically function in one of two ways. Loosely speaking, let’s call them the light side and the dark side.

On the light side, everyone is communicating and everyone is focused on the success of the team. People are willing to make sacrifices, and everyone knows who’s making the sacrifices. There is openness and solidarity; the team shares one objective.

If this sounds a little bit doe-eyed and delusional, then I don’t need to introduce you to the dark side.

While I call it the dark side, the thinking that pulls someone over to this side is completely rational. “Why should I give up my time and my effort to get something done for someone who’s just going to claim it for themselves when I’m done, like he did last month when we finished the Spearmint project?” The big question a darksider asks is simple and practical: What’s in it for me.

The other thing about the dark side is that it’s contagious. Once one person starts doing it, everyone gets pulled in.

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Now, I’m not going to claim that you should do anything for anyone if it’s only going to benefit them. But let’s consider what’s in it for you.

Did you ever think about what separates leaders from everyone else? Is it power? Money? The privilege of belonging to a special class, knowing special people? Education? Yes, all of those things matter. But what fills in the empty space when society no longer places them on a pedestal?

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t.

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t. Did you ever wonder, while you were sitting in the lecture hall, if you would ever stop being driven around by a system of authority beyond your ability to influence? Or why it didn’t seem to end when you left the high school classroom and found yourself in another set of forms and bureaucratic procedures driven by some unseen force?

There are two ways of coping in the workplace. The first way is the way of procedure, rule-taking, what’s in it for me. The rule followers are the dominant breed in high school and bureaucratic monoliths. You can’t change the rules, so you get what you can out of them. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to work that way.

The smaller the organization, and the simpler the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that part of the system and the rules is defined by you. When everyone else abdicates responsibility, that’s not an alarm warning you to rush to the doors while dodging all responsibility. That’s a vacuum, a power vacuum, and you’re going to fill it. If you choose to.

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Don’t Work on the Wrong Machine

Posted on August 28th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, Programming.

Fred Brooks: Build one to throw away

My version: Build every one to throw away.

Fred Brooks’ classic The Mythical Man-Month made this observation developing a new piece of software – inevitably, many of the problems that will need to be solved won’t be known until you try to solve them. The first try will incorporate many feelings of should-have and would-have that will be fixed on the second try.

This is much like a journeyman craftsman building his or her first bench, or planting their first garden. The first try is a learning experience. There is no way around this, nor should there be – learning is often best by doing. The valuable asset is the experience of the builder, not the product.

But we don’t live in the Middle Ages, the age of guilds. We live in the post-Industrial Age. Factory owners don’t consider hoarding all the toys or cars or electronics they produce as an asset. Henry Ford’s genius was to redesign not just the golden eggs, but the machine that lays them.

As programmers, we are not working on a code base. We are working on a machine that produces code. The machine is made up of us, our experiences, the tools we build to make code (which can be made out of code themselves!). This is where results come from, and we should spend our time tuning this machine by producing more, not protecting what we have.

Does this mean that we should throw out old code? By no means! Old code is one of the most efficient resources we have for producing new code. But every process of manufacture in the past has been made into a more automatic and refined process. How could we consider ourselves any different?

Does this mean that we should code like crap? By no means! As was once said, “If you write the first one to throw out, you will end up throwing out the second one as well.” The point is, write good code, but be willing to write new code – the point is to make not good code, but a good code factory.

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The Two Ways of Working

Posted on August 23rd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris.

1. If you know what you want to produce exactly (a car, toaster, etc.) and have a precise plan that you can follow to produce it, you can hire and evaluate people by spreadsheet and monitor their efficiency.
2. If what you want to produce is unknown (a strategic plan, a new product line), but know the sort of person you want to produce it, you can’t hire or evaluate by quantity. Instead, you need to create the right conditions for people and hope that they produce it themselves, as they will do, in the right conditions.

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Ramble: Bureaucracy

Posted on April 23rd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, General/Misc..

This is how bureaucracy works. When you first see this, if you’ve had any experience with office bureaucracy, you may think “that’s true!” followed by “that’s crazy” followed by “that’s life,” and then you may run away because you want to watch scrubs or family guy or something.

I don’t have a TV though, so I will now try to figure out how to fix this problem. In the process, I will probably accidentally prove that it’s good not to watch TV. But that’s ok, because I’ll probably watch TV after that, disproving everything I just said.

Bureaucracy

is all about the disconnect between people and their incentives. At big corporations and gov’t organizations, you don’t earn the money you spend; you get a budget. If you want to spend more, you use up all the money you have and then try to talk the right person into giving you more next year.

When one person runs a business, they try to do what’s in their best interests. When two people work together, they will tend to hold each other accountable. When one thousand people work together, the interests of the group become disconnected from the interests of the individual.

The Myth of the Rational Voter describes this very well. It may be true that how well my company does affects my well being, but I make a very small difference to a big company, and this is outweighed by even a small incentive to act in a different way.

Transparency

Once a group gets big enough, we must find a way to realign the incentives of its members with the incentives of the group.

One of the things we mentioned earlier was holding people accountable (in the case of small groups). We also noted that people are disconnected from their incentives in large groups. If we can make the individual’s accomplishments public within the group, we can measure them.

There is a weakness to this approach:

1. The individual is rewarded on appearing to be helpful, not actually being helpful.
2. Even if people are honest, there is no way to say for sure what is helpful–if the organization is driven by thousands of people, it may be impossible to accurately measure individual contributions.

The Free Market Approach

The most well-known of getting people to act in the general interest is market economics, which argues that people who are free to act in their own best interests and have a way of exchanging value with others will maximize the public’s well being as a whole. It’s interesting that though the economy is largely free market, corporations internally are run more like dictatorships; this may imply that there is some reason for the free market organizing principle to break down within a corporate body.

Is it, hypothetically, possible to change an organization into a group where everyone buys and sells from each other? If so, how would we preserve the advantages of a corporate structure?

For example, say I have a software product and I need someone to develop features for the latest version. Insofar as the product is modular, I can pick a module and contract out bids to people within my company. So far, so free. However, systems within a company tend towards natural monopoly–it is unlikely that any company would throw out its working team to replace it with a new, less experienced one.

Need that be absolute? Perhaps part of owning a process is having the ability to transfer knowledge about that process. If you can force the team working for you to make that process transferable, it changes from their asset to yours (and lest this seem unfair, you would likely pay for the privilege). The same goes for software as it does for factories or stores – if you don’t have the information to operate it with a different team, then you don’t own all of it.

Final Comments

But this is just one objection – an example amid many. The U.S. Army, certainly, could not operate along those principles. The power of choice is necessarily limited when it comes to a professional army.

Transparency can get people to operate in a way that appears good, though it wouldn’t actually make them act in the way best for the organization overall. There won’t always be two or more actors to compete for the same work and push the best one to the top.

Individuals can generally be counted on to act in a way that benefits them; the free market is largely based on this principal. Bureaucracy is typically about getting large groups to act in a way that benefits them as a whole; even when this is parallel to the individual example (large numbers of bureaucracies competing with each other) there is a necessary weakness–individuals are still individuals, and try as we might to get their interests to all point the same way, they will inevitably shift in their own direction.*

This may in fact be a good thing. Do we want the Mafia’s cronies to act with single minded purpose towards advancing the Mafia, or would we rather they skimmed and subverted?

That individuals can be counted on to act in their own interest more reliably than a group interest** may act as a bulwark against the power that a group has against an individual. Plenty of groups have turned against each other in history, but it is likely that there are injustices that have never occurred, simply because the unjust lacked the ability to act with sufficient unity.

* If you want to reduce this subversion, forcing people to act in the open is highly useful. Mobilizing the forces of conformity is likely to encourage people to act more subtly in their interests, however.

**(at least, when the group is not pitted directly against another group)

(originally started January 20, 2006 @ 00:22)

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