I remember the day very well … because it was my first day of “real work,” and it was a snow day.

Without any real working-from-home infrastructure to speak of, I didn’t get an email about this at work, and I didn’t spend the day online from home.  I got up in the morning and checked the news, and it was listed that our Westboro and Southboro facilities were closed to nonessential personnel.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that again since then – but I know I thoroughly enjoyed having my first day as a salaried employee being spent inside watching the snow pile up.  (Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but being paid to watch it snow is a pretty good deal, especially at 22…).

At the time, of course, I wasn’t working for EMC.  I had never heard of EMC.  I was working for Data General.  I was still a graduate student at WPI; I had completed one semester as a Teaching Assistant, and took the job and did the rest of my coursework part-time.   My classmates and professors thought I was mad – the future was not minicomputers; why would I go to work for a dead-end place like DG?  They weren’t pushing for EMC either of course; they were excited about the Internet, they were excited about consulting companies, about MathWorks, and so on.  The future wasn’t on 495, it was inside 128.

Well, I was happy on 495.  I was thrilled to be part of the CLARiiON team.

Turns out it was a good plan!

A lot has changed in 15 years.  A lot has changed in the overall industry, in the Massachusetts tech scene, and certainly here at EMC (and DG!).   I had high hopes of putting together a post full of things that are different now than they were in 1996, but frankly I don’t know where to start, and I’ve spent the last few nights working on “real work” (now that’s a change from 15 years back!) and couldn’t really do the necessary research.

But I will share the closest press release I could find to my joining date: this one, from DG .  It announced the joint creation of a 2.5 terabyte DSS in Tokyo.    2.5 TB … the amount of disk space I have on my desk.  About a month after I joined, DG announced a new disk array with capacity of 84 GB per chassis.  The Blu-Ray XL format, standardized last year, puts more than that on a single optical disk.

A lot more than just capacity numbers has changed.  The name of the corporation that pays the bills, the technology I use every day, the way I manage my work/life balance, my career goals … all are a lot different than what I signed up for when I took that job offer.  But what hasn’t changed is that I come in every day challenged by exciting problems, and I try to leave every day knowing I helped my co-workers to solve those problems in a good way.  There are worse ways to make a living … much worse.

Thanks EMC, thanks DG, thanks to the crew that hired me (you know who you are), many of whom are still here — and many thanks to all the people I’ve worked with since then.  And I couldn’t do it without the loving support of my family; I love my job, but coming home every day is what makes it all worthwhile.

I wonder what I’ll be looking back on in 2026….

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Fifteen years!

Fortunately, I didn’t toss it too far aside.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in almost 15 years at EMC it’s that change isn’t disruptive to the status quo, it is the status quo.

Everything I said I was doing before, I’m still doing.  I’m wearing a lot of hats right now.  My small development team has grown as it takes on more responsibility, and I find myself playing the roles of Scrum Master, Technical Lead, and Development Manager.  Somewhere in all that I’m trying to individually contribute technically as well, but that is at the bottom of the list.

The other thing that keeps falling off the list is contributing to “the conversation” (both internally at EMC and externally on twitter and in people’s blogs).  I’m afraid that is going to be an uncomfortable reality while I try to wrap my arms around all these roles and make sure my own commitments aren’t being missed. Try not to do too much without me .

It’s a great place to be, in the thick of the action, surrounded by good people.  I’m never bored, I’ll say that much!

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Personal update: putting new hats on

Why the sudden burst in activity?  Why am I letting my day job run away with my life?

I’m not, really.  The truth is my shift into a more technical role was just the first part of a two-part shift I didn’t see coming.  I also inherited a handful of work from another colleague who had recently changed jobs within EMC.  I did the best I could playing both roles for the month of January, but I basically spent the entire month stressed out and losing track of everything.

The answer, in true EMC style, was to invest more time into work — but in a smarter way.  I set aside chunks of “me” time at home (and at work, to be fair) to organize my tasks, organize my team’s tasks, organize my information.  Cleaned my inbox.  Set up a system for tracking open issues, for organizing my meeting minutes, all that.  I didn’t do a full GTD reset or anything (I keep thinking I should, but …), but I did invest heavily into my work infrastructure.

The end result is that at the end of the day I’m tired and spent, but I’m not lost and overwhelmed.  I know where I am, I know what I need to do tomorrow, and I know what my team is doing.

Mostly.

The truth is, how hard you work isn’t really the determining factor in how you feel at the end of the day.  It’s how you do that work.  For me, the weight of inheriting someone else’s “tracking system” was too much to carry, and I had to do extra work to create my own.  It made the past calendar week pretty much unbearable, but now that I’m coming out of the weeds I can see February shaping up to be a pretty good month.

Busy, but good.

That’s how I like it.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

How do you feel at the end of the day?

So here, as requested by Natalie, is my version of the web at 20…

How has the web changed my life?

It’s a bit of a cheat for me to answer this question, because what truly changed my life were the networks that predated what we think of as the Web.  The web made them easier to use and broadened their scope by orders of magnitude, but the damage was already done.

I would not be where I am in life without the Internet.  As a teenager, I hungrily sought out information from any source I could.  On a TRS-80 Color Computer hooked up to a tiny black&white TV, at 300 baud, I connected to (and eventually ran) bulletin boards, snuck into unprotected university dialins to play MUDs and read Usenet, and connected to individuals and information from a much bigger world.  I am still in contact with some of those people, still use the behaviors I learned back then every day.

But it wasn’t until college, in 1993, that I saw those things melded together into The Web.  It may have been technically 3 years old by then, but it was just getting its momentum.  It became my immediate and constant companion, and has been since.  Everything I cherished about the Internet was boiled down into one magical term: Home Page.  We didn’t have net connections in our dorms, so all that gweeping was done in the semi-dark basements of the CS building, in labs shared with giant line printers and dozens of black and white monitors.

I can still taste the Mountain Dew … and the freedom.

I created my first web page in those years, when the best web search engine was called WebCrawler and people still coded for users of Lynx.  The Internet Archive has a version of that page, from right before I graduated.  Most of the links are incredibly broken, but you can still see a snapshot of my personality in the text, personal branding way before the Millennials “discovered” it.

This was the brave new world.  And we thought we’d keep it to ourselves forever: nerds arguing over Star Trek and D&D, posting pictures of our cats, and researching new technologies.

And then some damn fool figured out how to make money off it all.

How has the web changed business and society?

I like to say the changes to society and business associated with the web have come (and are coming) in waves.  For a long time, businesses saw the web as nothing but a giant Yellow Pages, and society saw the web as a place to argue over Star Trek.  I remember a magical period in the Web’s history when business hadn’t caught on yet, but there were enough people for actual connections to be made.  You could find people who had been to far away places and talk to them about their experiences.  You could bump into groups who were dedicated to obscure programming languages and figure out how to solve bizarre software problems.

And then the marketers took over, clumsily but powerfully. When you tried to find real people, you found storefronts instead.  Search engines were new, and SEO technology outpaced the search algorithms.  You couldn’t trust the web any more.  Communities were buried, hard to find.  It was difficult to meet new people and form new interactions.

Eventually the old sense of community emerged from its hibernation.  Strong web forums with passionate moderators helped people with similar interests hook up, and some of them lasted long enough to become trusted sources of information.  Social media sites formed and helped us track trusted crowds.  Web page technology got decent, bandwidth got cheap, blogs became mainstream, and suddenly (if you knew where to look) the web was social again.  Now there were two webs, the social web and the static clumsy business web.

Then, most recently, businesses figured out how to leverage the new (old) online world.  Instead of trying to take over, they tried to engage.  And the business web became social.

And so we’re back where we started, but better.  We’re free to argue over Star Trek and post pictures of our cats … and route around government censorship … and collaborate on new technologies … and tallk directly to our government … and order pizza online … and monitor millions of conversations until you find an unhappy customer in Paraguay … and finally engage with that person following the same unwritten rules we geeks help put into place 20 years ago.

It’s a beautiful time to be an information professional.

(What I think is an important followup point here is that there are areas where the web hasn’t changed society.  Vast stretches of people are not connected, and the disconnect isn’t shrinking.  Let’s not forget this.)

What do I think the web will look like in twenty years?

To answer this I tried to think back on the past twenty years.  Many of the technologies existed when the “web” was born, but we found innovative ways of tying them together, made bandwidth cheaper, and exponentially extended its reach.  So what do we have the technology to do now, but aren’t doing yet?  What will change when (and if) the digital divide narrows?

The easiest answer is that dumb search will disappear.  All search will be contextual by default, whether that context is geographical, social, historical, or something else we haven’t thought of yet.  Our tools will serve us, help us filter the world automatically in contexts that make sense to us.  Based on aggregating data about ourselves, our histories, and our friends, the tools will be highly predictive and accurate.  They’ll work on objects other than text (we’re improving image search, but let’s imagine all of youtube indexed not by metadata but by the data itself!).

This will come at the cost of privacy, of course, and the mad scientists of the 2030s will be those who refuse to make that trade.  Like a person in today’s world who refuses to have a credit card or a bank account, most of us won’t be able to understand how they can reject all that convenience.

Another easy one is that we’ll take the cloud for granted.  If you have data somewhere, you’ll have that data everywhere.  The concept of remembering a URL or bookmarking it and losing that bookmark will seem archaic.  There’s some fascinating security and usability problems to be solved there, of course.  It’ll be fun to see that fall into place.

Fads will come and go faster than they do today.  With the ability to spin up a virtual data center and tear it down with no delay, a startup can flare up and disappear within hours.  Low-budget clones of such companies will appear worldwide, and the battles over who had an idea first will be epic.

Another trend I think will continue is the shrinking of content.  Real writers will be harder to find, as the majority of content providers end up doing nothing but sharing links and snippets.  Our attention spans will shrink further.  If we can’t read it or watch it in 30 seconds, we won’t care.  And the few of us who insist that things used to be better will be laughed at by our juniors.

One thing I can predict is that twenty years from now, my daughter will 21 years old, and she will laugh uproariously at how wrong we all are about where things are headed.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’ll ask Jamie Pappas, a colleague at EMC, to continue the discussion next.  Jamie?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The web at #20years old

It’s worth noting, however, that managers are also soon going to be working on annual performance reviews.  And while we all know reviews should cover the entire year’s work, often times a high-impact event at the close of the year gets some extra mental attention during this busy time.  So what can you do at work to bring a little bit of what the holidays are supposed to be about into your routine?

Be thankful

A simple “thank you” goes a long way.  A more complex “thank you” goes a little further.  “Thanks, Bill, I wouldn’t have thought of looking there, you made my day a lot easier.”  It takes 15 seconds to type that, and whoever you are thanking probably saved you more than 15 seconds.  So send the email.  Better yet, drop by their cubicle, or say something when you spot them in the hallway.

Be generous

Sitting in your inbox is that simple request.  It’ll take you a couple minutes to process it, and you have so much else going on, but it’ll really make a difference in that person’s day.  So ttop putting it off.  Set aside 5 minutes this morning to be helpful, and then go on to your “real” work.

You can also be generous with your praise.  Saying “thank you” is great, but copying the boss is generous as well.  It wins on so many levels it’s hard to even list them.  I’m not suggesting every single “thanks” needs a cc: line, but once in a while it’s a powerful tool.

It doesn’t need to be a “thanks” either.  Sometimes you can just directly tell someone about great performance by a team member.  I recently sent an email to a senior director letting him know about a great moment with someone in his organization.  His response was that he rarely receives that kind of direct feedback.  Flood your management with emails and you’ll get ignored.  Target a couple moments of high performance, though, and you’re playing with powerful tools.

Balance your life

It’s crucial now to remember your work-life balance, and that of your teammates.  Tensions may be high, and small things leap into significance. Don’t forget that for some people, the holidays are a time of joy and pleasure … while others are on an emotional rollercoaster.

As for yourself, be present at your family dinner; put down the Blackberry and enjoy the blackberry pie instead.  That email will still be there after the kids are in bed.

The great thing about gestures like this is that they multiply. You are essentially increasing the positive climate, and as a colleague of mine recently put it, when the tide rises all ships rise with it.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

It’s that time of year

What if I told you it’s the same one it was a hundred years ago?

Listening.

Hearing (or reading) comes naturally, but listening requires active investment.  Active listening, empathic listening, listening with intent … these do not come naturally.

Recently a colleague and friend of mine, Gina, wrote about her experiences at a conference.  She shared a fascinating story about how a group of women self-organized at the conference and had a discussion about the sociological factors which impacted them in the workplace and beyond, and how that connected to so few women deciding to present at the conference (and others like it).

What’s interesting to me is what people heard when they read her post. I had a chat with Gina about the subject, and did my best to really listen and understand what she was trying to say.  I then tried my best to listen to what other people were saying about the subject … and there have been no shortage of bloggers offering their opinions.  I won’t link them all here, but so much discussion went on that further follow-up posts were needed, and it all led to even more confusion about what was originally being said.

I found something agreeable in every post I read about the subject, but what stood out most to me was that none of them really seemed to be approaching the subject from the same starting point. If I put myself in each of the writers’ shoes, I could understand what they were trying to say — people in general aren’t inherently unreasonable.

It’s not a leap in logic to apply that same principle to the original discussion.  Each participant in the conversation was hearing something different, because they began the conversation in a different place.

It’s hard enough to empathize and actively listen when you’re directly present in a conversation, witness to all the body language and able to ask clarifying questions.  Imagine how hard it is when all you have to go by is a couple paragraphs of a blog post … or worse, 140 characters on a microblogging site?

If you really want to make the most out of the new technologies and norms that make up the 21st-century workplace, you’ve got to push your listening skills beyond the last century’s limitations.  The skills are the same, but the fine details of using them?  Lots of changes.  We spend so much time talking about how to blog, how to update your twitter feed, how to promote yourself … but at the core there’s something so much more important we should be nurturing.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The most important communication skill

Touché.

So it was with some interest that I noted a recent study on anticipating the worst.  Timothy Pychyl blogged about it at the Psychology Today website, as it relates to his topic of interest, procrastination.  Let me sum it up briefly here:

• If you anticipate the worst, you dread the event, “paying” in stress prior to it happening
• If something good happens, you are no happier because you were pleasantly surprised
• If something bad happens, you are only barely less upset because you expected it

In other words, if stress has a cost and happiness and accomplishment is a benefit, anticipating the worst always costs extra, no matter the outcome.

Building realistic expectations is a vital engineering skill.  Turning a shadow into a monster and using that fear as an excuse not to take any risks is a different beast, and a dangerous one.  It’s easy to fall into the trap, especially in a corporate setting, where risk-averse decision making may be rewarded in the short term.   I know I’ve fallen for it before.

There is an interesting side note to this discussion — visualizing the worst possible outcome does sometimes cause behavioral changes to prevent it.  Visualizing how poorly it would reflect on your career if your presentation bombs might trick you into preparing more.  But the study shows it has little to no impact on how you feel after you give the presentation, whether you bomb or not.

Finding a middle ground, letting the rational visualization of negative results motivate you without letting irrational fear paralyze you, is the real trick here.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

What’s the worst that could happen?

Simply put, it’s this: don’t make yourself into a character in a story.

In the game of poker, this basically means that you shouldn’t let yourself see patterns in the randomness of the game which influence you.  After something improbable happens a few times, you might begin thinking “That always happens to me,” and next time there’s a chance of that happening, you back off, frightened.  Your ace-high flush bested by a full house twice in one night becomes “I never win with flushes,” and next time you get a flush, you fold the winning hand.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for situations where you misread the game — perhaps you are “always” losing with the second-best hand because you aren’t evaluating the probability of the winning hand being present accurately.  But that’s not what Phillips is talking about.

This advice carries over into the professional world as well.  How many times have you encountered people who claim “I just don’t get that kind of stuff,” when faced with a new problem?  “Oh, I’m no good at writing,” or “I don’t get all this social media stuff,” or even “I’d never make a good manager.” These individuals have written themselves into a story; instead of seeing all their options, they are living life like a character in a book, their reactions predetermined by the plot they’ve built in their head.

Not only are these people missing out on their own potential, they are advertising their closed-mindedness to their colleagues, customers, and managers.

I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t be self-aware.  Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, knowing where to invest your energy and where to cut your losses: these are vital skills to acquire.  But do it knowingly, by choice, and carefully.  Don’t project the “oh well it’s not meant to be” attitude of the two-dimensional character in a pulp novel.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Lessons from poker

That might protect EMC if I were to go off the deep end legally.  They might be able to fire me, disavow all knowledge of my actions, and prevent themselves from getting in too much trouble themselves.  But if I were to do something legal but just plain stupid, do you think that disclaimer would prevent the EMC brand from being damaged in your eyes?  Of course not.

But that’s old news.  Of course your employees represent your company in their actions, even when they’re off the clock. It’s just that the rise of the social web increases the scope and permanence of those actions.  When your employee has a lapse of judgment, it’s not forgotten about the next day, it’s immortalized online and your competitors, customers, and employees will be seeing it for years.

Of course, it’s not just interaction with the general public that can turn an employee into a PR nightmare.  An entry-level employee can poorly handle one customer encounter and suddenly investors know about it because it’s the top story on The Consumerist.

The obvious move in the face of this is to be terrified, lawyer up constantly, and threaten to fire anyone who speaks out of turn. The harder move is to make sure all your employees understand the new rules, make sure they’re as happy and as well-trained as you can afford, and let them run loose.

I imagine we’ll see which move pays off in the long term.  You can guess which one I value more.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Everyone works for PR

The day after EMC World 2009 ended, I spent several hours touring Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s eastern coast.  It’s easy to take our space program for granted, but as I walked among the incredible reminders of the challenges and victories of the Apollo Program I couldn’t help but be moved.  The nation came together in pursuit of this Big Idea, thousands upon thousands of men and women combined their expertise and their passion and the result were honest-to-goodness human footprints on our moon.

Now, we could have drafted a long-term plan full of nice achievable goals.  “When can we get to the moon?”  “We’ll have a date for you in 5 years.”  But that’s not what we did.  We didn’t put a bunch of small ideas together, we had one Big Idea.  People got on board with the Big Idea, it unlocked their drive, their excitement, their commitment.  And in the end it was a success.

You don’t have to spend your entire working life in pursuit of Big Ideas.  But sometimes it’s worth throwing one out there.  When’s the last time you were in pursuit of a Big Idea?  Is it time for one in your life?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The power of the Big Idea