Thriving in the 21st century workplace

If you know me, you aren’t surprised by my Survivor addiction.  From its very first episode I’ve been on board, and every new season I dive in and watch as teams of strangers play in this odd mix of competition and cooperation, as social structures evolve and intermingle and new strategies emerge to conflict with the old.

Recently this season (an “all-star” season with returning contestants), I watched as two competitors vying for control of a team gave us an interesting leadership lesson.

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… get an important answer.

Two colleagues of mine demonstrated to me today a habit which, on its surface, can be difficult to understand.  They really enjoy asking the stupid questions.  We’ll be in a design review, looking at a fairly straightforward diagram showing a few components interacting, and they’ll ask what customer use case this represents and what those components are.

We all know the answer.  It’s fairly obvious. But the person writing the design didn’t label the components and left it open to interpretation.

My first instinct was to jump in, say it wasn’t important, that we needed to get to the guts of the design to review it.  I was wrong.

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A while back I made kind of a big deal about getting back into the technical arena and putting away my manager hat.

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!

My first desktop PC didn’t much resemble the PCs of today.  It was a TRS-80 Color Computer II, with 16K of RAM, a single cartridge slot, and two joystick ports.  If you’re like me, you also had a computer like this one — maybe a TI-99/4A, a Commodore 64, or a PET.  Chances are, it booted into an interpreted BASIC command line prompt.  For many of us writing software today, our first experiments in software development came from looking at the prompt and wondering, “What can I do here?”

photo credit: Extra Ketchup. This is not me … but it practically could be!

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I got a great email last week from my colleague Susan Shapiro, who works with the EMC Community Network.  The EDN (EMC Developer Network) is organizing a coding challenge for EMC World 2010, with a respectable amount of prize money ($25K total split among several prizes) at stake.  Being the self-centered guy I am, I immediately confirmed that EMC employees were eligible (they are, but only for one of the prizes) before letting myself get excited.

The concept: write a project where multiple EMC developer technologies can be used in a single program.  Bonus points for incorporating other online technologies.  Win money and fame and the adoration of the world.

I’m waiting for the detailed T&C, but you can read up more on it here.  Innovation through contest is something EMC has tinkered with quite a bit, as you may have read on Steve Todd’s blog last year.

Definitely check out the link for more info. I’m hoping I can find some time in between all my “real work” to put a couple of these tools through their paces.

You’ve probably heard a variation on this statement from a software developer, made in jest, but containing a nugget of sincerity:

It was hard to create, it should be hard to use (or maintain).

Basically, we worked hard to get this stuff done and we expect you as a user or future maintainer to put the same effort into it.  After all, it took many man-years to write the software, it’s not too much to expect you to spend a few weeks reading manuals and understanding it before you start complaining that it’s hard to use.

As Paul Young recently wrote, though, imagine if wood-chippers took that approach.

Imagine if an author did?  “It took me years to write this novel, you should have to do some research before you read it.”

Some do, I guess.  I’ve read a few novels that require major work to get through.  Sometimes the end result is even worth the work.  But as my fiction writing friends tell me, in general you don’t want your readers to be thinking about your writing, you want them thinking about your story.  Similarly, you don’t want your users thinking about your software design, you just want them thinking about the task your software enables.

I feel the same way about maintaining and testing software.  We want developers thinking about the code, not about the way you wrote it.  You don’t want someone looking at your code, peering at it for a few minutes, and then saying, “Oh, I get it.  Wow, that’s clever.”

There’s a famous quote attributed to a half-dozen different writers (and perhaps originated by Blaise Pascal), that says, basically, “I am sorry I wrote such a lengthy letter; I did not have time to write a short one.”  It takes time to create simple, elegant software.  When we force the issue and compress the time spent on a project, you end up with complex code and complex user interactions.  We should consider this a problem, not a point of pride.

When we present some difficult software to our users, we should apologize to them.  “I’m sorry this UI is so complex.  I didn’t have time to make it easier.”  Instead, we make them feel guilty.  “Ah, perhaps you should have taken the training,” or read the manual more carefully, or attended our seminar.

Think about the people on your team, and ask yourself if they “get” this concept.  Realize, that if they don’t, you’re eventually going to lose your market share to a competitor who does.

(crossposted from a discussion thread at EMC)

I’ve been busy lately, here on the SRM team within Ionix.  My calendar fills up fast, and I’ve been logging in nights and weekends to sneak in work on my day job, never mind my blog (which explains the real gap in activity here!).

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

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When I saw the emails start floating by about EMC’s ON Magazine’s special issue about 20 years of the web, I flagged them for later attention and promptly moved on.  That may have been a mistake.  Recently, I cracked open the PDF and paged through it.  Something on every page caught my attention.  Except for a few times, I forgot I was reading something written by people at EMC.  I guiltily asked myself, “are we really this cool?”

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

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I have a tendency to keep everything.

In real life, this is a problem, and one which is solved by the fact that my wife has no sense of nostalgia and will throw my garbage away behind my back.  I pretend not to notice and we move on peacefully.

In the digital world, though, it has amusing results.  In a fit of nostalgia, I recently stumbled onto the oldest archived version of my first “web page,” from 1995.  In it, I mention someone as a good friend.  Fifteen years later, I cannot remember who this person was.  There’s something sad about that, don’t you think?  The Internet never forgets, though.  I’ve found much older stuff out there, archived on weird mailing lists or whatever, stuff I have trouble believing came from my keyboard but obviously did.

I also have carried the same text files from computer to computer since the first PC-compatible machine I ever got, in the late 80s.  Since I was an awkward teenager in the late 80s, you know what this means?  I still have all the awful stuff I wrote as a misunderstood loner in high school.  Lyrics to heavy metal songs that never got set to music.  Nasty unsent letters.  Poems that would delete themselves if they could, they’re so bad.  The beginning of a horror novel which thankfully never got finished.

Yup.  It’s all there.

And I back it up nightly on Mozy too.

My name is Dave, and I’m a digital packrat.