Microsoft is often held up as an example of good hiring practices. They have long, tough interview loops. They used to ask a lot of brainteaser-like questions. They’re intended to be far too tough, and to reject qualified candidates if it means that it prevents bad employees from being hired. I work at a company with Microsoft DNA, and we believe a lot of the same things.

Of course, that only works for so long: there are only so many rocket scientists out there. When Microsoft grew like crazy, it was reasonable to expect that they’d hire people who weren’t up to snuff of the original hires, because the company had two options:
– staff up like crazy, lowering standards but keeping them high, and take over the universe with an army of people who on average are still pretty great, or
– with only a few super-smart people, limit severely the scope of extremely high-quality things they could do, and see what happens

They chose the first, and it’s worked out for them. In a company where incentives were heavily based on stock options, and the stock price was heavily powered by explosive raw growth, it makes sense.

For a long time, I refused to consider working at Microsoft on general ethical grounds, which — and this is outside the scope of discussion — I eventually overcame. But even as an outsider who didn’t want to go there, I had a lot of respect for them. I know a lot of people who work their, and they’re all smart, smart people. When I interviewed there years back at the start of my IT career and didn’t get past the screen, I was okay with that. I’ve gone back and considered working there again.

Which brings me to today.

I worked at AT&T Wireless for five years in a number of roles on the software development side. Some of the people were great, but the company as a whole was pretty messed up, and there were some things that were just horrible:
– the leaders made inexplicable decisions
– everything was political and getting work done often involved a lot of poisoned knives
– the incompetent were promoted as fast as possible, while the competent were often punished for being right

If you could find a good team to work on, and a manager who could protect everyone, working in that bubble was okay. I wish I’d left much earlier, but that last year-and-change I really liked my team, and it was hard to go.

So to my point: one of the huge problems AWS had was hiring to fill slots. People were valued by the number of reports, so everyone hired like crazy and we got a lot of horrible people, and that made life miserable for the good people, and then they left… bad stuff.

Starting a couple years ago, every once in a while I’d hear about someone getting hired over there that would cause me to pause. A developer, say.

Now it’s all over the place: the worst people I knew at AWS are now at Microsoft, and they’re bringing in all the people they were comfortable working with. It’s like seeing a cancer spread from the outside, but what am I going to do, write Bill Gates and say “Hey, you’ve got this clearly malignant growth on your company…”

I don’t know how much time I give them. I don’t know if Microsoft might be large enough that this kind of thing won’t affect the giant engine of commerce.

But here’s the thing: it’s the end of Microsoft if Microsoft is voluntarily giving itself cancer. Even if someone at Microsoft today saw this post, went through the rosters and purged everyone they’d hired with last_employer=cingular, something’s changed that these executives are being hired and they’re able to get their equally bad minions hired on. Something’s gone horribly wrong. Their immune system isn’t working, and it’s not one random staph cell or something with a funny fake nose-and-moustache disguise strolling around, it’s a convention.

This is why hiring standards matter, and why companies must actively seek out and destroy bad hires that get through the screen and then make the screen better. And why I’m glad I don’t own MSFT stock.

“I would like to use your site to produce a T-shirt or two.”
“Great! We can certainly help you with that. By the way, if we like your T-shirt design, you agree to allow us to steal the design and use it any way we see fit, and if we make tons of money off it, we’ll pay you a pittance.”
“I what now?”
“All in the non-exclusive license agreement. No need to read that in detail.”
“Well, uh, good luck with that, Zazzle. I’ll go look elsewhere.”

Roger Ebert’s 2/19 Movie Answer Man column gets into how movies suck now. It’s worth reading, but the best part is an exchange with a reader who complains about having to watch 40 minutes of commercials and previews ahead of “Fun with Dick and Jane”.

And Stephen Cummings of Coralville, Iowa, writes: “According to the IMDB, Pam Blase, a spokeswoman for AMC Entertainment, states that only one movie patron per 600,000 guests complain about ads before movies and that most regard the ads as ‘part of the theatergoing experience,’ something to do rather than talk to the person they came with before the movie starts (talking to a friend when you could spend valuable time staring at ads is really bad in consumer culture).”

[sic]

I don’t go to the movies anymore, and I never complained about them to management. I booed them at first, soon I stopped going. I used to go to movies all the time, too — back in the mid-90s, when I worked right next to a theater and had a job that didn’t have a punch-clock, I’d go see a matinee for lunch at least once a week, and if there were several good movies out, I might go three times.

Now, I never go. It’s not worth it. $10 admission for a fairly horrible experience:
– the sound cranked up to ear-splitting levels (including the pre-commercial in-theater commercial radio, for your listening enjoyment while watching slides of ads)
– other people behaving badly
– badly-framed and projected films

I’ve got better things to do with my time. I used to go out with my friends on weekends, get dinner and have beers, catch a film, maybe head out to a bar afterwards to discuss or, if it sucked, get back to whining about work. Now we almost never go to the movies, and if we go it’s to some tiny art-house place where we don’t have to put up with that.

Movie theaters, then — consider this a retroactive complaint. I wish you luck in your work to drive away the other 599,999 guests.

Enjoy the softness of gentle breeze
that sweeps through the vineyard
spread vast on the hill in each soft
and juicy Kasugai Grape Gummy
— from the front of the pack
(they were delicious, if you’re curious)

On August 15 of 2002 I wrote an article for Baseball Prospectus called “The Zumsteg Plan” in which I proposed a revenue-sharing plan that attempted to even the playing field for teams in a rational way that didn’t hurt well-run teams in modest markets.

Singled out were the Phillies, who in 2002 were eagerly taking revenue-sharing money from much smaller teams like the Indians:

At the same time, revenue sharing based on payroll or revenue is wrong. If teams want to invest in their product, to put a good team on the field, to try and bring a pennant home, why should they be punished? If a team builds its fan base in limited circumstances, why should it ever have to give money to a lazy and stupid team playing a much larger market? The Indians gave money to the Phillies last year, and that’s not just pathetic, it’s wrong: There are 2,910,000 people in Cleveland and 5,999,000 in Philly. What kind of a stupid system rewards the Phillies for their ability to alienate their fans?

Also, later, after a table showing the Phillies were the worst team in baseball at making money in their market, I commented that they “suck”.

A year after I left BP as a regular contributor, three and a half years after writing this column, I get this off the BP feedback form:

From – Wed Feb 22 20:24:26 2006
Received: (qmail 18106 invoked by uid 99); 22 Feb 2006 08:23:44 -0800
Date: 22 Feb 2006 08:23:44 -0800
Message-ID: <20060222162344.18105.qmail@mail.bbp.cx>
To: dzumsteg@baseballprospectus.com
Subject: [bpsite] August 15, 2002 The Zumsteg Plan
From: wangkid69@aol.com (timmy)
Reply-To: wangkid69@aol.com (timmy)
X-Mailer: Baseball Prospectus Hyper Fighting Email Script 0.1

BP Username: (Not a registered BP User)
IP: 68.192.153.102
Publish: yes_initials
timmy how come you dont put your email adress on your articles?

you obviously have the courage to call out the city of philadelphia

if I were you i would be very careful

watch ur back

Never mind that I didn’t say anything about the city.

This happens all the time. People go through old articles and they’ll find some random aside from four years ago (“I saw player X in spring training this year and while he’s supposed to have a great arm, I saw him make three throws from right field and they weren’t that good.”) and then email me when that guy throws a runner out running second-to-home. I haven’t written a column for BP in ages, and I still get a trickle of email from (say) White Sox fans, who are ticked I poked fun at Ozzie Guillen for some bizarre in-game strategy he tried out ages ago.

I’ve never understood what drives people to do this. Do people really look up “random player” in Google, stumble across the article at page 500/a billion, read the whole thing, and then decide that it’s about time I got my comeuppance? Does finding some tiny observation and trumping it really make them feel that much better?

The ring tone means someone’s about to pick up. That’s the whole point of the ring tone. If you’re holding and you hear a ring tone, you’ve been conditioned through a life of phone use to think “Oh! Someone’s about to pick up. I should take this call off of speaker and wait attentively, so as not to waste their time!”

I’ve been on hold for ages now. I still jump every time there’s a ring followed by “Please stay on the line.”

At least they’re not feeding me the line about my call being valued.

I just jumped again and then got the message. I’m Pavlov’s customer.

Read a couple of management books or histories of corporate success and you’ll almost certainly find one of the outline-point headings like “build a sustainable organization” or “pro-actively recruit from within” or something. S

There are a bunch of obvious reasons why this is good — for lower-level employees, the perception that they can advance is important. But I want to talk about something more subtle.

Bringing in executives from other companies doesn’t just cap ambition of current employees, it causes a huge amount of chaos. An executive joining a company from the outside has usually been recruited for some outstanding work they did turning around a division, or putting out innovative products or… something.

When they join, they have a couple of priorities.
– Figure out what I’ve gotten myself into
– Get things shaped up

Generally, they give themselves about three months to come up with a great plan for success. During that time, they’re listening to almost anyone’s ideas, try and map out the power lines, and come up with a long list of problems.

They will, almost inevitably, pick the worst people to listen to. It’ll be the personable politically saavy senior VP, or the guy running some random division he was rightfully exiled to. They’re good over lunch, they seem helpful and welcoming, they have a great pitch about the company’s problems.

This, as an aside, is where many execs lose it. When the people who actually make things happen look and see that the new exec is championing the worthless ideas of some scumbag everyone hates working with, that’s it for the new exec’s credibility. This kills morale when people know that the guy with the ear of the new VP or CEO or whatver is a slick moron.

But more to the point: nearly every exec, at the end of that initial period, takes their list and sets out to solve it in exactly the wrong way:

They try and change the world to match what made them successful at the last job.

You’d think that the kind of eagerly-persued talent that gets hired would be more adaptable, but that’s rarely the case.

Everything they look at will be measured against what things were like at the last awesome job that exec had. If they had success at customer-centered orgs, that’s what they’ll do. If they were all about cost control, order office supplies now and lock them in your desk.

I’ve seen this happen over and over. New execs are willing to look at the problems of the institutions they join but rarely at the positives.

For example, say a company’s evolved over a long period of time to produce teams centered around different pieces of particularly difficult technology (I’ll use cell phones, so my current job doesn’t get after me):
– Customer application A
– Payment application B
– Phone application C
…

Each of those has a couple of rocket scientists who have done the core work on the application, and an outer layer of people with specific experience who know their job really well.

The new CEO notes that it’s really hard to get big projects done, because each application has resources and wants to tinker with stuff. Resources are hard to move around. They come from a much different background, where all jobs classifactions were divided up and people might work on anything. So if you want Superproject 2000 to go out, you get 10 analysts, 10 devs, 10 testers, and so on. The new CEO decides they need to reorg around job function.

This fails, because the world can’t be bent to perception. Probably what happens is that everyone moves around on an org chart and then ignores it: the manager in charge of projects for application A goes and gets their old crew together, while application B does the same, with a little poaching here and there. Really undesirables get put on the worst work, or laid off.

Which isn’t bad, but those people should have been weeded out aggressively earlier. That’s a whole other topic though.

The other possibility is the rocket scientists and the other really smart folks leave, and now your silos are filled with dumb folks who can’t get anything done.

Whereas if you promote from within, the worst thing that’ll happen is you’ll have someone who came up through the ranks and knows how to work with the other groups. There are drawbacks, of course — favoritism towards old cronies, inability to let go — but the one advantage someone who comes up steeped in company culture will know is the company culture, and who is to be respected and who should be ignored.

When they face the problems the new exec faces, they are much better acquinted with it. They know why it exists, and what’s happened to previous attempts to fix it. They know who can make the solution happen, and how it can be done.

Sometimes when a company is clearly broken, a new exec is the solution. But often it does far more harm than good, and promoting from within should always be the prefered choice.

Looks like blogger’s been eating posts for two weeks. Always a nice surprise.

Still eating posts.

I’ve been working on SecretApp 2000, which involves trying to re-learn development and all that good stuff, plus it’s been winter… so today, the weather’s nice, it’s not freezing, I put on the gear, pumped up the bike tires, and ripped off a 50-miler for the first ride in months.

Nearly got taken out by a car again — some dude inexplicably thought he could make a left turn from the other direction *through* me. I don’t know if he just didn’t see me or what, but I’m a tall dude and I had some bright colors on.

Yeah. Good fun for the first 40, which surprised even me. Then it got bad. The problem with where I live is that any significant ride requires me to descend first — Lake Sammamish loop, hooking up with the Burke-Gilman, doing the Lake Washington loop, heading out to Duvall — and that means that at the end of my 20-40-60-100 mile ride, I come back and right before I get home I have to take a hellish climb. It’s always nice.

I’ve been meaning to put up more business posts, but I’m always leary of having my day job perk up. But there’s stuff brewing hopefully for this week.

“Don’t hold back!” yelled someone in the audience between songs. This happened a lot, the intimacy of one person on stage, alone, performing.
“I’m not holding back,” Tweedy said. He was a little exasperated at the callers, but also a little amused. “This is all I’ve got.”