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.”

I coded tonight for the first time in years. I’ve tinkered a little on USSM stuff, hacked a little PHP, but in the last couple months I’ve been asked if I could code, and my response has been “I haven’t coded in years and haven’t written anything close to production code in seven.”

Which, if you’re curious, was when I wrote a Perl script that automated data collection after a test run of the app I worked on at AT&T Wireless. Not that complicated. Before that I used to do some modest programming in college, and once had a short-lived job where I tried to maintain a horrible, horrible Fortran program at the UW.

Brief digression: that program, when handed to me, was eight pages, uncommented, no spacing of any kind, and had grown out of a “count lines in this census data” to a fairly sophisticated tail-eating snake that would, in the moment before it consumed itself, output a whole bunch of data, like

Family 1
Woman, 60 years old (data)
Husband, 40 years old
Wife, 35 years old
Son1
Son2
Daughter 1
…

When I had to work on this thing I would go back to my apartment with a 12-pack of Natural Ice beer, bring that cursed code up and stare it while I shotgunned two or three beers, at which point I would be numb enough that I could start untangling the thing.

I ended up re-writing the thing in C and then quit before I could get fired. Horrible job.

Back to the story. The problem is that I’m not a particularly good programmer. I go slowly. I pay a lot of attention to design, write really detailed pseudocode, and carefully ease into where I’m going.

It’s not my strength. I’m much better at requirements, design, and particularly the research, analysis, and problem solving, which makes me a far, far better program manager (or analyst– whatever they call people like me at your company).

Plus, knowing how to program is like being able to run the VCR back in school: if you demonstrated any kind of ability to troubleshoot AV equipment, the teacher picked on you for that stuff all year. It’s like when relatives fixate on one aspect of your personality, except that instead of incresingly tiring elephant-themed gifts every Christmas you get forced to jiggle the cables in the back of the TV or re-thread the projector.

So I’ve always pled ignorance. Sure, it shows up sometimes when I can follow devs into the cubbyhole during discussions, but by and large their expertise is so vast that what little knowledge I have is so small in comparison as to be non-existant. It’s not an issue. I’m almost never considered to go troubleshoot some bug: there are always better options around, and I’m better used negotiating with a vendor or something.

But I have this idea, you see, for something fairly simple and cool I want to do, and I’ve written the design docs. So I went out and installed some things today. I felt this trepidation while I was getting everything running, and reading the docs I started to feel nervous and kinda sick.

Then I got a trivial test app to compile, and I started smiling. Now if only I had some Natural Ice.

I log in to sell something. Every time I sell, it prompts me to sign up for automatic payments. If I cancel, I’m dumped out of the process.

There’s no notification anywhere that I have to sign up. But I do. There’s no other way.

No big deal. I sign up. PayPal’s page then tells me that

“You can review this billing agreement or cancel automatic PayPal payments at any time by going to your PayPal Profile and clicking the Preapproved Payments link or by modifying your eBay Seller Account preferences.”

Except that I can’t: there’s no link anywhere on the ebay seller account to do this.

I don’t understand how stuff like this goes live: do they seriously not have anyone doing QA at all to look for cases like “instructions point to non-existant option” and “user is able to sell something”?

And now, of course, ebay’s got a hook into my wallet. Which is reassuring because they are so trustworthy and all.

In my job, a reorginization kills my productivity for months and directly hurts my pocketbook. After a reorg, I’ve got a new team that doesn’t know how to work well together, a new boss who doesn’t know me or how to make my life easier (or how hard I’m going to make their life), and now the developers, testers, business customers, and operations people I’ve built good working relationships with are all replaced with new versions who I need to start over with. Often, everyone now has to work two jobs half-time, supporting whatever they used to be doing and trying to pick up their new jobs.

I don’t do my job really well until months after a reorg. This means for those months, the company isn’t getting as much out of me for what they’re paying, and that’s a poor choice. My annual review will then include a period of months where — despite my best efforts — I wasn’t as good as I normally was. And if my review goes:
Q1: Star
(Reorg)
Q2: Good after a period of largely ineffective
Q3: Outstanding, getting back to stardom
(Reorg)
Q4: Good but not particularly effective

There’s no way I get the “star” review score (and raise, and bonus). And it’s the best people, who invest in building relationships and doing the best work, who are inordinately hurt. Someone who’s just okay and goes through two reorgs is going to look fine. Someone great through a similar wringer will look erratic.

Every reorg costs every top-quality peer-level person in the company thousands of dollars. And there’s never any attempt made at compensation, either directly (“We know this reorg’s going to hurt your review scores, so everyone gets an extra 1% on their bonus”) or indirectly (“Review scores will be based on months unaffected by the chaos of the reorg”).

At each level, the pain is lessened, both by having broader goals and by the ability to have those goals thrown out. For instance, when I was at AT&T Wireless, when the company would post horrible results that missed goals, the board would lower those goals so that the executive leadership could get their bonuses and millions of low-priced stock options. The grunts, of course, didn’t get comperable treatment.

No wonder people on the ground level have such negative views of these things.

For managers, it’s a little better. Since they’re not held to the kind of “get x features into production” review standards a grunt is, and their networks wider, they’re better adapted for change. A manager who works on, say, the retail line-of-business applications and gets moved into working on customer-facing applications is going to find far more of their immediate contacts stay the same compared to a grunt-level worker.

However, managers get hit when the people who work for them change. People with a new boss are reluctant to rate their boss highly, especially on qualities that take a long time to establish (“My boss is honest with me…” and so on). And conversely, it can help mitigate bad scores for bad bosses, since employees are reluctant to rate a boss extremely badly if they’ve only worked for them for a month or so.

The more they’re evaluated on their ability to manage their employees, the more they’re harmed by reorgs. And even if they’re not, they’re still far less effected compared to an exec.

Soon, you’re at the level of the vice president of IT, and you have entirely different motivations. Your goal for the year isn’t “ship x widgets” though you may have some high-level initiatives you’re charged with getting out the door. It’s more likely “address supplier concerns” and the goal’s met if the suppliers rate the IT organization is “responsive or highly responsive” on the year-end survey, a dramatic improvement from “sometimes responsive”.

From your perspective, it makes total sense to order a reorganization around suppliers. Each supplier now gets their own team, with dedicated resources, and they’ll all do the projects that supplier wants! Ad-hoc teams will form around releases for each product! Sure, there’ll be a few months of depressed productivity, but after that, it’ll be great!

It works. The supplier’s overjoyed that you’re willing to go through this to better serve them. They understand that it’ll be tough at first, and you get a pass. During that initial honeymoon, as their new dedicated teams start to fight, the supplier’s going to be happy — look at the little ants go at it! They’re so cute, and the red ones are fighting for me!

The “highly responsive” box gets filled in. As the VP of IT, this stunning success gets you a huge bonus and a pat on the back.

When the annual employee survey results come out, and morale is down, people are mad about how bad communication is, express frustration with the direction of the company, with the competence of the leadership, there’s a ready excuse for you: the grunts are understandably frustrated because they’ve had to switch teams and bosses, and things will look better once they’ve settled down.

Then your boss realizes that actual productivity has ground to a halt because every team’s fighting every other team. Your reorg doesn’t get blamed — you get a new goal for next year, to streamline planning and build a unified build platform, or some such thing.

That clearly requires a reorg.

I had my resume on Monster.com briefly a while ago, when I’d quit my job before finding a new one, and before I decided to stay and fight. Despite having a good resume, I got no hits at all for a couple days. Nobody even read it. Then I realized that I should go through and fill out the different education/qualification fields, even though they were on my resume.

First offer came in the next morning, and kept coming until I took it down. Here’s why that sucks, beyond the obvious cautionary tale.

I just finished reading “Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams” by Darcy Frey. It’s about basketball but also the horrible conditions for kids growing up in Coney Island, and the institutions that exploit those who can play basketball.

Here’s the bind for a kid, even one who can play well enough at the high school level that they’re chased by recruiters: they have a crap education, so they can’t pass the SAT barrier required by the NCAA. If they’re amazingly talented, they can go pro out of high school. If they’re lucky, they can attend a junior college and hopefully transfer to a four-year school from there. Or they can get tutoring that tries to cover the gaps in their horrible education before they take the SAT tests.

Mostly, though, when the recruiters realize they’re not going to get a high enough SAT score, they’re dropped, and that’s the end of them.

Now for a second, imagine if they couldn’t play basketball, and all they got was the horrible education. Even if they were smart and dedicated, they’re screwed. They have to get out into the workplace, work their way into a full-time position (which is a difficult road) and find somewhere that’ll help with tuition. So that’s years before they’ve got a shot.

By contrast, take me. I grew up in the Kent-Renton area, attended schools in the Kent School District, which is no great shakes but compared to any account of the horrible state of inner-city schools (and, in “Last Shot” the Coney Island ones) seems like a paradise. Everyone I know in my class with half a mind to going to college managed it. If you were reasonably smart, you went to Western or the UW or some obscure college in Minnesota, and if you weren’t, you went to WSU (or, in fairness, if you wanted a good communications degree). Even those of us who went to public in-state universities and still took out
Stafford loans and worked in the library or other hapless jobs for a penny over minimum wage ($4.26) made it work.

Compared to the kids in Coney Island, our advantages were huge. From better-quality teachers and (as crappy as Kentridge was) facilities to community characteristics like better libraries* to read and study at.

Our background spotted us enough points that we were guaranteed to get in somewhere, which in turn meant x% graduated and then dominated the job marketplace.

But back to the topic at hand: the prejudice in favor of college degrees in an environment where college admission is hugely tilted towards affluence, and where a college degree means better job prospects and more money, is effective and sustainable discrimination against those who start out with less. This is exacerbated when the state of public education ensures that the different people start out on massively unequal footing.

What’s worse, I think, is that even if it’s unintentional and a recruiter’s means to cut down the available applicant pool to something more managable, it’s clear that not only are they not even looking at qualified resumes without a degree — they’re not looking at ones that have a degree if they can’t easily sort on that. I could have taken an entirely different path and worked my way out of a call center, with the same experience and the same abilities, and no one would be interested. But because I have a four-year degree from the University of Washington, where I learned that I can’t handle Southern Comfort, I am.

I don’t argue that everyone should enjoy equal results, and I don’t have any good solutions on how to solve it. If you’d told me I couldn’t go to the UW because someone from a horrible school system had put up substantially worse grades and SAT scores and bumped me out, I’d like to think I’d have understood, but I don’t really know.

If nothing else, the value the marketplace puts on college degrees makes it clear that barring widespread societal change, equality in early education — equality of opportunity — would make a huge difference in getting a more diverse group into colleges, and from there, into the workplace, which would in turn help end this discriminatory cycle.

* which are totally being screwed up, but that’s another post.

So we started throwing AdSense up on USSM, and it’s been totally bizarre. For contextual advertisements, they’re remarkably bad, which is weird because Google Mail is remarkably good at that. USSM ads tend to be for:
– the Mercury Mariner
– 1st Mariner Arena tickets (in Balitomore)
– Navy or nautical supplies
– Mariners or general sports

Needless to say, those ads don’t do a lot for us, since they’re pretty much useless to our readers as a group. So we’re not making any significant amount of money.

Stranger still, I discovered something today:
Google will take ads for wine, but not beer or whiskey.
Pipes, but not tobacco, or cigarettes.
No guns, but generic ads on some gun brand names (Glock, no, SIG-Sauer yes)
Marijuana, but only some ads, which leads to hilarity like this:

Actually… I bet they don’t.

And of course, alllll kinds of porn-related keywords.

Why wine but not vodka? Why is “home brewing” cool (and includes an ad for homebrewing Absinthe) but not beer normally? Why are some legal, controlled substances okay but not others?

When I tell people who are up here in the summer that it rains all the time and they shouldn’t move here, they think I’m being funny and trying to discourage people from clogging up the roads. Which is fair, because that’s what I’m trying to do. But it’s not as if it’s not true.

From the weather service:

THE PUGET SOUND AREA HAS RECEIVED ALMOST DAILY RAINFALL SINCE THIS
WET WEATHER PATTERN BEGAN ON DECEMBER 19TH. SOILS REMAIN SATURATED
AND THOSE ON STEEPER SLOPES ARE PRIMED TO GIVE WAY IN LANDSLIDES.

Chance we’ll go a full day without rain, based on current forecasts:
Monday: 0%
Tuesday: 6%
Wednesday: 21%
Thursday: 50%

Soooo there’s a reasonable chance during some 24-hour period this week we’ll break this streak. Whoopee! Wring me out and call me a sponge.

There were 229 suicides in King County in 2004 (King County Medical Examiner’s Office 2004 report, which has some really morbidly interesting statistical breakdowns). And you’ll note the criteria for determining if it’s suicide are pretty strict: if you offed yourself and didn’t leave clear evidence, well, who knows?

By method:
95 firearms
44 hanging
41 drugs/poison

(women, btw, all about drugs and poison)

I have to say, hanging? Really? Is it because it’s such a classic suicide method?

Anyway, the CDC offers this:

* Most popular press articles suggest a link between the winter holidays and suicides (Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania 2003). However, this claim is just a myth. In fact, suicide rates in the United States are lowest in the winter and highest in the spring (CDC 1985, McCleary et al. 1991, Warren et al. 1983).

229 out of 1,700,000 (ish) for King County = .0135% chance someone kills themself
~31,000 out of 287,000,000 for the US as a whole = .0108% chance someone kills themself (and that’s 2000 numbers)

Okay, so there’s a lot of room for variance, since the rate is so low that a couple in either direction can throw the local numbers off, but that’s a pretty dramatic increase.

Enough for the morbid thoughts, though.

Wooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I love this beer!

I got into Descutes beers because while at was working at AT&T Wireless, my team would go out on Fridays to a bar in downtown Bothell (such as it is) and drink Black Butte Porter while we bitched about the week, joked, and argued about random stuff. There were other beers available I liked more, but that was the group beer, and over time I grew to appreciate it. Every time I get it now, I think about those dudes, and how I miss working with them.

I saw a 12-pack of the red for under $12 this week. If you have the chance, I highly recommend it.