Category: Work Eyeballs

One Foot in Front of the Other

BobbieLeave a comment

One of the things I do to relax – particularly when I need the hands to be doing something (e.g., knitting project, cross stitch project, etc.) is “watch” YouTube. I have a handful of subscriptions but the ones I’ve enjoyed most of late are History Hit and the “Tech Support” series from Wired. The most recent one I watched was with a polar explorer, and I listened as he answered questions from a wide selection of forums.

In answering one of the questions, he started talking about a time he was on day 4 or 5 of a 50-day solo expedition – this guy legit goes out there with a tent and a stove and assorted gear and no one else — and he lost his iPod. (His white iPod, in the snow and ice, the irony of which was not lost on him). It meant that for 45 days then — if he was to continue — he was alone with his thoughts. No podcasts, no music, etc. This was disheartening and he had to park himself for a bit to work through a mental impasse; he ended up using his satellite phone to call a friend who in turn talked him through how to deal. Then he continued, for the remaining 45 days, with only his thoughts. As he put it: he started by putting one foot in front of the other, for a thousand feet, and just kept doing that.

I will not even pretend that anything I do in life is that hard. There’s not a chance. I can still take a lesson from it.

If you are at this moment a corporate worker bee of some sort, you are watching very likely as coworkers get Reduced in Force, as the job market dries up, as we are increasingly asked to do more with less in the name of Efficiency and Cost Savings. AI, whilst somewhat useful for the basics, hasn’t (yet, knock wood) really replaced human capability (barring the impression it has from some CEO’s). The more load you pile into a machine — think of increasing the number of pages you put through a shredder each time — the more bogged down it gets, the less productive it is, or feels.

It’s review season again where I work, meaning that each person sets aside a nominal period of time (some do this in 20 minutes, some do this over agonizing hours) to identify their *impact* over the last 6-ish months. Not delivery.

You can have a lot of delivery with little impact. If you ship a bunch of code and no one uses it, you had a lot of delivery, and not much impact. If you write a lot of docs and no one reads them, ditto. You can mop the floor six times a day 7 days a week but if no one is walking on it there’s not much impact. I’m not even going to pretend that this is in the sole control of the worker bee: oftentimes we are directed to Do the Thing and if your boss tells you to Do the Thing you Do the Thing because capitalism and rent and groceries.

Whereas you can *feel* like you’ve delivered relatively little but had serious impact. It’s a bit of “proving a negative” but if you are beating your head against a wall with a project and making only the slightest headway, *but still making headway*, that can be impact – because you’ve either found a way to NOT do it again (hey, document that so others can learn) or you’ve blazed the trail and figured out how it was supposed to go, so others can find it easier (and hey document that too). *Someone* had to do it first, and it wasn’t going to be easy. It’s also not what we normally think of when we think impact.

Dollars. Views. Customers. Reduced time to X. We tend to think about impact in objective numbers and quantitative measurement. There is also room for qualitative feedback and the value of pivoting. There is value in slogging through things but, and I want this to be copiously clear, there is no value in slog for slog’s sake, and having to repeat a slog. If you’re the first one to explore and slog, share that out so it’s less of a slog. If you find yourself slogging through the exact same stuff with the exact same people, it’s time to convert that into impact – pull back/up/out and figure out how to break the cycle (if you can).

I am equally not going to pretend that it’s that simple – there are and will be situations in which you’re told to do the thing because you were told to do the thing, in spite of objective evidence that there’s a better/different/impactful way. The best you can hope for there is a workplace that apparently rewards delivery, vs. impact. If you’re very very lucky, you have an environment, resources, and work community that lends itself to impact over delivery.

And in the meantime, you put one foot in front of the other for the next thousand feet.

Now What, Part III

BobbieLeave a comment

They say history does not repeat itself but boy howdy does it rhyme. Another quarter, and another batch of layoffs. This builds on previous guidance.

If you are Leaving

Firstly, I am sorry. I really am. Go check out Now What, and Now What II, for some initial guidance (especially about that RIF package you may or may not have gotten).

Resume

In addition to everything else in those other pages, you will want to use modern tools for modern solutions. While I do not believe AI is a golden hammer, it *can* help you brush up that resume. The key here is to use it for *parts* and then review it and add your voice and finishing touches. Things to particularly pay attention to:

  • a concise summary at the top – by concise I mean 240-character-tweetable concise.
  • bulleted skills list.
  • tailoring to different role types that are adjacent – a given person is perfectly capable of being a Technical Program Manager or a Product Manager, but how you slant your resume will differ for those two roles.
  • clean design – you want enough white space to not make it cramped and not so much that it creates extra pages of reading or the eye falls off the page.

Before you send it out, triple check it for accuracy, and remove any “the user” or other phrases that signal AI use.

Networking

Find local chapters and meet-ups of folks who are in the same industry/specialty as you. Yep, meetup is still a thing, as is dev.events. You may be an introvert (Hi. It’s me. I’m an introvert.) but you’ll want to get out there and network – this can lead to consulting gigs, soft intros, expanding your LinkedIn (up next), etc.

LinkedIn

OK I mean yes, you can post how you are/were impacted. And your feels. But after that you need to look at LinkedIn as a tool.

  • “Link” to those you worked with that you had a good working relationship with – because now you can see jobs that get posted on their pages, by *their* network.
  • Clean up your profile like you clean up your resume: get yourself a headline, an “about” section, make sure your experience and skills are up to date.
  • Did you know you can set the “Open to Work” feature to Recruiters only?
  • Use it to find companies that say they are hiring (more on that later). When you reach out to recruiters or folks hiring, add a short note about why you’re messaging them (personalize it). It will help you stand out.
  • Take a look at your post history – is there anything there that *might* give a recruiter or a company second thoughts? I’m of a “hey if I say it at all I will shout it in a public square” mentality, but not all are.

Job Hunting

Indeed, LinkedIn, etc. all post roles that are “open”. I say “open” because you know and I know that some organizations aren’t great about their job posting hygiene, leave roles online that have been filled, or (in some cases) have “ghost” roles open. You don’t want those, you want real jobs.

If you can, look at the posting date. Focus more on applying to things posted sooner to “now”, than older. Those are less likely to be well into the interview and/or hiring process, and more likely to be legitimate and still funded.

If you know someone who works at that company, reach out to them and ask them for a soft intro to the hiring manager, or a referral.

Stress Management

Touch grass. I’m serious: go out for a walk, make sure you’re hydrated, and so forth; this is a stressful time and stress management is going to be a requirement, because stress can impact a lot of things including your immune system. You don’t want that.

If you are Left

Yes, this sucks for you too; go see “Closure“.

LinkedIn

You get LinkedIn homework too.

  • Find the folks you know are impacted, that you have a good working relationship with them, and “Link” them. This gives them an extended network and exposes them to more opportunities.
  • As fellow Linkies post jobs available, repost them. You don’t have to add your thoughts if you don’t want to, but reposting them extends the visibility of the opening through *your* network directly.
  • For closer impacted folks, you can help them eyeball their resume. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of a role you don’t realize all that you do, so you can be that “realizer” for your impacted friends.

Referrals

  • If your company has open positions, offer referrals for those you know would be a good fit. Referrals may sometimes feel like a black hole via the “system”, so if you can (without too much political capital) reach out to the hiring manager of the role your fellow Linkie is applying for, that can absolutely help.
  • If a position has been open for longer than 2 weeks, *definitely* check with the hiring manager if you can before referring. In the current market, that role is likely already filled or deeply in the hiring process, and it may be too late.

Stress Management

This applies to you, too. Both from a survivor’s guilt perspective, but also from a “there’s bound to be a shuffle in the work structure or the workload”. Try to maintain good sleep hygiene, get some cardio, and stay hydrated, because it’s going to be icky for a bit as you juggle what you see online and what you experience at work.

Deep breaths, and do the best you can, with what you have.

Ripping

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Ask any sewist or person who works with fabric what their feelings are about their seam ripper, and they will either tell you it’s complicated or that it’s their favorite. Most of us think it’s complicated.

A seam ripper is a little tool with a sharpish-hooked edge that you use to rip seams (“it’s that easy!”). “Ripping” sounds more violent than it is — it cuts through the threads that hold the seam together whilst (mostly) preserving the fabric on either side and is used for either letting you take something that wasn’t right for you and make it right for you, or for tearing out a mistake.

In knitting, if you have to do that it’s called “frogging” and it’s where you yank the yarn free of the needles and, row by row, disassemble the knit into an unwieldy pile of yarn.

For the most part, NO ONE is having a good time doing these things. At the very best, these are an impedance to actual progress, a necessary correction on the way to doing the thing you actually wanted to do. More often, they are an admission of error, and a painstaking reminder at that. By the time you are frogging or ripping seams, you are watching as you undo dozens, perhaps scores of hours of work. It hurts.

At the very least, though, you have control – you can choose to let the seams stay as-they-are, or you can choose to undo them and refashion them into something you want — but you choose. If you’re one of the thousands laid off last week — or millions over the last year — you didn’t get to choose (or likely didn’t). You have been forced into a Very Large and Very Painful change.

I’ve got some older posts on the practicalities of handling this situation but for the most part they do not address one of the more problematic aspects: what if you’re old?

I speak as someone who is “old”. At least, considered “old” in the workforce for technology: this year I will be 52. With the power of hair dye and wrinkle cream and soft focus and carefully applied makeup I may still be “looking” mid 40’s but the reality is I’ve been in the corporate workforce now for 32 years.

Mind you, “age” isn’t a problem for the person who has it. *I* think my brain works just fine, thank you (or at least as fine as it did some 10 or 20 years ago), but the perception on the exterior could be that I am not as “fresh” as someone younger in career, or as “raw”. (Why do we use phraseology for candidates that we would for produce?). Older folks who have been hit by the layoffs are going to have a harder time getting a new job, and that can mean a forced early retirement or a forced early cliff in finances, neither of which sound great.

The irony is, of course, that we need people to be working as long as possible to support the infrastructure our government uses to support the *really old* people. With the largest generation — Boomers — retiring, the more of us Gen X-ers that can be kept in play, the better off “the system” will be. Gen-X has more in common with Millenials in terms of why we stay at a role, and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this infographic, I do think that our generation’s skeptical approach to most things — rebranded as “critical thinking” by the time I got into the workforce properly — is and proves to be quite useful.

Which is not to say the pain is solely borne by us “semi-olds”. Millenials are still paying off student loans while trying to hold a mortgage and save for their kids’ college. Gen Z are coming in with student debt and skyrocketing housing expenses. Getting yoinked out of your job, and also your health insurance, with no notice, is catastrophic. Sure, the unemployment rate — even today — isn’t as bad as it has been (the Great Recession and COVID both created huge spikes), but that is cold comfort to the person evaluating their current situation in what is hopefully a “garden leave” period.

This could be a post that tells one impacted to “buck up”, refashion that resume, pound the pavement, work your network, etc. There are plenty of those posts. This post is to acknowledge it sucks, and for some in a specific stage and circumstance, even if eventually they do get something bigger and better, it sucks hard.

Do your updates.

Bobbie2 Comments

Usually I try to figure out a pithy title as a draw, but for the love of whichever entities you respect and/or follow, please do your software updates. Specifically do your platform updates: on your iPhones/Pads/Macs, on your Windows machines. Update your apps. When the little red notification comes on, do not ignore it, just do it.

How to Update

(If you have other devices/platforms just use your handy dandy search engine — I use Duck Duck Go — to identify how to get your updates in a timely fashion. Bonus points if you set it up to automatically do it.)

Why Update

There are some that believe the updates are for feature funsies: e.g., if I update my phone I will get the new AI this or the new UI that. This is true, for most “regular” updates there are some feature releases and you get to read all about those (and decide if you like that or not). There are also “bug fixes”. I feel like this does disservice to what those fixes are: if I think of a “bug” I think of “annoying thing that happens”, I do not think of “wide open gaping hole for bad actors to waltz in through”.

Your platform updates often include security patches. These patches are, for the most part, NOT because the engineers made a mistake when crafting the platform, rather, they relied on packaged convenience libraries to do some standardized work and *it is those libraries* that have problems. Think of it like this: the engineers baked the cake, but the problem was hidden in the flour they used, and would not have been visible when they baked the cake and someone found out the flour had something in it long after the cake has been baked.

This happens *all the time*. There are thousands, probably millions of little packed up conveniences in the software world, because writing something *from scratch* takes a very long time and it’s kind of silly if someone has already done it (and done it so well that All the Other Kids are Using It). When a vulnerability is discovered in a package, it is given a CVE number (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), and a detailed write up on what the vulnerability is, where it is, and oftentimes suggestions on how to fix it. Companies worldwide use MITRE’s CVE database to understand what and where those vulnerabilities are, and how to fix them, so they can iteratively update their software and further secure it. Vulnerabilities are discovered by engineers around the world, sometimes on their own time, and sometimes on their company time: they are written up and shared with package users to make sure they get fixed.

How Bad Can it Be?

A vulnerability or exposure has roughly four stages of severity: low, medium, high, and critical. YOU as the consumer don’t really know which basket of vulnerabilities is addressed in “bug fixes”, but the company you depend on does: high and critical vulnerabilities, and their address, are often why you get off-cycle security patches (ever had an update on your phone that seemed awfully soon after the last one?). These vulnerabilities are “publicly disclosed”, meaning, their existence and how they can be exploited is also disclosed. The analogy here is: there’s a catalogue of all barn doors that are unlocked in your area, and anyone who uses those barns should be aware of that, and the barn owners should be aware of that, so the barn owner can lock the door. This also means that bad actors (who, let’s face it, are probably serially trying all the barn doors through the area anyway) who are lazy and did not do their homework now have a legit directory of which barns are probably unlocked.

Hence the haste.

These vulnerabilities are discovered and there is a Very Short Window in which the companies that use them can get a heads up on fixing them and getting those fixes out before they show up in the public discourse. (Meaning, the CVE doesn’t show up formally in the MITRE database until which time as the organizations and libraries dependent on fixing it have at least had a *chance* to fix it). This means that the original discoverer(s) of the exploit know how to break in, but it isn’t available to everyone else to see: that happens after (theoretically) everything has been fixed.

“Everything has been fixed”, in this case, means that your software has been patched and updated, *or you have been asked to do an update*.

If you wait, and the longer you wait, the more exposed you are.

Modern convenience often comes with modern inconvenience: we have computers that are smaller than our hand that literally tether to all global knowledge, they help us stay in communication with others and they help us track our lives and livelihoods. They also are fragile and need care and feeding, and it can be easy to defer it in light of convenience (“oh, I won’t do the update now because it will take too long, I’ll wait until ‘later'”). Please. Don’t wait until “later”.

Now What, Part II

Bobbie2 Comments

We’ve discussed before of what to do when you’re facing a layoff/Reduction In Force (RIF). It would appear that “the market” has decided the latest vogue is to do straight firing, based on “performance”. I put those in scare quotes because there is no small amount of evidence that some folks being let go for “performance” were under the impression– with receipts — that they were not under any form of performance improvement plan and/or had stellar reviews. Even if you were, being let go with no warning and no health insurance sucks. So let’s do this:

  1. Take a deep breath. Panic will not serve you now; and the energy you used to put into your job you now need to put into YOU. If you need to take a moment to scream into a pillow or sob in the shower or make a little felt voodoo doll, well, do you. Don’t take too long, because there’s more to do.
  2. Are you covered for health insurance? E.g., do you have a spouse and can they cover you on theirs? If you’re under 26 you may be able to be covered by your parents. Being let go (for whatever reason) is a “qualifying event”. If not, check out your state’s health insurance exchange. (If that doesn’t work, type your state name and “health insurance” into your browser… because that previous link is a federal government link and some of the sites are being “updated” lately).
  3. Different states have different rules for unemployment – in some there’s a waiting period if you’ve been “fired”, in others it “depends”. Put your state name into your browser along with “unemployment” and follow the links on how to file and what is needed. Do your best to NOT be emotionally compromised during this, you’re going to need patience. I find it useful to pretend it’s not for me, but for my kid or my mom. How would I advocate for them? Then I do that.
  4. Review whatever paperwork they gave you as part of your “firing”. What happens with your 401k, your pension, etc. … when does your last check drop – make a note of that too.
  5. If your insurance covers you “through the month” or suchlike, get an emergency appointment with your doc (if you can) and refill all your prescriptions, etc. Insurance goes by date of care.
  6. Take a look at your budget at home and, if you don’t have one, now’s the time. You need a hard list of the things you cannot NOT pay (like rent, food, utilities) and things you can cut out if you need to (like subscription services, dining out, etc.). Will it suck? Yes. But let’s get with Maslow on this one: needs first. Then figure out the gaps.
  7. Time for some math: you have whatever’s in your account, plus possibly an inbound “last check”. That “account” balance may include your emergency fund (this, friend, is an emergency) or you may not have one. Take that into account, along with how long before you can get unemployment, and compare that to your budget – are you going to be in the hole, and if so how much? (Then start trying to figure out what you can do to bridge the hole: how fast can you get a new job (any job), where can you pull cash from to bridge the gap, etc.). You can also negotiate with companies as to payment plans and hardship stays.
  8. Brush up that resume, your LinkedIn, etc. Network. Have informational “coffees” with people. Scour the job boards (e.g. Indeed).
  9. Have your talking points ready as to why you were let go. If you have references from coworkers, previous managers, etc., have those at the ready. Those employers know the score and they watch the news too: this is not necessarily a scarlet letter.
  10. This too shall pass. It’s going to absolutely suck, but you’re resilient, and you can do this.

The Cost Basis of Non-Monetary Recognition

BobbieLeave a comment

Recognition, without an understanding of the value of it, is worthless. Or at least, discounted.

On one hand, it’s a bit daft to say that: the very definition of recognition (say that five times fast) in the sense of a positive acknowledgment is “appreciation or acclaim for an achievement, service, or ability” (per the OED). If you do not understand or value what is behind that appreciation or acclaim, it is difficult to understand or value the recognition itself.

Sometime between 2009 and 2012 at the end of a PTA year I was awarded the “Golden Acorn“.

At the time I was awarded this I did not know what it was. I mean, I got a nice certificate, and a cute little pin (indeed, a little gold-colored acorn with WAPTSA on it – Washington PTSA), and everyone clapped, and it was nice. I still had no idea what it was. I was thankful of the clapping and of the little get together our PTSA had, where folks were verbally recognized and got little certificates and we put to rest another PTSA year. (I was on the PTSA board from 2008 to 2021 – the years, they blend together).

I still had no idea what the Golden Acorn was. I didn’t have a background in its value, or understanding of its place, priority, or frankly, point. I mean, thanks for the recognition in the meeting, but did I need a tchotchke? Not really. Did I ever really look it up? Nah. I still have the little golden pin in my “collection of weird little things I’ve acquired” drawer.

Last night we (the Royal We) finally got around to voting – in Washington State voting is done by mail, so the three of us dutifully sat around the dinner table, one with their computer up to do research, one reading the voter’s pamphlet, and the third asking pointed questions here and there (and/or running explainers when needed). As part of this the pamphlet reader would read out the position, education, community service, and qualifications of each candidate. We found two Golden Acorns in there.

It was hard for me to figure out why those would be so declared on a voter’s pamphlet, nestled among information like where someone got their JD from, or which Rotary club they were board chair of. To me, this was a chintzy little pin and nice piece of paper that I was certain no one outside of my little PTSA would be familiar with. I was wrong.

Here’s the thing: because I didn’t know this, the *complete value* of the award went over my head. Had I known and understood what it meant, I would have written thank you notes (I am not joking). I would have been much more humbled. Heck, it’s 10-15 years since I got this thing, and it’s tickled my brain repeatedly in the last 12 hours. Yet at the time I didn’t know the full value of the award and therefore the full value of the recognition escaped me.

Recognition in the workplace takes many forms: you can get a shiny new title. You can get money. You can get your name checked in large bold font across emails or reorganizational announcements or “shout outs” at meetings. You can get pizza lunches, Door Dash gift cards, or even 20-sided die. Unless the person *receiving* it values those things, though, it’s not as impactful as one would hope.

This is further complicated by the fact that not everyone values the same things. Some of us are more mercenary than others and straight cash will do, thank you. Some of us like our name in bold letters more. Some of us are food-hounds. Leadership therefore has a tricky problem: how do you properly recognize and individual, or a team, in such a way that *they* value it? In large teams — where you have hundreds of people — finding out if they are more into visibility or cash is problematic; a direct line manager should have that understanding of their team(s) but rolling that up into a nice neat “delivery” that accommodates all is impossible. Even if you knew that person A, B, C preferred money and person D, E, F preferred visibility, once the rewards are out there, minds can change.

The solution, then, is to do both. One of those things costs *nothing* in fiscal terms. It’s fairly obvious that cash rewards (or similar financial rewards: stocks, etc.) has a cost associated and that has to fit within an overall budget for the company, etc. etc. Genuine verbal and visual recognition of folks for a job well done, however, can and should happen publicly and directly. While folks understand the value of a dollar, they need to understand the value of the non-monetary recognition as well.

What does it mean for this VP or that VP to call out your name? What does it mean to have your name identified in a given mail, or proffered in a given meeting? And how is that meaning, and value interpreted based on its origin?

The Golden Acorn award I got was meaningful at the time (and still now) because my *peers* and my board chair were the ones to present it. That it was backed by state PTA was not known to me at the time and now the value that that imparts is a calculation of breadth and an understanding of rarity – there isn’t always one per PTA per year, and its value is understood across the state in the context of PTA. Similarly, the value of verbal or visual recognition (in *addition to* the practical rewards of money) is directly related to the *recipients* understanding of the breadth and rarity of the person or entity providing it. If I don’t know you and/or understand what it means to be praised by you, the value of that praise is somewhat diminished from what it could be.

In the End it Catches Up with You

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I am at present paying dearly for not reading the fine print.

I work at a large company, and we have SharePoints. We have more than one. Just in my group I think we have four. In some cases, the SharePoints are tied to a Teams instance, which means the security for access to said SharePoint is driven by membership to the Teams team. Because Teams does not restrict membership to security groups and instead does membership to individual humans, this can make for an administrative nightmare.

At any rate, I am having to move things from Teams-SharePoint-Locked-Folder to Regular-SharePoint-Locked-Folder and in order to do that there’s this handy-dandy little “move” function right at the top navigation. You can select all manner of things, select “move”, tell it where you want to move it to, and just hit go. It’s just that easy.

Except it is not.

Because the move functionality has unexplained and unannounced limits – at least no process on the site tells you about those limits, you have to actually RTFM, which is found at the very bottom of this page. Those limits are both in file size, number of files, and total file size. I did not know this two days ago, when I hit “move” and walked away thinking in 30 minutes everything would be magically done.

Instead, what happens is SharePoint looks at its old location (hm…) and at its new location (hm…) and starts to build out the folder structure in the new location before moving files. So that when it chokes — and it will choke — you are left with folders that are empty in your new location, and all your files still sitting merrily in your old location. Then, if you try to move folder by folder, it will give you a duplicate of your new folder, in your new folder location (e.g., now you have Folder and Folder1). Seamless transition this is not.

I am a victim of my own shortsightedness, and now I must pay – delicately and carefully deleting empty folders, then manually chunking and moving files, all in an environment where people are trying to use said files. Don’t even get me started on the One Note. I am, at present, 9 hours into this endeavor (of course I am multitasking).

The thing is, we set ourselves up for failure – or headaches – when we don’t read the fine print. Reading the fine print takes time, and effort, and sometimes it is incredibly boring, and often complex: it’s the written equivalent of bran. We all know we should do it and some of us do but you only get the benefit at the very end of the process (and depending on how long you waited to do it, it can be a really messy end).

We’re in that time of year (at least at my company) where we are evaluating again: ourselves, our teams, our output, our goals, our objectives, how we measure people/teams/features and how we should think about strategy. In times where there is Too Much Going On it is tempting to have the mindset of “I’m sure this will just work” because 1. in so many cases it just does and 2. the idea of investing the time into reading the documentation “just in case” seems limited. Until the end.

Choose your shortcuts wisely.

Are you there, Bob?

BobbieLeave a comment

I just sent an email to myself.

There’s kind of a lot happening right now. I work at a major tech company that is both growing and cutting back (looking at our stock valuation vs. our layoffs notice is an interesting, eye-crossing experience). My house is a little upended with some projects, and there are equally intricate family-dynamics things (all goodness just lots of moving parts). I also signed on to be a board member of the Washington Women’s Foundation and that adds another avenue of effort. If anything, work is the most relaxing part of my life at this moment, and that is saying something.

At 5am this morning my eyeballs snapped open, because of course they did, and here with my coffee I am sorting through the different mental threads and trying to find order. Coffee helps.

One of the things that happens semi-regularly where I work is a re-organization of the humans: upon evaluation of the market conditions, or assimilation of another group, or the departure or arrival of New Hotness, we split apart and reassemble our workforce like so many bucky balls. There are benefits and there are detractions: on the one hand, you get cross-pollination, you discover that the tech world is really small (I frequently find myself working again with people I worked with 5 or 10 years ago), you get new technology to play with, and so forth. On the other hand, the relabeling and renaming of things, the re-explanation of charter, and the re-divvying of workloads and requirements can make some apprehensive, some frustrated, and everyone a little less productive (for a time).

And so, this morning as I parsed through mails and thought about impacts, I started to pen a note to our leadership team outlining some of those impacts that would need attention, if not urgently. Renaming and refactoring things has implications to identity and access, and picking through how we can both stop the goat-rodeo of reacting to these reorganizations with short-term solutions for those, while also finding something that is efficient to execute, takes brain space. Again, coffee helps.

About two paragraphs into the email (ya, I know) I changed the “to” line and sent it to myself. It’s not fully baked, and if I send this thing out, the reaction from the recipients is likely to be, “ok, and?”. I don’t want to add to the churn, I do want to think about it more, but if I don’t send this to myself, I’m likely to push it off or at least not have the start of the salient thoughts written down somewhere. It needs to be in my inbox, because I need to consistently reflect on it.

Two months ago, some enterprising person managed to acquire my work email and my personal credit card and wrought some not insignificant damage, the legacy of which is my spam folder is legendary and my inbound email is a Bandini Mountain through which I must parse. Hyper-vigilant junk mail filters help, routine email hygiene helps, but it’s still a volume of stuff to wade through each morning to find the “real” things.

And I have just added to that pile.

Again. Coffee helps.

Gap Analysis

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I play a lot of Tetris. Cascading four-block shapes that have to be fit “just so” with one of two goals: either maximize your “points” (in which case your strategy is to build up four lines and then complete them by slotting a final piece in) or maximize the number of rows you exhaust (in which case your strategy is to complete a single line as often as possible). As you play either the cascade speeds up or impediments are put in your way to make it hard to complete rows. (FWIW, Tetris appears to be licensed out to a bunch of different entities and so your version may vary). I will play three or four rounds transitioning between “work brain” and “home brain”, a way to “accomplish” something, much the way finishing a cup of coffee and working out in the morning means I have “accomplished” something and/or doing a load of towels means I have “accomplished” something.

The thing is, as you progress in Tetris the speed and/or impediments do increase and so you rarely get nice, neat complete rows out of the gate (towards either goal). There’s always a gap and you can choose to ignore it (build nice, neat rows above it) or engineer towards it (what do I have to eliminate to get that gap addressed). If you are the type of person who likes everything “just so” you may find yourself using that second strategy and occasionally to your detriment: if you employ the “remove all gaps” strategy, you are giving up on “build up solid rows” strategy.

Of course this is like work.

I am a “Technical Program Manager” – but I expect this is observed and encountered by “Product Managers” and “Software Engineers” and pretty much any other role in which you have to coordinate sixteen things in order to deliver A Thing. Out of sixteen things, four will work perfectly well and four will work moderately well and four will be okay-ish and four will be an abject nightmare of permissions, architecture, personalities and/or randomization. (Your proportions may vary, your encounters will not). You can focus on those last four or you can work around them, but you will rarely, if ever, encounter a program or objective that does not hand you gaps through which you must strategize.

It’s frustrating. It’s also a muscle to build, because the nature of the world we live in now is that things are increasingly more intricate even while we strive to have things like AI and ML make things easier; I would posit that the development of AI and ML solutions have not been easy for those who *build* them. As our careers and technology progress, the blocks start falling faster, and the obstacles increase; and hopefully we get more agile and effective in dealing with them, because they continue.

Or we give up and go do a load of towels.

Diamonds and Graphite

BobbieLeave a comment

[Edit: Math]

It’s a time of nontrivial pressure here at my work, as we arrive at the end of one Fiscal Year and on the precipice of another. Like a calendar New Year this invites all sorts of process of evaluation and review and planning, meaning that if you are a front-line manager you are currently juggling the evaluation of your individual team members (both career wise and performance wise, which I would argue are two different things), the evaluation of the team as a whole (did we do the things we said we were going to do and if not why not), the planning for what the team will do in the coming period (as informed by previous), and the budgeting for that plan (which… is a bit more constrained everywhere). Every year we “kid” ourselves that come the new Fiscal Year things will Calm Down because we will have Sorted Out Last Year and we have a Plan For Next Year; and in some cases, that’s legit. In others, it is an invitation to self-delusion.

One analogy I hear a lot is how you can’t make a diamond without pressure. Sure – that is principally correct, if you want those carbons matrixed such that they create a 10 on the hardness scale and you can use them to be effective tools to cut other things (e.g., industrial diamonds) or inspire awe and avarice (e.g., diamond adornment) then rock on: apply your pressure to that carbon. It’s expensive, but the end product is useful, and sometimes pretty.

You know what else is made of pure carbon? Graphite. The stuff in your pencils (whether they be Dixon Ticonderoga or mechanical pencils) is graphite, and it’s *elementally the same* as diamond, it’s just configured differently. If a diamond is matrixed carbon, graphite are cellular sheets of carbon. (You can see diagrammatic and explanatory differences here). While graphite requires pressure too (about 75k lbs/square inch to form), Diamonds require tenfold more pressure.

Diamonds and graphite are measured differently — even the goth diamonds (industrial diamonds) are priced in carats (about 0.20 oz) and graphite is priced in ton (one ton =2000 pounds, 1 pound =16 ounces, so the differential there is 32k). Industrial diamonds can be priced as low as 12 cents per carat (I’m using industrial diamonds here because they produce work, vs other diamonds are for “art”). Graphite is running about $2281 per ton. In terms of value, graphite is then about $1.10 per pound and industrial diamonds are about $1.92, so the price difference is about a fifth of the pressure difference.

You get what you pay for. But what do you want?

You wouldn’t, for example, use an industrial diamond to sort out your notes, to sketch things, to use as a heat sink for your laptop, for use in a battery, to reinforce plastic or to deflect radar; you wouldn’t use graphite to grind or cut things. The pressure exerted produces a fundamentally different material and you use the material differently. The markets are also different: the Industrial Diamond market is projected to be $2.5bn by 2028, Graphite is headed to $25.7bn in the same year.

Which is a link-and-fact-ridden way to say that if you are valuing the pressure for the pressure’s sake then you are not valuing anything at all. You can hone a clump of carbon into a very, very specific tool with very, very specific use cases in a narrow-ish market (again, unless you’re doing it for “art”), or you can use about a tenth of the pressure and get a fundamentally broader application from your toolset.

If the metaphor hasn’t hit you with a carbon-fiber baseball bat yet, here we go: reveling in the volume of pressure applied to personnel for the value that “people work well under pressure” and “you can really see the value people provide when they are under pressure” is a detrimental and flawed approach. If what you want to do is hone that particular person into that particular niche, understand that you are developing a very, very hard matrix in that human that will allow it to go and cut things and grind things but at the expense of its ability to buffer things, to connect things, and to elucidate things. Or if you are asking the human to do both of those things then you will get neither well.

Sure, people are not elements (well technically people are elements, collections of them, but whatever). People have the ability to compartmentalize, to have sentience, to make decisions, and to make choices. Some of us were hardened and pressured and then had things written in our reviews like “bodies in the wake”; it takes a lot of hard work on the person upon whom pressure was applied to de-matrix their carbons and get to those nice flowy sheets (Years. It takes years, trust me).

We should not spend all of our efforts trying to create batches of diamonds alone, and we should identify and appreciate the need for graphite.