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Bored People Quit

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, “I’m quitting. I’m joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks’ notice.”

You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary “diving save”. Whether it’s HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee.

It’s an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They’ve quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, “I no longer believe in this company”. What’s worse is that what they were originally thinking was, “I’m bored”.

Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

Detecting Boredom

There are many reasons other than boredom that someone will quit. Your company might suck or be headed towards suck. This person might randomly get an offer that fulfills their life’s dream. There is a bevy of unpredictable reasons that someone will leave, but boredom is an aspect of their daily professional life you can not only easily assess, but also fix. More importantly, boredom is not initially catastrophic. Boredom shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore.

My three techniques for detecting boredom:

1. Any noticeable change in daily routine. A decrease in productivity is a great early sign that something’s up, but what you are looking for is any change in their routine. Increased snark? Unexpected vacations? Later arrivals? Earlier departures? Anything that strikes you as out of the ordinary for someone whose day you are familiar with is worth considering. The root cause of this change may have nothing to do with boredom, and the best way is figure that out is…
2. You ask, “Are you bored?” Even if you don’t have a gut feeling, it’s a good question to randomly ask your team. When I ask, I look you straight in the eyes and if you can’t stare me in the face and answer, I’m going to keep digging until you look me in the eye. Remember, the goal here is to discover boredom before they know it, and the act of a simple question might be just the mental impetus they need to see the early signs in themselves.
3. They tell you. And you listen. You’d think that someone walking into your office and stating that they’re bored would set off all sorts of alarms in your head, but that’s because you’re halfway through this article wondering when I’m going to cut to the chase and explain how to fix bored people. The reality is that someone is going to tell you they’re bored quietly and when you least expect it. They’ll tell you halfway through your 1:1 and they won’t use the word bored. They’ll say something innocuous like, “…and I really don’t know what to do next,” and you’re going to blow right by the most important thing they’ve said in a while because you’re worried about your next meeting.

As I’ve reflected on the regrettable departures of folks I’ve managed, hindsight allows me to point to the moment the person changed. Whether it was a detected subtle change or an outright declaration of their boredom, there was a clear sign that the work sitting in front of them was no longer interesting. And I ignored my observation. I assumed it was insignificant. He’s having a bad day. I assumed things would just get better. In reality, the boredom was a seed. What was “I’m bored” grew roots and became “I’m bored and why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?” and sprouted “I’m bored, I told my boss, and he… did nothing,” and finally bloomed into “I don’t want to work at a place where they don’t care if I’m bored.”

I think of boredom as a clock. Every second that someone on my team is bored, a second passes on this clock. After some aggregated amount of seconds that varies for every person, they look at the time, throw up their arms, and quit.

A Boredom Plan of Action

Whether someone is bored or not, you always need to be able to answer two questions regarding each person on your team:

1. Where are they going?
2. What are you currently doing to get them there?

In your head, answers sound like this:

• Francis wants to be a senior engineer and we’re getting him there by giving him increasingly more responsibility.
• Ronald wants to build his own company, so I’m going out of my way to include him the meetings where he can learn how the sausage is really made.
• Brooke has no idea what she wants to do, so I’m throwing curveballs at her until she hits a home run.

Knowing the answers to these questions makes the rest easier, but if you don’t have answers, you can start figuring them out by:

• Keeping an interesting problem squarely in front of them. Walk through your team right now and tell me the project they are working on that floats their boat. It doesn’t need to always be their main project, but there must be a piece of work on their plates that when they talk about it, their eyes light up. If their eyes aren’t lighting up, if there is no project in mind that will get them rambling endlessly, you…
• Let them experiment. Let them obsess. Let them scratch that itch. If there is no project on their plate that you know is engaging them, create time for them to explore whatever they want to obsess about. I absolutely guarantee there is an investigation somehow related to their work that they are dying to tinker with. The business justification for this wild-ass effort is likely not obvious, so I’ll define it: the act of exploration is as valuable as the act of building.

  Exploration is hard to justify because it’s hard to measure. When exploration is complete, you often have nothing to hold up to your project manager to explain or justify the expenditure of time. Here’s what you tell them, “My job isn’t just building product; I also build people.”

• They can only ‘take one for the team’ for so long. There are legitimate and frequent situations where someone needs to suck it up and dig into crap work for longer than they’d like. This is an inevitable function of teams of people working together — work becomes stratified by perceived importance. There’s no shit work when the work is all yours, there’s just work you like to do and work you have to do.

  Occasional stints on the latter are a good perspective reset for everyone on the team, but being left too long on “have to” work is a guarantee of eventual boredom. What isn’t obvious is that there are folks who aren’t going to complain because they believe the right thing to do is to take one for the team. They worry that that the act of complaining is tantamount to saying, “I don’t believe I should do shit work” or they’re simply wary of being accused of not being a team player.

  We all get shit work, but it’s the responsibility of the guy or gal in charge to dole this work out fairly and consistently. That means they’re constantly aware and communicating to the person who is currently taking one for them, knowing how long they’ve been taking it, and when they’re going to be done.

• Protect their time. Embrace the ambiguity of their experiment. Agreeing to let them experiment and obsess about a fascinating project is only half the game. The business day is full of previously undiscovered “things to do”, and your knee-jerk response when you find this new, urgent piece of work is to saddle it on the guy who is working on… something. You don’t know what it is because he can barely describe it himself, so please handle this urgent task. I swear when you’re done you can get back to… whatever it is you’re doing.

  A terrific way to accelerate the boredom clock is a promise of productive and creative time that is then taken away. In the heat of the moment, the ambiguous nature of their experiment makes the decision easy: Get this urgent, unplanned task done or make progress on the unmeasurable? The only thing this decision teaches your team is how little you value the cultivation of your people.

• Aggressively remove noise. In addition to previously undiscovered work, a daily set of distractions courtesy of exhausting people will pull your engineer away from their work. Random meetings, phone calls, interviews. These 30- to 60-minute tasks feel transactional and brief and there is no way you can fully remove a team member from them, but you manage them. Similar to crap work, it’s your job to evenly spread the load of daily noise across the team. More importantly, it’s your job to remember that productivity costs surrounding these micro-tasks aren’t just the 30 minutes necessary to get them done, it’s the context-switching tax involved in stopping their work, preparing for the task, doing the task, and then rebuilding the context regarding the work that floats their boat.

  There are two aspects of interesting work that equally fire up the nerd brain: the identification of interesting work and making progress on that work. And progress is not measured in interrupt-driven minutes, it’s blocks of delicious, uninterrupted hours.

• Tell them what the hell is going on. Much of the above activity implies that you’re paying attention, but your attention is only half the solution. The other half is regularly keeping folks in the loop regarding your thoughts. In terms of a low-cost means of keeping your team content, the simple act of saying, “I know where you want to be and I’m thinking about how to get you there” is a way to demonstrate you care about the growth of your team.

Don’t Forget What It’s Like to Build a Thing

This piece might read like I believe that engineering is some privileged artisan class and that I’m overly protective, and that is exactly what I believe. My gig is the care and feeding of engineers, and their productivity is my productivity. If they all leave, I have exactly no job.

Part of your credibility as a leader is your public and repeated declaration that it’s your job to help your team succeed, but you have another task: you need to keep building stuff.

I’ve gone back and forth on whether managers should code and my opinion is: don’t stop coding. Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer. Over time it means you’ll have a harder time talking to engineers because you’ll forget how they think and how they become bored.

Managing Nerds

Ten years ago, the world was collectively freaked out by the Y2K bug. The idea was that when innumerable software-driven clocks flipped at midnight from 1999 to 2000 that the digital shit was going to hit the fan. I blame the origin of the world-wide freak-out on the nerds.

Y2K collectively freaked out the nerds because every single software engineering nerd has had the moment where he looked across the table at someone important and said, “Yeah, I fixed that problem, but I have no fucking clue why it’s working. It’s a total mystery.” Nerds have been repeatedly bitten by previously dismissed and seemingly impossible edge cases that we believed there was no possible way for a regular human to encounter.

We’ve been shocked how often a demo has become a product. We know that it is an inherent property of complex systems that they will contain both our best work and our worst guesses.

I call this state of mind the Nerd Burden. It’s a curse put upon nerds who know how a system works, and, more importantly, what it took to build. Understanding the Nerd Burden is a good way to get into a nerd’s mind and start to figure out how to manage them.

A Worst Case Scenario

This is an article on nerd management. The usual requirement of nerd management is that in order to manage nerds, you need to be one. For the sake of this article, I’m assuming a worst-case scenario — you are not a nerd, but your job involves daily nerd management. My condolences, these guys and gals can eat you alive.

A good place to get mentally limber regarding nerds is with The Nerd Handbook. This is intended for the significant others of nerds and geeks and it’s a good place to start understanding the nerd mindset. However, where the Handbook explains the care and feeding of nerds in the home, this piece is concerned with nerds at work.

Multiple generations of nerds are in the workforce now, so your preconceived notions of nerdery are not as useful as you thought. Discard the nerd extremes: the curmudgeonly pocket protector set is retiring or retired and there’s a good chance that the slick brown-haired guy sitting across the bar wearing the $300 Ted Baker shirt is a fucking Python wizard.

Fortunately, a career as a nerd in software engineering still requires a well defined mental skill set, not any particular sartorial flair, and successfully acquiring and refining that skill set has tweaked the nerd’s brain in a unique way that will start to define your nerd management strategy.

Disclaimer: As with all of my articles, I use “he” as a convenience. There are plenty of female nerds out there and they display much of the same behavior.

A Problem

In front of you is The Problem. While I don’t know what The Problem is, I do know that you have a bright team of talented nerds working for you, and I know that you don’t have a clue how to tackle The Problem: you need the nerds and you don’t know where to start. The Problem is unique in that your normal leadership moves aren’t going to work. You can already predict the collective nerd reaction and it’s the opposite of what you need to happen.

Rather than attacking this Problem directly, let’s turn it around and explore the inner workings of your nerd’s mental landscape for inspired next steps.

The nerd as system thinker is a point I’ve been making since The Nerd Handbook and one I explore further in Being Geek. Briefly, a nerd is motivated to understand how a thing works — how it fits together. This drive comes from the nerd’s favorite tool, the computer, which is a blissful construction of logical knowability. Years of mastering the computer have created a strong belief in the illusory predictable calm that emerges from the chaos as you consistently follow the rules that define a system.

If I had to give you a single piece of managerial advice, I would say: “Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos”. Let’s begin.

Your nerd treasures consistency. Your staff meeting is an entertaining affair. You keep it light, you relay developing corporate shenanigans, and you crush rumors as best you can. Occasionally, you need to make a decision on the spot — random policy enforcement: Should Kate get that sweet office with the window?

You: “Sure, Kate deserves it… she’s doing great work.”

Suddenly, a normally chatty staff meeting is full of silence. What happened?

First, you nonchalantly barged your way though one of the three guaranteed topics that will cause anyone, not just nerds, to lose their goddamned minds: space, compensation, and titles. Second, your off-the-cuff decision regarding Kate is somehow inconsistent with your team. Remember, you are sitting in a room full of nerds who — just for intellectual sport — are parsing every decision you make, analyzing it, and comparing that analysis against every single decision you’ve ever made in their presence. That silence? That’s the silent nerd rage that arrives when they discover meaningful inconsistency.

The rules regarding who gets a window have never been written down, but they are known: you are either a manager who needs to have 1:1s or you’ve been with the group for multiple years and you have senior in your title. Kate has neither, and while her great work might be cause for awarding her the office, by not explicitly stating that there is an addendum to the unspoken rules regarding office windows, you are in consistency violation. You are less predictable because you are no longer following the rules of the system.

A predictable world is a comforting world to your nerd. Your inconsistency on the office ruling now has them wondering, “What the hell other random crap is coming down the line? How the hell am I supposed to get my work done when my boss engages in fits of randomness?” According to your nerd, a predictable world is a world where we know what is going to happen next. See…

Your nerd also treasures efficiency. When a nerd is mentally noting every single decision that you make, they’re not doing so because they want to catch you in a lie or an inconsistency, that’s just upside. What the nerd is doing is what they always do — sifting though impressive piles of information and discovering rules so they can discover the optimal system that governs everything. Grand Unification Theory? Yeah, a nerd invented that so he could sleep at night.

With an understanding of the rules, your nerd can choose a course of action that requires the least amount of energy. This isn’t laziness; this is the joy that in a world full of chaotic and political people with obscure agendas and erratic behavior, your nerd can conquer the chaos with logical, efficient predictability. Your nerd has a deliberate goal in mind that you need to support. Your nerd is…

Chasing the Two Highs

In The Nerd Handbook, I called this the High, but there are Two Highs:

The First High: When the nerd sees a knot, they want to unravel it. After each Christmas, someone screws up the Christmas tree lights. They remove the lights from the tree and carefully fold the lights as they lay them in the box. Mysteriously, somewhere between last year’s folding and this year’s Joy of Finding the Lights, these lights become a knotted mess.

The process of unknotting the lights is a seemingly haphazard one — you sit on the floor swearing and slowly pulling a single green cable through a mess of wires and lights and feeling like you’re making no progress — until you do. There’s a magical moment when the knot feels solved. There’s still a knot in front of you, but it’s collapsing on itself and unencumbered wire is just spilling out of it.

This mental achievement is the first nerd high. It’s the liberating moment when we suddenly understand the problem, but right behind that that solution is something greater. It’s….

The Second High: Complete knot domination. The world is full of knots and untying each has its own unique high. Your nerd spends a good portion of their day busily untying these knots, whether it’s that subtle tweak to a mail filter that allows them to parse their mail faster, or the 30 seconds they spend tweaking the font size in their favorite editor to achieve perfect readability. This constant removal of friction is satisfying, but eventually they’ll ask, “What’s with all the fucking knots?” and attack.

A switch flips when your nerd drops into this mode. They’re no longer trying to unravel the knot, they want to understand why all knots exist. They have a razor focus on a complete understanding of the system that is currently pissing them off and they use this understanding to build a completely knot-free product - this is the Second High.

Chasing the Second High is where nerds earn their salary. If the First High is the joy of understanding, the Second High is the act of creation. If you want your nerd to rock your world by building something revolutionary, you want them chasing the Second High. This is why…

You obsessively protect both your nerd’s time and space. Until you’ve experienced the solving of a seemingly impossible problem, it’s hard to understand how far a nerd will go to protect his problem solving focus and you can help. The road to either High is a mental state traditionally called the Zone. There are three things to know about the Zone:

1. The almost-constant quest of the nerd is managing all the crap that is preventing us from entering the Zone as we search for the Highs. Meetings, casual useless fly-bys, biological nuisances, that mysterious knock-knock-knocking that comes from the ceiling tiles whenever the AC kicks in — what the nerd is doing in the first 15 minutes of getting in the Zone is building focus, and it’s a Jenga-like construction that small distractions can topple.
2. Every single second you allow a nerd to remain in the Zone is a second where something fucking miraculous can occur.
3. As I’ve explained before, your nerd has built himself a Cave. It might not actually look like a cave, or maybe it does. The goal around its construction is simple: protect the Zone so we can chase the Highs. Stand up right now and walk to each of your nerds’ offices and spelunk the caves. Ask the question: “How are they protecting their focus?” Back to the door? Headphones? Massive screen real estate? You don’t have to ask a single question to begin to understand what your nerd does to protect his Cave. You need to ask…

What is your nerd’s hoodie? I write better when I’m wearing a hoodie. There’s something warm and cave-like about having my head surrounded — it gives me permission to ignore the world. Over time, those around me know that interrupting hoodie-writing is a capital offense. They know when I reach to pull the hoodie over my head that I’ve successfully discarded all distractions on the Planet Earth and am currently communing with the pure essence of whatever I’m working on.

It’s irrational and it’s delicious.

Your nerd has a hoodie. It’s a visual cue to stay away as they chase their Highs and your job is both identification and enforcement. I don’t know your nerds, so I don’t know what you’ll discover, but I am confident that these hoodie-like obsessions will often make no sense to you - even if you ask. Yes, there will always Mountain Dew nearby. Of course, we will never be without square pink Post-its.

Don’t sweat it. Support it. Also, understand the interesting potentially negative by-products of all this nerdery, such as…

Not invented here syndrome. When you ask your nerd to build something significant, your nerd is predisposed to build it himself rather than borrowing from someone else. Strike that, your nerd’s default opening position when asked to build a thing is: “We can build it better than anyone else”.

First, they probably can, but it’s an expensive proposition. Second, understanding why this is their opening position is important. The ideal mental state of the nerd with regard to The Problem is the First High - a completely understood model of the problem. The issue is each nerd’s strategic approach for this high is different.

Unfortunately, code is often the only documentation of our inspiration and your nerd would rather design his own inspiration than adapt someone else’s. When a nerd says, “We can build it better,” he’s saying, “I have not devoted the necessary time to understand the existing solution and it’s more fun to build than to investigate someone else’s crap.”

If your nerd is bent on building it versus buying it, fine, ask him to prove it. Make the Problem the explanation of why building the new is a more logical and strategic approach than pulling a working solution off the shelf.

The bitter nerd. Another default opening position for the nerd is bitterness — the curmudgeon. Your triage: Why can’t he be a team player? There are chronically negative nerds out there, but in my experience with nerd management, it’s more often the case the nerd is bitter because they’ve seen this situation before four times and it’s played out exactly the same way. Each time:

Whenever management feels they’re out of touch, we all get shuttled off to an offsite where we spend two days talking too much and not acting enough.

Nerds aren’t typically bitter; they’re just well informed. Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I’m wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it.

The disinterested or drifting nerd. Your nerd won’t engage. It’s been a week and a half and as far as you can tell, all he’s done is create and endlessly edit a to do list on his whiteboard. Whether he’s disinterested or drifting, your nerd is stuck. There are two likely situations here: he doesn’t want to engage or he can’t.

Triage here is similar to Not Invented Here — is the problem shiny? Is there something unique that will allow for the possibility of original work? Ok, it’s shiny - is it too shiny? Is your nerd outside of the comfort zone of his ability? My favorite move when a nerd appears stuck is pairing him with a credible technical peer - not a competitor, but a cohort.

Once you’ve discovered the productivity of the Highs, you’re going to attempt to invoke them. Bad news. The invocation process is entirely owned by and unique to your nerd. You can protect the cave and honor the hoodie, but your nerd will choose when to go deep. The amount of pressure you put on your nerd to engage is directly proportionate to the amount of resistance you’ll encounter.

Find a cohort. Someone who will be receptive to the perceived lack of shininess or someone who will say the one thing necessary to get your nerd chasing the Highs.

The Nerd Burden

I’ve spent a lot of time painting nerds as obsessive control freaks bent on controlling the universe. Fact is, your nerd understands how the system works. They know what you know — chaos is a guarantee. It’s neither efficient nor predictable, but it’s going to happen.

You and your nerd are surprisingly goal aligned with regard to the chaos. You want him to build a thing and you want him to build it well. You want it to perform reliably in bizarre situations that no one can predict. You want to scale when you least expect it. And you want to be amazed.

Amaze your nerd. Build calm and dark places where invoking the Zone is trivial. Perform consistently and efficiently around your nerd so they can spend their energy on what they build and not worry about that which they can’t control. Help them scale by knowing when they’re stuck or simply bored. And let them chase those Highs because then they can amaze everyone.

The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster

Business is noisy.

Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, process, and other people. These people have opinions and they share them all over the place — all the time. This collective chatter is part of the daily regimen of a healthy business, but this chatter will bury the individual voice unless someone pays attention.

Your job in a 1:1 is to give the smallest voice a chance to be heard, and I start with a question: “How are you?”

The Basics

Before we start, let’s go over the basic rules I follow regarding 1:1s:

Same time each week. When you become a manager of people, an odd thing happens. You’re automatically perceived as being busier. Whether you are or not is irrelevant; folks just think you are. Consistently landing your 1:1s at the same time on the same day is a weekly reminder that you are here for them — no matter how busy.

Always do it. Ok, so you are really busy. You’re running from meeting to meeting. It’s easy to de-prioritize a 1:1 because unlike whatever meeting you’re running to or from, a 1:1 doesn’t represent an urgent problem that needs solving. I’ll beat this perceived lack of value opinion out of you later in this piece, but for now understand that each time you bail on a 1:1 they hear, “You don’t matter”.

30 minutes, at least. Another favorite move of the busy manager is to schedule a 1:1 for 15 minutes or less. It’s the best I can do, Rands. I’ve got 15 people working for me. First, those 15 people don’t work for you; you work for them. Think of it like this: if those 15 people left, just left the building tomorrow, how much work would actually get done? Second, if you’ve got 15 people working for you, you’re not their manager, you’re just the guy who grins uncomfortably as you infrequently fly by the office, ask how it’s going, and then don’t actually listen to the answer.

Having a meaningful conversation with anyone takes time. As you’ll see in a moment, you start with an opener where you figure out where everyone is mentally, which builds conversational momentum into having a conversation of consequence. In your 15-minute 1:1, all you learn is that you don’t have time to care.

How Are You?

It’s a softball opener. I recognize that, but I lead with a vanilla opener because this type of content-free question is vague enough that the recipient can’t help but put part of themselves into the answer, and it’s the answer where the 1:1 begins.

What’s the first thing they say? Do they deflect with humor? Is it the standard off-the-cuff answer? Or is it different? How is it different? What words did they choose and how quickly are they saying them? How long did they wait to answer? Did they even answer the question? Do you understand the answer isn’t the point, either? The content is merely a delivery vehicle for the mood and the mood sets your agenda.

As I’m listening to the answer I’m discerning your mood and I’m throwing you into one of three buckets regarding the type of 1:1 we’re about to have:

1. The Update (All clear!)
2. The Vent (Something’s up…)
3. The Disaster (Oh dear…)

The reads on the majority of the 1:1s fall into the first bucket. The answer to my softball opener is pleasant and familiar. We’re going to walk through the facts, dig a little bit here and there, wander, and then it’ll be over. Great. The other two buckets are trickier to assess with a single question. Your answer to my question is… off. You either state this up front with the alarming, “We need to talk” proclamation, which immediately throws you in the Vent bucket, but this could also easily be a Disaster. By far, the worst answer to the opener is the quiet one, the answer that contains something hidden and insidious.

Oh dear.

The Update

You get exactly what you expect from The Update — it’s status. These are my projects and these are my people and this is how it’s going down. I believe most folks consider this type of 1:1 to be a success and they’re wrong.

A 1:1 is not a project meeting. A 1:1 is not status report. See all those project managers scurrying to and fro? Their job is the maintenance of the facts and the discovery of project truth. If you’re drawing the line for success in your 1:1 as the discussion of data you could find in a status report, you’re missing the point. A 1:1 is an opportunity to learn something new amidst the grind of daily business.

When a 1:1 starts and is clearly an Update, I start listening twice as hard for a nugget of something that we can discuss, investigate, and explore. It’s not that I don’t care about status, it’s just that we’ve got 45 minutes here and if we fill that time with data I can find scrubbing the bug database and the wiki, we’re both wasting our time.

So, I listen, I take it on myself to find a meaty conversation, and if I don’t find it in the first 15 minutes, I’ve got three moves:

Move #1 - Three Prepared Points: While I believe part of a good organic 1:1 is improvisation, I usually have three talking points in my back pocket that have shown up over the past week regarding you or your team. If we can’t find a good thread of conversation in the first 10-15 minutes, I’ll start with one of these points and see where that takes us.

Move #2 - The Mini-Performance Review: You read that right. If we’re 15 minutes into a lifeless, redundant, status-based 1:1 and I don’t have anything sitting in my back pocket, I’m going to turn this into a performance review. It won’t be your actual performance review; it’s one aspect of your review that somehow strikes me as more appropriate conversation than an update on your bug counts. I see you’ve got a handle on your bugs, but one thing we talked about at your last annual performance review was getting a better handle on the architecture. How’s that going?

Move #3 - My Current Disaster. Chances are, in my professional life, something is currently off the rails. It’s selfish, but if you’re leading with status and I can’t find an interesting discussion nugget, let’s talk about my current disaster. Do you know how many open reqs we have that we can’t hire against? Who is the best hiring manager you know and what were their best moves? The point of this discussion is not to solve my Disaster, the point is that we’re going to have a conversation where one of us is going to learn something more than just project status.

Business is noisy because there is always stuff to do and the process of doing stuff is called tactics. It’s tactical work and while tactics are progress, the real progress is made when we get strategic. A productive 1:1 is one where we talk strategically about how we do stuff, but, more importantly, how we might do this stuff better.

The Vent

A really good Vent starts with a disarmingly long period of silence. I’ve just asked my soft opener and you’re quiet. Really quiet. I can see you mentally gathering steam. I take this time to ground myself because while I know a Vent is coming, I likely don’t know the content or the severity. Vents vary from a semi-tense “I can’t stand QA today” to a full-on explosion: “If I have to listen to Thomas grind his goddamned Fair Trade Certified Peruvian coffee beans in his office ONE MORE TIME, I might lose it.”

When the Vent begins, you might confuse this for a conversation. It’s not. It’s a Vent. It’s a mental release valve and your job is to listen for as long as it takes. Don’t problem solve. Don’t redirect. Don’t comfort. Yet. Your employee is doing mental house cleaning and interrupting this cleaning is missing the point. They don’t want a solution, they want to be heard.

A Vent does have a conclusion. There is a point where you need to jump in, but these conclusions and your actions vary.

#1 It’s Done. The Vent starts to lose steam and the Venter finds themselves panting and staring at you with nothing to say because they’ve said it all — probably a couple of times. It’s in this moment that you begin your triage. Great, now we start talking…

#2 It’s a Rant. A Vent can repeat itself. The same facts and content might be thrown at you in a couple of different ways. I see this repetition as healthy way of chewing on the problem, but there’s a point where this Vent becomes a Rant. After a couple of Vent cycles, you might try grabbing hold of the conversation and starting with triage, but brace yourself — they might not be done — and my suggestion, in the face of resistance, is to give them the benefit of the doubt and let ‘em go another round.

The Vent that wants no help is a Rant. The Ranter somehow believes that the endless restatement of their opinion is the solution. Perhaps they have no clue what a solution might be or how to find it or perhaps they’ve been stewing on the topic so long, they’ve lost all sight of logic.

Whatever the back story, the Ranter is finding some weird mental satisfaction in the endless restatement of the problem, but they have no interest in solving the actual problem at this point. Annoying. When you’ve got a confirmed Rant on your hands, it’s ok to jump into the middle of the Vent — you’re saving everyone a pile of time and you’re teaching the Ranter that the incessant restatement of the Rant is not progress.

#3 It’s a Disaster. You’re listening carefully to the Vent. It’s moving forward and it’s not repeating itself, but… something is up. Perhaps it’s their demeanor or maybe it’s the topic, but your radar is pinging. The Venter is not standing on their usual soapbox. They’re out of character and, as time is passing, they are becoming less themselves.

At its core, the Vent is motivated by emotion. That’s the key difference between the Update and the Vent. The topic has triggered an emotional response and their therapy is the verbal statement and restatement of the situation. Emotion is a slippery slope, and what can start as a Vent has a chance of spiraling into a Disaster. It’s rare in business, but it’s a risk when you’re dealing with emotionally slippery human beings.

The Disaster

If a Vent feels like a speech, a Disaster feels like an attack. What started as an emotional conversation has transformed into a war, and you’re suddenly and unexpectedly on the battlefield.

Until you’ve seen the Disaster once, it’s hard to predict how you’re going to react to the perception of being attacked. For better or worse, it’s happened enough to me that when I see the Disaster approaching, I carefully tuck all of my emotions in a box, lock the aforementioned box, and magically transform into a Vulcan.

When the Disaster arrives, the absolute worst response is any semblance of emotion. See, they want to fight. They literally want to go a couple of rounds on this particular topic. What was a high degree of frustration has transformed into pure aggression and if you so much as blink improperly, you’re contributing to the escalation of this situation.

Some tips:

• They are not themselves. As you’re sitting there weathering the Disaster, remember that you are experiencing an anomaly. It’s a bizarre emotional version of themselves that only shows up when they’re on the edge. The person you’re familiar with will show up… eventually.
• Shut up. Really. Your primary job during the Disaster is to defuse, and you start defusing by contributing absolutely nothing. If you’re a logical, reasonable management type, you’ll be tempted to ask clarifying questions — to try to shape the problem. Don’t. Be quiet. Let the emotion pass. Here’s why…
• It’s not about the issue anymore. You’re no longer experiencing the problem. You’re experiencing the employee’s emotional baggage regarding the problem. Sure, there’s the core issue, but that’s not what you’re currently observing. You’re seeing the extreme negative reaction to the issue and that’s the first order of business.

Like the Vent, success is traversing the emotional explosion. There will, hopefully, be a point when the majority of the emotion has passed and they’re willing to having a rational discussion. Unlike the Vent, the discussion is not about the core issue. It starts with the Disaster, with understanding the intense emotion surrounding the topic.

A Disaster is end result of poor management. Your employee believes totally losing their shit is a productive strategy - they believe it’s the only option left to making anything change.

Assume They Have Something to Teach You

The cliché is “People are your most valuable resource”. I would argue they are your only resource. Computers, desks, building, data centers… Whatever. All of those other tools only support your one and only resource: your people.

People mentally wander. It’s in their nature to make off-the-cuff observations — “Why does Phil get the choice features?” — and to let those observations fester, mutate, and sometimes transform into a Disaster. I’m not suggesting that every 1:1 is a tortuous affair to discover deeply hidden emergent disasters, but you do want to create a weekly place where dissatisfaction might quietly appear. A 1:1 is your chance to perform weekly preventive maintenance while also understanding the health of your team. A 1:1 is a place to listen for what they aren’t saying.

The sound that surrounds successful regimen of 1:1s is silence. All of the listening, questioning, and discussion that happens during a 1:1 is managerial preventative maintenance. You’ll see when interest in a project begins to wane and take action before it becomes job dissatisfaction. You’ll hear about tension between two employees and moderate a discussion before it becomes a yelling match in a meeting. Your reward for a culture of healthy 1:1s is a distinct lack of drama.

How to Write a Book

I’m going to jump right to the punch line. I’m going to start by telling you exactly what you need to do in order to finally write that book you’ve been promising yourself for the past three years. Are you sitting down? Good.

Don’t write a book. Even better, stop thinking about writing a book. Your endless internal debate and self-conjured guilt about that book you haven’t written yet is a sensational waste of your time. My guess is if you took all the time that you’ve spent considering writing a book and translated that into actual writing time, you’d be a quarter of your way into writing that book you’re not writing.

So, stop. It’s the only sure-fire way to begin.

The Weight of Big Decisions

The theory about big decisions is that they require a tremendous amount of thought, and that investing in all this thought results in better decisions. There are many classes of decisions where there is a right move. Where deliberate planning around complex issues involving different people with varied goals is essential to making a correct decision.

Your unwritten book is not one of these decisions. Stop debating it.

I’m just about done with my book, Being Geek. This is my second book, so having gone through the process once before has given me experience that I am using for planning. There was an arc that I wanted to write about and a table of contents eventually did show up, but, by far, my most productive move regarding writing a book was — wait for it — writing.

A blank page. A scribble in a Moleskine. That tweet that captured your thought better than a chapter ever would. Quietly crossing out paragraphs you loved. These are the acts that comprise writing a book, not talking about it, not announcing that you’re going to do it, and certainly not reading an article by a blogger who at this very moment is procrastinating finishing his own book by writing about how you should start yours.

The Journey is the Book

There are scenarios where you’re going to want to plan the hell out of your book. If you’re writing the definitive medical book on the treatment of West Nile encephalitis, I would like to encourage you to plan the hell out of this book. These are books where the structure and the data are essential to this book’s success.

This is not the book that you are writing. In fact, if you’re a frequent reader of Rands in Repose, I would suggest that even if you have a book in mind, that is not the book you’d end up writing. Having done this twice now, I can confirm that the only part of my planning process that made it to the published work is the title.

It’s not that I ended up with an entirely different book than I intended. I wrote the book I intended to write, but the majority of the writing involved discovering ideas randomly, without planning, and in some of the strangest places. The following is the documentation of tools, strategies, and mind games I use to remove barriers and create a book.

The Title and the Pitch

If you’re going to obsess about something early on, my recommendation is to obsess about your title. Giving clever names to people, places, and things is my schtick — I know when I’ve succinctly and adeptly identified a thing, and once I’ve done it I stick with it. There wasn’t a moment during the writing of either book when either title was debated or at risk.

As for the pitch, well, if your title (“Managing Humans”) has done its job, you don’t need a great pitch. However, the other title (“Being Geek”) doesn’t always define your arc like you’d want, so you need the pitch. “A career handbook for geeks” is the pitch for the second book and it came straight out of early discussions with my editor.

The title and the pitch aren’t just the backbone of your book; they help define the literary space that you’ve chosen to write within. While I think it’s important to define some constraints up front, I’m more interested in your writing, so if you haven’t fallen in love with your title, don’t sweat it. Take your best shot and get back the writing.

Mobility, Pt. 1

Once your brain is engaged with your book, ideas are just going to show up randomly.

I make it a practice to keep a travel-sized notebook and pen with me at all times. When I forget these essential tools and my iPhone is nowhere to be found, I have no qualms about asking a stranger for any type of writing instrument in order to capture the relevant thought on the nearest portable writable surface.

The rule is simple: if you don’t write it down, it never happened.

Environment

Haphazard notes are then transcribed into TextEdit.

The entire first draft of both Managing Humans and Being Geek was written in TextEdit. I eagerly test-drive the latest gorgeous, time-saving, writer-specific tool, but after each evaluation, I always return to TextEdit.

Why? Barriers. I’m uncertain if it’s a nerd perspective or a writer one, but once you’ve begun a book, the world transforms into a menacing place intent on distracting you from doing what you love — writing.

See, you’re chasing an elusive high where the story just pours out of your fingers, and it occurs so infrequently that you start to wonder: is there a system? Is there a perfect sequence of events that conjure writing nirvana?

I wrote four effortless pages sitting on that high bar stool in the Los Gatos Coffee Company. And I had a black coffee, a 10% Kona blend… in my favorite mug… on a Tuesday.

What was a random sequence of events becomes your writing religion and suddenly you’re obsessing over the seating arrangements in your local coffee shop rather than doing what you love.

Humans, especially nerds, are creatures of habit. Often, these habits are designed to make the world a predictable place so that our brains can focus on the creative task at hand. The reason I continue to end up in TextEdit is because my favorite feature is the lack of features.

Here’s just a slice of one of the preference dialogs in a great writing tool called WriteRoom:

Do you know what I see? I see hours of gleeful distraction tweaking features and defining the perfect writing environment. In TextEdit, there are no knobs and dials for me to fuss with in order to optimize my writing experience.

Features create choice and choice is a dangerous distraction and the last place you want to find distraction is in the tool you use to write. In TextEdit, I set one preference - body text: Sentinel 15 pt and then I start writing:

Momentum

I have two writing states when generating new material. A fresh thought and an edited thought. The fresh thought state is when I’m staring at a blank page and starting a new article or chapter. The edited thought state is when I’m firing up an incomplete article and picking up where I let off.

Starting, in both states, is tricky, but it’s trickier picking up the editing state because I’m lacking the original raw motivation that caused me to fire up TextEdit and attack a blank page. My move in acquiring my train of thought is to re-read what I’ve already written and then retype the last two or three paragraphs of the existing work. This is usually enough of an exercise to kick off the mental dust.

My other momentum move involves the [square brackets]. The writing zone is a tenuous one and sometimes the thought just can’t be expressed in words, yet. Rather than getting lost in a single sentence, I put my best effort in [square brackets]:

• [Something about writing being hard]
• [You can say this better]
• [Blah blah blah I can’t be eloquent in a chair where my feet touch the floor].

[Square brackets] get those niggling thoughts out of your head and onto the paper so you can focus on moving forward.

Mobility, Pt. 2

Given that you can’t predict your writing mood, you need to have the entirety of your book at your fingers regardless of where you are on planet Earth. Better yet, I’d prefer if you had every single version of your chapters at your disposal.

This used to be a daunting requirement before Dropbox. Not only can you now have every single word you’ve written available on any computer on seemingly any platform, you also have access to every saved version as well.

As I’ve written before, the magic of Dropbox is that once you’ve started dumping chapters into your folder, you simply forget about it. You forget that your writing is seamlessly copied to all of your computers. You forget about that chapter you had to rewrite after accidentally deleting it from your USB thumb drive. Once again, you have a tool that eliminates distracting barriers.

Chapter Evolution

You must become comfortable with incompleteness. At one point during the latest book, I had seven chapters in various state of doneness. When I began Managing Humans, I’d get panicky if I didn’t complete one chapter before starting the next. This is your brain, once again, trying to organize where it shouldn’t.

The reason I have simple, readily available tools is that I can never tell when I’m going to be able to write. I’m on a deadline and my editor is breathing down my neck, which means I do have a weekly writing schedule that carves off mornings three days a week. As I settle into one of these mornings, it’s just as likely that I’ll write as it is that I’ll count the number of folks in the room who’ve chosen to drink from ceramic mugs versus paper cups.

A singular focus on finishing a chapter is just another barrier to writing. By browsing all my chapters in various states of doneness, I’m more likely to pick one that is going to tickle my writing fancy: Oh hey, I have something to say about this today. Those ceramic mugs have to wait.

A Table of Contents

At some point, it’s a book. This moment is entirely dependent on you, and the best advice I can give is that you’ll know when it happens. Perhaps it’s a critical mass of chapters. Maybe it’s the discovery of one key thought in one paragraph. The point is: you’re no longer actively thinking about not writing a book, you’re writing a book.

Congratulations. It’s time to get organized.

Once you feel you’re actually writing a book, it’s time for a table of contents. I exclusively use a spreadsheet for this task because it’s flexible as well as being good at math. My table of contents starts with three columns:

1. Chapter Number
2. Chapter Title
3. Notes

I then dump whatever chapters I have into this spreadsheet in whatever order feels right. There. Now, you have a table of contents.

There are all sorts of interesting ways to stress yourself out with this spreadsheet. Word counts, chapter counts, percent completes. There’s going to be plenty of time to do this when your editor starts with their kind yet passive aggressive threats, so my advice is stick to three columns for now.

Like many of your chapters, your table of contents is a work in progress. When you finish a chapter, when you’re inspired, or whenever the mood suits you, fire up the spreadsheet and read your table of contents. Are the titles right? What chapters are missing? Which ones don’t make sense?

As we’ll see in a moment, the closer you get to a final first draft, the more your table of contents becomes an essential specification for your book.

See It

Ok, it’s really a book now. 20 chapters, right? Feel like you’re beginning to repeat yourself? Getting annoyed by the sound of your voice in your head? Thinking about writing an article about How to Write a Book? Yeah, that’s pretty sweet.

There’s a painful threshold when you’re roughly two-thirds of the way through the book where you need an extra shove. My advice is to not write an article about this experience, but rather print out the whole damned book. That’s right. Every single page. If you haven’t already invested in a home laser printer, now is the time. You’re almost an author, dammit.

Seeing all of your work spread out on the floor of your office is cathartic.

You’ve spent the last few months (sigh, years) staring at the words and being lost in the paragraphs, so there’s a good chance that you’ve forgotten what you were up to. Look, there on the floor, you are writing a book.

Now is also a good time to make another pass at that table of contents. The sense that you’re repeating yourself in your writing is a good sign that you’re begin to tie up whatever stories you were intending to tell. The combination of the ready availability of all your writing on the floor and the structure of your table of contents makes for a constructive opportunity to see precisely where you’re at regarding your book. Does it fit together? Is it obvious where the holes are? Are there plans to fill those holes? Do you actually have an ending?

Patience

This is the last piece of advice and you don’t want to hear it because what I’m about to tell you is depressing. If you haven’t written a word of your book — if it’s just a great title — you are two years away from being anywhere close to done. I base this opinion on entirely unscientific evidence of (almost) having published two books.

Two years is forever, but I’m going to turn it into an opportunity.

Writing is a game of inches. No author I know sits down every morning in their home office and steadily produces three pages a day. I’m sure they’re out there, but these annoyingly efficient and profitable authors aren’t doing this on the side. They’re doing this because they’ve written enough to make it a career.

While the idea of writing books for a living is appealing, my impression is that if I stopped being a software engineering manager, my voice would quickly become an echo of how things used to be rather than how they are. Thanks, no.

You have time. In fact, you have lots of time. There will be weekends where all you will find is a paragraph. There will be a week where all of your progress will circle around finding precisely the right title for chapter 12.

In writing a book, you’re going to find all sorts of interesting ways to mentally beat yourself up. You’re going to consider new tools and different writing schedules. You’ll discover that inspiration can be encouraged, but never created. You’re going to find constructive ways to procrastinate and your friends are going to stop talking to you because all you talk about is that damned book.

Super. In the meantime, let’s write.

The Shop I Want

Until recently, I’d never been to IKEA, mostly because of fear. I knew there would be things I wanted, but the IKEA reputation kept me away.

What I heard:

• It’s huge
• It’s a maze
• You can’t get out in less than three hours
• It’s full of people.

While I guess I need flat-pack design furniture at affordable prices, this is not the shop I want.

You know, Everything

Back when eBay was novel, I played a game with the family before a Thanksgiving dinner. As a means of introducing the idea of eBay to them, I asked each member to describe a thing they wanted that they believed would be hard to find. The sister wanted an antique printer’s box, the Mom was looking for a vintage lens, and the Dad, an electrical engineer, requested a now forgotten device that I will dub a hibblygizmo.

“Ok, so these are things you want that you believe would be hard to find, right?”

Collectively, “Yes”.

“And how would you go about finding them?”

Again, collectively, “No clue”.

I spent the next ten minutes confirming what I already knew. All of these items, however esoteric and including the hibblygizmo, were readily available as active auctions on eBay. I printed out each of the auctions and handed the paper to each member of my family, saying, “Happy Thanksgiving. You now live in a world where a shop exists that has everything.”

Unfortunately, this is also not the shop I want.

Regarding Abundance

The shop I want is owned by a person I know and respect. Inside of this shop are two button-up shirts, a pair of jeans, three pens, a desk, and a small white marble polar bear. Each of these items is picked out specifically for me, and more importantly, they are items that, given my own devices, I would never choose or possibly even discover for myself.

As I walk in this shop, the proprietor sees me and grins. “Rands, I have the perfect desk for you.”

“I don’t need a desk.”

“You need this desk. It’s vintage Stow Davis. It’s walnut with solid brass and wood handles. It’s the perfect size for your Cave.”

“I don’t need a desk.”

“Stow Davis. Founded in 1879. Did you know Frank Lloyd Wright commissioned them to produce furniture in the ’30s?”

This mythical person is not going to stop until I’ve purchased this desk because this person knows me and knows that this desk is perfect for me.

I Said, Everything

We’re in a world where you can find anything you want, which is great, except when you realize there’s a lot of everything. Google was created and thrives attempting to solve the everything problem for us. Google has made it wonderfully simple to find a thing, but just because you find a thing doesn’t mean you care about it. As you stare at a PageRanked list of stuff, you have a choice:

You can sit back and be force-fed the decisions and opinions of others. Many of the people who are making these decisions are not evil. They are well-paid, well-intentioned, bright people whose publicly traded companies have built astoundingly profitable businesses building and marketing things they want you to think you need.

These people think they know you because they’ve done the math. They believe you fall into the Stow Davis-inclined IKEA-fearing writer slash surfer demographic, and that’s a strong demographic. Knowing this demographic, they can answer the question: “How can we move 72,000 more of those things on this demographic? How are we going to give the impression the mundane is unique?”

Or…

You can have an opinion. It sounds like work, but it’s really not. An opinion is not the definitive view or judgement regarding a thing; it’s you staring at that desk and saying, “You know, I like the look and the feel of those brass handles. I also like the drawers that squeak just a bit when you open them. It speaks to the character of the whole desk.”

It’s not that I want a Stow Davis desk, it’s that I want to find that desk. I want to go to seven different antique shops and spend a weekend developing an opinion about the state of antique desks. I want to find someone who knows the entire history of Stow Davis desks and won’t fucking shut up about them.

Half the fun of having an opinion is the quest to find one, but the everything problem remains. You don’t have the time to have an opinion about everything, but someone has the time.

My Shaving Cream is Crap

It is. It’s waxy pumpkin-smelling crap and when I ran out, I thought, “Good riddance”. I am now faced with two problems: first, I need new shaving cream, and second, my instinct is to spend the entire goddamned weekend researching shaving cream in a compulsive quest for complete understanding of all there is to know about the shaving cream world.

While I want to have an opinion, I do not have time for this exquisite shaving cream expedition, but someone has already completed this quest and has an opinion I can trust. I just need to find them, so I do:

An amazing thing happens when you ask for help, people respond. In their response, not only do you get their opinion, you also get brief glimpse into how they tick, and whether or not that ticking is aligned with yours. When I asked on Twitter for shaving cream help, not only did I learn more than I ever thought possible about wet shaving, shaving cream, straight razors, and a bevy of other shaving topics, I also found five more people to follow because in 140 simple characters, they told a story that reminded me that the best way to search the Internet is with someone you trust.

The Shop I Want is Full of Stories

The shop I want does not exist because this impossible shop is full of people spread across the planet. There’s Tasha who can explain anything about grammar. Scott can tell you anything about the Smashing Pumpkins and he also makes a Mac’n’Cheese for which I will fly across the United States to reverse engineer his recipe. Boris is in this shop and he’ll talk about scuba diving until I ask him to stop. I’ve collected each of these people and placed them in this impossible shop because, at some point in the past, we discover a common trait or idea that tied us together - we discovered that together we could explain the world to each other.

I don’t need flat furniture nor do I need a desk. I have enough pens and journals. My closet of full of shirts and while I still wonder what a hibblygizmo is, I’m certain I don’t need one. What I need is shop full of people with opinions — because it’s not what I know that I’m worried about, it’s what I don’t know that’s really interesting.

The shop I want is full of people who are dedicated to their opinion. Who are happier understanding a thing rather than wanting it. These people will happily tell the story of happened upon this opinion and I want to hear it because the opinion of someone I trust is just as valuable as my own.

A Disclosure

My management career began with a misunderstanding.

“Rands, you’re doing a great job on tools development and I’d really like you to Lead the effort.”

It sounded liked your standard professional compliment. Atta boy! Go run with it! Problem was, I didn’t hear the capital L.

Lead is what my manager had said. Not lead, but Lead. He asked poorly and without definition and specifics, but he did ask. He was subsequently baffled two months later when I said, “I don’t think I can finish this by next month, I need more time.”

Him: “Why don’t you hire another engineer?”

Me: “Wait, I can do that?”

I see three possible situations whereby you might become a manager:

1. You decide. “I believe I am going to be a better manager than engineer. I choose management.”
2. You evolve. This is what happened to me. Essentially, a series of small decisions and actions where, at the end, you end up being a manager.
3. You have no choice. “You. Manage this team. Go.”

Whether you get to choose or not, there are aspects of management that you need to understand.

Management is a total career restart. Now, if you’re evolving into the career, this will be less obvious, but if management just landed in your lap, realize that while you’re in the same game, it’s a totally new game board, and you’re at square #1. You will use the skills that made you a great engineer, but there’s an entirely new set of skills you need to acquire and refine.

This sensation will appear at the end of the day when you ask, “What did I build today?” The answer will be a troubling, “Nothing”. The days of fixing ten bugs before noon are gone. You’re no longer going to spend the bus ride home working on code; you’re going to be thinking hard about how to say something important to someone who doesn’t want to hear it. There will be drama. And there be those precious seconds when there is no one in your office wanting… something.

You go to a lot of meetings. You already knew this, but Managers Go to Meetings. Meetings are the bane of my existence and I consider it my personal goal to kill as many possible, but I still go to a lot of meetings. As best I can tell, there are two useful types of meeting: alignment and creation. Briefly:

Alignment meetings sound like this: “It’s red, are we all in agreement it’s red? Ok, swell. Wait, Phil thinks it’s blue. Phil, here are the 18 compelling reasons it’s red. Convinced? Done now?”

Creation meetings sound like this: “We need more blue. How are we going to do that? Phil, you’re our blue man. What should we do here?”

There are other meetings out there, but you will learn to avoid them. One being the therapy meeting. They sound like this: “Show of hands, who likes to talk about blue? Or red? I don’t care. Let’s explore our color feelings for the next 60 minutes.”

In time you will learn which meetings to attend, but when you start you will go to all of them because…

You are a communication hub. One of your primary jobs as a manager is to be a communication hub not only for all of those working for you, but for everyone who needs something from you. This means you are going to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in random conference rooms and listening. Hard. Who are they? What do they need? Do I understand what they are saying? Should I say no now or let this fester?

Confusingly, as a manager, you often get credit just by showing up, sitting there, and nodding. As a career management strategy, the “nodding fly-on-the-wall” approach isn’t proactive or helpful. But there are critical times when all that is being asked of you is that you are the receiver of the rant. Simply by listening, by letting an idea be heard, you are helping.

However, you need to do more than listen. Whatever is being said in this meeting isn’t just for you; parts of it are for your team, which means you need amazing skills of…

Abstraction and Filtering. During these endless demands for your time, you do need to communicate, but if you’re relaying all the information that’s being thrown at you during the day, all you’ll do is relay. Your new job is one of abstraction, synthesis, and filtering. During that 30-minute status meeting, you need to develop the mental filter to listen for the three things you actually need to tell the team in your alignment meeting, but in a mere three minutes instead of 30.

Your thought is, “If there are only three things I need to know, why the hell are we spending 30 minutes in this meeting?” First, I relate to your frustration. Second, the three things you need to relay are different than the three things each of the other folks in this meeting needs to relay. Third, if you blow this, here’s what’s going to happen: more meetings.

See, your world has expanded, now…

You will be multi-lingual / translator. Each group in the company has a different language they speak and a different set of needs. As a manager, you need to be able to speak all the corporate dialects of those you depend on. Think of the healthy tension between Engineering and QA. Remember that flame war that went on between you and the QA guy for a week in the bug database? Engineering and QA actually speak the same language, but have different goals. As a manager, you will discover an entire company of languages and goals. For example:

• Sales cares about selling and doesn’t much care how hard it is to build.
• Marketing is passionate about brand, content, and voice and will argue endlessly for details you find to be irrelevant.
• Tech supports talks to the customer ALL DAY, but still feels no one listens to what they say.
• Admins speak many of these languages and have more power than you think.

Everyone believes their job is essential, everyone believes everyone else’s job is easy, and, confusingly, everyone is right.

These roles exist for a reason. The groups each bring something unique to the corporate organism. You can giggle and make fun of their bizarre acronyms as an individual, but as a manager you must speak their language, because once you do, you’re going to better understand what they want.

Learning new languages is tricky, especially when you’re just getting started. You’re going to spend 90 days being totally confused, and it gets worse because there’s…

Drama everywhere. Your manager calls you into her office first thing on a Monday morning. It’s clearly urgent. She sits you down and starts, “I’m, uh, making a change in the organization. Amanda is really excelling in tools development so I’ve asked her to take over Jerry’s management responsibilities. I think this will make everyone more successful.”

Wondering what happen to Jerry? Feel like you’re getting half the story? Wrong, you’re getting 1/10th of the story. People are messy and a huge part of the management gig is managing this messiness. Who knows what personal or professional issue Jerry has that is forcing this management change. It’s really none of your business. However, it is your manager’s business because the people are her job.

As an individual, you’re seeing 10% of the organizational drama your manager is seeing. I know it’s intriguing to get the full story, but again, it’s often none of your business, and it’s not your job. As a manager, you get front row seats for all of the drama in all its messy glory. This is why you have a monthly 1:1 with Human Resources. Their job is to train you how to manage the drama. This is why you need to become a great…

Context Switcher. This is your morning. Six 30-minute 1:1s starting at 9am. This day is unique in that in your 4th 1:1, your architect resigns. The guy who has been designing the heart of your application for 18 months has been poached by a start-up and had piles of money thrown at him, and it sounds like there’s no way of saving him. Sounds grim. What’s harder is that when your sky-is-falling 1:1 is done, you’ve got your next one with your QA Director who has no clue your architect resigned, and she urgently wants to talk bug database, and that’s exactly what you need to do. You need to quietly and confidently forget that you’re fucked and give this team member your full attention.

There will be a steady stream of curveballs headed in your managerial direction, each with its own unique velocity. One of your jobs is to not only deftly handle the pitch, however bizarre, but also shake it off and calmly expect an even stranger one.

There’s a reason you’ll see an inordinate amount of bizarre organizational crap as a manager. See, the individuals can handle — and should handle — the regular stuff. You want a team of people who aren’t bringing you every little thing, but if you successfully build this team, your reward is that what is ends up in your office is uniquely kooky.

As these freakish pitches whiz by, you will be judged in two very different ways. First, what did he do about the pitch? Are we going to see more of these? Second, how was his composure as that pitch whizzed by, missing his nose by an inch? Does it look like he handled it or is he freaked out and ready to bolt?

Leadership is not just about effectively getting stuff done, but demonstrating through your composure that you aren’t rattled by the freakish. Fortunately, one of the new tools you have to control the proliferation of freakishness is the ability to…

Say No. This is your second most powerful tool. Whether you’re a manager, considering management, or just here for the Rands, I want you to pick the hardest problem on your plate. The one that is waking you up at 4am. I want you to decide and to say out loud:

“No.”

You’re not going to do that thing. QA can’t test it. Engineering won’t finish it. If we attempt to do it, we will fail and we don’t fail, so the answer is “No”.

You had this tool as an individual. You could say no, but you usually did so by cornering your manager and explaining, “Here is why No is the right move here,” and then he’d say no.

As a manager, you are caretaker of No for you group. When it is time to do the right thing by stopping, it’s your job to bust out the No. You defend your team against organizational insanity with No.

No does not come without consequences. Saying No because you can rather than because it’s right slowly transforms you into a power-hungry jerk, but again, this is your new tool to do with as you see fit. Also, it’s not all No, you can also…

Say Yes. Yes is how you begin building both people and things. It’s not just a positive word; it’s the word that provides the structure for moving forward. “Yes. Begin”, “Yes, I know he’s leaving. What are we going to do?” and “Why yes, we should tackle the audacious.”

There will be times when your Yes needs to be unencumbered by reality, where it needs to be the inspiration that demonstrates how you perceive the unknowable.

“Yes, I think you’d be a fine manager.”

Trust So You Can Scale

As a new manager, whenever the sky falls, you’ll become an engineer again. You’re going to fall back on the familiar because those are the tools you know and trust, but it’s time to trust someone else: your team.

If I could give you one word, a single, brief piece of management advice, the word would be “scale”. Your job as a manager is to scale the skills that got you the gig in the first place. You used to be the guy who did the impossible when it came to fixing bugs. Ok, now you’re the guy whose entire team does the impossible bug fixing.

It’s time to translate and to teach what you’re good at to those who you work with, and that starts by trusting them to do that which you previously only asked of yourself.

The benefits of defining and maintain this trust create a satisfying productivity feedback loop. By trusting your team, you get to scale, and scaling means you hopefully get to do more of what you love. The more you do, the more you build, the more experience you gather, the more lessons you learn. The more lessons you learn, the more you understand, and that means when more shows up you’ll have even greater opportunity to scale.

Out Loud

It’s the calm before the presentation storm. Over the next three months, I’ve got four different presentations at Webstock and SXSW. I’m also the best man at a wedding in Washington, all of which means I’m spending most of my down-time thinking up things I’m going to say in the future.

If you’re looking for advice on giving a presentation, the Internet is chock full of endless advice. I’ve been here, too. If you’re looking for tips on writing the presentation, the Internet goes dark — for a fairly simply reason. To think about how to write a presentation, you need to think about how you speak, and that’s not what you’re doing when you read or write. I’ll demonstrate. Say the following out loud right now:

I am reading this out loud to no one in particular.

Were you surprised to hear your voice? I was. Did you actually read it out loud? No? Why not? Sitting in a coffee shop? Worried that the guy next to you will think you’re a freak? This basic discomfort is the reason it’s tricky to explain how to present in an article. The skills involved in writing a clever paragraph are completely different from those used for developing and delivering that clever paragraph to a room full of strangers.

You still haven’t read it out loud, have you?

Presentation or Speech?

Developing a compelling presentation involves a series of decisions and exercises to align your head with the fact that you’re delivering your content directly to people. No internet. No weblog. Just you.

Your first decision: speech or presentation? Wondering about the difference? Take a quick look at these two entirely different appearances by Steve Jobs. The first is his Three Stories speech at Stanford and the second is part of his MacWorld 2007 keynote.

You only need to watch a few minutes of both to get a feel for the difference between a presentation and a speech. My guess is you only viewed the Stanford video because everyone has seen Steve Jobs at MacWorld and the Stanford video is a shocker. Clearly, it’s Steve Jobs. It’s his voice, he’s got his trademark bottle of water, but the delivery is completely anti-Jobs because he’s reading his compelling stories from a piece of a paper.

It freaks me out.

In his autobiography, regarding his stand-up comedy years, Steve Martin writes, “If you don’t dim the lights… the audience won’t laugh.” This subtle, paradoxical observation is the core difference between speeches and presentations. In a presentation, half of the art is figuring out how to create an environment where your audience can actively participate without knowing they are participating. In a speech, the audience may laugh or cry, but they are not required nor encouraged to participate, because, during a speech, the spotlight never leaves the speechmaker.

For a presentation or a speech, you need your audience, otherwise it’s just you in an empty room talking to no one in particular, and we already have a word for that… it’s called writing.

The Unforgivable Mistake

There is one unforgivable mistake when giving a presentation. You’ve heard it before: “Don’t read from your slides.” As you’ll see, my approach for presentation development is designed around avoiding this cardinal mistake, and it starts with picking the right tool.

For all of my presentations during the past three years, I’ve done all my content creation inside of my presentation software, which, thankfully, is Keynote. In the back of my mind, I’ve wondered if this is the right tool to iterate a presentation. Shouldn’t I follow the same process as writing and drop all my thoughts into TextEdit where I can easily slice and dice complex thoughts? No.

Start with and stick with Keynote or whatever presentation software floats your boat. First, presentation software is effectively designed to be outline software and that’s a great tool for organizing and editing your thoughts while not allowing them to become a book. By keeping your presentation in slide format, you’re forcing your content to remain a presentation, not an article. Where each slide is a thought. Where moments of undiscovered brilliance are sitting between bullet points. We’ll talk about how to find this brilliance in a bit, but for now, iterate in the slides.

Your job is to get as much of the meat as possible into outline form so that you can begin to transform it into a presentation. Don’t worry about how you’re going to say something or whether folks are going to get it. If you’re worried that the outline doesn’t allow you to capture the essential detail that you could with a blank piece of paper, start taking notes. I like the stickies in Keynote for random small thoughts. I like the speaker notes for bigger ones.

What’s going to happen as you edit and re-edit is that an initial structure will emerge from your outline. Better yet, since you’ve stuck with presentation software, I’m guessing you’re already starting to hear your voice in your head on certain slides…

• “This is a key point. I need to say this one reeeeeeeeallly slowly because it needs to stick.”
• “Good data that needs to be conveyed, but… dull. Needs hip.”

Once you’ve got what looks like a rough outline of your presentation, it’s time to invoke The Disaster.

The Disaster

This is the second time I’m going to ask you to do something and the second time I just want you to do it. No questions asked. I want you to go to the first slide of your presentation, stand up, and give your presentation.

Wait what whoa Rands this is rough and it’s missing thoughts and uh…

Quiet. Give it a shot. Beginning to end, each slide, I want to hear your presentation.

Done? How’d it go? There’s a reason I call it The Disaster, you know. There are three reasons you should tough out your rough presentation with zero prep:

1. Get a feel for how it fits all together.
2. Hear yourself speaking. This is more reinforcement that you aren’t writing a book, you’re writing a presentation.
3. Build confidence. You now know the absolute worst case scenario regarding this presentation. There is no way it could be worse than what you just went through.

Did you notice as you stood in your office talking to no one in particular how thoughts in your head sounded different than on the slides? Did you discover flaws in logic? Mysterious new gaps in content on the slides you’ve been staring at all morning? That’s progress.

During the Disaster run-through, I take a ton of notes. I do this on a piece of paper next to the computer because, as much as possible, I want to stick with the idea that I’m giving my presentation. If I stop to edit my slides, I lose track of tempo and momentum, or worse, I end up re-writing my presentation rather than giving it. These handwritten notes look like this:

• No clue what slide #2 is trying to say.
• Segue between #4 and #5 is non-existent
• #10: Repeating myself

Your first job after your Disaster is to integrate your notes as quickly as possible. For me, the post-Disaster edit is also the single biggest change I’ll make to the presentation. In addition to major structural changes, I also find new content that needs to be added.

Reduction

This is a good time to remind yourself how to not throw up. This is the topic of an article from last year I wrote on the topic of preparing to give — not develop — your presentation, and there are huge useful intersections between these articles. For those NADD afflictees out there, I present this article in three slightly revised bullet points:

• Practice endlessly (so that you can)
• Improvise (but never stop)
• Fret (ting)

In terms of developing your presentation, I’m going to further modify bullet #1 for this article. It’s now, “Practice and edit endlessly”. This is the largest piece of work where I have the least advice because you need to stare at your slides at 2am for three nights in a row. You need to soak in your presentation. So, mix it up. Invoke another disaster. Pitch a friend. Print your slides and pitch a tree in the woods.

My best piece of advice is a threat: an audience can smell an immature presentation on the very first slide. It has nothing to do with the quality of the content; it’s you standing lamely in front of your slide and silently conveying the “Ok, what I am going to talk about here?” vibe, and it’s presentation death.

During this endless editing and practice, you’re looking for a reduction and consolidation of slides to occur. It’s not that you’re saying less, it’s that you’re beginning to internalize the content so you no longer need all those words to remember your point. It can be disconcerting to delete your fine ideas, so use the speaker notes or stickies if you feel you’re going to forget something important. You aren’t going to need them, but if it makes it emotionally easier to prune, terrific.

This consolidation is one of the reasons I don’t usually send my slides to folks who ask after the presentation. My slides, standing on their own, rarely make sense without me standing in front of the room furiously waving my arms.

Second, as part of your consolidation, you’ll want to start thinking about where you want to use images rather than words. Remember, a presentation is a visual and auditory medium, and a slide covered with words is, well, a cop-out. If you’re only going to use words to describe your fine idea, why don’t you just send everyone an email instead of wasting an hour of their time reading the same thought plastered on the wall behind you.

This presentation is only partially about you and what you think. Yes, you are the guiding force, but the goal is to present an idea with space around it. In this space, your audience is going to pour their own experience and their opinions; they’re going to make your idea their own. Pictures, charts, and graphs create structured, memorable space. I use them in two ways: either to replace an entire thought wholesale or to augment a word slide that needs more space.

A Design Aside: The visual design of your slides is an important topic that is outside the scope of this article, but know this: I’ve seen people lose their minds tweaking animations and transitions on slides. They try every single animation in the hope that just the right transition will add that certain something to their presentation, but what they don’t know is that an animation fixation is usually a sign that your content blows. The same rule for typefaces applies for transitions and animations. The less your audience sees your design decisions, the more impact they’ll have.

Third, you’re looking for an underlying structure to your presentation that you’re going to want to share with your audience. During all of this endless practice, you’re going to develop a feel for how your presentation fits together, but this structure may not be initially obvious to your audience. For any reasonable-sized presentation, you need to design a visual system that allows audience members to instantly know where they are.

Fourth, and lastly, you’re looking for audience participation opportunities in the flow and tempo of your presentation. Where are you going to turn the lights up a little bit and remind the audience that they’re sitting there, soaking in your thoughts? Let’s talk a bit more about this.

Presentation Punctuation

Participation is presentation punctuation. You’re going to use participation to accentuate parts of your presentation. You’re going to use it to break up complex thoughts into digestible, comfortable ideas. But you only have partial control of when folks will actually participate.

The most common participation technique is the show of hands opener. It’s usually done at the beginning of the presentation as a warm-up:

• “Show of hands — how many of you own a Mac?”
• “Quickly, how many of you think you’re paying too much for term life insurance?”

As a warm-up technique, I’m a fan of the opener. It’s an up-front reminder that this is not a speech, it’s just an opening salvo and you’ve got another hour to fill. As you’re endlessly practicing your slides, look for sections that are idea-heavy and give your audience a shot in the arm with a question. You don’t even have to ask for a show of hands, just direct the spotlight at them for a moment.

Tell me exactly what you do with your fingers when you read at your computer.

You’re only going to be able to plan so much of your audience’s participation, and therein lies the beauty of actually giving a presentation: you don’t know when your audience is going to show up. Dull, wordy slides I considered deleting often got the biggest laugh. Visual slides that I’ve poured my heart into are often complete duds. You won’t know until you’re there.

Something for their Pocket

What do you want your audience to remember? I should’ve asked this at the beginning, but I’m asking it now because you’re almost done with your presentation and I want to know what your giving your audience that fits in their pocket. I want to know what part of your presentation is actually going to leave with them.

There’s a really easy and cheap way to do this and it’s the Lessons Learned slide. It’s the bulleted list of important points slide that, when displayed, invariably results in a slew of cameras and iPhones appearing in the audience because they know this slide fits in their pockets.

Regardless of whether or not you use it, the Lessons Learned slide is a handy one to have at the end of your deck during the entire presentation development. It defines the basic structure of your presentation and represents a goal. Could you give your entire presentation from a single slide. 50 minutes, a room full of people, and you with your single slide with six bullet points?

That’s your goal, and you can have a wildly successful presentation without achieving it, but a one-slide presentation represents the ultimate commitment to your audience. It says, “This isn’t about slides. This about me telling you a great story… out loud.”

The Nerd Handbook

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

Regarding gender: for this piece, my prototypical nerd is a he as a convenience. There are plenty of she nerds out there for which these observations equally apply.

Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.

First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day. When the illusion is broken, you are going to discover that…

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

These control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Think travel. Think job changes. These types of system-redefining events force your nerd to recognize that the world is not always or entirely a knowable place, and until he reconstructs this illusion, he’s going to be frustrated and he’s going to act erratically. I develop an incredibly short fuse during system-redefining events and I’m much more likely to lose it over something trivial and stupid. This is one of the reasons that…

Your nerd has built himself a cave. I’ve written about The Cave elsewhere, but here are the basics. The Cave is designed to allow your nerd to do his favorite thing, which is working on the project. If you want to understand your nerd, stare long and hard at his Cave. How does he have it arranged? When does he tend to go there? How long does he stay?

Each object in the Cave has a particular place and purpose. Even the clutter is well designed. Don’t believe me? Grab that seemingly discarded Mac Mini which has been sitting on the floor for two months and hide it. You’ll have 10 minutes before he’ll come stomping out of the Cave — “Where’s the Mac?”

The Cave is also frustrating you because your impression is that it’s your nerd’s way of checking out, and you are, unfortunately, completely correct. A correctly designed Cave removes your nerd from the physical world and plants him firmly in a virtual one complete with all the toys he needs. Because…

Your nerd loves toys and puzzles. The joy your nerd finds in his project is one of problem solving and discovery. As each part of the project is completed, your nerd receives an adrenaline rush that we’re going to call The High. Every profession has this — the moment when you’ve moved significantly closer to done. In many jobs, it’s easy to discern when progress is being made: “Look, now we have a door”. But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.

There are other ways your nerd can create The High and he does it all the time. It’s another juicy cliché to say that nerds love video games, but that’s not what they love. A video game is just one more system where your nerd’s job is to figure out the rules that define it, which will enable him to beat it. Yeah, we love to stare at games with a bazillion polygons, but we get the same high out of playing Bejeweled, getting our Night Elf to Level 70, or endlessly tinkering with a Rubik’s Cube. This fits nicely with the fact that…

Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.

Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

This quick wit is only augmented by the fact that…

Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information. Many years ago, I dubbed this behavior NADD, and you should read the article to learn more and to understand what mental muscles your nerd has developed.

How does a nerd watch TV? Probably one of two ways. First, there’s watching TV with you where the two of you sit and watch one show. Then there’s how he watches by himself when he watches three shows at once. It looks insane. You walk into the room and you’re watching your nerd jump between channels every five minutes.

“How can you keep track of anything?”

He keeps track of everything. See, he’s already seen all three of these movies… multiple times. He knows the compelling parts of the arcs and is mentally editing his own versions while watching all three. The basic mental move here is the context switch, and your nerd is the king of the context switch.

The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerd’s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. It’s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where he’s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.

You might suspect that given a world where context is constantly shifting, your nerd can’t focus, and you’d be partially correct. All that multi-tasking isn’t efficient. Your nerd knows very little about a lot. For many topics, his knowledge is an inch deep and four miles wide. He’s comfortable with this fact because he knows that deep knowledge about any topic is a clever keystroke away. See…

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

Information that your nerd is exposed to when the irrelevance flag is waving is forgotten almost immediately. I mean it. Next time you hear “Cool”, I want you to ask, “What’d I just say?” That awkward grin on your nerd’s face is the first step in getting him to acknowledge that he’s the problem in this particular conversation. This behavior is one of the reasons that…

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he’s thinking is, “I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me”. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.

The skills to interact with other people are there. They just lack a well-defined system.

Advanced Nerd Tweakage

If you’re still reading, then I’m thinking that your nerd is worth keeping. Even though he’s apt to vanish for hours, has a strange sense of humor, doesn’t like you touching his stuff, and often doesn’t listen when you’re talking directly at him, he’s a keeper. Go figure.

My advice:

Map the things he’s bad at to the things he loves. You love to travel, but your nerd would prefer to hide in his cave for hours on end chasing The High. You need to convince him of two things. First, you need to convince him that you’re going to do your best to recreate his cave in his new surrounding. You’re going to create a quiet, dark place here he can orient himself and figure out which way the water flushes down the toilet. Traveling internationally? Carve out three days somewhere quiet at the beginning of the trip. Traveling across the US? How about letting him chill on the bed for a half-day before you drag him out to see the Golden Gate Bridge?

Second, and more importantly, you need to remind him about his insatiable appetite for information. You need to appeal to his deep love of discovering new content and help him understand that there may be no greater content fire hose than waking up in a hotel overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice where you don’t speak a word of Italian.

Make it a project. You might’ve noticed your nerd’s strange relation to food. Does he eat fast? Like really fast? You should know what’s going on here. Food is thrown into the irrelevant bucket because it’s getting in the way of the content. Exercise, too. Thing is, you want your nerd to eat healthily so that he’s here in another thirty years, so how do you change this behavior? You make diet and exercise the project.

For me, exercise became the project ten years ago after a horrible break-up. When the project was no longer the Ex, I dove into exercise every single day of the week. There were charts tracking my workouts, there were graphs tracking my weight, and there was the exercise. Every single day for two years until the day I passed out in a McDonald’s post-workout after not eating for a day. Ok, so time for a new project. Yeah, nerds also have moderation issues. That’s another essay.

Significant nerd behavioral change is only going to happen if your nerd engages in the project heart and soul, otherwise it’s just another thought for the irrelevant bucket.

People are the most interesting content out there. If you’ve got a seriously shy nerd on your hands, try this: ask him how many folks are in his buddy list? How many friends does he have in Facebook? How many folks are following him on Twitter? LiveJournal? My guess is that, collectively, your nerd interacts with ten times more people than you think he does. He can do this because the interaction is via a system he understands — the computer.

Your nerd knows that people are interesting. Just because he can’t look your best friend straight in the eye doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to know what makes her tick, but you need to be the social buffer — the translation layer. You need to find one common thread of interest between your nerd and your friend and then he’ll engage because he will have found relevance.

The Next High

As you discovered when you were the project, your nerd’s focus can be deliciously overwhelming, but it will stop. Once a nerd believe he fully knows how a system works, the challenge to understand ceases to exist and he moves on in search of The Next High.

While I don’t know who you are or why in the world you chose a nerd for your companion, I do know that you are not a knowable system. I know that you are messy, just like your nerd. Being your own quirky self will be more than enough to present new and interesting challenges to your nerd.

Besides, it’s just as much a nerd’s job to figure you out and maybe someone somewhere is writing an article about your particular quirks. Good news, he’s probably reading it right now.

A Glimpse and a Hook

The terrifying reality regarding your resume is that for all the many hours you put into fine-tuning, you’ve got 30 seconds to make an impression on me. Maybe less.

It’s unfair, it’s imprecise, and there’s a good chance that I make horrible mistakes, but there’s a lot more of you than me, and while hiring phenomenal teams is the most important thing I do, I’m balancing that task with the fact that I need to build product and manage the endless stream of people walking into my office.

But here’s a glimpse. I’m going to walk through the exact mental process I use when I look at a resume. I don’t know if this is right or efficient, but after fifteen years and staring at thousands of resumes, this is the process.

The First Pass

Your Name. It’s simple. Do I know you? Whether I do or not, I’m going to immediately Google you to see if I should. Oh, you a have a weblog. Excellent.

Company Names. Do I recognize any companies that you worked at? If I do, I don’t look at what you actually do, I assume that if I recognize the company, I’m in the ballpark. If I don’t know the company, I scan for keywords in the description to get a rough idea. Hmmmmm… networking words. Ok, you’re a networking guy.

Job Description and History. Here I’m looking for history and trajectory. How many jobs have you had and for how long? How long have you been in your current role? Where’d you come from? QA? Or have you always been an engineer? This is when I start looking for inconsistencies and warning flags.

Other Interests and Extracurriculars. Yeah, this is part of the first pass. I’m eagerly looking to find something that makes you different from the last fifty resumes I looked at. More on this in a moment.

So, we’re done. It’s been ten to twenty seconds and I’ve already formed an opinion. There’s a good chance that I’ve already made a call whether to move forward on you. If there are other folks checking the resume out, I can certainly be convinced to take a second look, but a basic opinion has been formed.

Before we move to the second pass, let’s talk about the parts of your resume I didn’t look at and never will.

Professional objective. This is likely your lead paragraph and I skipped it. Career center counselors across the planet are slamming their fists on their desks as they read this because they’ve been telling students, “You need to write a crisp career objective. It defines your resume.”

Yes, it does, but I still don’t read it and it’s not because there isn’t good content there, it’s the time issue. See, if your resume is sitting in my inbox it means someone has already mapped you to an open job in my group. Reading your objective is going to tell me something I already know. Besides, my job title and description scrub will tell me whether we’re in the ballpark or not. If I’ve got a Jr. Engineering position open and you’ve got 10 years experience, I’ll figure out that mismatch when I look at your history.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include this objective in your resume. As you’ll see below, there’s more to the process than just me reading your resume, and different folks are looking for different content.

Skills. I skip the skills section not only because this is information I’ll derive from job history, but also because this section is full of misinformation. I’m not going to say that people lie in the skills section, but I know that if a candidate has heard the word Linux in the workplace, there’s a good chance they’re going to put Familiarity with Linux as a skill on their resume.

Besides, again, I know you’ve goofed around with Linux because you said so in the description of your last job, right?

Summary of Qualifications. Similar to Skills, this is another skip section for me. Here’s a good example from an imaginary resume: “Proven success in leading technical problem solving situations”. This line tells me nothing. Yes, I know you’re trying to tell me that you’re strategic, but there is no way you’re going to convince me that you’re strategic in a resume. I’m going to learn that from a phone screen and from an interview.

Unlike Skills, which I find to be a total waste of time, I will go back to Summary of Qualifications if we end up talking. When you write “Established track record for delivering measurable results under tight schedules”, I am going to ask you what the hell you mean on the phone and if your answer isn’t instant and insightful, I’ll know your qualifications are designed to be buzzword compliant and don’t actually define your qualifications.

The Second Pass

If I can’t decide whether to schedule a phone screen after the first pass, I go for another. The goal now is, “Ok, I saw something I liked in the first pass, is it real?” This is when I do the following:

In-depth Job History. I’m going to actually read the job history for the past couple of jobs. Not all of them, just the last two or three. What I’m doing is fleshing out my mental picture of you. I’m looking for more warning flags. Do your responsibilities match your title? How long were you at your most recent job? If it was a long time, can I get a sense of how you grew? If it was short, can I figure out why you left? Do your last two jobs build on each other? Can I get a sense of where you’re headed or are you all over the place?

Your job history, — your professional experience — is the heart of your resume. This is where I spent my time vetting you and this is where you should spend your time making sure I’m going to get the most complete picture of who you are and what you’re going to bring to my team.

School. Yeah, this is the first time I’ll notice whether you went to college or not. I purposely do this because I’ve found over years of hiring that a name brand university biases my opinion too early. There’s a lot to be said for a candidate who gets accepted to and graduates from Stanford or MIT, but I’ve made just as many bad hires from these colleges as great ones.

Seeing a non-Computer Science degree is not a warning flag. In fact, I’m a huge fan of hiring physics majors as engineers. For whatever reason, the curriculum for physics has a good intersection with computer science. Any technical major for me is perfectly acceptable, and even non-technical majors with a technical job history make for a resume worth thinking about.

Ok, so that second pass took another 15 to 30 seconds and we’re done. You’ve just given me the opportunity to change your life by potentially bringing you in for an interview and that chance is over. Next!

What’s unfair about what just happened is this. You spent hours working on your resume. You sent it to close friends for review and you edited it. You agonized over the different sections and you stressed about the tone, and here I am, the hiring manager, and I read 1/10th of your work in 30 seconds.

Don’t despair. There are some easy things you can do to improve your chances.

Differentiate, Don’t Annoy

Design your resume to downgrade. Your resume needs to withstand some formatting abuse. Go get your resume right now and convert it to plain text. Can you still see the different sections? Is your job history still cleanly formatted? Can you still see the different jobs as well as the start and stop dates? Screw around with the margins, too. Where are your line breaks? They’d better not be after every line because that means visual chaos if a well-intentioned recruiter starts messing with fonts.

Never include a cover letter. I don’t read them. Recruiters don’t pass them on. Make sure the key points of your cover letter are living in your career objective and your job history.

Embrace honest buzzword compliance. Remember, I’m not the only who is going to read your resume. I’m likely the most qualified to make a call whether you’re a fit for my job, but before your resume gets to me, its going to be passed through a couple of different recruiters and these folks are just as busy as I am.

The lifeblood of the recruiter is the keyword. Java, C++, Objective-C. The more specific relevant keywords and buzzwords you can shove into your resume, there more likely you’re going to make it past the initial cut.

As I said above, I skip the Skills section because most folks already know that recruiters are just searching for specific words when they’re sourcing candidates, so they shove every possible buzzword into their resume. Know this, if you claim to Strong Java Background in your resume, I’m going to be compelled to figure out how strong your skills actually are. Don’t include any keyword or buzzword that you aren’t comfortable talking about at length.

Differentiate, don’t annoy. You’re likely going to start developing your resume from a template. Maybe you’ll use a friend’s resume that you like as a starting point. Excellent. How are you going to make it yours?

Remember, I’ve looked at thousands of resumes, which means I’ve seen all the standard templates. I know when you’re using Microsoft Word and I know when you’ve developed a format of your own. Right this second, I’m flipping through a dozen college resumes and the ones I’m spending time on are the ones that grab me visually, where there is something different. On this one, the fellow put a subtle gray box around each of his section headings. On this other one, the candidate used a nice combination of serif and sans serif fonts to grab me.

A couple of subtle visual differences to your resume goes a long way toward keeping me engaged in reading it, but remember, we’re engineers here and efficiency matters. Differentiating your resume to the point that I can’t quickly parse it is going to frustrate me. You’re not applying to be a visual designer; you’re an engineer. Keep to the standard sections and don’t make me work to figure out who you are.

Sound like a human. Here’s a doozy, this intern says he “planned, designed, and coordinated engineers efforts for the development of a mission critical system”. ZzzzzzzzzzZzz. What did this guy actually do? I honestly don’t know. Let’s call this type of writing style resume mumbo jumbo and let’s agree that usage of this style is tantamount to saying nothing at all.

What was the mission critical system? Why was it critical? How in the world did an intern plan, design, and coordinate the engineering efforts? I’m a fan of giving interns real world work, but it’d take a world-class intern to plan, design, and manage engineers on whatever this mission critical system is.

Take time to write your resume for a human. You need to hit all the right buzzwords and keywords to get yourself past the layers of recruiters, but I’m the guy who is really going to take apart your resume, and if you’re saying nothing with resume mumbo jumbo, I’m learning nothing. Give me specifics and give them to me in a familiar tone. I’m not an automaton; I honestly want to know what you do. Tell me a story.

Include seemingly irrelevant experience. This applies mostly to college types who lack experience in high technology. You’re going to stress that your job history doesn’t include any engineering and you’re thinking your summer working at Borders bookstore is irrelevant. It’s not. Any job teaches you something. Even though you weren’t coding in C++, I want to know what you learned by being a bookseller. Was it your first job? What did you learn about managers? How did you grow from the beginning to the end of the summer? Explain to me how hard work is hard no matter what the job is.

A Glimpse and a Hook

A resume will never define who you are. It’s not the job of your resume to give me a complete picture, and if you’re struggling to include every last detail about who you are, you’re wasting your time. Your resume should be designed to give me a glimpse and a hook.

The glimpse is a view into the most recent years of your professional career. It should convey your three most important accomplishments and it should give me a good idea where your technical skills lie.

The hook is more important. The hook will leave me with a question. Maybe it’s something from your other interests section? How about an objective so outlandish that I can’t help but set up a phone screen. I’m not suggesting that you make anything up, I’m asking you to market yourself in a way that I’m going to remember. A resume is not a statement of facts. It’s a declaration of intent.

Management Cheat Sheet

There’s an article somewhere in my head which dissects the intense knee jerk reaction a lot folks have regarding managers. The question is, “Why do so many of us automatically assume that our managers are boobs?” The follow-on question is, “Even if we don’t think our managers are not boobs, why do we constantly ridicule them behind their backs?”

Clearly, the answer is rooted in our basic issue with authority. “Who does HE think HE is? More important than ME?” No, he’s just got a different job than you. Yeah, he’s probably got more to affect change now, but that he didn’t a few years back. He was you. So, what are YOU going to do about it?

The article needs to be written soon because my role continues to wander about the organizational chart and at each part of the chart, they serve a different kool-aid. This drink tastes great, but it slowly dulls my memory. It makes it harder to context switch to where I was versus where I am. Could be age, too.

To preserve these thoughts, I present you the Management Cheat Sheet. It leads off with a generic version of the Rands Communication Template and finishes with neatly organized lists of the various articles hiding on this site.

As you read the articles, you’ll notice I jump around a bit in terms of audience… sometimes I’m focused on the manager and sometimes on the employee. Here’s the point: There is no difference. Just because your boss can fire you doesn’t mean you can’t quit.

Rands Communication Template

People appreciate consistency… especially in business. They want to know what occurred today is likely to occur tomorrow.

“RANDS? HELLO? What about Messy Thinking? Signs of Art? Taking Time to Think? HOW DO I INNOVATE WITH CHAINS OF CONSISTENCY?!?!?”

Calm down.

Ever hung with a hardcore successful artist? Painter? Writer? I bet their workspace was a total disaster. I bet you wondered, “How is the world does this person produce their art in this mess?” They don’t produce, they create. There’s some studio or publisher out there who does the production and they need consistency because they’re responsible for the cash and the cash vanishes, the gig is up. Our artist can still create in this scenario, but can they eat?

The Rands Communication Template is document designed to allow you to consistently communicate with someone else. Maybe it’s your boss or maybe it’s your team. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that in your regular communication meetings, you are talking about the same stuff in the same way.

This template is a work in progress, but here’s the skinny:

• Using this template without modifying to your personal company/style is silly.
• This template is designed for someone managing multiple projects. Adjust to your load.
• Each of the mythical projects in the template are at a different mythical milestone. The content for each is adjusted accordingly.
• This document is intentionally one page — two columns. You should print it out and fold it in half when you use it. Two reasons: Sitting in front of a computer during a 1:1 is distracting and you should be focusing on communication with whoever is in the room. Also, keeping your notes short and to the point keeps you on message… less time consuming tangents. I can’t explain the folding thing, it just feels good.
• Almost every bucket on the template has an entry “Hot List Next Steps”. These are whatever festering problems you have in your program or project. These are items where a lack of a weekly forward progress is a career limiting move. It should be clear for each item what your plan is and when you’re going to execute on said plan.

My process with this document is simple. I update my template the morning of my meeting. To do this, I look at last week’s version for an interesting or hot issues I noted in the prior meeting. Ideally, I’ve already moved on these and have something to report.

During the meeting, I follow the order on the carefully folded sheet. People, Program, and Product. Success can be measured in two ways: healthy conversation during the meeting or awestruck silence. Your mileage may vary.

With feedback from y’all, I’ll be happy to continually update this document. I would absolutely love to hear from folks who have tried to use this document. I would absolutely love to see real world versions of this that folks have tried with the managers and employees.

Rands Communication Template v.02 (PDF)

Ok, useful articles:

Understanding the Team

These articles focus on figuring out who the hell your working with and for. I have a tendency to map personalities on a spectrum where they are either THIS or THAT. In reality, there are multiple spectrums and the following articles describe a bunch of them:

• Free Electron — the single best engineer you know
• Organics and Mechanics — fuzzy thinkers versus the machines
• Inwards, Outwards, and Holistics — managers are not evil
• Incrementalists & Completionists — better is the enemry of done
• Healthy Tension — r&d versus qa

Understanding the Company

Ever wondered why there are useless meetings? Confused by your new company’s lingo? Not clear why your boss is yelling at you? The following might help:

• Mandate Dissection — deliver and receive big news
• Agenda Detection — understanding the players and pawns in meetings
• Managementese — communication across the org chart
• Rands Management Glossary — evolving glossary of management mumbo jumbo

Improving the Team/Yourself

Constant improvement only comes from constant challenge. How you communicate and deal with that challenge will define you as an employee, a manager, or a soon-to-be-unemployeed loud mouth:

• Don’t Be a Prick — do unto others
• What To Do When Screwed — high velocity management
• How To Lose Your Job, Pt. 1 — understanding stagnation
• Avoiding the Fez — fixing stagnation

Creativity in Development

It’s relevant that the last section is the most fun. Figuring out how to build stunning products is job #1. I can help:

• Taking Time to Think — are you thinking or reacting?
• The Bear Story — art won’t die
• Messy Thinking — you need space to think
• Pitch — and a great pitch
• Signs of Art — because software is art

Free Electron

There’s a Screwed Scenario that I missed.

Back in my Borland days, we were working hard on Paradox for Windows. I was a QA engineer testing the database creation and modification functionality. My counterpart in engineering, Jerry, was working hard, but getting absolutely nowhere.

We were mid-to-late in a 1.0 product cycle and most of the engineers were slowly moving from development into bug fix mode, but not Jerry, he was still implementing… over and over again. That’s the Screwed Scenario, you’ve given a critical task to someone who is utterly unable to complete it.

Now, let’s first give Jerry a break. He was a fine programmer, but he had two major strikes against him. First, Jerry had never programmed for Windows. so he was learning while he was coding. Second, this was also a 1.0 product. I’ve got an article kicking around my head about 1.0 product development… it’s titled “1.0 spelled One point oh my god I’m never going to see my family again and, dead lord, I’m going to take the company out while I’m at it.” Short version: 1.0 is incredibly hard and combined with his Windows inexperience, Jerry was in trouble.

Yet, Jerry has pride. Jerry believed that he could pull it off, but being on the receiving end of his code, I observed a disturbing coding practice which we’ll call “moving crap around on your plate”. Jerry’s approach to fixing his bugs was to move his code around in interesting ways much the way you used to shove food around on your plate in a feeble attempt to convince your Mom that you actually ate your beets. Nothing substantively changes, it just looks different. Another name for this coding practice might be “Coding by hope”.

The end result with Jerry’s code was each time he’d fix something, we’d discover another fundamental problem with the feature. Yes, small incremental progress was being made with each bug fix, but Jerry was in a losing situation because his basic architecture was crap. When asked for status, his lists of excuses were astonishingly believable. They were the excuses of a person who honestly believed he could pull it off and was willing to put in the hours to do it, but all the hours in the world wasn’t going to help Jerry because he was in over his head.

If you’re the manager in this scenario, you’ve got to make a major change because you can not release crap. There are companies that do this and end up making a tidy profit. You are not that person because once you are rewarded for releasing crap, you begin a blind walk down a path of mediocrity that ends up with you working at Computer Associates on a product no one has heard of and that no one cares about.

It’s a two step fix process. We needed to make a Jerry adjustment and then we needed a miracle. I’ll start with the easy one.

We needed Jerry. He’s the only one who knows what the hell is going on in that pile of spaghetti and he can fix trivial bugs. The engineering manager sat Jerry down and told him we need to focus on quantity. There were scads of trivial little fixes all over the place that had been ignored and Jerry could handle those. Yes, he was pissed, but in a few weeks, Jerry was cranking because people always work better when they know they have the ability to complete a task.

With Jerry adjusted, we had to face another fact, we were six months from shipping and we had a major portion of functionality that was cobbled together and barely working. In this scenario, you need a unique talent. You need a Free Electron.

The Free Electron is the single most productive engineer that you’re ever going to meet. I have not even provided a definition and I’m guessing a person has already popped into your mind that fits the bill.

A Free Electron can do anything when it comes to code. They can write a complete application from scratch, learn a language in a weekend, and, most importantly, they can dive into a tremendous pile of spaghetti code, make sense of it, and actually getting it working. You can build an entire businesses around a Free Electron. They’re that good.

Free Electron Got’chas:

» There are two classes of Free Electrons. Sr. Electrons and Jr. Electrons. Both have similarly productivity yields, but the Senior versions have become politically aware. In technology savvy organizations, most CTOs fall into this category. Think Bill Joy. The Junior versions have all the ability, they just don’t have the experience of dealing with people because they spent a lot of the youth writing their own operating system as a intellectual exercise. These Junior electrons represent the single best hire you can make as a hiring manager. If you get two in twenty years, you’re doing something right.

» Misdirected Free Electron intensity can yield odd results. On one project, I assigned a couple of slippery memory corruption bugs to a Free Electron who nodded quietly and promptly vanished for a week. When he returned, the bugs were fixed and the entire database layer had been rewritten. A piece of code that’d taken two engineers roughly six months to design had been totally redone in seven days. Sound like a great idea until you realize we were working on a small update and did not have the resources or time to test a brand spankin’ new database layer. Oops.

» Free Electrons sometimes will never engage and they’ll never explain why. Free Electrons are high functioning and have a strong opinion about everything… but they may never tell you that opinion. If you’re asking them to do something that they don’t believe in, they aren’t going to do it… ask all you want. The worst case is when you ask a Free Electron to pull of a diving save and they nod in the affirmative and promptly return to whatever they were doing before you distracted them with your useless request One week later, you’re going to be expecting the miracle, but the Free Electron is going to plainly say, “Haven’t got to that”.

One week more, your hair is going to be mostly pulled out, and then you’re going to realize you didn’t need a miracle in the first place and inaction was the right move. Your Free Electron knew that two weeks ago. He/she just didn’t want to take the two hours to draw the picture for you… Annoying, huh? You’ll get over it.

» You might expect Free Electrons to exhibit the personality of other uber-nerds, but often they do not. The main Free Electron at Netscape was the most decent human being I’ve met in recent memory. He also rode a unicycle.

» There are two primary tasks in an engineering organization. Research and Development. While the Free Electron is imminently capable of doing the development, their value in the organization is research. They define the bleeding edge. If you leave a Free Electron in the development role too long, they will vanish and you will have permanently damage the future productivity of your organization.

Back to Jerry.

Enter Bernard, Borland’s resident Free Electron. Up until he started poking around the code, I had no idea what Bernard actually did. He had a office. It was full of books. He talked a lot and produced little visible work. “Blowhard” is what I thought.

Bernard started tinkering with Jerry’s code on a Friday afternoon. The next Monday, I was able to run through my functional test matrix for the first time ever. By the end of that week, Bernard had closed a majority of the high severity bugs and was beginning to tread in fix areas reserved for Jerry. The following week I was racing to file bugs to keep Bernard engaged.

That is a Free Electron at work.

Organics and Mechanics

Stop. Grab a pencil and write down the first and last names of your past three managers. Stare at those names for a bit and re-live those months or years of reporting to this person. I want your off-the-cuff opinion about each one.

My guess is your opinion falls into one the three buckets:

I love this guy. Best manager ever. I still talk to him on a monthly basis because this guy taught me everything I know about what I do. He is my mentor.

Mostly harmless. This guy doesn’t really challenge me, but then again, he’s not really slowing me down. I’m not learning much, but I don’t have to put up with much bullshit. Also, I’m not sure what he actually does, but he leaves me alone… so… whatever.

Worst. Manager. Ever. This guy makes my life a living hell. I dread our weekly 1:1. I prepare for an hour and we still end up talking about random useless crap. It’s like we’re speaking a different language. I don’t know what he wants and, even if I did, I wouldn’t want to give it to him because I’m so annoyed. I mostly want to give him a poke in the nose.

I want to talk about Worst Manager Ever because, chances are, you’re right… you are speaking a different language and he’s just as frustrated as you.

As an individual contributor or a manager, you interact with two populations — those you work with and those you work for. The conversations with these two populations are distinct. With co-workers, you speak the Truth. You speak it because each of you are slogging out in your respective trenches, so what good is there to say anything but the Truth?

With managers, you speak the Way. The Way are the things we shall do to achieve organizational enlightenment. “Verily, I shall scribe a specification and it will be a good thing” or “Yea, it came to pass, I say unto you, I am working weekends.” The Way is however you’re communicating up to your manager. It’s different content and it’s different tone and if you believe you have the Worst Manager Ever then you’re not doing it right.

In order to understand how to speak to your manager, you’ve gotta figure out how they acquire information and, chances are, they either gather it Organically or Mechanically.

Your first job is to figure out whether you’re working with an Organic or a Mechanic. To do that, think of any problem as a very complex itch. Now, this is no normal itch, it’s a complex itch and scratching said itch is going to take some work. Here’s the inner dialog for a Mechanic and then an Organic regarding how their going begin their scratching

Mechanic: “An itch. Well. This itch seems familiar. In fact, I scratched this type of itch in January 2001. Let me first dig up my notes regarding that itching. Excellent. We’re going to need an matrix. The vertical column will be action items I can think of that will assess different scratching scenarios and the vertical axis will measure our progress against these different scenarios. Ok, we’re going to need a meeting to form a committee… “

Organic: “Wow, an itch. Hmmmm… well, this sucks. Hey Frank, we’ve got a itch… whaddya think? Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. You know, this itch seems familiar… I think I’m going to deeply consider this itch while I drive home, but, first, where’s Mary? She knows all about itches and I bet she’ll have some ideas… I wonder what happens when I type itch in Google… HEY… there’s an idea…”

Mechanics move forward methodically. They carefully gather information in a structured manner and store that information in a manner that makes easiest to find again. They quietly observe, they stay on message, they are comfortably predictable, and they annoy the hell out of Organics.

Organics are all over the place. They tend to be loud and they can tell a joke. They ask seemingly meaningless questions. They lean forward when they talk to you. When confronted with a horrible situation, you’re going to think they’re insane because they appear to be still smiling.

A large part of the managerial conflict can be summed up in the following scenario:

An Organic and a Mechanic are staring at each other across the desk and are thinking the following:

Mechanic: “This guy is walking chaos”.

Organic: “This guy is totally uptight.”

They are both right because they both violate each others sense of propriety. Knowing this solves half the problem. The other half is figuring out how the hell to communicate and that’s the hard part.

Prior gig, four years ago. I was hired in by the CEO as a Director while they continued to search for a VP of Engineering. As an aside, let me stress how bad of a career move it is to NOT know who you are going to be working for when you arrive. The thirty minute interview you have with your future manager is a critical piece of information when you decide whether or not to make a move. Here’s why.

The VP of Engineer showed up a few months later and he seemed like a bright guy. Good technical background… a bit quiet for my taste, but I’m loud so we’ll balance out, right? Our first 1:1 showed up, so I grabbed my big black notebook and plopped down in his office and WHAM HOLY MICROMANAGEMENT.

“What’s going on with this? How is Person X? What about Person Y? Have we done XYZ task? No, why? Why again? No really, why?” Question question question data data my lord does this guy think I’m sitting around surfing the web? Ok, deep breath Rands, it’s his first week and he’s gathering information so I’m going to cut him slack. He’ll chill out once he realizes I’ve got things under control.

Nope.

One month later and the barrage of questions is non-stop. This guy peppers me with random questions and I consistently leave his office feeling like I’ve been doing nothing WITH MY 72 HOUR WORK WEEK. It’s a cop-out to label this guy a micro-manager. Great, he’s a micro-manager. So what? I’m still going to walk out of his office on a weekly basis thinking I’m useless. He’s clearly Mechanical, but so what?

Remember, Mechanical managers gather information in structured way. They do this because they aren’t great at relating at people, so they let the left brain take over as a means of content acquisition. This means that if you have a Mechanic for a manager, you need to push the information in a structured, well known, and consistent manner.

For my prior manager, I wrote a status template. It started with products and listed current relevant bits for each of the products on my team. Following that, I listed personnel issues team by team. Contractor status, requisition status, vacations.

Each week, I’d fill this template out 24 hours before my 1:1. This was my first pass which loaded my brain with this week’s content. I’d remember things we’d talked about the week before and make sure that I’d have the most recent data on those hot issues. An hour before the the 1:1, I’d review again and fine tune. When the 1:1 arrived, I pulled out my print-out and started. I stayed on message and I never deviated from the template. Every week. The same structure chocked full of dates, data, milestones… anything concrete and real.

Consistency. Structure. He loved it. I literally jumped up and down after the 1:1 where he didn’t ask a single question because I predicted every single possible question he might ask.

My VP was a Mechanic and he wanted to feel the structure that encompassed dealing with every problem. Guess what, I’m a Organic. My 1:1s start with a “Hey, how the hell are you?” and then they wander. You’re going to walk out of my office thinking we just shot the breeze for a bit, but as we chit-chatted, I was carefully gathering content. What was your reaction to question X? What questions did you ask me? Yes, I appear to be collecting trivial crap with my random questions, but I tend to gather more information than Mechanics because who the hell knows what I’m going to ask.

That’s one situation. There are more and I guarantee yours is unique. My advice:

If you work for an Organic…

You’ve got to trust that they’ve got a plan even though it may not be immediately apparent. Don’t confuse an extremely open mind with cluelessness. Organics often have a more complete picture about what is going down because they are better networked.

If you’re a Mechanic, you’re going to feel a bit lost with your Organic manager because you’re OK with lightweight forms of micromanagement. It gives you structure. Most Organic managers I’ve worked with can put on a Mechanic hat and provide that structure, but you’ve gotta ask because it’s not their natural state.

It’s true. Organics often miss detail as they hurry from place to place.

If you work for a Mechanic…

Like I said above, a Mechanic will not believe you’re dealing with something until they feel the structure that encompasses a problem your solving. You must overload your Mechanic with data in order to satiate their structured brain. If your Mechanic keeps asking you the EXACT SAME QUESTION and none of your responses appear to be the answer, it’s time to counter with, “I really don’t know what you are asking.”

If you’re an Organic, you will wrongly assume that Mechanics don’t trust you.. and you’re right… they don’t. You will build trust by acting like a Mechanic with them. It takes practice, but since you’re already working for one, you’ve got a great role model. I’m not suggesting you need to transform yourself into a Mechanic (which is impossible), you just need to speak Mechanic long enough to sooth your Mechanical manager. Once he’s figured out you’ve got chops, you can start going Organic on him. He’ll deal.

Look out for…

Like Incrementalists and Completionists, the most dangerous Organic/Mechanic type is the switch hitter. My personal favorites are Mechanical Organics. These folks have all the slick tricks of Organic information gathering, but they’ve got the astounding organization skills of the Mechanic. They know everything and never forget a bit. I mean it.

Organic Mechanics are frightening. They have extreme depth of knowledge, but there is no obvious organic thread which ties it all together. Here’s the scary part. There is a thread. There is a purpose. They just aren’t letting you see it. Organic Mechanics will keep you on your heels and just when you think you’ve figured them out, they’ll change everything. I hate that.

The answer is in the middle

Organics doing battle with Mechanics or vice verse… is a waste of time. Organizational warfare does one thing… focus on the people rather than the business and that means you’re losing cash money. Whether it’s my manager or my co-worker, when I find myself in a Organic/Mechanic conflict, I think this:

“A purely Mechanical organization lacks inspiration. A purely Organic organization is total chaos.”

Organics fill Mechanical blind spots with their intuition and their passion while Mechanics create a healthy, solid home where nutty Organics can run into things at speed. It’s a team thing.

Avoiding the Fez

Ed: This article assumes you’ve read Part #1.

The first article finished with the big Rands revelation that it’s the manager’s job to figure out how to give Fez a swift kick in the butt. Yes, Fez needs to have the brains to listen and react to constructive advice, but that’s his deal. If I’ve done everything I possibly can to illuminate a path of growth to an employee and they’ve chosen to hang out in the dark, well, ciao Fez… unemployment is a terrific motivator.

Let’s start with the bad news. There’s no silver bullet to solve the Fez issue. Solving Fez is going to involve strategy, effort, inspiration, luck, and, lastly, a bit of time. You won’t solve it in a moment and you won’t solve it in a meeting.

There is a convenient yearly inflection point where everyone panics about their careers. Annual reviews. I’m going to construct this article around annual reviews, but I don’t want you to think that performing an annual review will solve the Fez. If you worry about career development once a year, you’re screwed. As you’ll see below, avoiding the Fez is a full time job, but since you get actual allocated time to stress about employee development why not stress in a constructive manner?

A BRIEF SIDEBAR ABOUT ANNUAL REVIEWS

People do care about cash. When that annual review begins, your employee is hanging on every word… carefully listening to your tone wondering, good review or bad review? If it’s sounding good.. that must mean cash; and cash rocks. If it’s sounding bad, they stop listening and start pre-bittering themselves for hating you for the next month since you clearly have NO IDEA where they ADDED THEIR VALUE this year.

Compensation adjustments are the result everyone cares about, but does anyone actually know how they’re calculated? What happened over the previous 365 days to result in a BIG CASH WINDFALL or an INSIGNIFICANT PITTANCE?

If you don’t draw a concrete line between a coherent understanding of an employee’s performance and their reward/punishment, you are only adding more fuel to the argument that “Managers sit around doing nothing all day”.

Let’s begin…

FIRST, GATHER YOUR THOUGHTS, BUT DON’T THINK (YET)

Here’s the deal. If I asked you right this second to tell me about your particular local Fez, you’ve already got a strong opinion, but it’s an opinion of the moment. It’s the latest three interactions you’ve had with your Fez and while those are relevant, they hardly represent a complete picture of the past year.

When you’re assessing an employee, you need to assess against their job, not the work they’ve done over the past two months. This is hard because this is the Silicon Valley and no one knows what happened two months ago… GOOGLE IPO THEN IPOD PHOTO THEN CHRISTMAS, RIGHT? DID I MISS ANYTHING IMPORTANT? IS TIGER OUT YET?

You did. Every month, your team produced something and it’s your job to document that production. I do this by spending an hour a month jotting down reflections of the team for the past 30 days. What stands out in my mind… What’d we do? Who rocked? Don’t get hung up on documenting every single event or talking about every single person… just type. Even if you miss massive contributions by a team member, the act of capturing your thoughts at the time they were happening creates a handy mental bookmark. This bookmark captures not only what you wrote, but everything else hiding around it so that when you go back and read the last summer’s terribly small entry:

“This month blew. No time to write.”

You’ll not only remember that y’all were on a death march, but you’ll also remember that Eddie the QA guy was there with you that weekend and, oh hey, he’s been here every single weekend and, wow, why aren’t we promoting him?

Regular snapshots of your team’s work will construct an impression of your team that you are incapable of constructing in the moment because, in the moment, you’re cranky about not getting coffee this morning, stressed about your product review next week, and DON’T GET ME STARTED ABOUT THE 300 MAILS I HAVE YET TO READ. How can you create an objective opinion of someone’s performance with all this crap in your head? You gotta step back, take a deep breath, and reflect.

As you sit there staring at the ceiling chewing on a year of thoughts, an overall impression is going to form… you can’t avoid it, but I’m asking you to ignore it for now. I’m going to distract you by proposing a model that you could use to look at your employees and begin to understand what exactly are their career needs. The model is Skill versus Will.

SKILL VERSUS WILL PLUS EPIPHANIES

It’s a simple graph. One axis is skill — how much skill does the employee have to do their job? Are the qualified? Over qualified? How long have their been doing it? When is the last time you know they learned something new? How quickly do they handle tasks compared to their peers?

The other axis is will — this is where we measure the employee’s desire. Do they like their job? Really? Have they told you that? Are they viewed as energetic by their team? When is the last time they generated a great idea that blew your mind? Are they talking in meetings or listening? Are they EVER talking? Are they ALWAYS talking?

This graph is not a precision instrument. It’s a tool to better define the impression you’re constructing of your employee. Once you’ve placed someone on the Skill/Will graph, you can begin to consider what your full time job is… constantly and consistently pushing your employees to the upper right quadrant… high skill (I’M GOOD AT WHAT I DO) and high will (I LIKE WHAT I DO). This mental map is your first step in constructing a Fez avoidance insurance policy.

“Rands, um, what exactly am I pushing constantly and consistently?”

Great question.

Worst case scenario. You’ve ignored everything I’ve said so far. You’re spending fifteen rereading your Fez’s review from last year… spending another fifteen throwing together this year’s review by cutting and pasting the one and only review you wrote for all your employees… making it unique by inserting their full name and project name. Dear Lord. You’ve really blown it.

Yet, you haven’t fully blown it. A complete fuck up is when you take this pathetic excuse for a review and present it. You say, “Employee 629, here is your review. You did this well, you did this poorly. Here’s your 4% increase and here’s your indecipherable objectives for next year. BACK TO WORK.”

You deserve every single Fez that you get. Please stop reading and move to a Red State. Thank you very much.

If you’ve taken some time to reflect on the full year… if you’ve mapped your employee against Skill and Will, you’ve probably had some epiphany regarding the Fez. You’ve realized, “Wow, they’re bored” or “She really has no clue how to architect software”. Great, an epiphany… it’s a start, but it’s not a finish. You are not the one who needs to have the epiphany — it’s your employee who needs it.

I’ll explain via the real fictional Fez. Go back and think about where you’d put him on the Skill/Will graph.. Your gut might say, well, he’s worked a lot of years, so he’s high skill and he’s just bored, so he’s low will

Nice try, but you don’t have the 12 months of fictional notes that I have. See, Fez’s skill used to be high, but it’s fading… it’s middle of the road skill now and the slow reduction is also affecting his confidence… his will. His diminishing skill is diminishing his will which, in turn, further diminishes his skill because he has zero confidence to go gather new skills. Yikes. A Skill/Will negative feedback loop. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Here’s the upside. Just as Skill/Will fade together, they also rise together. If you focus on one, you often fix the other. It’s a brilliant management two-for-one.

Back to Fez. Let’s say your epiphany is to get Fez some technical training… send him to a C++ class and WHAM he’s going to be happy. HURRY, write that down as an objective because WOW you’ve really nailed that Fez problem.

Easy Eager Manager. Slow down.

ANOTHER BRIEF SIDEBAR — ASSERTIVENESS

I’ve got a a task for you and I’m going to ask you in two different ways. You tell me which request you’re going to actually do:

Request #1: You — go fix that bug.

Request #2: Hey, can you look into bug #1837?

The difference between these two requests is a management style which shows up in every personality test. You, Mr. Manager, are either ASK assertive meaning that you ASK in order to get stuff done or TELL assertive which means you TELL to make progress.

There are a great many charismatic leaders who’ve made billions by only telling folks what to do… I am not one of them. It’s not that I’m conflict adverse or that there are not times that I’m an incessant dictator, it’s merely I hate being told what to do, so I treat others like I’d prefer to be treated.

Telling your Fez what the problem is without belief on their part that a problem exists is tantamount to a personal attack. “You, Fez, are doing a poor job and I’ve decided that objectives x, y, and z are the only way that we’re going to save your job.”

I exaggerate for example, but I’ve had ten plus years of reviews and I’ve had some phenomenal managers turn a review into a speech about me… without involving me… and, well, I happen to be expert about me, so can I please be involved in the discussion?

An annual review is a discussion, not a speech. The goal of the discussion is to, first, agree that the review is in the ballpark. Remember, you’ve been thinking about the review for weeks because you’ve got a deadline… Fez is seeing it for the first time and he needs time to mentally digest. It’s very hard to be mentally nimble when you’re manager is staring you down asking, “Any questions?” It’s doubly hard when they’ve just told you you screwed up for the past year.

Rule of thumb. If you’re delivering big bad news, schedule TWO meetings. At the first meeting, you’re presenting the review… not the objectives. They’re going to want to know about compensation and you’re going to want to say it, but don’t. The moment you say “No increase”, the review is over, the employee is pissed and you’re going to be on the defensive. The meeting has become a mental fight and fights only prove who can punch harder.

It’s the second meeting where everyone involved has had time to digest the review. You can have a discussion about objectives because Fez drove home the prior night wondering, “My manager is telling me that I’m getting stale and I vehemently disagree with that… buuuuuuuut maybe there’s some truth in what he’s saying… Hmmmmmmm.”

With just a smidgen of agreement that the review is fair combined with you and your Fez agreeing about his place on Skill/Will, you can start talking objectives. What can do we to increase skill or will? New job? New tasks? Training? Maybe move him off that team of pessimists so they can spread their wings with some optimists?

Maybe get them out that the job of nay sayers so they can spread their wings with some optimists?

I don’t know what is up with your particular Fez, so I can’t advise specific objectives, but here are some high level thoughts about the extremes on the Skill/Will graph:

• High skill, low will. Boredom is imminent — needs a change of scenery/responsibility. Stat.
• High will, low skill. Needs training, needs mentorship. Needs management. The good news is they really really want it. Savor this because as soon as the skill kicks in, they’re going to start wanting your job.
• Low will, low skill. Boy, did you screw up. It takes a fairly concerted effort to ignore the needs of your employee so long that a) they no longer have the skills necessary to do their job and b) they don’t want to do it. Roll those sleeves up, pal. You’ve got work to do.
• High skill, high will. Great job, ummmmmm, guess what? No one stays here long.

BIG FINISH

Fez is career drift.

You’ve got some Fez in you right now. You may be the rockstar of your company right now, but you have no clue that three guys in a garage in San Jose are spending every waking hour working to make you irrelevant… they call it the New Whizbang and you’re going to hate the New Whizbang when it shows up because you know it replaces your corporate relevancy.

Your manager is not going to hate the New Whizbang because she doesn’t feel personally threatened by it. She is going to see you Fezzing out about it and, hopefully, she can figure out to trickle objectivity into your indignation.

I have a simple way of managing against Fez. I tell everyone I hire the same thing, “I hired you because you’ve got enough skill and enough will to have my job one day… whether you want it or not.” This statement tells those I work with that I expect them to succeed and reminds me to keep moving because there is nothing like having bright people nipping at your heels to keep you running.

A Del.icio.us Interview

The original headline for this article hit me last week in a post-Turkey haze… laying on the couch… staring at the ceiling in the living room — “Why Del.icio.us is more important than Google”. Let’s hear it for SENSATIONALISM! Woo-hoo!

It’s hard to compare the two… one is a web service and the other is a company, but they do have a common goal — they strive to manage the endless pile of information that is the Web. They are both viewed as doing a successful job of this as measured by their ability to provide their users with relevant information… quickly.

I believe where Del.icio.us succeeds that Google does not is buzz latency. Like weblogs, Del.icio.us’s social bookmarking system does a fine job of identifying buzz quickly. A quick glance of the popular page and you get a pretty clear idea what Del.icio.us’s 30k+ community cares about.

Yes, Google indexes 8 billion pages and, yes, it serves up the results of queries to those indicies to, well, The Planet Earth, but Google chews on their large bites of the web relatively slowly. A monthly Zeitgeist reports tells me what The Planet Earth cares about, but I could pretty much guess that the most popular retail query on Google was Ebay. I was surprised that the #2 male celebrity query was Matt Drudge, but I don’t actually care.

I do care that Joel on Software is gathering the Best Software Essays of 2004. I’m also oddly interested in how to fold a shirt… free graph paper you say? Well, sure. These are topics I learn about from my anonymous del.icio.us peers… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Del.icio.us more important than Google? Nah. It’s an AND, it’s not an OR. Can’t really write that article, so a different tact. We know there are several thousands Googlers in Mountain View… what about Del.icio.us?

Joshua Schachter is the decidedly low-profile author of Del.icio.us and he graciously agreed be interviewed via email.

RANDS: At whatever level of detail you prefer, what have you been up to since you graduated from Carnegie Mellon?

JOSHUA: I spend most of my time pressing the buttons in front of the big glowing thing. Occasionally, gunfire is heard.

From outward appearances, del.icio.us is the work of a single person… you… is this the case?

I do all the coding and other heavy lifting, but a cast of thousands contribute ideas.

Given there appears to be no revenue generated by your projects, how do you afford to eat?

I have a day job. I only work on del.icio.us one evenings and weekends. It’s not that expensive, just rack space and ALL MY SPARE TIME.

Do you expect to have to charge for del.icio.us at some point?

I don’t think charging is realistic. I probably could put ads on it to cover the bandwidth costs. I’m not really trying to make a business, just have fun.

Where did the idea for del.icio.us come from?

I had built a single-user bookmark system a few years ago. It had tags but otherwise wasn’t a lot like the current system.

I’d like to nominate del.icio.us for “Best Use of a Non-Dot-Com Name” — is there a deeping meaning to the name?

Not really. I’d registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words.

In early discussions, a friend refered to finding good links as “eating cherries” and the metaphor stuck, I guess.

I somewhat regret using the domain name, because it’s almost impossible to discuss or verify without sounding silly. I’ll probably have to rename it at some point, presumably as something ending in -ster or -zilla or whatever.

From looking at del.icio.us from the outside, it appears you first design an architecture, throw it out in the wild, and then continue iteratively developing based off community feedback. �Is this a correct observation? � If so, how do you know when you’ve got enough of a product to throw it into the wild? �Is it a conscious choice?

I develop in the live system directly. I get pretty much immediate feedback about what works and what doesn’t, and I’m not above backing out a change I’ve made if it ends up working badly.

Usually I stay up really late hacking, and then as soon as I think I’m done implementing (but not debugging) I fall asleep. Then in the morning I fix all the damage.

Again, at whatever level of detail you prefer, can you give a high level architectural description of del.icio.us?

I’m using mod_perl, HTML::Mason, and MySQL. Pretty much standard stuff. It’s having some trouble keeping up with the load lately, so I’m starting to look into rearchitecting. The tags don’t map to standard RDBMS very well.

What’s the most interesting statistics you’ve found during the care and feeding of del.icio.us?

I built it to have an interesting dataset to look at for recommendation and so on.

Some folks have used it for interesting stuff. There’s a group of folks who use it to collaboratively find posts on one site, and they all use the same tag, and the feed for that is read by Livejournal…

I am a bit surprised that some people really just wanted to emit RSS feeds and nothing more.

I did have the expectation that users are much more clever and would use it for things that I did not imagine beforehand. I rarely tell people they are “using it wrong” or whatever (aside from the hierarchical categorization versus tags thing.)

Who do you consider to be your target user?

To start with: myself. I tend to collect lots and lots of links and need help managing it. The original predecessor system was built to manage tens of thousands of links I’d collected over the course of running Memepool.

After that, it’s a matter of listening to users, observing what users do (which is distinctly different,) trying to understand what people’s goals are, and what functionality can be added and what the interface cost is.

How many users?

30k or so.

A whole crop of third-party del.icio.us add-ons have appeared. �Do you have time to check these out? �Any favorites?

I love the nutr.itio.us bookmarklet, and I’m planning to integrate something very much like it into the site itself.

How do you approach user interface design?

Lots and lots of iterations until something feels right. Avoiding features until the interface for them is apparent. Seeing how users use the existing features to do things I didn’t expect, and then making those things easier.

Messy Thinking

Having a full blown case of N.A.D.D., I know two things:

• There is an infinite amount of information out there
• I have a limited time to find it all

The consequence of these truths is simple. I’m in an incredible fucking hurry to learn as much as I possibly can.

My desktop is my primary window to all of this information which means I (and all N.A.D.D. sufferers) develop a unique relationship with our workspace. We develop what others may see as quirks, but, to us, the quirks represent pure information acquisition acceleration.

These interactions… these preferences… are developed over time; they are refined to support whatever variant of N.A.D.D. you might have (and there are many… another column). Some are created as a reaction to technology while others emerge from our very personality and each is unique.

Here’s the history of my N.A.D.D.

The Cold, Dark Years of DOS (Early 80s)

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker conduit to information than a DOS command line. How am I supposed to multi-task behind 64k memory, a 2400 (nay 300) baud modem, and a monochrome display? The only glimpse we had of N.A.D.D. were memory resident programs (TSRs, remember that?) . Think SideKick. Think XTree. Yeah, I was there… tinkering with the XTree color scheme to get it JUST RIGHT because green text with yellow borders is HOW IT SHOULD BE.

Mac, The Real Deal… 15 years early (Mid-80s)

I’ve already described my holy shit moment with the Mac, but it’s interested to reflect on it now given what I understand about N.A.D.D. The introduction to a graphical user interface is a seminal moment because I understood that this new desktop metaphor reflected my mental process… which is messy.

Messy?

Yeah, most thinking is messy. Really messy. So are GUIs… they are imprecise and they are HELLO WINDOWS AND FOLDERS EVERYWHERE and I like that because it reflects the imprecise nature of our thinking. GUIs give us the ability to construct a visual structure for organizing our thoughts and each structure is different. By organizing your thoughts in a single, visible location, you encourage idea cross-pollination and that’s what our brains are good at… making new wholes greater than the sum their parts.

My first twelve minutes with the original Mac were life changing and, chances are, I could have saved myself a lot of productivity over the past two decades if I’d somehow weaseled my way into owning one, but they were amazingly expensive and the Dad could read the writing on the wall about the coming Microsoft monopoly, so we were a PC house. Weak.

“The Unix Moment” (Late 80s)

With Microsoft still spending a lot of time stumbling around in the dark and bumping into shit trying to figure Windows out, I had another formative moment in college which, like the Mac, I recognized, but stupidly, didn’t do anything about.

The University of California @ Santa Cruz gave you a Unix account when you showed up for your first computer science class. There were rumors in the hallways that this was “cool” because you could send “email”. Being a BBS dork, I got the concept, but did not understand the Internet implications thinking “Well, I guess I can email other UCSC accounts… OH YOU MEAN THE ENTIRE WORLD… oh.”

My first homework assignment involved compiling and submitting my first Pascal program via my Unix account and, armed with some basic Unix commands, I poked around a bit. “Who” revealed there were twenty other folks on this machine. I ask the guy next to me, “So, when the machine crashes, do we all have to re-login?” His response, “It doesn’t crash”. Well now.

Unix was a glimpse of extreme multi-tasking. A prerequisite of N.A.D.D. The problem was there wasn’t a messy GUI to provide a model for using it. Command-line multi-tasking just isn’t a turn on. Sure, you can do it, but you gotta work for it. If I’d stuck with Unix at this time, I would’ve probably turned into a tremendous Unix nerd with no appetite for UI asthetics… I would probably have also grown my hair long.

Windows Tries Really Really Hard (Early 90s)

My N.A.D.D. hit it’s stride with full time use of a GUI. In this case, during my Borland years, the GUI was Windows 3.x and Windows 95. Microsoft had finally created a semi-non-ugly version of Windows. Borland was in the midst of moving all our applications over to Windows so we could ride the wave that was becoming Windows 95.

I developed two significant N.A.D.D. interactions during this time that are still with me:

First, I developed a strong pro keyboard policy. This is partly due to the fact that I’d begun my stint as an engineer and I appreciated the precision of the keyboard. As I’ve said before, if you use a mouse, sometimes you just miss. Keyboards don’t miss… and if they do, just hit the BACKSPACE.

With every release of Windows, I’d comb over the document to determine what keyboard support was available. This ultimately resulted in the discovery the Alt-Tab command which allowed me to cycle through active applications with zero mouse interaction. As a N.A.D.D. sufferer, I can safely say that I’ve used that keyboard combination more than the spacebar.

Another keyboard convention I adopted was the Windows key which handily fired up the Windows 95 Start menu. From that menu, selecting the first key of any menu item would select it. This meant that for launch applications, I simply type WINDOWS-R(un)-. Avid mousers out there are staring at that and thinking, “Lotta work Rands”. I promise that in the time it takes you to leave your keyboard, grab your mouse, and successfully double-click that Excel icon that I’ve already fired up Excel and moved onto something else. Keyboard. Faster.

The second interaction that developed during this time was my predilection for maximizing all windows. Remember, thinking is messy and we like GUIs because they encourage this messiness, but I really can only focus on thing at a time. Please don’t tell my N.A.D.D. support group this… they’ll kick me out.

Yes, the 15” monitors of the time looked big at the time, but they were small especially since we were suddenly ACTUALLY MULTI-TASKING. Combining my Alt-Tab aptitude with my maximize windows fetish, I refined my N.A.D.D. Folks would drop by my office and be dazzled by my keyboard mastery… never leaving the keyboard while surfing a pile of windows.

I also had a brief hint of blissful things to come during this time thanks to Borland’s C development environment. Little know fact, if you installed a Hercules video card in your PC, you could do something revolutionary (for PCs). On your primary monitor, you had the windows application that you’d be debugging. On your secondary Hercules monitor, you’d have your debugging information. Given present day technology, this is a serious yawn, but remember, we’re talking about the early 90s here. Macs remained spendy and it’d be another eight years before Microsoft landed dual-monitor support in Windows 2000.

I’ll say this now and I’ll explain it in a bit, “If you’ve ever experienced a dual-monitor set-up, you will never ever be happy with a single monitor again. Ever.”

Windows Gets It Right, Too Late, Rands Bails (Mid-to-Late 90s)

The Internet bubble was good to N.A.D.D. Money was free, so the technical superiority of your average desktop set-up improved. Big, faster, more. Suddenly, everyone had a 21” monitor which meant more pixels. Microsoft finally landed dual monitor support and I couldn’t buy a second monitor fast enough. Sure, initial support was pretty sketchy, but who cares… I’m dazzling my co-workers by dragging a single window across two monitors.

The full time presence of dual monitors changed my maximize-everything N.A.D.D. interaction. While I tended to still keep my primary monitor maximized, my second monitor became more of a palette desktop… a careful organized set of always running applications that I tended to constantly refer to. Think instant messaging, music, calendar… The adjustment here was that now that I had more screen real estate, I realized that moving my eyeballs was faster than all that alt-tabbing. That means more information with less work. mMmmm… NAAAAAAADDDDDDD.

The Big Switch (Early 00s)

I’ve already documented my switch to Mac OS X back in 2002. The article points out many of my issues with Mac OS X, but, in terms of N.A.D.D., they can be summarized thusly:

First issue: Mac OS X’s design for heavy reliance on the mouse. This frustrates my N.A.D.D.. A mouse is swell, a mouse gives you precision, but it does not give you speed.

Second issue: Window management. The concept of “maximize a window” appears to vary based on application. Maximizing to fill an entire monitor isn’t a no-no, it just doesn’t do anything useful except make the window bigger… kind’f.

I solved both issues incrementally. For mouse and application launch issues, LiteSwitchX gave me my task switching while LaunchBar gave me speedy access to applications for both launch and selecting. Since Jaguar, Mac OS X has taken a stronger keyboard stance by adopting Alt-Tab as Apple-Tab in Panther. With Tiger, Spotlight appears to be landing an integrated means of finding/launching applications.

Unfortunately, my maximized_windows_everywhere tendancy has just not translated Mac OS X, but, two years later, I think I’ve accepted the transition. Allow me to explain visually. Brace yourself for a big segue.

Folks, that’s 30 inches of flat panel. You’ve got a strong opinion about this beast, but let’s forget the hugeness for a second and remember a simple, important fact:

Thinking is messy.

You don’t want to admit this because you’ve been carefully orchestrating yourself out of the chaos by constructing your personal version of N.A.D.D. These interactions with your desktop, your content, your thoughts exist because information is messy, too. It’s all a big mess and our job as consumers of an infinite amount of information is to find a system of organization which best suits our interests and our attention spans.

The comment I’ve heard most about this new 30 inch flat panel is, “Who in the world needs it?” You do. Right now. So do I. 60 inches would better, but 30 inches is all we got.

Yes, I can’t afford it. Neither can you because we’re not working at Pixar or PDI where they’ve got a present day politically correct justification for all those pixels, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. It just means we haven’t successfully convinced the bill payers that more pixels means more productivity.

I know, I know, it sounds like an engineering boondoggle. MORE MONITORS MEANS MORE FEATURES AND LESS BUGS. Right and I’M REALLY WORKING AT HOME. Of course our managers are going to be suspect and they’re going to ask for proof positive about why a tremendous monitor is going to improve our productivity and I don’t have said proof, but I do have an opinion.

My maximize-every-window tendency was a reaction to technological limitation, namely, monitors are too damned small. Mac OS X’s lack of aggressive window maximization forced me to start using my desktop as a organization mechanism. I resisted it for about three months, but, invariably, my desktop became populated with the usual collection of folders, half-thought-out documents, fire wire drives, and stickies.

My desktop became a two dimensional, colorful snapshot of my life and that’s the point… my desktop became a living, breathing reflection of how I think. If the sky is falling in my life, my desktop is a disaster. If life is proceeding as expected, my desktop is clean and predictable.

Your desktop is structured clutter and so is your brain. Sitting in this clutter is everything that you’re up to. It’s your budget, your journal, your to do list, your status reports and that half written flame-o-gram that you’re never going to send, but you constantly revise. These thoughts sitting in close visual proximity to each other allow them to cross-pollinate… to borrow from each other or to merge into something you were not expecting. Sure, it’s not the desktop doing this, it’s your brain… but the desktop is the essential tool which gives you this clutter abstraction process.

Look at your desktop right now. Now, I want you sit back in your chair, fold your arms behind your head, and imagine four of those desktops forming a square as your workspace… get past the slack jawed amazement about the sea of pixels and think about how’d you work in this space.

That’s right. As your desktop size increases, as the borders become wider and taller… they vanish. You now realize that, yes, you’ve been staring at a world of information through a tiny 17” window for the past decade… who knows what you’ve missed with this myopic vision. No wonder you’re writing that flame-o-gram… I’d be pissed, too.

30 inches is big. It’s huge. Don’t let your size envy prevent you from seeing the evolution it represents for your desktop. It’s a step out of mediocrity into greatness because one of your favorite tools, your desktop, is doing exactly what it should… it’s getting the hell out of your way and allowing you to move faster and learn more as you stumble through your messy life.

That’s the pitch for your manager. It’s a soft pitch and they probably won’t get it, so send them this article to them and tell them this, “Genius is defined by the ability to make connections between dissimilar subjects and, boy oh boy, can I get a bunch of dissimilar subjects on screen with 4 million pixels.” Good luck and get one for me while you’re at it.

I warned you. It was a big segue. Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah.

Your N.A.D.D. is different than mine. You never had a chance to live on Mac OS X… or maybe you’ve never used a dual monitor set-up. Doesn’t matter. You’ve got your quirks well defined and, boy, LOOK AT YOU FLY WITH THAT TRACKBALL. The one constant we share as N.A.D.D. sufferers is the ability to evolve because, by definition, NADD keeps you relevant. We want to know it all… and we want to know it all right now. (And 30 inch flat panel can help!)

What To Do When You're Screwed

Cabel Sasser of Panic dropped a shirt off with me shortly before my first presentation at WWDC.

For those of you still using Lynx, the shirt reads, “Hi, I make macintosh software.”

While Jimmy Eats World was ripping the tunes at the WWDC campus bash, I proudly wore the aforementioned shirt all over the campus. Co-workers quickly pointed out, “You don’t make software anymore… you tell others to make software.”

That’s right.

I do.

Let’s get started.

You’re a manager now. Congratulations. Either you sucked at programming and wanted to try a different influence avenue or you’re fed up with every other manger you’ve worked for and now you’re going to REALLY GOING TO SHOW US how it’s done.

I’m here to help.

Your first five years as a manager are going to be full of lessons galore. Lesson #1 begins the moment someone asks you a question and you realize they’re asking you not because you actually know the answer, but because the term manager is in your title and they’ll believe any reasonable answer. Some folks call that power, I call it responsibility.

There are other lessons, as well. There’s the big three: hire, fire, and layoff. All of those are a nice kick in the teeth that’ll be the source of significant insomnia. There’s the little stuff, too. You’ll find yourself saying “We” a lot. You’ll notice you’re repeating yourself… saying the exactly same thing to twelve different people. Some of it’s entertaining, some of it’s dull, but it none of it compares to when you’re Screwed.

The state of being screwed is unique. You know when things are going smoothly because you can arrive in the morning and quietly sip your hot beverage until your first meeting at 11am. Screwed is the oppposite. Screwed is being accosted the moment you walk out of the elevator and being unable to even check your mail… until Winter.

Screwed is mental paralysis.

Screwed is career panic.

Screwed is also an opportunity to hit it out of the park. Overcoming screwed will give you confidence, experience, and respect, but you need to figure out how screwed you actually are and then then figure out and how to fix it. If you aren’t interested in unscrewing yourself, I’d suggest this article is not for you. I’m assuming you have passion regarding your professional career. You want to do more. You want make more money and, if it all works out well, you want to change the world.

Maybe I haven’t been kicked in the shins enough, but it baffles me when I run into folks who are coasting through life. Doing the bare minimum to get by and… enjoying it? What exactly are you enjoying? Hey, maybe your day job isn’t your gig, but I like mine, so let’s begin:

#1) I’m Missing A Document and People are Yelling at Me
Screwedness: Low

Early on the product development process, everyone is talking about writing it down. Marketing specifications, engineering specifications… specs, specs, specs. Milestones are often constructed around these specifications, but, usually, these milestones come and go and no one really gets fussy about missing or incomplete specifications. That’s the good news.

The absence of a particular document really isn’t that relevant to your screwedness. The real question is “Who is asking for said specification and why?”

If the requestor is someone who has a legitimate need for the information, your potential screw-i-tude is high. Someone, somewhere is not able to do their job and that means someone could fail in their work and that’s bad because they’re going to be pissed off and pointing at you.

A tip: Don’t confuse the request for information as a request for a complete answer. You completionists out there do this a lot. “I must answer the question thoroughly and completely; therefore, I must start by selecting a template for the information that best structures my response and BLAH BLAH BLAH”… two weeks later and the requestor has moved on. You have officially missed your window to sound like you know what you’re talking about and, guess what, you’ve also been pegged as hard to work with / unreliable. Way to go.

Larger organizations really believe they need to document more and they’re right. Communication in big organizations is tricky because everyone’s got an opinion and you never know who is going to have a bright idea. Big company policy on requiring documentation is furthered by layers of management struggling to ascertain/measure what is actually going on in large groups of people. (See: Status Reports Must Die)

If you’re feeling screwed by the absence of some important document, again, look at who is giving you that screwed feeling and ask yourself, “Is this an honest request for facts or a management boondoggle?” If the answer is facts then face-to-face communication is always the way to go especially if time is of the essence.

This section reads like I’m anti-documentation which is silly because HELLO I WRITE A WEBLOG. Remember the context of this column, “When you’re screwed…”. I’m talking about situtations when it appears the sky is falling and you need to move quickly. I could easily argue that diligent and frequent documentation is a handy way to avoid sky-falling-situations because writing stuff down is a great way to make information scale… because you don’t.

#2) A Significant Development Tool Does Not Exist on My Team
Screwedness: Varies by tool

There are an endless pile of tools engineers are fond of using in their development process, but there are only four that they really need:

• Editor
• Compiler
• Version control
• Bug tracking

I’ve never seen any engineering organization that hasn’t had some form of an editor and compiler, but I’ve been shocked to find both version control and bug tracking missing when I’ve walked in the door.

If you ever find yourself in this situation, your first job… before you even sit down at your desk… is to get these tools in place and in use or you and your organization will be forever screwed. Any engineering organization with more than two people will fall flat on it’s face as soon as the product development process gains any sort of momentum unless version control and bug tracking are in use.

These tools empower engineers by allowing the entire team to:

• Collaborate without stepping on each others toes. You do this, I’ll do that.
• Be accountable for their work. Who’s got that checked out? Who’s bug is this anyway?
• Measure their work. How many bugs do I have? How about you?
• Remember what they did. Uh, who the hell checked in this crap?

You’ll find early on in your management stint that main reason people make the trek to your office is because they need conflict resolution. Once the conflict participants stop yelling, you need to get them looking at facts because facts will ground them and grounded means less yelling. All of the tools I describe above are excellent repostiories of cold hard facts and that can help.

#3) I Can’t Stand My Product/Program Manager or They Plain Don’t Exist
Screwedness: Medium

As an engineering manager, you need to have two significant peers. First, you have a product manager… marketing. This person represents your conduit to your customer and their needs. Second, you have your program manager. This is your process and communication czar.

The program manager role is a bit harder to define because most engineering managers confuse a program manager’s role with their own. A program manager owns the entire process of shipping a product. Think of it like this, you, the engineering manager, hand a DVD with your final product to the program manager and they make sure it shows up in Fry’s in the right box. Don’t think that isn’t a huge amount of work because it is.

Again, both product and program managers are information brokers. For the product manager, they represent the customers needs… they tell you what the customer wants and you build it. Once you’re done, they tell you how it went. The program manager’s information is organizational. For any given question, they know the answer or know who to ask. Good ones are also process wienies which means things just don’t fall through the cracks around them.

Program Manager Sidebar: My strong belief in the role of program manager comes from first hand screwedness. My start-up was twenty folks when I arrived as the first engineering manager. Over the coming two years, we grew to 250 people where I was managing three product lines. The executive management team created the program office around that time and I was immediately suspect. “What do these boobs do? Take meeting notes? Jesus, what a waste.” Wrong wrong wrong. Good program managers are detail drivers. They handle the piles of minutia surrounding a release and you’ll be shocked the amount of time they’ll save the average engineering manager.

If you’re unable to work with these co-workers or if they just don’t exist, you’re pretty much at the same state of screwedness. You’re going to have to do their jobs for them and that means less time to actually be an engineering manager. This isn’t going to feel like screwed because you’ll be busy, but you are, bit by bit, cheating your team and your product out your time while you making sure the box art looks right.

Of the two, a missing or moronic product manager is probably more of an issue since their data affects the work of your entire team. You’ll likely make things worse when, if pressed for time, you declare, “Well, I know what’s best for the customer.” Again, wrong. Unless your product is targetted at software engineering managers then it’s unlikely your opinion is relevant. Sorry.

#4) My Product is No Where Near Done
Screwedness: Less than you think (hopefully)

Let’s first remember that product development team loses their minds the last month of any significant product development cycle. Really. They’re insane. They’ve been staring at this damned product for so long that they’ve developed a serious emotional attachment with the bits and that means irrational, goofy behavior that is not based on reality.

This is you. Mr. Insane Engineering Manager. It’s two weeks until your product ships and you are sure there is no way you’re going to make it. Your claim is, “The product is crap”

Now, there are two possibilities both of which are equally possible. First, you might be too close to the product to make a quality judgement. Your initimacy with your product has clouded your judgement and what you’d consider ready for prime time has nothing to do with what a customer would be happy with it. If, in a moment of lucidity, you realize that this the situation you’re in, it’s best to find a person/party who’s judgement you trust and get a sanity check. You’re instinct will be to go to your QA organization, but they’re likely equally in love with the product and probably more wacked about quality than you.

Maybe your boss? Maybe another engineering manager? I don’t know who, but it’s got to be someone who has not spent the last three months living and breathing this product that’s NEVER GOING TO SHIP. When you do find a designated sane person, they should ask questions like this:

1. Are the features done? How done? Are they testable?
2. How many bugs are left?
3. How many bugs are you fixing on a daily basis?
4. How many bugs are you willing to ship with?
5. What’s your bug deferral criteria?
6. What’s your update strategy?

This sane person’s job is not to decide for you. Their job is to be neutral and to help you frame your decision by asking great questions. As a rookie manager, you’re not going to seek external input because you’ll think asking for help is a sign of weakness and, boy, are you wrong. Asking for help of team members allows these folks to apply their unique experience to whatever the problem might be and that’s how you make better decisions while also building a stronger team. Asking for help is a big deal. Do it. Often.

That’s situation #1… getting a second opinion. This leads us to situation #2 which is, you’re right… your product is nowhere near ready for customers and you’re fourteen working days from shipping. You and your team are charging forward to the ship date, but most everyone is shaking their heads slowly and murmuring, “It’s not ready”.

And it’s not. No need to get a second opinion. You’re still finishing features. QA is sufficiently pissed off and your program manager is crying in his/her office.

Yes, it’s really not ready.

As an individual contributor, your job is to bitch about the situation. I mean that in a good way. Bitching is one way to conveying data and if your manager is listening, they’ll register it as such. Problem is, you’re the manager and it’s now YOUR JOB to make initiate a course correction because late is better than crap.

If this is your first ever course correction, you’re going to believe you’re more screwed than you are. Here’s the truth: Most everyone believes that engineering is lying when they propose a schedule. It’s what fancy word talkers call a truism. If engineering says it’s going to take a month, it’ll probably take three. Ok, maybe lying is a bit strong. We’re actually not lying, but we’re doing the best we can, I swear. We honestly don’t know how long it’s going to take to finish that feature until we’re halfway done.

Organizations insulate themselves in different ways against the lack of engineering certainty. Some product groups build in slip time. Others have mysteriously named milestones POST ship which are the actual ship dates. The point is: If this the first proposed slip for any given product, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised when the product team says, “How much time do you need?” Didn’t know you were playing poker did you? Well, you are.

DISCLAIMER: If you’re interested in building any sort of credibility in your organization, I suggest that slipping your product late in the game is just bad PR. Any good engineering manager + program manager team is going to build in feature and schedule checkpoints where mid-game adjustments are made that give everyone higher confidence in a final schedule. Last minute schedule changes violates Rule #3 of Rands Management No No’s: “No surprises”.

#5) My Company/Job Sucks or Is About To Suck
Screwedness: High

True story. In the early 90s, Borland was taking it on the chin from Microsoft. Borland’s big transition of their office applications to Windows was going abysmally. The Microsoft monopoly was in full force… they bundled their first version of the Office suite and were underpricing the competition. Good-bye Quattro Pro, Paradox, and dBase.

After years of expansion and a move into a (still) amazing campus, Borland was about to implode and I was aware of this. That’s the first step to get yourself unscrewed in this situation… detection… knowing the ship is sinking even though those execs continue to sound eternally optimistic in those all hands meetings. Of course they sound positive, if the rank and file universally believe the sky is falling, those all hands meetings will become utterly devoid of hands.

What’d I do? I jumped ship. I took my engineering title and moved up the peninsula to a now defunct database company. Problem was, the new company was in much worse shape than Borland having imploded about a year earlier. I didn’t know this until my hiring manager who had portrayed portrait of enthusiasm and vision was gone one month after I started. I was suddenly debugging build systems and drinking really bad coffee with a bunch of chronically depressed database developers.

Ooops.

It’s obvious, but there are two parts to getting descrewed when your company sucks. First, detection. There are people still at Borland who, to this very day, are still bitching about that company the same way they were over a decade ago. Let’s call them faux-Bitchers because for all their bitching, they’re never going to do anything about it because bitching about, apparently, is enough.

You are not faux-Bitcher because you’re still with me. You want to do something about your screwedness. You want to make an upwardly mobile move. You want to go somewhere where you’re:

1. Getting a raise
2. Getting a promotion
3. Getting to do something that interests you
4. Working for a company that doesn’t suck

In my post-Borland move, I succeeded in A and B, but I blew D… and, it later turned out, C. It was my worst career transition ever and it took me a year to get back to a place that I felt I was moving forward. Good managers keep their teams, their products, and their careers full of velocity.

Velocity.

That’s a better term than upward mobility. Constant forward momentum.

How you are going to achieve your own personal velocity is your own deal. My apparently endless stream of management advice is just that… advice. What you really want is my experience, but you can’t have it because there is only one way to get it… you’ve got to put yourself a situation that allows you to get screwed. When you’re deep in it and terrified, maybe some useful acquired advice will pop into your mind or maybe you’ll construct more elegant solution. Either way, you’ll come out the other side moving faster… or maybe slower.

Agenda Detection

I hate meetings.

Everyone hates them because we’ve all been to so many that have sucked so badly that we now walk into a conference room, sit down… arms folded, and think, “Ok, how long until this one is going to suck?”

And then it does. Time is wasted. Hot air is created. Silent frustrations are confirmed while historic hatred of managers is furthered.

There is a basic skill you need whenever you walk into a meeting which has suck potential. This skill is important in the case that you are a participant or the person running the meeting. The skill is called Agenda Detection.

Simply put, Agenda Detection is the ability to discern:

1. Typical meetings roles and how meeting participants assume them
2. Explanation of what these distinct meetings roles want out of a meeting
3. How to use this understanding to get the hell out of the meeting as quickly as possible.

If you’ve ever been frustrated in a meeting — if you’ve sat there wondering why in the world these people, these managers, who are paid the big bucks to move the company along simply can’t do or say the painfully obvious then keep reading.

The first step in getting out of a meeting is to identify what kind of meeting you’re in. A meeting agenda would help, but as most meetings proceed without one, you’re on your own. Chances are, you’re either in a informational meeting or a conflict resolution meeting.

At informational meetings, big surprise, information is passed on. Think your favorite quarterly all-hands meeting, staff meetings… any meeting where there’s a standing assumed agenda. There are two kinds of participants in these meetings: talkers and listeners.

Roles and agendas in these meetings are simple. Talkers are talking and listeners are listening. Get it? There is no problem to be solved other than the transmission of information… that’s it. The quicker it happens, the sooner everyone is back to work.

You can quickly identify those folks who don’t get this. They’re the wack jobs who always ask the same (or random) question during an all hands with the hope that simply by asking, they’re going to change something. It’s a noble act… speaking your mind in front of all your peers. It’s a waste of time. This is an informational meeting, people. The talkers are here to pass on whatever organization knowledge they need to so as to prevent a rebellion. When the wack job speaks up, everyone who gets the nature of the meeting is thinking, “Ok, another useless question which is going to keep me here longer. Crap.”

I’m not saying that rocking the boat during the required Q&A session is not feasible in these meetings, it’s just not efficient. Folks are there to nod, not solve problems. Where the wack job should be speaking up is at our other class of meeting, conflict resolution… that’s where they could influence folks because people go to these meetings to solve problems.

At a conflict resolution meeting, some problem needs to be solved. Apparently, it could not be resolved via email, instant messaging, or hallway conversations, so some brihg tfellow decided to waste some more time in a face to face meeting where the bandwidth is high and the time wastage is significant.

Agenda detection in the conflict resolution meeting is more complex. To see it in action, let’s create a meeting:

4pm, this Tuesday. You, Joe Sr. Engineer, two other random engineers, one product management person, and a program manager. The program manager called the meeting to solve a problem. See, the Sales folks sold something that your company does not make. You’re here to explain how much it’d cost to build this thing that you’ve never built before but that’s already been sold. Been here? Thought so.

Agenda detection starts when by first classifying the players. There are two major types that you need to identify: Players and Pawns. The simple distinction between Players and Pawns is that Players want something out of the meeting. This is their incentive to participate. They’ll be leaning forward, actively nodding, and barely able to hold themselves back from spilling their agenda all over the table.

Pawns are either silent or instruments of running the meeting — in any case, they’re adding very little to the meeting and can be removed from consideration as a means of getting out of the meeting. The term Pawns is not intended to be derogatory… Pawns very well might be running your company, but in meetings, they just don’t contribute… it’s not their key skill.

Bucketing of Players and Pawns is simple, you can do it with the attendee list and a bit of organization knowledge. Let’s try it with our hypothetical meeting above.

First, you can assume all the engineers are players — they’ve got technical knowledge they may throw on the table otherwise why were they invited? The product management person is also a player as they represent sales folks in this meeting. The program manager is a pawn… they’ll make sure action items are recorded and that the meeting ends on time.

MEETING BAIL TIP #1: If you’re sitting in a meeting where you are unable to identify unable any Players, get the hell out. This is a waste of your time. These are meetings traditionally called by wind bags who like to hear themselves talk, but hold no real influence over the organization/product/whatever. Unfortunately, if you’re new to a group, you need to get burned by the wind bags a few times before you learn to avoid this totally fucking useless meetings. It’s tough being the new guy.

The next step in agenda detection now kicks in as we look at the Players. This is when you figure out each Player’s position relative to the issue on the table. For whatever that issue is, there are two subclasses of Players: the Pros and the Cons.

The Pros are the players who are currently on the winning side of the issue. They’re getting what they want and are not incented to negotiate. Heck, they don’t even have to be there… they’re just here to see the Cons squirm. Yet, they are there, they’re at least willing to listen to the Cons, right? Maybe.

The Cons, clearly, are the ones who are being screwed. They’re likely the ones who yelled loudly enough to get the meeting set-up in the first place. Cons are usually easy to pick out because they’re expressing some degree of pissed-off-ed-ness.

MEETING BAIL TIP #2: Like our Player requirement, both Pros and Cons must be represented for any progress to occur otherwise you’re just going to talk and talk and talk. You’re guaranteed the Cons are going to be present because they’re the ones who are screaming and shouting. If you want the meeting to actually produce something useful, the Pros must be represented. The specific Pro does not need to be in the building, but they must have designated a proxy otherwise the Cons are going to bitch, heads will nod, and nothing will happen.

Let’s take a stab at identifying the Pros and Cons in our hypothetical meeting.

In the example above, it’s clearly engineering who is being asked to build a product THAT DOES NOT EXIST. They’re pissed and they’ve called this meeting to quantify this frustration. Hello Cons.

As we’ve already identified our program manager as a Pawn, we can only assume that our product manager is the Pro. But wait, now you’re in this meeting and she sounds like an engineer. “Those god damned sales folks. What the hell are they thinking? This is the last time blah blah blah…”

Wait, our product manager appears to be a Con? Does this means Rands thinks I should pull the rip cord and get the hell out? No, your product manager is the Pro… she’s just bright. A common tactic of a good Pro is to not acknowledge that they’re the Pro. This means that they don’t have to actually take the heat for whatever the conflict is. The real Pros aren’t in the room — the real Pros, in this example, are the sales folks who cut the deal to sell the product that doesn’t exist — except they’re out in the field cutting more unachievable deals. The product manager is attempting to fake out the engineers in the room by saying, “Hey, this is a tough problem that THEY have put US in… what are WE going to do?” Brilliant bait and switch, no? Don’t sweat it. They make less than you.

The stage is set. Our Pawns have been filtered out. Our sneaky Pro is nodding.. placating with her feigned commiseration, the Cons are yelling and, yes, you’re still in the meeting.

Believe it or not, the hard part is done.

If you’ve paid attention, you’ve got a pretty good map of who is who, where the whos are… now all you need to do is figure out what the whos want. The Pawns don’t want anything — they were just happy to be invited. The Pros are there to show off their complete and utter ownership of the issue… they’ll leave whenever, the sooner the better.

So the reason you are sitting there is the Cons. What is it that they want?

Stop. You’ve got some meeting in mind, some horrible meeting where the issue is so complex that there is no way the simple identification process I described could apply. Wrong. Your jumping to solve the issue and there is where everyone fucks this up. Who cares about the issue? Do you know who matters in whatever horrible meeting your sitting in? Did you take the time to identify the people who actually care? The ones who can make a difference? If you haven’t then you deserve every useless minute of that meeting.

I am convinced that a majority of the meetings on this planet go long and do less because the people sitting around the table simply do not figure who the hell they’re talking to and what they want.

Yes, the Cons do want something. You’re going to meet their needs in order to get out the door and their needs are simple… so simple you’re going to laugh. The Cons need a plan. Some assurances there is a plan which is going to somehow address whatever the issue is. Doesn’t matter if that plan comes from the Pawn, the Player, the Pro, the Con… someone needs to synthesize everything into constructive next steps, communicate that TO the Cons, and you’re done. You’re out the door.

Doesn’t need to be a great plan or a honest one or a complete one. Cons will not let you out of that meeting until there is the perception of forward progress (“a plan”). If you’ve scheduled a hour and that hour is up, you’re thinking, “Well, that’s one way out the door”. Again, incorrect, because the Cons are returning to their desks and scheduling a follow-up meeting where the organizational ineptitude is going to continue.

MEETING BAIL TIP #3: You very well might have the requisite Players & Pros/Cons, but, then again, you might have too many. If it’s thirty minutes in and you still can’t figure out what the issue is, it’s time to go… too many issues. Someone who cares more than you needs to distill this chaos down to a coherent statement so the Pros/Cons can argue about one thing.

Meetings are always going to be inefficient because language is hard. Getting folks in the same group, with the same organizational accent to talk coherently to each other is hard enough. Meetings give us the opportunity to include other organizations with other accents. This makes the language chaos complete, but, now, you don’t care. You don’t need to know what they’re saying because with Agenda Detection, you can figure out what they want, get it for them, and get the hell out.

Incrementalists & Completionists

I recently got into minor war of words with a co-worker regarding the proper solution to a problem with one of my products. As an aside, let me say that email is never ever ever never ever the right way to resolve controversy. Too much subtly is lost when you’re YELLING IN ALL CAPS. Don’t waste your time solving problems in email… stand up… walk down the hall… and look the person in the eye. You’ll live longer.

ANYHOW.

What was intriguing about my email repartee with the co-worker was that we weren’t disagreeing about whether or not we should do something about the problem. We’re arguing about how much we should do. The disagreement reminded me there are two distinct personalities when it comes to devising solutions to problems: Incrementalists and Completionists.

Incrementalists are realists. They have a pretty good idea of what is achievable given a problem to solve, a product to ship. They’re intimately aware of how many resources are available, where the political landscape is at any given moment, and they know who knows what. They tend to know all the secrets and they like to be recognized for that fact.

Completionists are dreamers. They have a very good idea of how to solve a given problem and that answer is SOLVE IT RIGHT. Their mantra is, “If you’re going to spend the time to solve a problem, solve it in a manner that you aren’t going to be solving it AGAIN in three months.” I used to think that architects were the only real Completionists in an organization, but I was wrong. Architects are the only RECOGNIZED Completionists in the company, but the personality is hiding all over the place.

Rewind to my email situation. The actual problem is irrelevant, but here’s the background. The co-worker discovered a problem in our product and reported it. I responded and suggested an minor improvement which didn’t solve the core problem, but was achievable given our schedule. The co-worker responded with “Why do this if we don’t solve the problem”. I responded, “We don’t have time to solve it and something is better than nothing.” Co-worker, “This is less than nothing!” Insert stunned silence.

Remember, the co-worker identified (correctly) the original problem. Why in the world don’t they see the value of my solution? The reason is, this is a Incrementalist doing battle with a Completionist. This isn’t the battle of wrong versus right, it’s the battle of right versus right. Bizarre.

How does anything get done with Incrementalists and Completionists arguing about degrees of rightness? Well, first, limber Incrementalists can switch teams. They’re opportunists and when they see that acting like a Completionist is a good move and, more importantly, it’s an achievable move, they’ll step up to the Completionist plate. Once they’re there, it’s likely they’ll engage a Completionist to do the heavy lifting, but the Incrementalist will drive because THEY CAN SEE THE PLAN FROM SOUP TO NUTS. This is a big deal for Incrementalists because they normally can’t see past their next meeting… getting them on-board with the “big picture” gives them a sense of foundation they don’t usually have.

Conversely, effective Completionists know when to let the Incrementalists poke around and do their thing. Completionists recognize where this Incrementalists with their rapid-fire buzz-speak fit into the corporate culture and they embrace their mania because they know it’ll help with their Completionist agenda. This, too, is a big deal because Completionists spend much of their lives shaking their heads, staring at the floor, muttering, “Boy, could they fuck this up more?”

A healthy population of both Incrementalists and Completionists is essential to a corporate agenda. It’s not only because they both represent groups that “get stuff done”, it’s also because they are going to argue, but it’s the argument you want your teams to have. It’s not “Should We or Shouldn’t We”, it’s “Let’s do this thing, let’s make sure it gets done, and let’s make sure it get’s done right.”

N.A.D.D.

I just finished reading Guns of the South (tip of the hat to JayBees for the recommendation). The gist of the book is straight forward, yet odd… what if, during the Civil War, the South became equipped with a lot of AK-47s. Long story short, they would have won. Harry Turtledove chose to not focus on time travel or other delectable sci-fi tidbits; he spends the time on “YAY! The South Won! So, uh, what are you going to do about that whole slavery thing?”

While I’m certain Civil War enthusiasts would enjoy this book, it is not geared for someone with my particular disability — Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder… or NADD. This innocuous condition reared it’s head during Guns when it became clear the book was a tome dedicated to the exploration of lifestyles during an alternative post-Civil War period. Zzzzzzzzzzz.

Now, Guns was a fine read, but, more than once, I was flipping through the pages wondering, “Ok, HOW long is this chapter?” When I neared the end of the book and it became clear that some time traveler from the future wasn’t going to appear and, using some whizbang futuristic device, join the North and South together, well, I was disappointed. Sure, I’m happy that President Lee learned his lesson and started to abolish slavery on his own, but, please, no lasers guns? Sheesh.

Folks, I’m a nerd. I need rapid fire content delivery in short, clever, punch phrases. Give me Coupland, give me Calvin’n’Hobbes, give me Asimov, give me The Watchmen. I need this type of content because I’m horribly afflicted with NADD.

If you’re still with me, it might mean you know that you already suffer from some type of NADD-related disorder. Let’s find out:

Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this column? Me, I’ve got a terminal session open to a chat room, I’m listening to music, I’ve got Safari open with three tabs open where I’m watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I’ve got two notepads open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I’m writing this column, as well.

Folks, this isn’t multi-tasking. This is advanced case of Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. I am unable to function at my desktop unless I’ve got, at least, five things going on at the same time. If your count came close, you’re probably afflicted, as well. Most excellent.

My mother first diagnosed me with NADD. It was the late 80s and she was bringing me dinner in my bedroom (nerd). I was merrily typing away to friends in some primitive chat room on my IBM XT (super nerd), listening to some music (probably Flock of Seagulls — nerd++), and watching Back to the Future with the sound off (neeeeerrrrrrrd). She commented, “How can you focus on anything with all this stuff going on?” I responded, “Mom, I can’t focus without all this noise.”

The presence of NADD in your life is directly related to how you’ve dealt with the media deluge of the new millennium. You’ve likely gone one of three ways:

1) You’ve checked out… you don’t own a TV and it’s unlikely you’re even reading this column.

2) You enjoy your media/content in moderation. When I asked you to count how many windows were open on your desktop you either said, “One, my browser for which to read this article” or you made yourself a note to yourself to check this AFTER completing this column. In a previous age, you were the type of person who kept their pencils very sharpened.

3) You enjoy the content fire hose. Give me tabbed browsing, tabbed instant messaging, music all the time, and TIVO TIVO TIVO. Welcome to NADD.

The presence of NADD in your friends is equally detectable. Here’s a simple test. Ask to sit down at THEIR computer and start mucking with stuff on their desktop. Move an icon here… adjust a window size there. If your friend calmly watches as you tinker away, they’re probably NADD-free, for now. However, if your friend is anxiously rubbing their forehead and/or climbing out of their skin when you move that icon 12 PIXELS TO THE RIGHT, there’s NADD in the house. BACK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER.

I’m making NADDers sounds like obsessive power freaks and, well, we are. How else would you deal with a world where media is forced on you at every turn? You’d get very good at controlling it. Here’s more good news:

1) Folks not afflicted NADD think those who are can’t focus because, look at us, we’re all over the place. PLEASE STOP CLICKING ON THINGS — YOU ARE GIVING ME A HEADACHE. Wrong. NADDers have an amazingly ability to focus when they choose to. Granted, it’s not their natural state and, granted, it can take longer than some to get in the zone, but when we’re there, BOY HOWDY.

2) Weblogs are designed for those with NADD. The web digested into short little blurbs of information. NADD heaven. My guess would be that the population of regular webloggers is mostly NADD-afflicted. Otherwise, they’d be writing books… not paragraphs… at random times of the day… always.

3) NADD can advance your career… if you’re in the right career. Ever worked at a start-up? Ever shipped software? What are the last few weeks like? We call it the fire drill because everyone is running around like crazy people doing random, unexpected shit. NADD is the perfect disease for managing this situation. It develops the skills to sift through the colossal amount of useless noise and hear what’s relevant.

Here’s a tip: If the building you are currently in is burning to the ground, go find the person with NADD on your floor. Not only will they know where the fire escape is, they’ll probably have some helpful tips about how to avoid smoke inhalation as well likely probabilities regarding the likelihood you’ll survive. How is it this Jr. Software Engineer knows all this? Who knows, maybe he read it on a weblog two years ago. Perhaps a close virtual friend of his in New York is a fire fighter. Does it matter? He may save your life or, better yet, keep you well informed with useless facts before you are burnt to a crisp.

I’m making NADD sound like a rosy affliction. There are several downsides.

First, it’s a lot of work to figure out your personal program of digesting the world and, sorry, you are going to miss things. This will annoy you, but it will also drive you to incessantly look for the NEXT COOL THING.

Second, you’re going to sound like a know-it-all. Try not to.

Third, and lastly, you’re not going to have much patience with those who have not chosen a NADD-like life. Ocassionally, you’ll attempt to impart your fractured wisdom only to throw your hands up four minutes later when it’s clear, “Jesus, they just don’t get it.” Chances are, they might’ve gotten it, you’re just afflicted with a disease where your attention span is that of a second grader. Oh well, embrace your handicap.

Rands Vegas System -- PRELUDE

We’re all still laughing about the time when Vegas tried to convince the world that it was a family town. You remember this? This was back during the Internet boom, money was free, and Vegas was pretty full of itself as it’d as it had every instant multi-millionaire with huge amounts of disposible cash stumbling around the casinos literally bleeding cash.

With this new wad of cash, Vegas was wondering, What’s next? Where was the growth? Who were the new Vegas customers? What about families? In Sin City? Sure, why the hell not? If they can sell cat food on the Internet, why not get families to think of Vegas as Disneyland? Rollercoasters, yeah, that’s the ticket.

What a complete crock of shit.

There is no bigger Vegas buzz kill than stumbling out of a casino at 9am after a twenty seven hour gambling binge to find Mom and Dad and two screaming anklebiters cutting you off as they bolt to M&M World.

I have no issue with family entertainment, but Mom… Dad… there’s a reason they put Vegas far from the civilized world in the middle of a desert. IT’S BECAUSE NORMAL PEOPLE DO NOT BEHAVE LIKE THIS.

People leave their lives when they get to Vegas, they transform into tremendous assholes. It’s hard to read that sentence without thinking I’m somehow predisposed to not like these people, but I do… because I’m one of them… as regularly as humanly possible.

Vegas is Sin City. It’s an delectable adventure designed to swallow you whole and then spit you out in a haze of smoke and a a stench of booze. When Vegas is done with you, you’ll be broke, exhausted, and reeking of strippers.

Hell yes.

Like any adventure, there are rules. Obey them and you’ll increase the chances that you won’t get the shit kicked out of you. I’ve documented these rules… these guidelines in a series of columns I call the “Rands Vegas System”. I will explain the best way to experience Vegas for a person who has the following requirements:

• Wants to gamble, but knows they are going to lose money
• Wants to drink a lot for free, is willing to get really drunk, but isn’t interested on puking on their shoes
• Wants to spend lots of hours with strippers, but does not want to spend a ton of cash and is not under the illusion they’ll actually get laid

If you’re reading this and it’s harshing your perceptions about Vegas (WHAT? I WON’T GET LAID? WHAT DO YOU MEAN I WON’T MAKE A KILLING?), let me suggest you keep reading. Proper application of the Rands Vegas System will eliminate such concerns. You’ll be spending more time having fun rather than sweating the two hundred large you just blew at craps.

Yes, it will be 4am and, yes, you will be hammered at Olympic Gardens and, yes, you will believe that Trussy the blonde stripper with bodacious ta-tas is going to take you home and molest you. (Reality: She actually won’t and, here’s a FYI, under normal lighting you’d fucking bolt if you saw Trussy.)

Let’s get started with: Preparing for Vegas…

(c) 2002-2012 Rands  (Something witty)