SloppyThoughts

No Old Farts

So I'm looking through Monster.com for some new contracts, and I run across one ad from Hudson IT & Telecommunications that would use a tiny fraction of my skills, and which might actually interest me. However, at the beginning of the ad, they state unequivocally, "[q]ualified candidates MUST have a standard software development degree (CIS, MIS, etc.) from a 4 year institution!!!!" And just to make sure you got it, in the bullet points describing the position requirements, one item has the phrase "[...] and education in software development having one of the standard software development degrees (CIS, MIS, etc.) from a 4 year institution."

In case you missed it the first two times, they follow up with a final bullet point, "MUST have a standard software development degree (CIS, MIS, etc.) from a 4 year institution!!!!"

They really must be serious ... they used four whole exclamation points!!!! Twice!!!!

So I'm naturally a little curious ... are they really intending to exclude as candidates people whose college career pre-dates the vast majority of such degrees even being established, let alone being pretentiously named? When I was in school, they called it "computer science", and it was usually tacked on to the math department. Is that the equivalent of a community college degree these days?

Into Oblivion

Well, the socialists and corrupt politicians, and their IRS thugs, have done it to me again. The vast amounts of contradictory and ineptly recommended actions on the part of ostensible experts, business and tax books, and CPAs didn't help.

Perhaps it's time to move to a country that does not punish the people who actually want to produce value.

Buckstop

If you are the top person in your department ... senior DBA, tech lead, QA manager, architect ... you do not have the luxury of throwing up your hands and saying, "I don't know".

Variable Lucidity

Ok, to say that things have been a wee bit busy is an understatement of such magnitude that I can't describe. Given that the things I write about either require quite a bit of research, for which I had no time, or are inspired by the day-to-day activities at my clients', which, for the last couple of months, would have been inappropriate subject matter, there has been little about which I could write. However, there were a couple of little items that popped up, so as I spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to short out my neighbor's stereo, I'll take the opportunity to mention one.

There is a tendency among programmers to plan the code to implement a particular piece of functionality in their heads. Breakdown of functions, little features to implement, peculiarities that will need to be accounted for, etc.

The difficulty is that your mind tends not to have the same level of lucidity day to day. To compensate for this, I like to put little one-liner comments in the function stubs as I think of the details.

It was not until a conversation with a friend a few weeks back that I realized that most programmers don't do this. I think this is one reason programmers prefer to work long hours once they have the idea in their heads ... to keep the level of mental function that they had when designing on through the coding.

There's this thing called "a life" that I've been trying to acquire for some decades. I've found it very difficult to do so when I have to work long hours to keep a design in my head. A few little comments while designing, and "life" becomes more pleasant.

Success is Not an Option

Beware any manager, at any level, who thinks that the most difficult part of an effort is the decision to actually do something. Such a manager will never recognize success or accomplishment on the part of the implementation teams, but will always be eager to lay blame on those teams if they don't somehow pull the effort off. He did the hard part, after all.

Since most large companies have a multitude of efforts in a year, the implementation teams get plenty of negative feedback for the things that don't go well (because the buck always stops at the bottom), and a disproportionately small amount of positive feedback for the things that do go well (since the success was a foregone conclusion after the difficult part of actually deciding was accomplished). As a result, your implementation teams get rapidly burned out. Your only hope in a place like this is that your burned out team will stagger their resignations, and not depart en masse.

Demon Undead

Yes, I still live. I will not tell you how busy I have been because, frankly, you would not believe me.

I was going to mention a few of the things I've learned over the past several weeks but, frankly, I'd prefer not to relive it. Let me summarize, instead: beware any company that embraces risk at every opportunity.

Risk and Causality

The more eagerly you embrace increasing degrees of risk, the more rigorous your recognition of causality must be in order to alter your plans accordingly. If you fail to do so, you are no longer embracing risk. You are embracing failure.

Missed Opportunity

Companies need to remember that every decision is an opportunity to benefit or harm the company. A hundred negligible acts can easily equal one significant act, particularly when you're talking about the subtleties that influence morale. Negligible does not equal inconsequential. If you delegate those decisions to someone who considers them inconsequential, you need to realize that you are doing the company a disservice.

For instance, if you're eliminating an entire office, don't offer to give their computers to all comers on a first-come, first-served basis when your IT department is desperate for testing environments. Or, as it's the time of the year for food drives, if your company is having real problems with inter-departmental cohesion and cooperation, don't make the food drive a gender-based competition (particularly when various departments are dominated by one gender or the other.)

Of course, this means that every decision maker in the company must know what's going on in the company. And since you never know who might be making those decisions, everyone in the company must know what's going on in the company. The monthly company newsletter is ancient technology. Invest in the tools, and reap the rewards.

CommercialTube

Much has been made, recently, about Comedy Central's decision to require YouTube to pull copies of the Daily Show, Cobert Report, and South Park. The move has been almost uniformly condemned as being foolish, and a good way for Comedy Central to alienate its fans, resulting in fewer live viewers.

But in a simplistic sense, it's the right move. Any service that uses ad impressions as their primary source of revenue must attempt to curtail any situation that reduces the number of eyes seeing those ads.

Or replace it.

Comedy Central and other services need to make YouTube part of their revenue stream ... either with the same business model or a new one. Not just as hooks to get live viewers, or free research with which to determine which episodes should be in "best of" DVD releases (the only kind of DVD release likely to be viable with a current events show), but as ad impression-generators as well. To make this desirable and successful, YouTube will need to facilitate the process ... soliciting contributions from companies like Comedy Central that have advertising incorporated in the video, preventing unapproved copies of the video, and providing verifiable metrics on viewers.

Unfortunately, it may be too late now. If this had been done instead of pulling all the Comedy Central content, fans might have embraced the convenience, even if they had to suffer through the same ads (although I'd hope Comedy Central would recognize the need for shorter ads in that context) ... but now the same act would be seen less as an attempt on Comedy Central's part to provide value to viewers and customers, and more a blatantly mercenary act done with total disregard for the viewers. Comedy Central, without extreme creativity, can only be the villain, now. YouTube can be the hero.

Today's Blinders

Tom Smith has decided to trot out both Socialist fallacies and an ignorance of the lifecycle of technological innovation, and since people are actually paying attention thanks to an Instapundit link, I felt I must respond.

There's rarely much hope in talking about creating the value in money, or the imaginary zero-sum game, or the fact that huge dreams provide huge motivation to those who can accomplish great things and provide so much value to the world (which then *gasp* pays for it), or any of the usual tripe-prevention, and I won't comment at length on the contemptible act of suggesting that Charles Simonyi and his like-minded dreamers fantasize about sexual promiscuity to rival some of Heinlein's characters. Those aren't within the scope of this blog anyway.

But I will comment on Smith's apparent ignorance of the life-cycle of technological innovation.

Most revolutionary innovation goes through a very predictable sequence. First is the basic research and commercial idea ... proof of feasability. Many people think it is appropriate for the government to finance this effort, although I do not. The first commercial idea is almost always bare-boned and ridiculously expensive. Its commercial success relies on rich people or corporations (or governments) buying the item.

Next is a period of refinement ... standardization of production methods, improved efficiency, cheaper materials. Entire industries can be created during this process, and the end result is typically a cheaper, but still bare, product available to the masses. Please note, however, that if the original customer of the item is a government, it is frequently unnecessary to go through this process, and the item remains in the hands of the government or major corporations.

The next step is to come up with desirable frills. Again, they start off expensive and are marketed to those who can afford it.

And the last phase is, again, making the new, full-featured product cheap enough for the masses. This is the point at which consequent innvoation just explodes.

ENIAC on one end, Napster's peer-to-peer software architecture on the other. Gramaphone on one end, pink leather-sheathed Ipods on the other. Otto's and Daimler's gas engines on one end, rural power generation and food transport adequate enough to support large cities on the other. Cameras. Cars. Computers. Boats. Airplanes. Telecom. Books. Electricity. Plumbing supplies. Fertilizer and farming equipment. Anything made of steel. Anything made of plastic.

And the future of space flight.

And all because a few "selfish" rich people found it worthwhile to buy something during the expensive steps. So really ... cheer loudly for every expensive purchase you consider frivolous, or give silent thanks to the value they provided to get rich and their invaluable contribution to the things you and your descendants will enjoy.

Or find a cave and some lightning-struck fire, and condemn to your heart's content.

Update: Hello folks from Instapundit. Welcome to my formerly quiet hole in the wall. Just to clarify Glenn's characterization of my position ... it's not that I thought that he was approving Smith's analysis. It's that I thought he was either approving Smith's analysis OR providing both soapbox and audience to his adversaries. I could not understand either act. Regrettable confusion ensued.