Pre-game

As we were walking in, he pointed out an Asian girl with a spiky-haired Asian guy wearing an Olympics jersey and said, “That guy with the Olympic jersey pulled a hotter Asian woman than you.”

The girl was hotter than my wife is now, but not hotter than she was at that age.

“You don’t know anything,” I said. “Mom was pretty hot.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Game

Pretty good game! The starters played more than I thought they would.

Andrew Bynum is back. He looked good!

Jerry Buss was there. He looked terrible. Thirty minutes before the game, a guy rolled him out in a wheelchair to the end of the court. It took him several minutes to hobble from there to his courtside seat. My son said he had a leg injury. I thought he was just too old.

The girl sitting next to him — his date or his great-granddaughter, I’m not sure which — looked really good.

The Laker Girls totally set the bar for whatever you call these kinds of groups — cheerleaders? Dance teams?

I realized that what’s missing from my workplace is hot girls in extremely short skirts who jump around and cheer whenever something noteworthy happens.

We check in a bug fix? Gooooo team!

Then at halftime — or “lunch” as we call it — they’d change into tight pants and belly shirts and jump around in the new outfits all afternoon.

Good times!

Post-game

On the drive home, my wife called my son’s cell phone. The conversation was focused on exactly where we were and how long it would take us to get home.

“Why does she care about that?” I asked.

“She’s probably up to something and wants to make sure she stops doing it before we get there.”

“Some of them would be cute,” I say, “if they lost about 150 pounds.”

An eHarmony commercial comes on . . .

We prescreen candidates for compatibility . . .

“Good,” the boy says, “because I don’t want to date any women weightlifters.”

The Australian team has some rather unfortunate-looking women on the roster . . .

“Crikey!” the boy says. “Wot an oy-sore!”

Related Links

• Whistle disparity in Game 2 leaves Lakers feeling foul — ESPN.com

Length — For some reason, people who talk about basketball now describe players as having “great length.” Nobody says, “He’s very tall.” They say, “He’s got great length.”

News flash: People don’t have length. They have height. They even have width. But they don’t have length — except at birth and shortly thereafter, when we measure them lying down because they can’t stand up yet.

Describing a basketball player as having “great length” is as uninformative as saying, “He’s a tall black guy with long arms.”

A friend of mine asked me the other day, “Do you think an organization really values a good manager?”

He asked me that because he’s moving from a position as lead developer on a high-visibility system (lots of job security) to a position managing the developers of that system.

And I had to say that in general, I think the answer is no, which is why you see managers generating a lot of useless paperwork to make their work visible: project plans, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, flowcharts . . .

Does this help? I haven’t found that it does, but it does provide an illusion of control and an acceptable way of failing: the manager can point to all the paperwork and say, “Well, I followed the accepted process right down the line, so the fact that we failed can’t be my fault!”

An analogy

Our local basketball team is coached by a guy named Phil Jackson. He’s not nearly as animated as most coaches . . . he spends most of each game sitting quietly in his chair on the sidelines, even when things seem to be falling apart for the team.

When things aren’t going well, he gets a lot of criticism for this:

They lost the game and he didn’t do anything!

I think this is why most coaches spend the whole game jumping up and down, yelling, tearing their hair out . . . they want to be seen as having done something.

Even if the team loses, people say, “Boy, he really coached his ass off.”

A second analogy

I grew up in Southern California during the years that John Wooden was coaching the UCLA basketball team. Like Phil Jackson, Wooden was distinctly non-animated during games.

He sat on the sidelines holding a rolled-up program in his hand, rarely called time-outs . . . his teams won 10 national championships and he hardly even got out of his chair the whole time.

He believed that the real work was done behind the scenes — preparation, attention to detail. Bill Walton summed up Wooden’s coaching style like this:

Don’t confuse activity with achievement.

Summary

Managing a software project is not a process of managing dependencies . . . it’s more a process of managing uncertainty, complexity and change. That’s why the Gantt charts and flowcharts don’t help, but they do allow the manager to show that he did something.

A well-managed team should have a clear, common vision, a robust flow of ideas, a reputation for high-quality work . . . but it may not be obvious to an observer what role, if any, the manager had in developing these qualities, because a lot of what a good manager does is not visible . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

The best thing about all the NBA players from Europe and Latin America is when they’re interviewed after the game, you can understand them.