My son’s upstairs playing PawnGame as my wife yells up to him, “Didn’t I tell you 15 minutes ago to take a shower?”
“Yes,” he yells back.
“Didn’t you say ‘OK’?”
“No, I said ‘hold on.'”
“Oh . . . must be something wrong with my ears then.”
What is Not Worth Doing
Real achievement means inevitably a worthy and virtuous task. To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement. I like my phrasing, “What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.”
Mallet Men
My son’s junior high school has two bands, Symphonic Band and Concert Band. You could think of them as the varsity and the JV. Membership in the Symphonic Band is by audition only.
Because the boy changed instruments from saxophone to percussion last summer, after the Symphonic Band auditions, he has to play in the Concert Band this year.
I don’t think he’s happy about it, but he’s taking lessons and practicing and trying to get better.
This week, we had All-City Honor Band tryouts. All five percussionists from the Symphonic Band tried out, and four of them made it. My son also tried out and made it — as first chair. He’s the best junior high percussionist in Irvine.
Don’t give up on your dreams, kids!
I too played percussion in junior high and high school, where I was known far and wide as the Fast-Hand Mallet Man. So the kid has good genetics, obviously . . .
When is a Release Not a Release?
On this morning’s enterprise IT conference call, one of our project managers announced the successful release of Project Foobar.
Then a woman’s voice — I assume it was the business owner — came on and said, “We had to pull that back out.”
“Is that true?” the PMO manager asked.
The project manager continued on in the same tone as before: “We had to pull it out after release. The customers are using a manual workaround until we resolve the issues.”
Business owners rarely participate in these calls. I assume that had this particular business owner not been on the call, the minor detail about backing out the release would never have been mentioned.
Believe it or not, an argument then ensued regarding whether this could be credited as a successful release, with the additional work considered as “post-release” effort.
How Long Should it Take to Define a Project?
Project X hit a milestone called Vision/Scope seven months ago, 99 days late. It’s 312 days late on the current milestone, which is called Definition.
To date, the project has consumed 36,000 labor hours — 18 person-years — and $2.5 million.
At this morning’s enterprise-level status meeting, it was decided that Project X will be put on indefinite hold, as it is no longer a strategic priority.
This reminded me a lot of an article I read a few days ago:
What the waterfall does well is to keep useless projects from resulting in useless code that needs to be maintained. I’m not sure if that’s the real purpose, but it’s certainly a great side benefit. It may sound inefficient to pay a lot of engineers to get started on projects, do a bunch of analysis and design, and finally abandon the whole thing when something else becomes a higher priority, but every line of code they don’t write is another line that can’t break!
OK . . . you could make a case that waterfall “worked” here — clearly if, after 18 years of effort, people can’t even define the project, that sounds like a project that has no chance of success and shouldn’t be attempted — but it worked at a cost of $2.5 million.
That doesn’t seem very efficient.
What I find is that if you put the customer, the technical team and other appropriate representatives together for as little as four to eight hours, à la a Sprint Planning Meeting, it should be obvious whether or not anyone understands the problem well enough to go ahead and attempt a software solution.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
What’s Left?
My instant reaction to the 9/11 attacks was that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. . . . Accepting that fascism is worse than western democracy, even western democracies governed by George W Bush and Tony Blair, sounds very easy in theory, but it is very difficult to do in practice when you are a habitual enemy of the status quo in your own country.
EppsNet’s IT Responses
Inspired by Don Carman’s Reporter Responses, a handy list for the IT professional:
- Good, fast, cheap — pick two.
- It’s not a show-stopper.
- It’s a show-stopper.
- It’s out of scope.
- It’s not rocket science.
- It’s not brain surgery.
- Let’s not reinvent the wheel.
- That sounds doable.
- I could do it myself in a week.
- That’s why I make the big money.
- It works fine on my machine.
- It was working fine 10 minutes ago.
- It’s a best-of-breed solution.
- It’s an enterprise-class solution.
- It’s a state-of-the-art solution.
- It’s an industry standard.
- It’s a best practice.
- It’s not one of our core competencies.
- We’re waiting on requirements.
- We’re waiting on design.
- We’re waiting on the vendor.
- We found some issues in testing.
- We’re thinking outside the box.
- Add that to the lessons learned.
- That’s a ballpark estimate.
- I’m working smarter, not harder.
- There are no problems, only opportunities.
- Since when did you become an expert on ____?
- I know you are but what am I?
- I can’t explain that to my boss.
- I’ll get to it next week.
- We’ll make up the lost time in testing.
- It has to go through change control.
- We moved that to the next release.
- I’ll clean that up later.
- It’s pretty much done.
- It’s 90 percent done.
- It’s done, except for the testing.
- It’s just a one-line fix.
- We have to rewrite it from scratch.
- That’s a training issue.
- That’s not really an issue.
- Have you tried calling the help desk?
- We’re in discovery on that.
- We would have been all right, but the requirements kept changing.
- We have to follow the standard process.
- Let’s do a gap analysis.
- It’s a team effort.
- This business has really changed.
Interview FAQ: How Do You Motivate People?
In 1960, Douglas MacGregor of the MIT Sloan School of Management developed two theories of workplace motivation, Theory X and Theory Y.
Theory X assumptions
- People have an inherent dislike for work and will avoid it whenever possible.
- People must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened with punishment in order to get them to achieve the organizational objectives.
- People prefer to be directed, do not want responsibility, and have little or no ambition.
- People seek security above all else.
Theory Y assumptions
- Work is as natural as rest or play.
- People will exercise self-control and self-direction in the pursuit of organizational objectives.
- Commitment to objectives is a function of rewards associated with their achievement.
- People usually accept and often seek responsibility.
- Imagination, ingenuity and creativity are widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
- The intellectual potential of the average person is only partly utilized.
I come down strongly in favor of Theory Y. I don’t feel like I’m an inherently unmotivated person, that my boss has to keep coming up with new ways to get my head in the game, and I don’t find that most other people do either. People want to do good work. They want the opportunity to do good work.
The key, really, is not to motivate people, but to avoid demotivating them. A lot of managers haven’t figured that one out yet.
Standard Methods = Standard Results
This is an excerpt from a job posting for a Sr. IT Project Manager:
- Develop project plans and ensure that deadlines are met on time and projects are delivered within budget constraints. You will use standard project management tools to define requirements and track project status.
- Manage and prioritize projects for the division using standard project planning methods and software through all phases of the project/development lifecycle.
OK, let me get this straight: You want projects delivered on time and within budget — you don’t mention whether or not you want the software to actually work, but I assume you do — and you want it done with standard tools and standard methods.
It may have escaped your attention, but that is not a standard result. The standard IT project is either late or over budget or fails to meet customer expectations, or all three.
If it were possible to deliver high-quality software on time and within budget with standard tools and methods, then everybody would be doing it.
So you want someone to achieve exceptional results — non-standard results — with standard tools and methods. How is that supposed to happen?
I can deliver exceptional results, but you have to let me do it my own way. If I have to use the standard tools and methods, I’ll get the same crappy results everyone else gets.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Ali at 65: Still the Greatest
Watching George [Foreman] come back to win the title got me all excited. Made me want to come back. But then the next morning came, and it was time to start running. I lay back in bed and said, “That’s okay, I’m still the Greatest.”
I Get All the Holidays — And Then Some!
Here’s how I spent the MLK holiday: My son went over to a friend’s house and I stayed home and read a book. When the boy came home, we threw a football around for a while, and then I took Lightning to the dog park, where he fended off an inappropriate advance from a giant black pit bull.
So all in all, a jam-packed day of doing nothing . . .
A friend of mine tells me he doesn’t get a day off for the King holiday. In fact, he doesn’t get another paid holiday until Memorial Day!
HA HA HA! I work for a company in the banking industry. If you work for a bank, you get all the holidays off! In fact, between now and Memorial Day, we get Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday, Groundhog Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Earth Day, Cinco de Mayo and spring break. Plus a floating holiday.
Oh, I almost forgot — National Safe Boating Week.
WOO-HOO!
Lit Quiz
Identify these two well-known novels from the first and last lines. Answers are in the comments. More lit quizzes here.
Book One
- First line
- We were using the old blue china and the stainless steel cutlery, with place mats on the big oval table and odd-sized jelly glasses for the wine.
- Last line
- I said: “It’s the color of the sky.”
Book Two
- First line
- The insuperable gap between East and West that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than an optical illusion.
- Last line
- “The only proper action,” Colonel Green agreed.
What Would Andrew Jackson Say?
My son and I are sitting around the house when the phone rings. He looks at the caller ID, which says something about Recruiting.
“It’s the U.S. Army,” he says.
We don’t pick it up, and a female voice comes on to leave a message, which has nothing to do with the army.
“A woman?!” he shouts. “What would Andrew Jackson say about that?”
“Andrew Jackson?”
“That’s right, soldier!”
The Next Best Thing to Being There
My wife is talking about the possibility of a Christmastime family trip to Thailand. She’s from Thailand, lived there through college, and still has relatives there.
I’ve never been to Thailand — I hate to travel, for one thing — but our son has been over there with her on a few occasions.
Here’s his reaction, punctuated with frantic screaming:
“AHHHHH! It’s people who can’t speak English in 170-degree heat!”
I don’t think this boy has a future as a travel agent.
“They haven’t seen you in a long time,” my wife tells him.
“Can’t we do a video conference?”
Blessed Art Thou
In case you don’t recognize the woman in the painting, it’s Angelina Jolie (as the Virgin Mary) with her kids, hovering in the heavens above a Wal-Mart.
Fear in the Workplace
Perhaps most surprising to us has been the degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life. Whenever we talk with others about this work, such as on airplanes with strangers, we get a similar response — “Oh yeah, I can relate to wanting to speak up but biting my tongue.” It’s really a shame how much apparently untapped knowledge there is out there and how much pain and frustration results from this silence. That, too, has been somewhat surprising–that people are genuinely hurt and frustrated about their silence. This suggests that employees aren’t failing to provide ideas or input because they’ve “checked out” and just don’t care, but because of fear.
What is happening here? Let’s examine some possibilities:
- Some people are afraid to speak up under any circumstances and the workplace has nothing to do with it.
- In some workplaces, speaking up is so obviously unsafe or a waste of time that everyone just keeps their yap shut.
Assuming neither of these conditions holds, people make a decision to speak or hold their tongue based on the specific features of the situation, including a calculation of how what they have to say is likely to affect their job security and/or mobility.
People who don’t care about job security or mobility are therefore able to be more fully engaged in their work, ask questions that need to be asked and say things that need to be said.
Hence the old saying that the effective leader must come to work everyday prepared to lose his or her job . . .
Why Asian Girls Like White Guys II
As in the previous example, these photos are from the same photoset on Flickr:
What could be worse than being an Asian woman in Asia and having to surrender your mystical Oriental hotness to Asian men? In no other race — white, black, Hispanic — are the women so much better-looking than the men.
Now you might say: What about Indian or Middle Eastern men? Aren’t they uglier than Asian men?
Possibly — but my point is that their women are incredibly ugly as well, so it’s a good match.
My wife’s cousin, also an Asian girl, agrees with my theory, but adds something I hadn’t thought of: Asian guys are also boring, she says, because they’re all the same. They all have the same story, same parents, same college major (engineering or business), same, same, same . . .
A Hug from Your Mom
Replacing an on-site customer with some use cases is about as effective as replacing a hug from your Mom with a friendly note.
Rose Bowl Update
- John David Booty’s 391 passing yards was the highest total ever for a USC quarterback in a bowl game.
- The USC song girl buttocks investigation has apparently been resolved.
LSU 41, Notre Dame 14
Brady Quinn and the rest of the Irish seniors wrapped up their college careers by doing what they do best: losing every big game they play, most of them badly. It was the ninth consecutive bowl loss for Notre Dame, setting a new NCAA record for ineptitude.
Thank God they locked up Charlie Weis for 10 years, huh? As recently as last week, Weis was assuring everyone that he plans to be at Notre Dame for the duration. More of a threat than a promise at this point . . .
See Also: How to be a Notre Dame Fan