God forbid I ever have to have my arm amputated, but if I do, I hope they let me keep it. I’d like to stick it back up my sleeve and shake hands with children.
“That’s some grip you got there!” I’d say, when the arm comes off in their little hands.
A Rule of Thumb on Documentation
As a rule of thumb, I’d guess that 90 percent of what a team knows would be lost if they tried to write it down, and that 90 percent of what they wrote down would be lost when some other team tried to read it. But then, I’m an optimist.
They Call Me The Hammah
My son’s holding a gigantic inflatable mallet that he won at Dave and Buster’s.
“They call me The Hammah!” he announces in a loud ghetto drawl. “Do you know why they call me The Hammah? Go on, take a guess . . .”
The Semi-Gifted Students Academy
I’m driving my son to UCI this morning . . . he’s taking a couple of classes at the Gifted Students Academy.
“Only about half the students are gifted,” he informs me. “The rest are stoo-pid.”
“How can you tell they’re stupid?” I ask.
“I can just tell.”
“I mean are they actively doing stupid things, or they can’t answer questions?”
“Both.” Then: “Drive faster. Mom dropped me off late yesterday and I almost had to run to get to class on time.”
“That’s good. Your years of athletic training are finally paying off for you.”
“I said I almost had to run.”
“Oh. What happened next? You got to class and almost had to think?”
We’re No Geniuses
Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
It’s All My Fault
. . . it is utterly trivial to create a case (and to “prove” it, too) that pretty much anybody is pretty much to blame for pretty much anything. Since a causal link can readily be drawn from either of us to anything in our lives, we simply stipulate our own blame. This saves effort, reduces friction, disinvites defensiveness and promotes remediation. Of course I cause my own troubles. . . . If I am not the prime cause of my own circumstances, I am doomed to live in a victim’s world. That would suck so bad that I prefer personal accountability.
I Guess You’ll Do
But Can U Do This…
Originally uploaded by goinonbro.
Cannot Measure Productivity
I can be pretty confident that a 100 KLOC system is bigger than a 10KLOC system. But if I’ve written the 100KLOC system in a year, and Joe writes the same system in 10KLOC during the same time, that doesn’t make me more productive. Indeed I would conclude that our productivities are about the same but my system is much more poorly designed.
Assuming an accurate FP [function point] counting system, if I spend a year delivering a 100FP system and Joe spends the same year delivering a 50FP system can we assume that I’m more productive? I would say not. It may be that of my 100FP only a 30 [sic] is actually functionality that’s useful to my customer, but Joe’s is all useful. I would thus argue that while my direct productivity is higher, Joe’s true productivity is higher.
But all of this ignores the point that even useful functionality isn’t the true measure. As I get better I produce 30 useful FP of functionality, and Joe only does 15. But someone figures out that Joe’s 15 leads to $10 million extra profit for our customer and my work only leads to $5 million. I would again argue that Joe’s true productivity is higher because he has delivered more business value – and I assert that any true measure of software development productivity must be based on delivered business value.
Advice for the Feng Shui Entrepreneur
During a recent trip to Las Vegas, we visited a junk shop, a.k.a. a Feng Shui emporium. My wife sketched out the floor plan of our house, after which the proprietor predicted — correctly — that the orientation of our son’s bed was making him stubborn.
See, I thought it was the fact that he’s 13 years old that was making him stubborn.
Probably a good tip for the up-and-coming Feng Shui professional would be to always predict that the client’s teenage children are stubborn. You’re not going to be wrong very often.
And always predict that the client has frequent disagreements with his or her spouse.
Racial Sensitivity at the Office
A manager says to one of the programmers, “You are the whitest Mexican I’ve ever seen. You need to get out and mow some more lawns.”
You Don’t Know Enough
We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side. If you can’t state arguments against what you believe better than your detractors, you don’t know enough.
A Blind Woman Was Driving the Car
The entry gate to our community is kind of screwy. It’s supposed to open and close automatically if you’ve got a transponder in your car, but sometimes it just stays open.
Last night, we were driving up to the gate when my wife hunched forward over the steering wheel and asked, “Is the gate open?”
Everything at EppsNet is the Best
When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.
“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.
“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”
At these words Banzan became enlightened.
Ambidextrous
My wife, a non-native English speaker, asks, “What does ‘ambidextrous’ mean?”
My son says, “It means you’re just as comfortable with one side as the other.”
“So it means gay,” she says.
Boring in a Good Way
A friend of a friend has started dating a guy with a history of mental problems, including an in-patient hospitalization.
That should be exciting.
Some guys are boring. Me, for example. My wife tells me all the time how boring I am . . .
I remember a few years ago, a woman came over to clean our house — a white woman, which is unusual in Southern California. She was telling my wife that her alcoholic ex-husband was in jail, as a result of which, she wasn’t getting any financial support from him and had to take up house cleaning to make some money.
Now that’s excitement! You hook up with a guy who you don’t know if or when he’s going to be home, how drunk he’s going to be when he gets there . . . maybe he’ll end up in jail and you can spend your life cleaning other people’s toilets to keep your head and your kids’ heads above water.
Me on the other hand — like I said, I’m boring. I roll my ass out of bed every morning in a very predictable manner and head off to work. I come home directly afterwards without stopping off at any of the local watering holes. I provide a predictable income stream. On evenings and weekends, I’m available for family activities.
So I’m boring, but I like to think of myself as boring in a good way. Boring is not always bad, and exciting is not always good, particularly if it involves being institutionalized in some fashion . . .
Yin and Yang
Yang never drops its sword until death has made its decision who to take. Yin hopes that the other guy will die of a heart attack while he’s stabbing you.
Conversations with a 7th Grader
I was driving my son to school one day when the following conversation ensued.
ME: Do you have any exams today?
HIM: No . . . and why do you call them “exams”? We have “tests” and “quizzes,” not [in a dopey voice] “exams” — or whatever they called them back in the 1800s.
If he thinks that comments like that are going to put me off my game, he must have me confused with his mom.
ME: Do you have any exams tomorrow?
Orange County Fair
[UPDATE: Macphoto1 has a better set of OC Fair photos than mine.]
Why Good Projects Fail Anyway
A September 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Good Projects Fail Anyway” by Nadim Matta and Ronald Ashkenas (free summary here), says that the high failure rate of major projects — not just IT projects — suggests that either these projects are inherently unmanageable or else something is wrong with the standard approach to project management.
Matta and Ashkenas argue that the standard project management model is designed to control “execution risk” — the risk that designated activities won’t be carried out properly — by means of project plans, timelines, and budgets, but ignores two other equally important risks: