Old School

A recent photo I don't want to lose.  This is me and Jorgs and Petro [left to right for those two, very technical project manager and lead software engineer at the time] out having a beer very end of last year / 2023.  These young gentlemen [they're one year younger than me, each] were my first two team members when I was on the migration project [which was really a bunch of projects to move off mainframes] after I became a software delivery manager in 2009. It honestly seems longer than fifteen years and we're all in different places [e.g. not at a local legal software company] now.  Couldn't have asked for a better first team to be part of.  Our full development teams moving hundreds of millions of calls, hundreds of stylesheets, and an amount of content that would seem large even by today's standards, were a bit wider in scope. I think we had almost fifty people working on migration at one time or another via resource leads and delivery leads and all sorts of indirect reporting structures, and that's if you don't include everyone that was already involved in maintaining current systems and content which was easily at least twice that many again.  It was a great time.  There were constant frustrations, but these two really made it fun.

Accident Posters

 These are interesting.  They're from my iPad1 (!) circa....2012?  They must be from after I came back to work with the cane.  My brain was operating a little different from standard at the time and these are definitely me, but something about them puts me in memory of a state of mind that was a little strange during meetings.  If I was SVG savvy, I'd create some real posters with the National Park / Workplace Productivity feel to them.

This is a Stone Angel Free Workplace: Your Accidents Are All With Your Future Self

This is a Dalek Free Workplace: Although We Do Exterminate Anyone Who Might Cause an Accident

This is a Cyberman Free Workplace: If There IS an Accident, You Won't Feel Pain

And then we switch from Doctor Who to Elder Scrolls!

This is a Sweet Roll Free Workplace: 324 Days Since Anyone Took an Arrow to the Knee.

Dinner and More...

My day...pretty casual.  I worked from home.  Which is a good thing for work as I get a lot of extra time in never leaving the house.  I even tend to move less unless I remind myself.  I was going to study spring boot all day and barely got started I had so many other things to do.

We went out to Buster's for dinner with Kyle and Lisa.  Wings and chips and beer and fish tacos and such.  Nice dinner, although we finished up a little early.  I think they were headed over to Elevated (liquor store) to pass some time before they picked folks up at the airport.  Kyle handed off a bunch of mugs he'd picked up for me at Good Will.  I'm going to try the mugs for developers thing again now that I'm at a new place and no one can find my list.  He's got some good ones.  I should add, not only are these new people who probably won't find my list, but the person who found my list last time retired and can't tattle on me.

Lara, our German foreign exchange student, left yesterday after two and a half weeks.  She was a great addition to the family.  Poot took her to the pumpkin event at the zoo and Parasite (movie) while we were at Gameholecon.  Peter took her trick or treating.  And we got her to the D Spot and Chipotle (three times) and she watched a lot of baking tv and played a lot of board games (Sushi Go was her favorite).  It was sad she was gone so soon.

And Joe flew back to Ohio.  It was great to go to wings with him at D Spot and out for a beer at Town Hall while he was here.  I'm glad he's got his new gig.

Ah....and Sandy (my first boss) had her severance party last night.  Whole bunch of my old co workers were at Union 32 for several different "lay off" events.  Crazy.  At least they're all pulling down a package.

Out of Town Visitor

Not a euphemism.  My old coworker, Joe.  As in we used to work together, not that either of us is old. We're not!  My old coworker, Joe, was in town for a new job over at phData, doing his video training.  Last night he trained (as in on a train, not watching corporate videos) down to the MoA and Eryn, Lara, and I picked him up and took him to the D Spot for wings in Oakdale.  We met Erik, Jestine, Pat, and Jessica there, so we had a full on mini reunion of sorts.  It was a pretty nice evening getting to see everyone after three months.

Tonight I stayed in town late and met up with him at his hotel and walked to Town Hall Brewery for beer and dinner.  He seems pretty sure he made the right move.  Does not surprise me.  We had some of the some complaints.  About the same things and the same people.  It's a bummer he lives in another state, but I'll probably get to see him in January again when he's back for 2020 planning.

Stallworth

A picture of Ron Stallworth right before he speaks at Town Hall at my office.  They've got a particularly good line up of speakers lately, including one of the attorneys from the Cosby trial.

Stallworth's story about joining the Klan back in the day, which became Spike Lee's BlackKKlansman, is fascinating.  It was interesting to hear him talk about how much of what he did was about prevention of terrorist acts (burning crosses for instance) not arrests.  The goal was to shut them down before they happened, even if it meant subterfuge (sending cop cars past planned burn sites).  He also talked about how he wasn't infiltrating only the Klan, but the left as well, basically getting a read on all potential violence in his city.

He talked for a while about getting the story/book to print and film, which was an interesting angle and got away from the basic story I'd already watched by watching the movie (and he covered where there was some artistic license like his girlfriend, although the cross burning on the day he was taken off the case was true).

Stallworth's outspoken (negative) opinions about our current president clearly made the coordinator (not the one on stage, but the one with the microphone) nervous.  I saw one audience member leave after the first 45 comment.  I'm ok with that.  One out of an audience of hundreds.  And the current administration isn't particularly friendly (ouch, that was a Minnesotan way to put that) to LGBTQ, or really anyone who isn't their core. That's not aligned with corporate values.

Great presentation - wish I could have been at the one later in the evening (elsewhere) where he talked about his recent phone call with David Duke.

God Hands

I was wandering in an unusual part of the office building the other day when I came across these.  The individual with the Hulk hands has a cube full of superhero knickknacks.  The caring or Jesus hands belong to the neighbor.  I pondered whether the Hulk hands came first, or the Jesus hands.  It's a poser if you're not willing to ask.

Mood Elevator

I sent my HR representative an email the other day stating that I was worried about the mood elevator posters on our corporate elevators because they reinforced a well-known unconscious bias toward tall (generally white, generally men) being more in line with the company expectations.  My boss, for instance, is very tall, so he's automatically "grateful" when someone sees him on the elevator (I'm somewhere around that creative/innovative mark).  My friend from my xml database days (also a manager, and a very good one) by contrast, is probably closer to 5' tall and barely makes the flexible/adaptive line.  My favorite snarks are ones that have a grain of truth to them.  She (my HR representative) sent an email to my boss trying to ferret out how serious I was.  Truth...not that serious.  But unfortunately not that inaccurate.

I want a picture of my boss and my friend standing next to the mood elevator.  Or, I want to draw a line on the poster for every manager with a name so folks can see the women versus the men and what they're seeing every day against the poster that's reinforcing inaccurate assumptions.  I know to watch for it, so it's not unconscious bias.  I'm hoping every time my HR rep gets on the elevator she sees it and has to think about it.

Collaborative Space

I won't get the order on these statements quite right.  And I'm going to paraphrase. But this catches the spirit of an exchange I had with facilities on Friday morning about an area at the end of a dead-end row one of my teams sits in - and only my team members - where we merged four empty cubes and that we use for some collaborative time because my team members have been moving around within the three teams I manage.  Generally a quick game on Friday that I hope highlights communication and which is run in rotation by me or one of my six coaches: Fuse (it was very interesting to see who froze during a quick decision making process), the Marshmallow Challenge, Concept (it was interesting to see how in sync the developers were when it came to thought process), Werewolf (who do they go to when they pick the untrustworthy person/s), sometimes a quick TED video, volunteer events and technical sharing including the start of a little tech library, and more.

So facilities - in the form of one person who had been seen loitering in the collaboration area - visited me.  They were angry about the table and that my admin had not set up a meeting to discuss the table. I asked, what's the problem with the table? They told me it shouldn't be there.  So I asked why they had been willing to put it there instead of telling me I couldn't have it when the request was filed.  Because we had gone through facilities to procure it. I'd have been fine with being told "no table" in the first place.

Well...it should have never been approved.  And the first request was for a table in the wrong location and facilities had put a table in the wrong place.  I noted I hadn't filed the request personally, so I couldn't vouch for the content, but that I had included a photograph of the cubes with numbers visible and a note that there was tape on the floor marking the edges of where I approximately wanted it to fit.  I added if they didn't want a table in that space, they could just take it back.  The response: ...well....maybe.

We moved to the next related topic: why wasn't there a meeting with J, the admin?  I replied that J was only filing requests I asked her to and it wasn't her job to verify I'd pre-cleared a request with facilities...she didn't need to be involved. If facilities needed additional removal requests filed, they could tell me what they wanted removed and I'd file them personally and we could leave J out of it.

Well....never mind.

Facilities continued...but you shouldn't have that space.  Someone else needs to use it.  Me: that's fine; we never assumed we'd have it for long and that we'd give it up as soon as it was needed by another team. Facilities replied: we might need it.  Me: do you need it?  Them: we might. Me: if you need it take it; we'll move the loose items.  Them: there's a table there. Me, biting my tongue and not pointing out we already discussed they didn't have to move the table there in the first place if it was a problem: remove the table. Them: it should have never been there in the first place.  At which point I wanted to quote Westley from The Princess Bride when he tells Vizzini, "Truly you have a dizzying intellect."

She moved on...and it's a risk to move the file cabinets. Me, think back on a coach I had who had been lectured about a contractor moving his phone and laptop without a facilities request: we turned them sideways. They're empty. And if you want the space back, we'll move them back.  Did someone file a complaint?  We move to another, closed room, if we even think we'll be noisy.  We try to respect our neighbors.

Facilities: well, you really shouldn't meet other than in approved spaces.  Me: like our dedicated room?  The project takes priority when they need it.  Facilities: there are three other collaboration rooms nearby.  That left me confused until I realized: you mean those little offices? We don't fit, but we have the alternate room if there are noise complaints. Facilities: Well it's not really fair to anyone else that you have additional place to meet when they don't. Me, at this point incredibly confused because I feel we're venturing into some very strange logic that says no one should do anything unless we all agree beforehand and divvy up the resources even for those who don't want or use them: What are you talking about?

Facilities gets a little glint in the eye, like they have me right where they want me.  And maybe that's me being paranoid in retrospect, but I heard the big intake of breath before they dropped this one signifying it was of extra importance:  Games.. You're playing games. Me, a bit incredulous to say the least: you mean having team building activities. Them: no, games. Me: and team building activities inclusive of those games. Them, with what really seemed like literal derision: no.

Just no.

Big pause.  Facilities: And there's food. Me, thinking back on a few corporate "you should celebrate milestones and anniversaries and birthdays" directives that we liked to celebrate anyway, but the company had assured us were important: like donuts?  muffins?

Facilities: no, loose food. Me, realizing where we were: The canned food for the corporate food shelf event that's already moved on to a cart and then on to the Eagan foodshelf?   The toilet paper and canned food?  Facilities: There were boxes. Me: closed boxes. Them: they can still attract rodents. (I literally thought at this point about how floors in the cube areas are no longer vacuumed unless you make an official request and the cafe meeting area has seen two separate requests from me to clean it after a week of food, plus one for the tops of the dividers, one for a bathroom you could smell from nearby work areas, and two for a bathroom with drain (or as my tech calls them "shit") flies. I'm know for filing cleaning requests).

Me: so what do you want me to do about the area?  You haven't told me anything concrete? Facilities: we need a meeting with J the admin and you. Me: J isn't involved.  I told you she only filed what I asked her to file. Are you asking me to involve my management?   At this point it got even weirder, facilities: I'm trying to be reasonable here, my boss wants me to be less reasonable (yes, that's right...good cop fucking bad cop because of a table in a dead end row where no one sits). Me: Again, what do you want to happen?  Facilities: Well, nothing now. Let me take it back to my manager.

At that point I headed off six minutes late to my CTO's all hands meeting on the other side of the building. I've been thinking of recommending to HR that our culture initiative/training expand to include contractors.

I know what you did in the bathroom

This does get the point across that you shouldn't use this particular stall.  But it also looks like perhaps there's some sort of bio emergency underway.  Perhaps a nice sign just doesn't cut it when it comes to conveying urgency.

Playoffs

We had a series of card game design events on my team.  I broke up the traditional teams and had them design card games using a.) preferably a work or developer/quality theme, b.) a card making framework (I had examples in javascript and Ruby with modifications), c.) paper prototyping if they didn't want to use a framework.  They had an hour to design, minimal follow up to firm up their rules and give me a paper or printable prototype, and then we spent an hour at a subsequent meeting rotating the games between the teams for play testing.

The goal was a.) to design, b.) to see how hard it is to write good documentation and acceptance criteria, c.) do some testing and modifications to adjust based on the findings, and d.) do it in a way that was fun, because I find aspects of our tech jobs to be fun, we just lose sight of it.

Afterwards, everyone voted, and the four folks on the winning team had a playoff to determine who picked their prize first out of four different commercial card games (Coup, Batman Love Letter, Release!, and Guillotine).  My door was closed, but glass, so as people walked by they observed four people laughing and playing cards with this on the white board behind them.  The game that won was called Year End Review (initially a bit tongue in cheek and no one won, everyone walking away with a subpar review, but cleaned up for team play and upper management), but that wasn't obvious if you didn't know the backstory.  So you could watch people pause momentarily outside my door and ponder the players and the sign and look really confused.  Which means they were pondering whether I was making my reports play cards to determine their annual rating.  Admittedly, not necessarily the worst approach, and better than some, but not what we were doing.

Office Swap

I'm going full circle.  Like Ouroboros, the tail-eating snake.  I went from my office near the doors, to an office on the old row, to the end of third floor, and now I'm back on the old row.  My first office is now a room for testing boxes, so I don't think I'll get back quite that far unless there's a big shake up of the sort that shuts down projects.  So today I cleaned and packed.  I really liked my current office - almost no furniture and a huge white board.  My previous boss once measured it with a piece of 8.5x11 paper and declared it slightly larger than an average office. The new place won't have those perks.  And I had to erase Eryn's art on my secondary white board.  I'm going to miss Lisa Simpson and the cat army slash cat parade.  I still have no idea who was drawing Terminator eye diagrams in the corner.

Paper Planes

No, not the MIA song.  The other day I had a meeting and, sitting out on the floor instead of in my office, I grabbed a random meeting room to participate in the webex so it would be quiet and I wouldn't disturb anyone else.  It wasn't a very exciting meeting.  This represents about 10 minutes into 60 minutes of paper plane folding because someone left a spare notebook sitting in the room.  By the time I was done there were more like dozens of planes on chairs and on the table.  When I walked past the room later, there was a meeting going on and planes drifted up against people's laptops and notepads.  They probably thought a group was having a contest, not that a single employee had temporarily gone insane.

Peformance, Trust, and Hiring

Recently I had my first team meeting with my new team.  Not so new now - I've been with them for a quarter, but in my experience even with a team where you know most of the developers it takes a quarter to understand the personalities and whether their goals and desires have changed since you last worked with them (and some of them I haven't worked with in almost three years).

I had a plan for the meeting, but I’m flexible and have lots of backup directions. Partially because my plans: talk about larger organizational theoretical topics, talk about Javascript visualization packages (although JS Sequence, cool...), talk about corporate/code security; can sometimes feel like lecturing rather than responding.  So after a few minutes of Q&A we went with flexible instead of planned and talked about team questions (culture, dev and test merging under a project aspect, am I moving closer to the team space [I currently sit two floors up and a tenth of a mile away - seriously], annual reviews/ratings and why you should give them some serious attention, etc) for 40 minutes.

I was sort of glad I didn't have to stick to my original plan.  A couple of team members asked “what’s that?” as regards culture changes, artifacts, and corporate statements.  I had a couple of videos that seemed somewhat culture change centric that had been in my planned queue.  I’d read a really good article by Derek Sivers on great customer service in my PragProg magazine (I know, I know, it's the Prose Garden now) – focused more on a culture of customer service, but interesting - and knew he had TED talks, so it included the following by him and these two others about corporate culture and safety.

• http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement?language=en
• http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work
• http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe#t-9553

Sivers was funny, but it's the Sinek one that strikes a little close to home in a culture discussion.  You don’t need to watch it – I’ll boil it down.  He says our tribal nature as humans encourages us to be safe within a particular group and see other, outside, things as a threat.  In any culture, that’s what you’re working against (the group identified as “safe” vs. everything outside “safe”).  As an example of a culture that tries to break down that safety circle and redefine it in terms of the company (widening the safety/trust circle is an alternative way to look at it), he refers to a company that hires for life, NextJump.  They have a incredibly in-depth onboarding process with the end result being you can’t get fired.  They can make you miserable (I assume) and put you through tons of training and re-training, and the company could go bankrupt, but the basic philosophy of the company is you’re hired for life or as long as you want to be (hired, not alive).  You can now ignore the threat of losing your job as an issue – you’re safe/r.  The whole company is your tribal safety space.

This leads to unpleasant questions…is there a basic disconnect between our pay for performance cultural practice and our desired cultural reality at my own employer?  If team members have to worry that not only is their performance potentially an issue, but that it’s subject to influences such as the opinion of specific managers and bell curves (basic math), are we sending two different messages about our culture?  Or creating a schizophrenic culture where we ask for trust that we potentially might not be giving?  You can intuit out some of my thoughts on it from my questions – but at the moment, I’m mulling it over and trying to decide if I think our cultural change isn’t thought out enough to tackle the shift on all levels and from all angles (and whether that dooms it to fail).  I need to think it through a bit more before I'm willing to dig into the topic with a group so that I'm not grinding my ideas against my team.

The Creeper Creeps

My co-worker has been releasing some of his tunes on YouTube.  Yesterday I came home and found my daughter playing this one, so he's famous at our household, if no where else.  For your enjoyment, The Creeper Creeps (Steve).

Star on Thar

Every time I see this blue gorilla at work I have a brief moment where I worry he's been put into the corner because he's Jewish.  He's in a bit of a time out area and I find it a little creepy.


But he's not Jewish.  At least not in any observable way.  He's the build sheriff.  He sits in your chair when you break the build.  That's much more work appropriate.

Rapture!

Someone left a pamphlet about the rapture (and 666 and Visa's tracking using 666, which I feel is woefully out of date given the recent Target problems.  That current event seems ripe for Satanic correlation) on the corporate elevator. Not rapture ON the corporate elevator. But they left the pamphlet on the elevator. I don’t think the rapture will be limited to one back elevator near my office.  That seems awfully specific and limiting.  Then again, my wife and I saw Devil in the theater, so if Satan can specifically target elevators, maybe God does as well.

Anyway, the pamphlet urges me not to be left behind when my relatives head up to see the guy in the sky, but then it goes on to say only 4,000,000 humans will actually ascend. Given a population of roughly 6 billion, and not accounting for what this implies about the wrongness of those other religions, that means there’s only a 1 in 1500 chance anyone is going to make it to the pearly gates. So only like ¼ of a person out of all the people I really know - if you use my Facebook acquaintance list as a measure - are headed up. 

It seems like if I want to play the odds, I should busy myself doing all the things that make me happy, not rapture-specific activities, because it’s likely my friends and family will just be staying here with me anyway. The pamphlet does say I can increase my odds by dying a martyr and that one of the traditional ways to do this is to get my head chopped off.  This meshes nicely with the advice to get started preparing right away.  But in that case, the case where I chop off my own head to increase my odds by a few points, I think it would help if the others I care about were to do it first so I’m not left ahead, instead of left behind (that is punny on so many levels).

So friends and family, do you have any desire to chop off your head in his name and then let me know how it goes?  I think it would significant help in my pre-rapture planning.  And no stealing “Left Ahead” – I think I can make a parody using that title.

Dystopic Work Memes

Today work announced that we would be having a Catching Fire (Hunger Games) innovation challenge.  12 teams, competing for prizes.  As a manager who likes developers having any excuse to have innovation and tech time and engage in cross-functional work, I'll encourage participation.  As someone who wrote his master's thesis on dystopias, I'm disturbed.  While I don't consider The Hunger Games to be particularly dystopic, more post-apocalyptic, it's obvious dystopia is sort of what it was going for.  So we're celebrating innovation by embracing a genre that has, at it's core, the suppression of imagination and in most cases, stagnation.  And 12 teams?  If you carry the metaphor in the book a step further, that means those teams are controlled by a group/district, Panem or the Capitol, that has lots of leisure time and little day-to-day interaction with the other districts except to the extent that they use them as resources and control them through fear and scarcity.  This manager doesn't want to be identified with fear and scarcity, even if it does generate productivity gains.  And who's the 13th district?  MIS?  That's bad.  I hope they don't have their finger on the nuclear option.

And what about the whole kill each other theme?  It's not quite Battle Royale, but damn close.

It reminds me of a spam message I talked about on Facebook regarding the 451 Group.  While the meaning behind their name was obvious, to move into a post-paper world, the use of a book where burning paper is synonymous with burning memory is a frightening metaphor for your company.

Eryn and I were talking about it in the car.  She and my wife had recently read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (full story here) by Ursula Le Guin.  I told Eryn that for our next corporate innovation initiative we were going to mistreat a developer and then lock them in a supply cabinet so the rest of us could feel smarter for not being the ones locked in the closet.

Check the Time

Here's the new gear clock Kyle gave me for my birthday on my wall.  A little difficult to read with out numbers if you're just taking a quick glance, but very stylish.  I gave my old clock to another manager, and the wall clock I brought from home I thought about giving to Goodwill to yet another manager.  Many employees may thank me for ensuring their one on one's never run long and they can say, "Oh, it's # o'clock, I better get to my meeting.....at Caribou coffee."

Fire Door

Today Erik ripped the handle off the fire door in the swing area, where his team is temporarily hiding in a basement at the end of a very long wing.  One of the other developers, concerned they might burn to death, put a temporary fix in place until facilities can resolve the issue.

King of Tokyo

After a very long day at working worrying about organizational shifts which included an exceptionally large departure of talent from my team, digging around in capacity numbers that hadn't caught up to reality yet, and a variety of SOC 2 related issues, I was pleased that it was a board gaming day in the cafeteria.  There were more than enough people for Descent, and it looked very similar to Ravenloft which I'd played the last time, so I joined in a game of King of Tokyo with Jon, John, Mike, and Dan.  Three games.

I've never played it before, although I watched them play it on Table Top.  Wil Wheaton made it look like enough fun that we bought a copy for Logan for his birthday.  I'm not sure if he and Ming have played it yet.  If they haven't.  They should.  Our first game was incredibly fast, one of the two monsters in the middle killing nearly everyone outside Tokyo.  I'd been swapped into Tokyo just prior to that event, so I ended up with a quick win.  The second game dragged considerably longer and was a win by points on Jonathan's part.  And the third game took up 2/3 of our gaming time and was a barely eeked out win by Jon in a monster-to-monster grudge match between him and Mike.  Mike was within a point of winning when Jon pushed his own points over the edge.

One of my favorite cards in the game was one which let me reroll one die of any other player.  While the extra heads and large brains allowed players to have brute force dice rolling fun, the reroll die allowed me to just be sort of a dick and disrupt point accumulation and specialty card accumulation.  I used it to good effect a few times derailing 3 point plays and the accumulation of three hearts which allows a player to grab a card off their monster-specific set.

Mike said with five people, the games are generally incredibly fast because of the damage flying back and forth.  It would definitely be a good family game or quick game with casual gamers.