Posts in the “career” category

There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn’t true. If you want to change people’s behavior you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument. We call this the Oprah Winfrey Rule. (It’s also the way good politicians operate, but Oprah does it better than anyone.)

~ Google’s Oprah Winfrey Rule, from the book, How Google Works

I went through this several times when writing the Scala Cookbook and Functional Programming, Simplified. In the end I just tried to think of myself, and write a book that would have been helpful to me five years earlier. (Image from this Twitter page.)

The Denver Post has an article about how the Broncos are (finally) hiring more coaches, hopefully to teach “technique” to their players. They’ve been horrible at developing players under the Elway regime, and hopefully this is a positive sign.

When I owned my software company I learned how important training was. At first we hired people who were generally experts at what they did, but as we tried to expand we realized that not everyone was an expert, or, if they were an expert at web development using Framework A, they weren’t an expert at Java Swing development, or vice-versa. I’m not saying we always did a good job at training (in large part because some of the initial hires didn’t think it was necessary), but over time we learned and tried.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

~ Howard Thurman

If you’ve read any of my books (like the Scala Cookbook or Functional Programming, Simplified), and thought, “Hey, I can write a book,” I encourage you to do so. One book that has been helpful in my writing career is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. If you’re seriously thinking about writing a book about programming or any other technical topic, it’s a good read.

You can tell when people love their work by seeing the quality of the products they produce. What I’m thinking about at this moment is that whoever controls MLB.tv does not love their work, because if they did they would certainly make better UI/UX decisions. If they really cared about the product, they would let you easily fast-forward and rewind; mobile navigation would let you go directly to a specific inning; and on all platforms it would be extremely helpful if you could skip from one at-bat to the next.

Beyond those basics, anyone who loves baseball would like an easy way to watch all of the at-bats of their favorite batters. For example, when I’m really pressed for personal time I’d like to be able to watch all of Kris Bryant’s at bats.

A terrific feature would be to be able to watch recorded games without all of the delays and downtime that is involved in a baseball game. A full game can easily take two and half hours (or more) to watch, but there’s actually only about 20-30 minutes of real action, so if you’re watching a recorded game, why not be able to skip all that wasted time?

Those are just a few obvious ideas, where again the point of this little post/rant is that whoever is creating the MLB.tv apps doesn’t love their work (IMHO).

I should add that another possibility in this specific case — because they have a monopoly — is that it may not be the product manager or developers who don’t love their work. It may be that their organization is holding them down. But personally, while I’ve worked with some organizations that make it hard to produce great work, there’s almost always a way of getting things done.

inc.com has this article about a Google study that shows that the best managers use emotional intelligence.

One thing I learned about being a full-time, at-home writer: people don’t respect your time. It’s like, “You’re a writer? Haha, that’s funny. Why don’t you come over and help me paint my house? I’m counting on you.” That sort of thing.

I was just reminded of the time a recruiter told me to “play dumb” when a particular person interviewed me, because that person didn’t like to be challenged, and had to feel like he was the smartest person in the room. I couldn’t bring myself to do that; I figured if that was the way it was going to be, I didn’t want to work there.

“I don’t have talent. I have tenacity. I have discipline. There was no choice for me but to work really hard.”

~ Henry Rollins

I had to go to a doctor’s office today to give blood for another test, but there was a delay in processing my paperwork so I had to sit there for a little while. As I was sitting there my doctor walked into this area with another patient. I don’t remember how we started the conversation, but as we were talking, my doctor said that she was “trying to simplify her life.”

“I touch the future – I teach.”

Christa McAuliffe

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”

~ Aristotle

“Your attitude is such an important topic, I want to end this book by getting you to look at yourself the way other people see you.”

A quote from the last chapter of my book, A Survival Guide for New Consultants.

Here’s one of my favorite lessons from my consulting book, titled “Who are your customers?”

In the next day or two I hope to finish moving my book, A Survival Guide for New Consultants, to this website. As with my other books, I like the idea of having all of my books on this website so I (and you) can easily search for them, and also easily find related content.

Just saw this: “Never let your boss convince you that ‘work ethic’ is working extra hours for free. It’s the same as writing a check to the business owner.”

Technically that’s true, a good observation, and I can’t argue with it.

Conversely, when I got out of college, my wife’s grandfather told me the phrase, “If you do more for what you’re paid to do, you’ll eventually be paid more for what you do.” As an employee, I made a lot of money with his philosophy, rapidly doubling and tripling my income.

Later, as the owner of a small business, I didn’t mind it when employees didn’t work overtime – and we always paid for overtime. I respect people who want to work forty hours a week and have a balanced life. But I also knew that those people would never become partners in our business. I never thought of it as good or bad, just a fact of business life.

Somewhere around the year 2006, my writing style was influenced by the CIO of a company I was working with. When trying to get a new project started, a project manager gave me a very vague description of what he wanted, and as a result, the cost estimate and Statement of Work I wrote (so I would get paid) was vague as well.

The CIO called me to her office, and then told me that I didn’t have to write anything fancy, I just had to “say what I mean.” Since then, that simple approach has been a key to my writing style.

DeMarcus Ware is one of my favorite football players, by all accounts a real leader and team player. Here’s a nice quote from him in this article:

“I told myself, ‘Don’t get caught up. Stay focused and keep your head down and everything will be all right,’ ” he says. “That’s always been my motto: If you don’t get caught up in the hype, you can do something great.”

A quote from the founder of Buddhist Geeks: “I’ve cow-towed to a culture of sensitivity, whose aim has been to avoid offending others over having difficult conversations.”

This made me think of two things. First, many years ago my company worked as a consultant with a large church, and any time there was conflict about something on the project, all productivity came to a screeching halt. People there all felt the need to be nice to each other above all else, and as a result the tough decisions couldn’t be made, and they were our slowest-moving client of ever.

Second, as I learned from Zen, being your true self doesn’t mean “being nice above all else” all the time. That’s just faking it. There will always be disagreements, and the philosophy I try to follow is, “The best idea wins.”

I learned part of that philosophy — and how to handle conflict — from this article by Bill Parcells, The tough work of turning around a team.