'Life' category

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Chemistry and compatibility

November 21st, 2011

There's a spectrum for the working compatibility between two people.

On the far left of the spectrum, there's negativity. You hate the other person's guts, and can't work with them at all. There's some personality conflict (which could simply be, "That person is an asshole") or some impasse that would require psychotherapy to bridge.

On the far right of the spectrum, there's chemistry. Effectively, you want to have their technological babies. You finish each other's... that's right, sandwiches. Or sentences. Or parser combinator libraries. When you stumble with a task or concept, that person is there to pick you up with a how's-it-going or whiteboard marker, and that's a two way street. You work together like the badass components of a emergently-more badass machine. Bio-digital jazz, man.

And smack dab in the middle, there's plain ol' compatible. This is like the "friend zone" of the working world. It's fine, and you can go on that way indefinitely, getting things done at a reasonable clip, but it probably doesn't get the creative juices flowing. You're scheduled to meet at a waypoint instead of bushwhacking away at the thicket together.

It takes time, effort, and luck to find people that you have working chemistry with — they're understandably rare. The effort has to start somewhere, though. Maybe it's a good exercise to imagine a person that you're just working-compatible with: if you bore to them your technological soul, might you get something going on?

Categories:Life, Programming
Tags:Godinesque, Peopleware
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Too smart, doesn't get quite so many things done?

November 17th, 2011

We care about our craft. We're totally smart and get things done. No question.

But "smart and gets things done" has to have some kind of spectrum associated with it, right? There's at least a "smart" dimension and a "gets things done" dimension.

An easy question to ask is, "Am I overthinking?" (This is especially easy to ask if you're overthinking.)

We often quibble about how to get things done better [*] in terms of practicalities, but it often feels like people who ignore the long tail of practicalities achieve greatness with the least effort.

If you had to pick one, would it be better to over-think or to over-do?

(My advice: don't think about it too much.)

Footnotes

[*]

In some asymptotic sense of better.

Categories:Best Practices, Life, Mozilla, Programming
Tags:Godinesque, Introspection, Peopleware, Philosophical
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Collaboration and concentration

November 15th, 2011

Latest in the, "People problems are hard, I'm glad I just program computers," set of thought processes. If you have thought-provoking anecdotal data points, your comments are welcome!

There's a confounding and contentious dynamic in programming between collaboration and concentration. This goes beyond just individual and team efficiency — it's also about finding a balance that lets you enjoy and grow your craft.

There are certainly times that you want to hunker down in an LCD-monitor-adorned sensory deprivation chamber and do some badass debugging, find all the corner cases in that nasty algorithm, or suss out all the invariants in a complicated system.

But, on the other hand, there are certainly times that you need to write code during a flurry of peer interaction. If you're ramping up on a new system, the thirty seconds it takes you to ask another human being a question and receive a solid, well-informed answer usually trumps the hours you'd spend reaching the "same" conclusion. With less certainty. Oh, and you actually missed the trap everybody else already knows about, so you actually figured it out wrong.

The extent of the dichotomy is clearly not limited to these examples. It's easy to think of times you've had to pepper somebody with questions as well as times you wanted to hole up in a cave to get some code done. For my systems programming experience I'd hazard a guess that it's around an 80/20 split between concentration and collaboration.

So, it's interesting to ponder: if you were building a team, how would you structure the work space or work activities to enable collaboration when it was necessary, but enable concentration in the common case?

I suppose it's doubly difficult because you also want your team to feel empowered — capable of seeking out collaborative help when they need it in order to get things done and make progress, but also empowered to cordon themselves off and have at it.

I can pretty easily find research that involves hospital workers in the early 1990s, but I have to imagine that a team of brilliant systems programmers is a different beast altogether.

Categories:Life, Mozilla, Programming
Tags:JS Pit, Peopleware
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The peril of the new shiny

October 29th, 2011

I'm a little bit behind in my movie watching. About 35 years behind.

Yesterday I saw the movie "Network" (1976) for the first time. Humorous, cynical, and meta is totally my hook, so I had a ball with this one. However, it reminded me of a pretty solemn pattern that I wanted to write about.

I call this pattern the "new shiny", in the same sense that a house cat only sits in your lap in the absence of a shiny thing dangling just out of its reach. In the movie, an older man leaves his wife, with whom he previously shared a 25-year committed relationship, for a younger woman, with whom he's become infatuated.

Now, in this movie's allegory, that younger woman is a metaphor for television and stuff, but that's besides the point for this discussion.

The story presents an instance of the "new shiny" pattern. You happen upon a new opportunity, incompatible with an opportunity you're currently pursuing, and you're tacitly forced to make a choice: pursue the new opportunity, or, through inaction, continue with pursuit of the current opportunity.

As the movie points out, it's easy to become infatuated, even obsessed, with the new shiny, if only because striking out on a new path is exciting and optimistically promising in its "honeymoon phase". In this light, the situation becomes even more difficult: passivity results in an outright denial of something intriguing, leaving you wondering, classically, "what could have been".

Inevitably, evaluating the new shiny with sound reasoning and peace of mind becomes very difficult. The irrationality of attachment — whether to existing things or to things that might be — blurs rational evaluation, if there was really any to be had to begin with. Often, no matter which you choose, you will quickly begin to wonder how much better things would have been on the other path.

...lovers, technologies, jobs, subjects of interest, projects...

Some categories don't have the same existential scarcity that makes the new shiny perilous. Take food: there's little cost to returning after venturing off to sample another cuisine. You don't feel the same kind of remorse choosing soup over salad. Other categories are far less forgiving.

There's also ample reason to fear the new shiny. Every time you make a commitment you disavow the temptation of the new shiny and its hold over you. And, typically, unless you take steps to strategically isolate yourself, you have little control over new shiny encounters — these things are just stumbled upon in the course of everyday life.

There are very few tools at our disposal to deal with the new shiny properly. Human prescience is quite limited to begin with. I suppose that the new shiny is just the classic problem of man versus raw choice taken to its passionate, emotionally-involved and foresight-crippled extreme.

Categories:Life
Tags:Philosophical
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Simple formula for instilling unease in a person you've just met

October 22nd, 2011
A: Nice to meet you, I've heard a lot about you!
B: All good things, I hope!
A: Oh yeah, definitely. You know, except for that one thing.
B: Oh? What thing is that?
A: Haha, you know I'm just kidding.
B: Right, right...
Categories:Life, Sarcasm
Tags:Dialogue
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