What's it all about, Alfie?

I've often said that Command and Control is a valid, useful, form of management. So is Consensus. Now the latter is a lot harder to achieve because you have to have very self-aware people in the organization. They have to be aware of their limitations, and know when it's best for the group for them to stop back, and to step up. Yet it is, without doubt, the most effective team.

But a lot can get done with Command and Control - as long as everyone does their part. The commanders have to assume responsibility for their commands, and they have to be available to make those decisions at any time - based on the needs of their subordinates to have issues resolved. After all, it's no good to have a great commander if he's never available to make the command decisions.

I've been thinking a lot about management lately, and I'd like to think I've made enough mistakes to know that I work pretty well in either form, but I think everyone works better in the consensus format - assuming they have the right teammates. After all - a good team doesn't have to be staffed will all-stars, it just has to be staffed with the right people, and then set the expectations accordingly.

What I have seen fail over and over is the organization that claims to be Consensus - but is, in fact, Command and Control. They want to appear that they trust the workers, that they have hired the right mix of people, but in the end, they really don't trust them because either they know the people aren't right (but are possibly hoping they will become the right people), or they just don't trust others.

This latter truth is really what I've seen more of than anything else - mistrust. A very smart guy - capable of being an amazing individual contributor gets promoted out of that spot, into a place where they are no longer outstanding. It's the Peter Principle all the time:

managers rise to the level of their incompetence

It's so true it almost makes me sad, reading the Wikipedia page. I can see in so many people that they have really risen out of the position where they were outstanding into a job that they really are very marginal at. They might have thought they could do it, or could learn to do it, or would get better at it, but in the end, their realization that they really are no good at their job is something that creates a great deal of friction for them - internally.

Unhappy people aren't necessarily the first to see it in themselves. They get irritable, cranky, intolerant, micromanaging - all things that the wouldn't normally want to be doing, but their current mental state is being heavily influenced by the fact that they are mad at themselves for taking this job over staying where they were and feeling a lot of job satisfaction out of doing something really well.

I don't think there's any real solution to this problem. The wikipedia page gives a few suggestions, but they are all virtually impossible to implement as human beings are involved, and the willingness to admit defeat is not something most people want to admit to. So we suffer through. Adults aren't going to change their beliefs and habits without a significant Life-Altering Event - and there's no way to predict those - nor would I want to inflict one on anyone. But that's what it'll take for these folks to re-asses the way they work.

Sadly, it's just considered normal.

I had to update my work MacBook Pro, and I got the dreaded "login" Keychain problem because I guess the tools they created/used to update my local password were not up to snuff, and now that I've created a new KeyChain, I've also found that they have just horribly managed this laptop to the point that I'm surprised that it works at all.

It's this kind of lame administration that really makes me upset. They bought this bill of goods from some enterprisey shop about how to "Easily" and "Securely" administer their laptops, and rather than just teach people, or make it clear what to do, and not do, they have this crap with no way to remove it for those of us that simply don't need it.

It's frustrating. Yet in the end, I have to follow the advice I gave a friend just this morning... take it easy, this is just another indicator that this is not the place you really want to work. Simple.

I've been at a new Shop for about three weeks now, and it's got a lot more Drama than I expected. This is not news to my new teammates, but it's news to me, and sadly not something that's so out of the realm of possibility to be considered unusual for the Tech Industry. Rather than go into it, we'll just call it Drama, and leave it at that.

But someday I'm going to work at a place where I can open up this journal again, and not have to worry about anyone feeling threatened, or unhappy, or asking me to shut it down. I think today is not that day, but I'm not sure I really expected it to be. Hoped? Yes. Expected? Nope.

But along those lines, I've decided to spend a little of my free time thinking on new business ideas with some old friends. Specifically, what I could do to get back into business like I want to do, and still pay the bills. I'm not at all sure what that would be, but I'm opening up the entire gamut and willing to think about consulting - like we did with Port-to-Port, and also service and product ideas. Everything is in play.

What I'm really doing is trying to make something happen, as opposed to waiting for something to come my way. I'm not going to stop looking for that magical job to fall into my lap, but I'm willing to take a more active role in creating that job than I was in previous years.

Someday may never come. But I'm going to see if I can't give it a nudge.

I would not have thought it, but just now a co-worker came by to say they were going to really miss working with me. She was brought to tears. I was shocked. When I asked why, she said she came to work at Groupon because of our interview, and it really stuck out to her the passion and commitment. She wanted to do that.

I remember that interview, and I wanted that too. She could be really great. But she let management push her around, and that was a mistake. She's young, and there will be more times to work together.

It's surprising to me how we touch each other's lives without knowing it. I thought I was just a pain to the group - at least in a large part, but I wasn't - not to her. And she was touched enough to express it.

I have had a good run here. Learned ruby, clojure, a lot of good things, and I've clearly touched at least two people here. That's a good run. I have nothing to complain about.

While at The Shop, I've been given an interesting list of name signs for my desk. I was really fortunate to start in a good group - where there was a nice balance of work and play, and they all took part in giving people names on their name signs. While I could just save the paper copies, I decided that I'd spend a little time, do the CSS, and put them all - with a nice commentary, as a post.

Without further ado, let's get right to it.

I'm a little fuzzy about the first one, but I remember distinctly asking about the name signs, and where I could get the metal stands they all sat on. I didn't say that I was hoping to get a great nematic from someone in the group, but within a few minutes of me asking about it, Mike had gotten a new stand out of the office supply cupboard, and Gary had printed out a name tag for me:

It was so nice because it's one of my favorite movies, and it was a wonderfully kind thing for the guys to do.

The next one, like all the others, were placed without my knowledge - which was the way the group worked. And I'm not sure exactly what I did to be awarded this name tag, but I'm sure it had to do with never giving up.

This next name tag was clearly from a time when everyone in the group was sold on the idea of moving forward, and I was quoting National Treasure about what we still had to do before we got there.

This one came along after someone had doubted me on something, and I answered back the the childhood response that I used for many a year.

The ruby gem collection is impressive - some are good, others are great, but there is the tendency to go with Convention over configuration, and in that sense, there was a new feature the group needed to add - and were hoping that it already existed in the wild. In the end, I quipped that if it existed, that it would be...

There was likely a time when I brought in a cold. The group was tight, and it was a mistake on my part. I should have stayed home. But it earned me this name tag.

It was customary to send out an email to the group when you were planning on working from home in the coming days. I was typing this email way too fast, and the title was a typo, but one of epic proportions in the group. I had people using this as the tag for working from home for months to come. It was my one, real contribution to the group's culture.

My consumption of Diet Coke was certainly noted and talked about around the group. At the same time, I was working on a project called Dark Magic, and so they gave me the name tag:

During the Bitcoin boom, a few of the guys in the group and I talked about doing some interesting things with Bitcoin. I'm still interested in it, but the lack of a solid financial backing means that it's just too volatile for me. One of the guys joked that if that were solved, how would I feel then, and my response made several of them laugh. It was almost immediately my new name tag.

While in a meeting with a group trying to internationalize the data on the cheap, the person presenting was very upbeat (to say the least), and while I wanted to temper the ideas with the reality, I wanted to also let this person know that I recognized their positive attitude. It was then my next name tag.

This next one came from Gary, but I wasn't really sure why. Just Gary being Gary, I suppose.

And my final name tag came when a few in the group realized that we all had unique initials, and so made name tags for everyone in the group:

And now it's my last day at The Shop. I start a new job just after the holidays, and that's going to be very nice, but I'll always remember my first group here, and all these fantastic name tags.

I read with a giggle this article off Slashdot about the problems companies are having making Hadoop actually work in their environment. This is not in the least surprising to me. Hadoop is a nice, distributed, storage environment, but so is a very nice SAN. Both can store a lot of files, and do it very quickly, with redundancy, but one is putting entire computers on each "disk", while the other is allowing the disks to just be... well... disks.

The promise (hype) of Hadoop is that by distributing the computing power like the storage, the map/reduce jobs can be done fast and easily and you get old-style SQL performance with as much online storage as you can muster.

But the truth of the matter is far different than this, as this article in the WSJ attests.

Hadoop is nice, but it's not fast. It's good for lots of storage space, but so is a SAN. It's nice to do small map/reduce jobs, but so is CouchDB. But you can't scale CouchDB to any size you want, either. There will always be limits.

I know folks that are looking at Cassandra, and really like it. It's not as general-purpose as Hadoop, but it's targeted at the problem of massive storage with SQL access. Advocates of Hadoop will say Use Spark - get SQL that way! and that's possible, but then that's not Hadoop, is it?

You can use many different caching schemes to make any storage scheme work faster, but the promise of Hadoop was that you wouldn't need them. That's where it fell over. I have no doubt that Hadoop can do a lot of really good things in a lot of very specialized environments, but it's not the silver bullet worth $2 billion. It's a nice open source map/reduce like CouchDB, but on as many boxes as you want. It's nice... but it's not what people hoped it would be.

Too many distractions in systems development these days. Just too many.

This morning I saw that I got an offer letter from one of the shops I have been interviewing with and it was pretty much exactly what I'd heard from the CTO last night on a phone call. I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with the speed of getting the letter out. I told him there was no rush, but they got it done right away. Nice touch.

I've sent an email to another of the companies I talked to to inform them that I'd gotten the letter. Just to let them know that I'd need to know within a few days if they were interested. Just a courtesy email. I don't expect anything from them, but it's what Ive been told is polite. And I want to be polite. They have all been very nice in this interview cycle.

It looks like I'll have a restful Christmas break and then get to the new job at the first of the year. New chapter in life and new job. Not bad.

I had a great phone call from an old friend last night. He's known me since the second grade. That's over 45 years. I don't have another friend that's even close to that long, and he's been a wonderful friend. He was remarking last night that he felt I was making progress, and that he was glad about that - and he should know... more than a decade as a nurse on the psych ward puts him in a position to know about recovery. So it was nice to hear that from him.

This morning I was looking at a pull request from one of the younger - and quite smart - developers in the group. I looked at what he'd done, and it was all just very sloppy. Basing the pull request off a deleted branch used in another pull request, and then not checking dependencies in the libraries, and then just changing things because he wanted to.

Typical kinds of things I've seen from a lot of smart, but not very disciplined, developers. They are used to their intelligence covering for their lack of attention to details and general discipline. Most of the time it works, but that's really just luck more than anything else. They aren't really compensating for it, they're just obscuring it. It's still there - the lack of detail, etc. and it'll come back to haunt the group and the code.

But I really can't say anything to him, because until he wants to change, he's not going to be receptive to any other person telling him he needs to change. We are all like that. I'm on a path now that I would have never voluntarily taken... in fact, I fought not to take it - but it had to be. Sooner or later, I had to realize that my marriage wasn't what I needed, nor was it what Liza needed, and maybe we shouldn't have been married, or maybe things just changed. Whatever the reason, it had to happen.

So it will be for the smart-but-lazy developer.

And at the same time, I've been told by many friends that the environment I've been in for months is not good for me. Again, I have been fighting that this should be a good fit, but that's based on a wish - not a fact. As I've interviewed with other shops, I've realized that I'm not a guy to be "just" a developer. That's going to be too big a mis-match, as I'm going to have decades of experience over my bosses, and that's only going to lead to issues.

Here again, I didn't want to see it - I just didn't want it to be true. But it was. I need to stop pretending that I'm happiest as just a developer. I'm a creative person, and consequently, I want to spend the majority of my time creating, but I can't shut off 30 years of professional programming, and all the mistakes made, and lessons learned. And when I am asked to make one of those mistakes again by a manager that hasn't yet made it, I really have to do it. But I can't. I just can't.

So I really need to be in the kinds of positions that I'm looking at currently - Senior Tech positions... Leads, Architects, decision maker. Something where my experience is a requirement so that it's not overlooked, but leveraged. I was again not thrilled with the idea of this a few months ago when I turned down promotions here at The Shop, but I see that was no different than me not wanting my marriage to end - wishful thinking, but sadly not accurate.

Yet I'm learning. Slowly, yes, but I'm learning. Accept. Forgive. Move on.

So I'm honestly looking forward to some of these opportunities I've interviewed for. There's a small company that needs someone to just help out. Lots of things to do, and because there aren't all that many people, there's lots to do. Then there's another place that's looking for real-time trading experience, and that's always a ton of fun to build - and the people there are smart and experienced so I'm not dealing with the 20-somethings that play cards during lunch and come in at 9:15.

Finally, there's one that might be the most interesting of all - as a tech lead for a line of business working side-by-side with the head of the business to make sure that the systems will scale, be robust, and keep moving in the right direction. This would require me to use everything I've learned and apply it on a daily basis - creatively and experientially.

Yet I know it's a path. I don't know that I'll ever have a day where I don't hurt about the marriage and family that might have been. Or the job or group that might have been. But those are just stories, and not reality. But the pain is very real.

I don't remember who told me this story, but it's an interesting tale that has really hit home this morning as I've been reading some of the posts I wrote in the last month. The story is about The Tree of Problems, and it goes something like this:

At the end of each person's life, they walk up to The Tree of Problems where every person takes all their problems - as a group, and hangs them on the tree. Then they walk around to see what set of problems they would like to have in their next life, and after looking at all the problems on the tree, they pick theirs back up.

Because they realize they can deal with these problems best.

And it's really just a statement that when we look at people, and think they have no problems, that's because we aren't really seeing what their life is like. We are only seeing this tiny slice of their life that they choose to expose to us. And the real issues are not something that we really almost never see, because most of us really try to hide those bad problems from others - even friends and family.

I'm currently in the middle of this job search. It's going well. I'm hoping to have something all lined up before the first of the year, but I'm trying to manage my expectations as well. This all relates to The Tree of Problems in that I've not been happy at work for a while. A long while. I can look at posts going back a while, and while there are times when the work was fun and exciting, the environment I'm working in is really not something I like.

Yet I held onto it far too long.

I kept thinking "It'll get better"... or "This is the system I know"... when in reality it's not going to get better, and in fact, it's getting worse. Not because the people are mean or nasty - just because they share different values that I do, and there isn't a group in Chicago that appears to share my values.

This also reminds me of Liza. Loving and marrying the wrong person is a recipe for the same kind of grief. You think "I'll work harder"... or "I'll stop doing this for them"... or any of a million other things, all of which don't matter because ultimately, they aren't interested in being with you. It's a bad fit.

So I need to Let Go... as Richard Bach said in Illusions... let go of the rocks I'm clinging to at the bottom of this river and trust that the river knows where it's going, and will carry me along. It's not all that easy, but nothing of value is. Letting go and having a little more faith is what I need, and this morning it was just so clear that people hold on all the time.

So I just need to cut myself a little slack and try and relax as I see where my path is headed.

Well... it's Thanksgiving Week, and that means a light week at the office, and then a long, stressful day with the family. I suppose it could be a lot worse, and it really kicks off the very best time of the year for me. Yeah, it's cold, and it's supposed to snow today, and it's going to get a lot colder and stay that way for the next six months, but hey... that's Chicago weather, and I knew that going in.

Today is the last full day at the office for me for the week. Tomorrow I have an appointment in the afternoon, and then the day after that, my oldest is moving back to town - and moving in with me, and then there's Thanksgiving, and the day after I'll be making sure things are working well and everything is humming right along with the systems at work for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Things at The Shop have been kinda stressful lately - I need to leave, not for cause, but because I make the folks in the team feel uncomfortable, and they would rather have a happy team than one that gets work done. I have known there's a mis-match here for a while, but it's another thing to present it in the way they have.

But hey... it's Thanksgiving Week... let's have a decent week, and relax a little. If we can.