Entries tagged as ‘Culture’
I finally finished the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr.
Do you feel like the internet has made it harder for you to concentrate? Do you multitask *all* the time? When was the last time you sat down and read a book? Do you just skim reading material? How is your reading comprehension?
I admit it, I am not the reader I once was. Oh, I read online all the time, but it takes a lot more effort for me to read a book these days. If you look at my reading list on linkedin, you’ll see multiple books that I am reading all at the same time. I get bored, or I have a library deadline to meet and I put down the book I own and pick up one that has to go back. I definitely get distracted more easily and I find it harder to really get lost in the pages like I used to. I always assumed it was just my middle-aged brain getting older. Now, I can blame something else. The internet! SWEET!! My brain’s neuroplasticity coupled with the internet’s addictive qualities means that I am rewiring my brain to multitask rather than think deeply. Really?
When books first became commonplace, similar arguments were made. There was too much information available, it was stressing people out. Books definitely changed the oral history that humans used to amass. Memorization became less necessary. There was a fear that because of books people would no longer have to remember anything.
This reminds me of a saying I’ve heard recently – “I don’t bother remembering anything that I can look up”. Heck, the cell phone has had as much of an impact on me here as the internet. When was the last time you actually entered a phone number from memory? Seriously. If I didn’t have my contacts list on my cell phone I could only call 2 people, my husband and my dad. Is this bad? I’m not sure. It’s kind of nice to free up that memory space.
The one thing that really hit me is that using the internet tends to mostly use your short-term working memory. If you over tax that, it is much harder to make long-term memories. Is it a problem that I don’t remember all the stuff I read? Tweets? Blogs? Facebook statuses? The breadcrumb trail of hyperlinks? Junk e-mails? Probably not. How do you make long-term memories? Repetition. Reliving the memory over and over again. That’s why people remember the most important good and bad things that happen in their lives. They replay them. I know I do.
I think the author is a bit of a fatalist when it comes to this topic. Yes, the internet will change (I think it already has) our society and our brains dramatically. So did the book. So did the map. So did the clock. Are things better or worse today because of these items? I would venture to say better. Read this book and make up your own mind.
Categories: Book Reviews · Technology
Tagged: Culture, Learning
I think that everyone has heard the tale of the frog and the pot. If you put a frog into a pot of cold water and place it on the stove, the frog will happily sit there until it is cooked. If you attempt to put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will do its best to jump out.
I recently read a blog post entitled “Why Newcomers Often See Things More Clearly Than Old Hands” by Bob Sutton. FYI – he’s also the author of “The No Asshole Rule” which is an entertaining read.
I liken the newcomer to the frog placed into a pot of boiling water – the newcomer will have a reaction (either good or bad) to the host of interesting things that don’t even phase the long term employees. I know that I’m still in that place right now. I’m about 6.5 weeks into my employment now. There are things about my new place that still leave me starstruck. My goodness, the walking trails and rec center are amazing! I work with some people who are totally passionate about what they are working on. Now, on the dark side… it’s been a very long time since I’ve worked for a big company. Small companies are very nimble. I’m used to grabbing a few stakeholders and making important decisions quickly. These days I am feeling my way around – trying to understand which groups need to be included in what decisions. I’m learning all sorts of new processes – and some of them leave me scratching my head.
I think that a manager can always benefit from listening to what is causing a new person concern. So far my new manager has been pretty open to my comments, and I’m thankful for that.
Categories: Leadership · Tactical
Tagged: Culture, Empowerment, Innovation, Leadership, Listening
Well, last week you got to hear about the pigeon roosting nightmare at our house, and this week it became even more interesting. There was one place where we didn’t replace the bird netting with aluminum screening due to its inaccessibility. Upon hearing pigeon noises yesterday morning my husband leaned over the railing to take a look. Both of us were dismayed to find a poor little (about 3′ long) corn snake totally wound up in the bird netting. It looked hopeless, at first glance it appeared that the snake had sliced himself with the netting it was so tight. Never mind that the piece of bird netting was mounted in a wooden frame screwed to the side of our house three stories off the ground. It was hung using an extension ladder, which happens to be at our other house…
The difficulty factor of this rescue clearly was high, so we didn’t take any pictures while it was in progress. We figured we had less than a 50% chance of success and didn’t want any reminders of a botched attempt. Besides, time was of the essence, the poor little fellow probably had been stuck there overnight. First step – remove the wood frame from the house. This had to be done blind, my husband had to lay face down on the deck with one arm stuck through the railing with a crow bar. I leaned over the railing from the top and helped guide him so that he could pry off the frame without hurting the snake. Once that was done, the “snake in a frame” was lowered 3 stories by a rope to the ground below.
This is where I stepped in with a pair of scissors. Luckily the bird netting was easily snippable and i started to free the snake from the tail end up. As I cut him loose he started to wiggle, which made things a bit harder to deal with and he kept trying to insert his tail back in the netting. Silly snake, stop that. At this point hubby had to hold him still. Snakes are strong, even little skinny ones like this guy. Corn snakes are constrictors so they can be tough to straighten out. I wasn’t convinced that he would be ok, there were parts of him that were protruding and bulging through the netting, but as I carefully unwrapped him and clipped the tight spots he started to look like a regular snake again. Whew! It was such a satisfying feeling to put him on the ground and watch him happily slither away. He was such a beautiful creature.
My husband and I have a habit of being in the right place at the right time to save critters in distress. We have two cats that surely would have died if we hadn’t rescued them as kittens. The youngest one was trapped (and howling) in a storm drain. It took us two days, some tuna fish as bait and a squirrel trap to get her out. We also learned the delicate art of getting a hummingbird out of a garage. That could have been a disaster, because they beat themselves silly against ceilings and can die in a few short hours without nectar. Untold numbers of turtles have been rescued from the roads in our area. Neither one of us can stand by and watch an innocent animal in trouble. It just isn’t in our nature.
So, we saved a snake, but we gave the pigeons a great access hole. DOH! It was time to fix the pigeon problem correctly. Down came all of the aluminum screening. I washed all of the guano out of their favorite roosting location. That in itself was an hour long miserable, dirty, smelly task. Out came the mitre saw and up went custom cut and fitted pressure treated wood barriers. We will never have a pigeon problem in this spot again. We should have just fixed it right the first time. Less time, less money, and no traumatized snake would have been the result. Ah well, another lesson learned.
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Culture, Taking Responsibility
Well, today I saw my new office for the first time. Let me say “wow”. I almost cried when I saw the view from my windows and the big 4 seat meeting table beside my new desk. It is gorgeous. It is clean, it is shiny-new, and my name is already on the door (YES! a door, a real door that shuts!!). My laptop was setup too. On my first day. Double “wow”. I don’t think that has EVER happened before. If I have to use one word to describe the environment I would call it serene. I am continually impressed by the professionalism this place exudes.
Now it’s time to reminisce. What kinds of office environments have I had?
- I once remember taking a tour during an interview and asking if an open linoleum floored area was going to be the new lab. I never got a good answer. When I started, I found that my cube was in that area. My chair rolled real good there. Aside from the fact that it was awful noisy, it wasn’t that bad…. not after I got used to it.
- I once worked for a startup that rented space in a former motorcycle garage. The worst part is that the bathroom flooded into the carpeting. Ew. Other interesting features include that we didn’t have a phone switch or even a broadband connection. Yes, for internet connectivity I needed to use a modem! The irony is that this company was building the next great core router. It is still funny to look back at it, but at the time it was a great place to work with a lot of energy. Eventually we moved into much swankier digs.
- I’ve worked in office space that was designed to feng shui principles. We had water features like salt water fish tanks and water walls. There were curved walls and meticulously designed workspaces. It was neat, but it didn’t reduce the stress of the workload or the overwhelming demands of the company.
- I’ve had desks that exacerbated carpal tunnel symptoms, and I’ve had to attach keyboard trays on my own. No biggie. Where’s my drill?
- I’ve cleaned sticky crud out of used desks, and suffered through lumpy used chairs as well.
- I’ve worked for VPs at small companies who used hanging large white boards as a test to determine who was “hands on” capable. I passed with flying colors.
I guess my bottom line is this: an awesome environment is nice, but it can never overcome inherent corporate problems. Those need to be addressed first. If the company is great, the environment doesn’t haven’t to be perfect for people to be happy. I’ve been miserable in nice environments, and I’ve been really happy in dumpy places too.
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Culture
Today I am going to do something that I’ve totally shied away from while I’ve been looking for a job. I’m going to write about an interview that I had this week. Yes, really. Part of my brain is still screaming “NOOOO don’t do it!”, but I’m going to override that. Hopefully that’s not a bad idea, but here goes.
First off, this is a position that I really, really want. Since I’ve been interviewing it is one of only a very few that I have been very excited about. This isn’t pretend excited, this is chomping at the bit to get started excited. I was beginning to wonder if such a job exists or not… well, it does.
The reason for this post is because I learned something completely new and different. I’ve done a lot of interviewing. I mean a LOT. I’ve probably personally interviewed well over 100 people. I’ve asked technical questions, I’ve asked behavioral question, I’ve made people really squirm. On the other side of the interview table, I’ve learned to answer questions with stories about my past rather than general feel good statements. This week I learned an interview technique that applies extremely well when you are interviewing for a role that has many different interpretations. Ask the interviewee to present what the role means to them in 10 minutes or less. SO Simple. Duh! I should have thought of this!
Actually, it’s a little more than that:
- Describe what you think that this role is
- Describe how you’d approach this particular role in this company
- Describe what makes you uniquely qualified for this role
So simple. But yet, so effective. I put together 8 slides and presented them to a panel of interviewers who then asked me questions about my background and my presentation. It was a quick, effective way to get to understand how a person would approach a job. I’m going to remember this for when I am interviewing to fill positions again.
So, you’re probably wondering… how did my interview go? I’m cautiously optimistic. My one regret is that I wasn’t able to sit down with everyone individually. It is much harder for me to make a connection with people when I am talking to a roomful. I don’t know how much that hurt me.
Categories: How Tos · Personal · Tactical
Tagged: Communication, Culture, Job Search, Problem Solving, Public Speaking
As the economy is starting to turn around, a lot of companies are going to get back into a hiring mode. Since it’s probably been a while since you’ve had to think about this stuff, I thought it would be good to put together a list of pointers to help you make sure that a new person has the worst possible on-boarding experience ever.
- Leave the person sitting unattended for hours at a time – Nothing says you’re insignificant and we don’t really care that you’re part of our team like this one. If you tell them that you want to meet with them first thing in the morning on their first day – make sure to show up at least an hour late. They can cool their heels in the receptionist area waiting. You know you have more important things to do.
- Ignore the person’s background when you provide training – Just because everyone is different doesn’t mean you need to customize how you bring them up to speed. It’s much easier to just train everyone the same way regardless of what they know. So what if it is frustrating for someone that really knows what they are doing – or is too complicated for someone who has never done the job before.
- Forget them around lunchtime – This one is especially entertaining if the person is new to the area and has no idea where to go to get some food on their first day. Leaving them behind at lunch is a great way to be able to talk about how annoying it is to train the new guy.
- Don’t have their computer systems and accounts setup – This is best for people whose jobs really depend on computer access. Give them some out of date printouts to read while they wait a week (or more) for their computer to show up. Nothing says loving like dry hardcopy in an 8pt font.
- Give them the worst desk and chair in the office – Especially effective if you can find a “trick” chair that has a habit of tipping over or has a bad pneumatic lift mechanism.
- Don’t provide them with a buddy – Buddies get bothered with all of the stupid questions. If you don’t provide one, the new hire will have to figure everything out for themselves.
- Make sure to hit on your new coworker – This doesn’t scream “awkward situation” for a new person trying to learn their way around their new office and among their new coworkers.
Clearly I’m being facetious with my advice, but I’ve had all of these things happen to me at one time or another when I’ve started a new job. Here’s hoping that my next position won’t provide me with a new way to expand my list!
Categories: How Tos · Leadership
Tagged: Attitude, Culture, Respect
December 28, 2009 · 1 Comment
There are times when my profession really frustrates me. I don’t know what it is about engineering and programming, but it sure seems to attract a lot of homogeneous people – like hires like. A lot of people are most comfortable working with people who are like themselves. I’ve worked in offices where I am literally the only (or one of a very few) woman in a sea of white men. Working in a geographically diverse company (West coast offices help here) tends to improve upon diversity somewhat, adding Indian and Asian influences, but there are still few women in engineering. The best software engineering team I ever led was diverse – both from a gender and cultural perspective. I somehow put together a team that was close to 50% female, and represented the US, Canada, China, the Philippines, Turkey, and India. We were white, black, yellow and brown. We were conservative, we were liberal. We were single, married, with kids and without. We were Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Agnostic. It didn’t matter, we were a team. There was mutual respect for everyone’s unique abilities and contributions. We didn’t always agree, and there certainly were different viewpoints, which actually improved what the team was able to accomplish. Everyone did their best to approach their differences with kindness and a good sense of humor.
This team reflects my life. I pick my friends based on what kind of a person they are. Do they share my hobbies? Are they kind? Mean-spirited people who take advantage of others need not apply. The older I get, the less I care about differences, I always look for similarities. What’s important??
- Age? No. I have friends much younger than I am, and also quite a bit older. Zest for life is what is important.
- Religion? No. Just don’t try to convert me. I’ll accept whatever you believe as being the best thing for you.
- Gender? No. I’ve met wonderful men and women and count both among my closest friends. Both sexes can also be miserable and unkind.
- Sexual Orientation? No. Gay, Lesbian, Straight. It’s not a choice for someone – why should I use it as a choice when finding friends? What matters is self-respect and honesty.
- Politics? No. Though, sometimes it is easiest just to agree to disagree on this one. It’s always interesting to hear other opinions and reasons for them.
- Nationality? No. Latina, European (too many to count!), Asian, Middle Eastern – I count them all among my friends.
Maybe I am a little naive, but I think under it all we are more similar than different. We are all human. Yes, our experiences and our culture let us have different perspectives, but this is what good relationships are about. Who wants to sit around with people that are exactly the same as you? What can you possibly learn?
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Appearance, Culture, Diversity, Social Networks, Women in Business
November 24, 2009 · 1 Comment
Well, this topic is a little bit more technical than my usual postings. I recently had an e-mail exchange with someone on this topic and decided that it could make a pretty good post as well. Senior management can drive significant improvements in software quality by encouraging certain practices and behaviors in a development organization. Sometimes this means changing the culture of the organization to see problems as an opportunity to improve rather than an opportunity to initiate a witch hunt.
In a dysfunctional development culture software bugs are seen as failures that should not occur and should be hidden at all costs. Development teams and test teams are adversaries – fighting over the differences between designating a problem as just a “user error” vs an actual problem in the code. The worst instance of this that I have ever seen is a developer arguing that there wasn’t a problem – the code was working as designed. Nevermind that the design as it currently stood was something that would cause the customer untold amount of pain in order to work around. You’re supposed to test to the design right? No – actually you’re supposed to test based on the requirements.
First off, the team has to determine the best ways to find problems as early as possible in the development process – and with the least amount of manual effort. The concept of continuous integration is key here. Every time a programmer checks in a software change it should initiate an incremental product build automatically. This incremental build then should also kick off a base set of regression test cases to test the software functionality. BAM! The problem will be identified before a full build gets done at night *AND* you know exactly which check in to the source code repository caused it. This is awesome. It is easy to fix a problem if you know exactly where to look. If you wait a week or two to do a build you are looking through possibly hundreds of checkins to identify possible candidates that could have caused the failure. Now, granted sometimes this means that the change has to be backed out in order to do some serious refactoring. However, better to do this now rather than during system test. Full nightly builds are also crucial. Sometimes two independent changes can each work, but when you put them together all hell breaks lose. The full build should start from scratch – no reuse of any object files or libraries (unless they are third party code that hasn’t changed). It also should have a full set of “smoke” or regression tests associated with it that test more than just the basic functionality of the code. Another key point that a lot of people miss is that if software is checked in right before the nightly build starts it should NOT be included in the build if the incremental build testing it has not been yet run. It should be included the next day.
I think that a lot of good quality improvements also can be driven through metrics – you just have to pick the right ones. For example, I’ve never seen a lot of success with Lines of Code written. Some software is inherently much more complex. Frequently the engineers writing the least number of lines of code are doing the hardest work – and the most sensitive from a reliability / failure perspective. They also can generate the most number of bugs per lines of code because of this sensitivity.
Overall bug trends as different levels of smoke, unit, and system test are run have been very helpful however. The number of bugs should ramp up steeply when heavy development and testing commences. Over time the number of new bugs (and total open) will level off, and then should drop just as steeply when the product is ready to ship. Using that data to determine the overall health of the product is key. However, once management starts to use that data to find the organization or individual who is to “blame” for the code instability strange things happen. The culture needs to be setup in a way to encourage people to track all bugs. If individuals worry about being blamed they will stop formally tracking their bugs and will even try to negotiate with test groups to make bugs disappear. It is an odd phenomenon, but it can be easily mitigated by how the organization reacts to finding bugs. Finding bugs is a *good* thing. The earlier you find them, and the fact that the customer didn’t is most important!
This clearly leads into test driven design methods. Whenever you plan to add new functionality, you add the automated tests first to go along with it. When the code is done, the tests better pass. Whenever a new bug is discovered you add a new test that clearly shows the problem and can later prove the fix for that bug actually worked. By doing this a product develops a full set of test cases as it grows. There is no need for a big test case development push at the end. Quality is tested in from the start.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: Collaboration, Competition, Culture, Quality
I recently read a blog post written by a friend and former colleague of mine that made me think about how important focus is. For background – see Don’t Die in the Wrong Lake by themadepeacock. He describes a scenario where his former employer was so focused on one particular industry that she killed the company by ignoring all of the other possibilities. This is when too much focus – or even more specifically the wrong focus is very bad.
To play the devil’s advocate, I have to say that normally, strong focus is very good. There is nothing worse than working for a company with very limited resources (time, money and people) that is trying to be everything to everybody. Diversity in focus is great for profitable companies and especially profitable companies that want to grow into other industries and have the means to do so. Too much diversity can kill a small company just as quickly as the wrong focus can.
First of all, small companies are highly dependent upon each one of their customers. This is because typically small companies only have a few of them. If you only have 10 customers it is really painful to lose 1 of them. For a bigger company losing one customer is only bad if it is a really high profile large customer.
If you are a customer of a small company, you know that you are taking a risk in buying from them. If you are working with Joe’s Software Emporium you don’t know if the company will be around for the long haul or not. Joe is clearly not IBM. The reason you *are* working with Joe is because he can provide you with something very specific that no one else can provide. This may mean a particular piece of functionality, a particular customer service capability, or even just the fact that you can get something small and simple at a price point that larger companies may not be interested in selling as an independent product (it’s not worth their effort). Joe’s customers are dependent on his focus. They care about what he is providing to them now, and how it will meet their needs in the future. What if Joe decided to put most of his resources on another product that his customer’s aren’t interested in – splitting his focus? He might lose his current customers trying to get different ones.
I’ve worked for a number of companies that decided not to focus on the product that they were successfully selling in the market place even though it could be improved and its revenue could be grown significantly. Instead, these companies started multiple new efforts, sometimes it almost felt like the flavor of the week. What this caused was significant alienation of their existing customer base as well as frustration at the employee level. Some employees could clearly see the customer problems and were powerless to stop them due to a lack of resources. Other employees were getting whip-sawed among multiple top priorities and were never able to focus (there’s that word again) successfully on getting anything done.
Remember – focus is good. It’s only the wrong focus that is bad.
Categories: Corporate Strategy
Tagged: Culture, Leadership, Priorities, Productivity
Ok ok… Too many book reviews! I know. Unfortunately this last book that needs to go back to the library TODAY is going to drive many many more of them. I just finished Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check. 
. Full disclosure, I *love* Guy Kawasaki and I have ever since I read “The Macintosh Way” back in 1993 when I worked for IBM. My team was trying to learn how to evangelize products like the did at Apple – and Guy was the best.
He still hasn’t changed. He is funny, he uses great stories to illustrate his points, AND he brings in a lot of published experts to help him make his case. Hence my realization that I will be reading more books – many many more books. This is a fantastic book for anyone who wants to start or run a company. A bit of the content in here can be found on his blog as well as some in the presentation “The Art of the Start” which you can find on my twitter feed.
One of my favorite quotes is “If the two most popular words in your company are “partner” and “strategic,” and “partner” has become a verb, and “strategic” is used to describe decisions and activities that don’t make sense, it’s time for a reality check.” This is so true. If the partnership doesn’t enhance BOTH of your bottom lines in some way then it isn’t worth doing!
Other concepts that I have seen in real life before include:
- For a new product – add 6 months to a year to your scheduled ship date depending on the status of your prototype.
- For new product sales – take your “conservative” top down estimate and divide it by 100!
Yep, sounds crazy but I’ve worked for companies creating very complex new products that were well over a year late! One was a startup, one was a big company that should have known better.
I’ve also been in all hands meetings where month after month the sales pipeline looked so huge, but nothing ever managed to close. Because the sales projections were so high we all felt like a bunch of losers. It takes a lot of time to sell a new product if you are an unproven startup!
This book is great. It talks about raising money, planning and executing, innovating, marketing and much much more. I highly recommend it.
Categories: Book Reviews · Corporate Strategy
Tagged: Culture, Management
Do you feel like the internet has made it harder for you to concentrate? Do you multitask *all* the time? When was the last time you sat down and read a book? Do you just skim reading material? How is your reading comprehension?
