Mind The Gap

See the Paul Graham essay (www.paulgraham.com/gap.html) of the same name.

I like this essay. It made me mad at first, but then I caught on and it made me feel good. I got giddy realizing that I'd been wrong all these years, and my problem wasn't figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up, or finding the right job, or figuring out how to be extroverted and fearless enough to go out and talk people into working with me, but my problem was just relaxing and giving myself permission to grab whatever it was that I wanted and needed in life. Honestly, and through hard work, sure, but grabbing need not inspire guilt.

If there is no shortage of wealth, then I can have as much as I want, and I don't have to worry where it comes from. If I don't happen to create my quota then someone else will just make more, because wealth is not found or given but created. So easy.

Mr. Graham has opened my eyes: "making money is a very specialized skill...but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.... What causes people to react so strongly?

"(1) the misleading model of wealth we learn as children

"(2) the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated

"(3) and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society."

Because we're given money as children, and do not earn or manufacture it, we grow up with a distorted view, he says. In the past, fortunes were created largely by taking what others had and saying, in effect, "It's mine now, just come and try to take it back and I'll kill all the rest of you too."

And now that the world has become so technologically intense, some of us can be ever so much more productive than others, and we get fantastically rich because of it, and the poorest among us are fantastically richer than the poorest of the past, and both the poor and rich alike are now all pretty much the same. We eat the same foods, buy the same goods, live in houses with central heating, drive cars, and so on.

So what's the big deal then? Why should anyone get upset because Mr. Bill Gates owns something in the neighborhood of $60 billion, and the average person with a median sort of income makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year. Does it matter that an average person would have to work 1,200,000 years to equal that wealth?

Yes.

One of the current political arguments is about inheritance of wealth. Some refer to taxation of inheritance as a tax on dying. I understand that there is something called an estate tax and something called an inheritance tax, and that the former kicks in upon death, and the latter upon descent of value to one's heirs. And that isn't the issue.

Neither is the amount, or the cutoff value.

What is relevant is that we live in one world and that wealth is not infinite, and neither can it be created on the fly. Sorry, Mr. Graham. Such taxes exist because wealth is dangerous. Hardship we can handle. It brings us together and coaxes the best out of us. Not so with being wealthy, especially if we inherit it. It sours us. That's why we tax inheritance.

I know all too little about economics, but one of the things I do know is that there are various kinds of industries, and the wealth-producing industries are those like mining, fishing, hunting, agriculture, in which value is either directly removed from the belly of the earth itself, or free natural processes are harvested. Without sunshine, air and water, agriculture would be pointless, and agriculture would be pointless if a farmer had to produce light, heat, air and water to feed crops and livestock. What gives farming a shot at profitability is the availability of energy, substances, and processes that are there for the taking.

Yes, farmers may have to pay for the use of irrigation water, or pay to pump it from the ground, but they don't have to create hydrogen and oxygen, combine them, capture the resulting water, and apply it to their plants. No farmer has to create plants or animals from piles of minerals, and invent metabolic pathways that consume water, air, and nutrients, and then provide nourishment. It takes smarts, care, hard work and luck, but the basics are there for use by anyone, for free.

All industries except for a very few just transform that wealth which is created, and since wealth, fundamentally, is material, it is limited. Don't confuse energy with immateriality. Energy is equivalent to matter. They are two aspects of the same phenomenon. It is also limited. The universe at large may contain more matter and energy than humanity can even comprehend, let alone use, but right here where we live there are limits.

"Materially and socially, technology seems to be decreasing the gap between the rich and the poor, not increasing it. If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he'd think communism had won.... Everything would seem exactly as he'd predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops," says Mr Graham.

But it's just not so. Technology and politics are increasing the gap between rich and poor. It may be true in the past that the nobility lived far better than the other 98% of the population, and that a simple peasant could never have dreamed of becoming king. A peasant may have dreamed of having enough bread to eat, but no more.

But in that far distant past, almost everyone was pretty much at the same level, the other 98% of them. They may have been abjectly poor compared to even our common homeless street alcoholics, and diseased, and ignorant, but there was no real gap. Everyone was like them, except for a few exotics in feathers and brocades, who lived in high palaces and kept armies. Those few were seen as gods, not as rich humans.

Those clever youths mingling freely in bright offices of technology companies did not create the world. And we cannot compare them only one to another. There never was, is not, and never will be the self-made-man. We depend on each other. We are better now at extracting and shaping the things we can harvest from the earth, and make a much wider variety of things from out common raw materials. Because of our education (from knowledge slowly built up over the last 4.5 million years of human existence) we have learned about new raw materials. We no longer seek only to mine silver, gold, copper, coal, iron and lead. We now make from sand machines that think. But the sand is still free. We take it and use it but no matter how clever we might be, we still can't afford to make it.

But even beyond that, there is the use of the rest of the world's people as raw material. Those bright young happy people in offices are not the whole story. We should not compare them one to another, but to the rest of the world's peoples.

If a factory in Mexico can make shirts cheaper than one in Cincinnati, then it's off to Mexico with the factory and our jobs. Then to India from Mexico, and then to China from India, and to Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, and who knows where. Anywhere people are paid less for more work is good for our cubicle dwellers. Cheaper goods means that they keep more of the money they make, and through taxes apply subsidies for our own industries, so they and we get wealthier and wealthier. Some of us. Not all of us.

Some of our own, lots of our own in fact, are going down with the ship as well. It isn't just the farmers of India who are paid so little for their crops that they can't afford to eat. Even though the grain they produce is sold to Australia and Europe as cattle feed, and even though some is repurchased and imported back again into India to serve as emergency rations for the poorest. Even in this country the price paid farmers keeps dropping while retail prices hold steady. And many Americans scratch through food banks now, seeking enough to just get through the month.

It doesn't matter much that as Palagummi Sainath has said, India ranks eighth in the world in the number of billionaires (as figured in U.S. dollars, no less). India is getting both richer and poorer at the same time, as the gap between the richest and the poorest widens. As it is in this country, which has the biggest gap among all "developed" nations. And we can feel it.

We're long past the time when one income could support a family. Like it or not, many women if given the choice would prefer to work at home raising their children. It happens that women are really good at that, and it can be really good for children. But few can do it, because even with a woman and her husband working, they still have trouble getting by these days.

No, wealth doesn't come out of the air. It doesn't materialize when smart, educated, driven people apply themselves. That's needed, but wealth grows exceedingly slowly if it has to be created. Only when wealth is taken, as Mr Graham has said happened in the past, does the graph take a sharp upward jump.

And we are more and more rapidly taking from the poorest of the world to benefit the richest. We are taking resources and labor from the poorest of the world and using them for our benefit, and not giving back. We are dealing with the lowest bidder, the one who does not provide clean water, enough food, medical care, education, and who does not enforce even the most basic labor laws. And that's one reason why we are getting richer.

Some of us.

I simply don't agree with Mr Graham that "in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health". I believe that the opposite is true. Wealth creates both economic and political power, and the wealthy use power to become even wealthier and more powerful. That is the way it is today, and that is the way it has always been. We are too weak to control our lust for wealth and power. It is the human disease.

That is why the United States has a constitution.

If you want a truly healthy and happy society, one full of rich competition and growth in the arts, sciences and in business, you need to have an egalitarian one. One that has learned from the sad mistakes of human history. One that is wise enough to know that unchecked capitalism is as dangerous as unregulated military power.

If wealth is good, and a gap in wealth is better, and increasingly better as it grows wider, then power is also good, and a disparity in power is better, and absolute power is best. Either route will lead to an intense concentration of wealth, political power, religious power, police power, and military power. Dictatorship. The ultimate monopoly. It always happens. That is not what I want for the United States, or for the world as a whole.

Mr Graham ignores the story of Europe, a subcontinent that has learned the hard way. The European Union has a larger population than the United States. It is wealthier than the United States. Its people are better educated and happier. They all have health care, and don't worry about their pensions. They have high taxes and they pay them willingly. They know what the alternative is. They know what they're getting for the money. Several countries, including France, even have higher productivity than the United States. Bite that.

Europeans know that too much difference between the two ends of the economic spectrum creates problems for everyone. It isn't a personal moral failure to be poor, it's a social moral failure. It makes sense to share. An educated population can adapt and innovate. It can be more creative and peaceful. A healthy population need not fear epidemics bred and spread through a diseased underclass.

Toward the end of his essay, Mr Graham says a couple of interesting things.

"If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I'd take the first option.... It's absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty."

This is of course just the opposite of reality. Poverty is poverty. Being poor in a rich society is a little better than being poor in a poor society, but not much. The poor always suffer more. It doesn't matter whether they drive old cars or walk shoeless . The status of poverty is the crime, and the poor live shorter, less happy and less healthy lives because of it. Period.

And if Mr Graham lived as a rich man in a poor society, he would be much better off. If it bothered him too much, he could use his wealth to do good. This is rare, but some have done it. Without modern medicine and sanitation he might die relatively young, but maybe not. Many premodern societies were full of the elderly. It was the first five years of life that were the most dangerous. After that, if you didn't have to work too hard, if you were rich, you probably had it made. And the rich get a big boost just from being rich, and from being powerful. That's why they lived into old age.

Mr Graham's final comment is "You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse."

Um, yes he is. It's right in there. "In spending their money they create jobs" is a standard line of the wealthy, even though he says it isn't so. Every wealthy person believes in an absolute, innate right to their own wealth: because I am wealthy I am good, and because I am wealthy I create jobs all around me, and so I deserve to be even wealthier, because I am blessed. If I were not blessed, I would be poor too.

But try to find a person who actually manufactured a significant portion of his or her wealth. It doesn't happen. My wealth comes from getting someone else's wealth. It's that old economic thing again. Money does grow on trees, and in oil wells, but hardly anyone gets it there. It's too much work. It's much easier and more fun to get it from someone else. Just to pick on Bill Gates again (well heck, everyone knows who he is), he didn't create wealth. He accumulated money from you and me for a long time. What he has now was once ours, and we willingly gave it to him.

Therefore he is now rich. Not a self-made man, but one that you and I made.

Will you pray for him? Or for Rupert Murdoch? Or for Warren Buffett? Larry Ellison? Do you sob with joy when you think of what Donald Trump has done for the world? How do these people compare to Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Dalai Lama? How about Jesus?

Rich men, were they? Self-made millionaires? Do you admire them because of that? Or because they gave? Who's powerful now?

What really does matter? What is the value of a rich man, except to excite our own greed? Is there even a single thing to admire about a rich man? Isn't wealth a measure not of how much one has, but of how much one gives?

Mr Graham would not want to live as a poor man in a rich society. The basis of his essay has an opposing thrust. He is an entrepreneur. He values accumulating and winning. To be happy as a poor man means that he is not an entrepreneur. But he is.

If free enterprise is followed to its limit, and the accumulation of wealth is worshipped above all else, well, it leads somewhere we've heard of. It was called the Dark Ages. There is no such thing as a free lunch. We can't all be rich, and unfortunately, being rich still means that someone is rich and someone else can't be. It will always be that way, by definition. If we were all tall, then none of us would be. If we were all fat, then no one would be. Get the picture?

Think back a few years when IBM owned about half the software in the world, Microsoft owned nearly all of the rest, and a few other companies held title to what was left.

Compare that to now. Because of a few crackpots who insisted on sharing software freely, things have changed radically. Ownership, secrecy and lawsuits are no longer the keys to success. First called the "Free Software" movement, now sometimes also called the "Open Source" movement this change has revolutionized the world.

Almost everyone who wants to get into software now has a shot at it, and not only is free to take the source code and bend it into new shapes, but often can get it all free of cost.

This is progress. This we can celebrate. No one has to win or lose. We can share and rise together.

(Originally published in 2006.)

 

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What Is Pay, Really? This.

So here I am, about four months late, writing something I thought I'd be knocking off last October. Well I'm like that and I hope you are too, because then I get to feel just as smart and conscientious as you, and that way we can call it a draw.

What is pay? Sounds so obvious, so boring, like one of those things that everyone knows without thinking about it. One of those ideas you have bouncing around in your head every day and take as a thoroughly vetted, completely settled aspect of the universe that always was, always will be, and is therefore right and just.

Pay is complex but simple. Obvious but obscure. Definite but tenuous. Or the inverse.

Pay is not money.

Money enters into the world of pay but it is only part of the story, and a relatively minor part, even if you work only for the money. Because you don't. Even if you do.

And even if you are desperate for it, you aren't.

How arrogant am I? How stupid could I be if I only tried harder?

Hold on -- it's true.

What you need and what I need are those things that the terminally dense recite without thought. Because they are cliches: food, shelter, clothing. That's what money gets us, and a little more. Without a minimum to exist on things are ugly, but it takes very little to get by. More money, more food, your own house, more clothes, maybe a car or two, splashy vacation trips. Then more junk, bigger TV sets, golf lessons, a second story on the house. More stuff in the closet. And then more of the same. And then again more of the same. And then you're dead, but not happier, even just before you died.

"Our profits were above the average for our industry, and our financial statements showed every sign of health. We were growing at a rate of about 20% annually with sales that were strong in our home state. Our quality was high. We were respected in the community I was making a lot of money. And I had a knot in my stomach that wouldn't go away."

Those are the words of Ralph Stayer. They open his article in the Harvard Business Review of November 1990.

"What worried me more than the competition, however, was the gap between potential and performance. Our people didn't seem to care. Every day I came to work and saw people so bored by their jobs that they made thoughtless, dumb mistakes. They showed up in the morning, did halfheartedly what they were told to do, and then went home."

I've been there. Maybe you have too. Maybe you are now.

Mr. Stayer did something drastic. He raised everyone's pay, but not their paychecks.

"The image that best captured the organizational end state I had in mind for Johnsonville was a flock of geese on the wing. I didn't want an organizational chart with traditional lines and boxes, but a "V" of individuals who knew the common goal, took turns leading, and adjusted their structure to the task at hand. Each individual bird is responsible for its own performance."

OK, it's a metaphor. Whatever. Pay attention though. Somehow this business owner was able to realize that both he and his company had a problem, and that no obvious or traditional solution would be a solution.

Instead of cracking the whip or scraping off the lowest-performing 10% of staff every year, or just firing everyone and starting over, he did something else.

He turned the company over to the people who knew how to run it, who were the people who already worked there. They were the ones with the greatest stake in the company's success, because the company was the support for them and their families. Once they were in full charge they were truly responsible for their own destiny.

Years later Mr. Stayer was able evaluate his experiences.

"Everyone at Johnsonville discovered they could do considerably better and earn considerably more than they had imagined. Since they had little trouble meeting the accelerated production goals that they themselves had set, members raised the minimum acceptable performance criteria and began routinely to expect more of themselves and others. The cause of excitement at Johnsonville Sausage is not change itself but the process used in producing change. Learning and responsibility are invigorating, and aspirations make our hearts beat. For the last five years, my own aspiration has been to eliminate my job by creating such a crowd of self-starting, problem-solving, responsibility-grabbing, independent thinkers that Johnsonville would run itself."

That is a good description of pay.

Another person who followed approximately the same path was Ricardo Semler. His company is in Brazil. You can think of his approach this way: "We transfer responsibility to our people. We hand them their freedom."

He has written several books. The one I bought and read was "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works."

His basic ideas run like this: If work is meaningful then people will do it because it has meaning. If work is fun then people will do it in order to have fun. If the workplace accommodates the lives of people then they will embrace the workplace as part of their lives. If people are allowed to take charge they will do much better than if they are told what to do. And the business will benefit as well.

His business is called Semco. Here is an example of how it runs differently than any place you and I may have worked: Employees set their own salaries.

There are five pieces of knowledge involved, three known by the company and two by the employee. The company has salary surveys so it knows what people outside the company earn. The company also knows what everyone inside the company earns. And the company knows current market conditions and what it can afford to pay.

The employees know what they want to make and what their coworkers make.

The company then shares its information with the employees so they can make informed decisions. The types of compensation available are salary, bonuses, profit sharing, commissions, royalties on sales, royalties on profits, commissions on gross margin, stock, stock options, initial public offerings, and sale of business units. (He explains all these in the book.)

How well does this work, then, really?

"The flexible reward system mirrors our philosophy that people will understand that it's in their best interest to choose compensation packages that maximize both their own pay and the company's returns." Because "if workers understand the big picture, they'll know how their salaries fit into it."

Occasionally someone has to leave the company to make what they think they're worth. Occasionally the company pays someone more than they think they're worth. Generally, all sides pretty well agree on it though.

There are several companies under the Semco umbrella. They have been sweetly profitable. Most of those who work there stay for decades. But, you may ask, if this is so good, why hasn't Semco taken over the world? Because they have more important things to do.

Because work and profit are not the most important things for Semco.

Not as important as weekends, for example. "If the workweek is going to slop over into the weekend -- and there's no hope of stopping that from happening -- why can't the weekend, with its precious restorative moments of playtime, my time, and our time, spill over into the workweek?"

If you have a job at Semco, and you need to do something outside of work, and you can schedule it, then you go, even if it's a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, or a day at the beach, just because you want to stick your toes into the sand and sit for a while. No one comes around to sniff your chair seat. No one touches it to see if it's still warm. You are expected to act like an adult, and so is the company.

What about the bad times, when you just have to ax people and ignore the blood? That happened too. They decided together. Meetings sometimes go on for weeks there, with people drifting in and out, and hashing and rehashing ideas until they find a reasonable consensus.

It was like that when the company hit the skids some years back. The conclusion for most was to take a 38% pay cut, and make it up later with an increased share of the profits. Some people were spun off with a grubstake to start their own businesses, some retired, some went elsewhere. But there were no massive layoffs.

There was no loss of valuable staff, no slow bleed until the company was brain dead. They all pulled together, and it was their decision as a group of adults. People is all any company has anyway. Staff is all any company is. Without people who know the business, its history and philosophy, there is no business. It's not the buildings or the advertising or the bank statements. It's all people, all the time.

To give you an idea of how much Semco respects people, the company devised a custom email system. It is impossible for the company to read staff email. It was so fundamentally important to them that they wanted to ensure that it could never happen even by accident and certainly not in secret, if anyone was ever tempted to peek.

They are strong cooperative individuals working together in good faith toward a common goal. People naturally want to do, and to do well, and to do well together. That is pay.

Don't believe it? Skeptical about a smallish sausage company and some foreigners you've never heard of?

They aren't alone. There is a good article in "Fast Company" magazine from a few years back, about a company you have heard of.

"Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication. He organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams to 150 to 200 people at most."

So what?

"Pound for pound, the most innovative company in America is W.L. Gore & Associates."

Listen to Diane Davidson. "I came from a very traditional business." At first she didn't know who did what.

"I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy."

"'Who's my boss?' she kept asking."

"'Stop using the B-word,' her sponsor replied."

"'Secretly, there are bosses, right?' she asked. There weren't. She eventually figured out that 'your team is your boss, because you don't want to let them down. Everyone's your boss, and no one's your boss.'"

At Gore people are free to communicate, collaborate, and to follow up on their own ideas, just because they want to, because something might come of it. The company mixes up people in diverse groups containing researchers, engineers, designers, production workers, sales people and others.

"You're supposed to morph your role over time to match your skills. You're not expected to fit into some preconceived box or standardized organizational niche. Your compensation is tied to your 'contribution' and decided by a committee. The company looks at your past and present performance as well as your future prospects, which takes away the potential disincentive for investing time and effort in speculative projects. Gore encourages risk taking."

People go there, people work there, people stay there, and people make the company successful because they get more than a paycheck. They get true rewards. They are fully paid.

"No one has to follow. You attract talented people who want to work with you. You draw them with your passion and the credibility that you've built over time." Just like that.

In 2004, Gore was a $1.6 billion company. They must know something.

How is your job?

 

References:

How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead, by Ralph Stayer, (online) and in book form

Ricardo Semler. His books: "Maverick!", "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works", "Managing Without Managers"

"The Fabric of Creativity: At W.L. Gore, innovation is more than skin deep: The culture is as imaginative as the products.", by Alan Deutschman, Fast Company, Issue 89, December 2004

(This post originally published January 23, 2008.)

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Exceedingly not that important.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Customer Service, Where Ha' Ye Gone?

In what is now the past, I had a few interesting times dealing with reputable businesses. Hold on a sec. Maybe I should qualify that. I'd have to call one of them a formerly reputable business.

I had a hosting company, in the sense that I contracted with them for services. My first account worked out really well. They were a relatively small company that the owners had built from the ground up. They were on top of things and had created a bunch of custom features and though not a giant company had a good reputation.

I bought in. I had a few small problems, mostly due to inexperience on my part, and the service was great. I always sent a final email thanking the service technician when my problem got resolved. I figured that I owed. I figured that people like to be thanked. And I was grateful.

Times were good. My site stayed up, it worked perfectly, I added to it, and had no further problems. So after almost two years with this company, they were the obvious choice for my second site.

A few months before this I'd seen a few emails coming in about the hosting company "joining forces" with some other company. Or maybe they called it "teaming up", or something like that. I vaguely wondered if something unfortunate was going on, but since nothing seemed to be changing, I ignored it. About the only change I could see was that they were offering more services at lower prices. Whatever.

Not too very long after setting up my second account I began checking it every morning. Every now and then the site would be unresponsive. I wondered if my internet service provider or my DSL provider was having problems, but then before I could get too worked up things seemed to resolve themselves.

This happened maybe once a week for a few minutes. Then it seemed to be getting worse, but it was sporadic. I'd had some problems early on with my DSL provider, a major phone company whose telephone support had been vile. But they had been OK for several years now. I wondered if I was getting hosed by them again, or if my ISP was mucking around, though they had been dead reliable and even had helped me figure out that the phone company was lying to me when outages were really the phone company's fault.

Anyway, one day my site simply did not work. I checked everything I could. Browser OK (I had four installed). Computer on and running. Other web sites came up OK. In fact I could access any other web site that I could think of except my own site number two.

After pulling some hair out and thrashing around looking to define the problem, my site was suddenly there again. This happened several times over the following weeks. It seemed to be down about 20 to 30 minutes, and then it was back. I kept notes.

Finally one day when this was happening I submitted a support request to the web host, documenting what I'd seen. The logs for my site showed nothing and there were no reports from the hosting company, or notes in their forums.

The response I got was to let them know if it happened again. I think I ate my tongue. But after a few minutes I got back on track and let it slide.

Then a few days later it happened again. After a half hour of thrashing around checking things I saw my site come up again, but five minutes later it went down and didn't come back for another 20, so I submitted another support request. And got pretty much the same response, so I kept after them, saying that I'd at least expect them to check things and let me know what they checked, when, and supplying some proof.

I got a condescending response from someone who said he was a technical support supervisor. He mentioned a couple of things that weren't all that deep and basically let me know that they were not interested in following up on my problem.

OK fine. I love you too.

About a week after that my site disappeared again. The original site was still doing fine. I never did have a problem with that, but the newer one was down. I decided to log on to the control panel and check the logs. I don't know much about web servers and the back end stuff, but I can make some sense of it.

Except that I couldn't get there. The whole server had disappeared from the internet. I checked the company's forums for an announcement, and checked my email inbox but found no news, so I submitted another support request in case they were unaware. I got a reply that they knew there was a problem. And beyond that they supplied nothing else, ever.

A couple of days later I received an email notifying me that my request for support had been resolved, so I queried them. They said that after three days of inactivity, their system considers all support requests to have been resolved. Period. Thank you very much now go away.

Then my site went down again and so did the server. Totally gone.

I submitted another support request and asked that it go straight to a supervisor. I said I was fed up with a web site that kept disappearing, and a server that did the same and wanted some answers and a resolution.

OK, children, now it gets fun.

After some back and forth the person identifying himself as a technical support supervisor told me three interesting things.

One was that they would provide no support for application programming problems. He said that if I was having problems with my web site I should contact my developer and work things out there.

I had a contact form on my site which had been working fine, but after the server disappeared it stopped working. Cold. Dead. I hadn't touched the site in several weeks and made this clear several times. Nevertheless, this guy had to make a point of telling me not to even think of getting any help of that kind.

Up to that moment it hadn't occurred to me for the obvious reason that I had had a perfectly working site and hadn't changed a thing. It could not be my faulty code.

The second thing this guy said was that they would provide zero help configuring anything whatsoever within my account. Since I was on an Apache server on Linux, there were .htaccess files and file permissions and things to fiddle with. But I hadn't, and hadn't asked for help either.

Then the third thing I was told was that if I thought that the goofiness I had been experiencing were due to hardware, operating system or server software problems, it was my job to verify it (right, from my apartment 1500 miles away), document it, and tell them exactly what they had to do to fix their system.

And by the way, we didn't notify anyone or put the outages on our company forum because that's reserved for major outages. (He didn't answer when I said that having my server disappear was a major outage for me.)

Talk about your body slam.

So there I was, having been told that no matter where the problem was, they were not going to do anything to help. Thank you very much and please don't call again.

Luckily my first account had only about a month to run, so I found another host that looked good. I even queried one of its customers. Everything sounded OK. A little more expensive, but I could consolidate two accounts into one for about the same total cost.

So then I notified the first company that I was going to move my first account, and in case I missed the deadline I did not want my account to be automatically renewed (which they normally do). This unleashed another load of stuff that went right into the fan.

It so happens that they have no way of closing an account unless they do it immediately. Their system is set up in such a way that they cannot indicate that an account just runs out and dies. According to them. So they could either close it immediately or if I ran over they would have to bill me for another entire year and then refund me (if things worked out that way).

The information on the company wiki said something else, but they didn't accept that. I got into a major email battle and made it clear that I would consider it fraud, and fight them up one side and down the other. All that fun stuff. They kept saying that the giant robot in the back room would not listen to them. Etcetera. It was lovely.

I spent about two weeks updating the style sheets for my site (on my desktop) simplifying them and bring them up a notch or two in quality. I finished that and got my site moved over to the new host without a problem, and then managed to cancel my account with about a week left to run. Later I noticed that they had changed the company wiki to explicitly say that they could not cancel in advance.

A few weeks later I was ready to move my second site. First I had to get my domain name pointing at the new host's servers. I went into the control panel about three times and for the life of me could find no option to let me make the change.

Sounds like it's time to submit another support request. So I did, lucky me.

The reply I got was "You could change the domain nameservers via BackStage >> Domains >> [redacted].com, click on the 'Edit' button on the left and then you will be able to do that. Hope this helps."

Like I hadn't' been there.

So I replied, and told them that there was no 'Edit' button and sent a screen capture.

Of course the reply I got (from a different monkey) was "Hi, On Domains tab: [redacted].com click on that 'Edit' to change nameservers."

Lovely day in the neighborhood. Lovely.

Eventually, out of desperation I went looking around some more and accidentally stumbled on that elusive 'Edit' button under the name of the account that I had closed about a month earlier. I'm sure they never expected me to find it there, but I did.

So after gluing most of my hair back on I closed that account too, with 16 months to run. No refund of course. They'd never think of that, but I'm glad to be free, and the new hosting company is another small one, with real people working there, and it's their livelihood and they don't offer the lowest prices but they are actually on the job.

So far it's working.

Part two in this story is about a gift to my sister.

I sort of missed Xmas. I wanted to get her something. Life has been especially unkind to her since her birthday is about two weeks before Xmas, and she's been shorted all her life. Mine is in the warm months so I never had that sort of conflict. I can't understand why my parents didn't move her birthday to July instead. They muffed it and she has suffered.

So I owed her. I haven't been that good either, but now that I'm a geezer I realize I won't have another six decades to put it off. If I don't do something now, maybe there won't be a next year to make it up.

Chocolate and coffee seemed good.

I ordered some chocolate. Goofy web site but pretty good deals. Fantastic service. When you submit your order you can specify delivery options, such as an acceptable temperature range, or let them decide when it's cool enough to send chocolate, and so on.

An email confirming the order arrived shortly, then another one told me when the order shipped, and included a UPS tracking number. I followed the order and notified my sister when it had arrived, in case maybe it hadn't really. Then I got another email confirming that the order had been delivered. Everything went beautifully.

I've been buying coffee locally from a great company for 20 years. This was a good chance to share with my sister, and since the coffee company had an online store, all I had to do was order and pay, and let it all rip.

RIP. You know what that means, but I didn't get too much peace out of this one.

I selected two pounds of premium beans, then went to check out. I entered my billing info, credit card number and all that, but when I put my sister's name and address into the shipping address form the system changed the billing info to the shipping info.

I found this out after I submitted the order, on a summary screen. Too late, Jake.

I had to log on to the site (you need to set up an account in order to order) and filled out a contact form notifying them of the difference between the shipping and billing addresses (and that they were two different people). Silence.

I kept checking with my sister. No coffee.

After about a week I logged back into the coffee site and saw a note about the order having been shipped, but there was nothing else there. No tracking number, no way to follow up on anything. After 10 days my sister informed me that the order still hadn't arrived so I logged onto the site one more time and sent them a few flames. I gave them a day and a half to provide me with a definite delivery date, which had to be within the following week, or I'd have to cancel the order and demand a refund.

So then I get an email. Finally someone wants to talk.

Dear sir, so sorry. Order has been faithfully delivered. Here is fabled UPS tracking number. Please see for yourself. Meanwhile we are sending a duplicate shipment Real Soon Now just in case. So sorry please.

It was about then that my sister went snooping out in the office of her apartment complex and found that her original order had indeed arrived and gotten stuffed away somewhere. Since they hadn't notified her (as they used to do) she hadn't thought of going out digging around.

The other half of this is that if I had had a tracking number in the first place I could have told her to go look on a particular date, to verify that it had or had not actually been delivered.

So I'm a butthead. My sister is at fault for not being curious enough to look for something that she did not know was coming, and the merchant created a bad experience by being secretive about all of this. I still don't know if the second, courtesy order has even been shipped. I just logged in to the web site and the address was still wrong, about a week later. And so on.

Great coffee though.

(Original post was written in 2008 but I'm still mad.)

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Glad I forgot which hosting company that was.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Just More Corporate HR Marketing, or...

I'm still evolving. I hope you are too. It means you're alive. Possibly troubled, but alive.

I got contacted this week by what appeared to be a good employer. On the surface it appeared to be a good job and a good company. Maybe better than that, even. Maybe great.

The opening words to my reply were: "I thought I'd deleted my resume from every place it was posted, after getting spam for .Net jobs in New York City for about two months, so was surprised to hear from you. But that's OK."

The part of the recruitment announcement that caught my attention was "our development philosophy is to write software correctly the first time, without shortcuts; to build reusable components whenever possible for use across all of our development projects; and to ensure that our existing code base is our biggest asset, rather than a liability."

Yow!

Then they went on to say how one of their people was working on an Ajax tool to generate scaffolds in Ruby on Rails.

Yow! They work with Rails!

Of their 10 requirements, I met nine, but not the first, Ruby on Rails experience in production applications. I've been trying but haven't made it there yet. Possibly due to sloth. To get there, since I have no experience, I'll have to manufacture experience, by going out and finding freelance work, which then may still not qualify, in the eyes of an employer.

But what's a fella gonna do, I ask yers, what then?

I decided not to strain myself by leaping at it. The job is in an isolated city of 30,000, and the person who contacted me, the company's technology manager, has the same name as someone who went to school in that town, and has been active in posting comments about religious subjects hither and thither.

I've been lucky enough to have had lots of fun experiences in life. Among them being trapped in a small town, and working at small companies owned by families who gossip about their employees over lunch, and being approached by my boss and given religious pamphlets to read. And most fun of all, not all at the same place, so it wasn't just one scary black hole in a world full of light and the smell of roses.

Still...

Then, thinking more, several other things about this company began to worry at me with little teeth. They started in 2001 with two employees and had 60 as of a year ago. Why? Why do they need so many, and how does this mesh with precision software development? Wouldn't you expect to find people throwing things around, just to get their work backlogs down? And wouldn't you expect there to be a lot of chaos?

I think you would, no?

Thinking more, a process which may or may not be good for me, but which I can't quit (though I did give up smoking many long years ago), I began wondering what made this company special.

They have a good idea. It's sort of like a social networking site to pre-qualify contractors and bring them together with customers for home improvement work, plus some glass and automotive stuff mixed in as well. Brilliant idea, in fact. Nearly recession-proof.

But they advertise dead plain and simple, just like everyone else. When you read the ideas they lay out and think back, what you imagine is just another business. You don't think fun, quirky, imaginative and welcoming workplace where you can finally fit in and make a difference.

What you think about is all those classified ads you've read over the years that all say exactly the same thing in the same way, some better than others:

CORPORATE

Research & Development

To become a recognized leader in the food industry it takes a successful pattern of constant growth with many new and innovative projects on the horizon. A true phenomenon occurs when brilliant research minds meet the challenge of a technological society. At Star-Kist, makers of 9-Lives cat food, and Jerky Treats dog snacks, we are committed to this through the caliber of our employees. If you would like the opportunity to show what you can do, we have something for you...

Successful candidate must have experience in pet foods or low-acid canned foods...

Right. You can hardly avoid stepping in it.

So back to "my" company:

We reward ambition with a pay-for-performance plan that includes a competitive compensation package, including bonuses for meeting/exceeding performance goals.

Which, as I noted in my reply, could mean that they have a really great place, or it could be all knife fights all the time, winner take all, or it could be so-so yawn time. Can't tell. Can't see anything through the haze of HR bafflegab.

By this time, of course, I'd decided that I didn't want to drive 300 miles for an interview just to be told that they really wanted someone with paid experience, just as they'd said, so I had nothing to lose and was honest.

But I was trying to be helpful. Really. I pointed out some things like this, like how their words were really great but how they nevertheless sounded like just another PR machine. I've been burned before. You can tell, can't you?

More snooping around their web site paid off. They offer six days of vacation the first year, nine the second, and then it shoots up to 12 days and stays there forever. Six days a year? This is a cutting-edge company? I'd rather get more time off instead of a raise, or better yet, get time to do interesting things on the job with a flat two weeks a year. Never mind that Australians and Europeans expect a month, no questions asked.

What happens when a staffer exceeds expectations, say? What if I worked there, and invented a way to shave eight hours a week off the time for my tasks? What would they let me do with that extra day? Would they even think that way? Would they ever assume that the time was then mine?

Hard to say, but I bet not. I bet they grind. Grind through the work. Grind out profits. All of which is OK, but where is the payoff? What do you get for working besides enough pay to keep going? What do you get to feed your soul?

They don't say.

As I said clearly in my resume, I'm a generalist. I do lots of things, most of them well and a few exceedingly well, and am looking for a place where I can make a difference doing interesting things in a supportive environment. (Three things, count 'em.)

I think of Humanized, which I stumbled on at about that time. I got the idea that I would have liked to send them money just because they deserved it. It was clear that they were all so smart that they'd never even let me shine their shoes, but if somehow I ran into one of them at a party, I'd probably have a lot of fun, and learn so much that my head would hurt for weeks.

They presented themselves as a few people on a mission. It sounded as though they really cared about what they did and why they did it, and as though they had at least three or four major interests each, outside of their work. The message was clear and engaging. They were different.

They weren't recruiting, but if they had been, people from everywhere would have been climbing all over each other to get there. It's absolutely clear that they were not the same old whatever.

And that's why I'm still unemployed, or, um, er, still in the process of getting my company started.

Yes. That sounds much better.

Damn. Did I just outsmart myself again with all this thinking?

Ahem.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Recently nominated for something by someone, somewhere.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Getting Your Head On Straight

There is a fundamental problem in building software, and that is deciding what to build. It is fundamental because everything else rests on this one decision, and it is often overlooked, or made in the wrong way. Because everything else depends on it, you have to start at ground level, from first principles, if you want to make a sound decision.

Thinking from first principles is simple but hard. Very hard.

The need for a piece of software may come from several directions. It may arise because of a critical need of the business. Then again it may be only a perceived need. It could be an impulse, driven by one strong personality or the tide of politics internal to the business. This would not be good.

You may need software because of new laws that must be complied with, from fear of competition, or just because you're feeling a little behind and want to keep up with trends by copying everyone else.

A good reason will arise from a true need, and if carried through it may result in a real benefit to your business. If you are working from faulty principles though, you will have not only a poor foundation but a poor result.

You need to know your business through and through. And your customers. One way or another you are in business to do something for someone else, something they cannot do, or do not want to do, so they come to you. If you can deliver they will be glad to pay you what you need to get by. But you do have to keep their needs in sight.

Somewhere along the way you will have to deal with staff, even if you are self-employed. The people you directly employ are the experts in running the business. They know how things work, and when, and all of them are acutely aware of exactly everything that does not work. They are your surface of contact with customers, the membrane your business breathes through, its nerve endings.

Staying close to your customer's needs is critical, but so is anticipating where they might be going, so you need to make your decisions match the long term interests of the business. With the customers, and your staff, and the long term in mind, go for the greatest gain possible from the minimum investment, but always focusing on that "greatest gain".

Plan to start small, with something functional, something you can use tomorrow, or the day after, but don't shoot for something sometime next year. You need to start small and see how it feels, then let the software evolve and accrete over time while it's being used, and lead you to a successful end point.

Evolution is a wonderful thing, and it has a proven track record.

If you build software that your business really needs, and start small, and keep adding to it, then you will get to keep testing it every day, starting from the first day, when that software is still very small and very simple.

Daily stressing of any living thing is the best way to have it grow up to be strong. The more you use the first parts you create, the more time you will have to fill all the gaps, and build more and more strength. As time goes by, your foundation will be more than strong enough to support the whole edifice, no matter how big it gets, and the whole structure will have been thoroughly tested by time.

By starting small you will also be able to stay within your budget, and within your competence, and assess all risks. You can measure small things pretty easily, so when faced with small problems you will be able to head them off, knowing that they do exist, and knowing exactly where they are, and that they are small. You can also measure progress a whole lot better on a small project. Because it is small, it is small enough to understand.

By starting small you can also keep an eye on resources. Not just money, but time and the energy of your staff as well. Burning through your money, wasting your time, and flaming out your staff are all bad, but much less likely to happen when your project starts small and grows organically.

Then, with a little success under your belt, and because you have learned to assess risks and measure resources, you can think about going outside your areas of maximum comfort and competence and gradually branch into new areas.

But first, last, and always, you have to keep your head on straight. There are some deep pits to fall into. Maybe you don't need software at all. If you do, you will likely be better off buying something rather than building it.

If you do decide to build software, there are two attitudes you especially want to avoid. One is dismissive, and it runs something like "Why should I have to get involved? You're the computer people. You should know what to do."

The other is arrogant, and follows the rule that we all have running around in our heads, no matter who we are, that if I don't understand something, then it can't be important, so I don't have to pay attention to it.

Considering that about 80% of software projects still fail all these decades after computer programming became a thing, you really want to avoid a losing attitude. If you are going down the route of building software, then you have to be real. You have to be serious about knowing what you want, why you want it, and what it will do.

You need a real plan, you need coordination, and you have to measure everything and make sure that you are on track. You need to keep checking your sanity all the way through, and every day you need to wonder if this is really the right thing to be doing.

If you don't treat software development like a real job, it can eat you up and put you right out of business. It happens every day.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Yep.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Sheep Sheep Poo Poo

First comes the grass.

Then the sheeps.

Poo follows shortly. Endlessly. Forever.

A resource waiting for its chance to shine.

All poo really needs is a chance. A chance to show the world what it is capable of. A chance to prove its worth. A chance to reach into the note card market, bookmarks, and, yes -- air fresheners.

Creative Paper Wales is a creative paper company in Wales, wherever that is. Possibly near an ocean. Maybe on an island. An island infested with sheep.

What to do? Where to find creativity?

Ah, the sheep. Close at hand, ever churning away at the grass, veritable fountains of poo.

Creative Paper Wales, located at Twll Golau Paper Mill, Aberllefenni Slate Quarry, Snowdonia, Wales, United Kingdom, said: "Yes, we can do it." So they did.

You can too. "Making simple and attractive paper is enormous fun and remarkably easily learned. You can do it yourself with improvised home made equipment...start making your own paper at home using a kitchen blender." Presumably a spare, but who knows? You can visit Creative Paper Wales's site to find out.

And pursue answers to other questions such as "What is the furthest a sheep has ever flown, unaided?", "When faced with a 'water emergency' a sheep will...", and so on. Sounds like real fun.

Oh, and where can you buy "Rose fragranced Poo-Pourri", and so on.

No, seriously. They really do this.

Update: They really did this. Gone now. Poo is like that. Company dissolved around ten years ago. So, OK, good idea anyway. Creativity is like that.

Some images are still available if you search.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Freshly washed and all sparkly, my hands too.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Planning Madness

The idea of Information Architecture sounds pompous. Or daunting. Or impressive. Or stupid. Or something.

The truth is that the name doesn't matter, but the concepts do. Or maybe not so much the concepts but their application. So can we apply concepts without knowing about them? Sure. Performance counts. Ideas come from life and not the other way around.

Better to do something right without knowing exactly why, or even exactly what you're doing than to know all sorts of things and never do anything. Concepts always come after expertise, after people have tried things various ways, after finding that some things work and others don't. Eventually someone stops, takes a breath or two, and begins to sort things out. That's where concepts come from.

So you can go at it hammer and tongs and bang around, and get something or other done. Maybe even something that works. You have to actually do things to get work done, and doing it does it. But on the other hand you can do much better if you know the theory and apply it well.

So knowing about information architecture can help.

The term comes from Richard Saul Wurman, an architect and graphic designer concerned with presenting information, especially information about urban environments and what goes on in them. These days the term describes ways to organize information in general. How to define it, store it, retrieve it, and then use it efficiently. Information Architecture is the idea underlying good web sites.

The number one reason a web site fails to meet its mission is because that mission is never defined. Information Architecture can help. Think first, then do. That's the idea.

Sounds pretty simple but too many people prefer to fly blind. What usually happens is more like "I like this picture. Let's try building around it and see what happens." Then, later "Let's try something a little more blue." Then, later, more of the same. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the herd gets restless.

This can go on for years. I've seen it.

When computing was done on the backs of whales, in rooms the size of football fields, and cables lay on the floor like dead pythons, programming was slow and painful. Expensive. One small mistake brought everything to a halt and those warehouses full of hot vacuum tubes sat burning away millions. People learned the hard way. They developed ways to think. Ways to plan. Plans showed how to get from Start to Finish before people actually had to hit the road. They could think first, then act decisively. But there was still much flailing.

Free as birds. When desktop computers came along people figured they could wing it. No thinking needed. Just act. Try one thing and then another, unlike those old creepy guys in white shirts and ties in the glass room. Computer time was cheap.

But programmer time became expensive. And a lot of things never got finished. Because people didn't know where they were or what the destination looked like. More mess. More waste. Time and money. Gone.

Then the web. You didn't need programmers any more. Yay! Just try stuff. Anyone. Everyone. Build a web page and see how it looks. Try another. Tweak it a little until you get it right. Add fonts. More blue. More blinky stuff, maybe. You'll get it right eventually if you try enough times. For sure, dude.

I've worked on projects that ran blindly for years before being thrown away. Cost? Only a few hundred thousand, maybe a million wasted. I've known others who were on bigger projects. Thirty, forty, ninety million down the hole.

Mainframe or web site doesn't matter. Standalone desktop system deployed to several thousand users. Client server app. Web site. All the same.

Think first, then act. Define your purpose, define your goal, then proceed with caution. If you are smart and good and careful you can get the job done. If not you won't. The project will collapse, and if your business is based on success of the project, well bye-bye.

Information Architecture helps. And it isn't even special. No secret sauce. No insider information. No special handshake needed. It is nothing new.

Way back in the old days, long ago, back in the dim 1950s and 1960s people were coming up with ways to plan. A few decided that there must be a right way to do things. People like Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, Bertrand Meyer and others. Booch and Jacobson merged their methods into the Rational Unified Process, and Meyer is a fundamental thinker in object orientation who invented design by contract.

Information Architecture is the term that web designers use but it isn't unique. Maybe the web is a bit more like magazine publishing or motion picture producing than traditional software development. A bit more varied in the elements needed. But the basics are the same. Think first, then act. Get things done. Well. Completely. The first time.

From the table of contents of "Getting Real", 37Signals' book on the approach they use, their priorities are:

1. What's the big idea?: Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app.
2. Ignore Details Early On: Work from large to small.
3. It's a Problem When It's a Problem: Don't waste time on problems you don't have yet.
4. Hire the Right Customers: Find the core market for your application and focus solely on them.
5. Scale Later: You don't have a scaling problem yet.
6. Make Opinionated Software: Your app should take sides.

At first glance this looks like a seat of the pants approach but it's not. The idea, the main idea, the big idea, is to decide what you want to do and then do it. After deciding what to do you decide how, and then you do it, and when you are done you stop. And then decide if you've done it well enough.

But nowhere in their process is there any notion of "we'll just try this and see if maybe it works out somehow". The point is to have a destination, produce a map, then follow the map.

One project I was on had to take over a paper form and bring it alive in software. A committee had met for two years. To determine what questions were needed on that form. Finally, knowing that the development team was ready to go, the committee wrapped up work. "Good enough," they decided.

Then they started meeting again. They had no idea what they were up to. Didn't know where they were going or when they were done. Otherwise they could have finished the job in two weeks.

So web people call it Information Architecture. Other people use different words. But the important thing is not to waste time or money or opportunity messing around when what you really need is a plan.

Define your goal. Survey your resources. Pick your team. Build the simplest possible solution. Test it. Review it. Deploy it. Repeat as often as needed. Keep the goal and the plan and the system synchronized. Don't wander around with your mouth open.

You'll come out ahead.

I've chosen to call myself an Information Architect. I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something that informs because it is clear. I use the word information in its truest sense. I call things information only if they inform me, not if they are just collections of data, of stuff. -- Richard Saul Wurman

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Recently nominated for something by someone, somewhere.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Who, Me?

There seems to be a lack of individual responsibility around these days. Maybe that's just me. Maybe it's always been this way. Probably. Some things I don't notice so good.

I've always been surprised by how lazy and opportunistic people are. Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not as bright as I've thought, or maybe I just haven't caught on yet to the true meaning of life. Something like that. I guess that I haven't caught on to massive sloth and grabbing what's easy.

I noticed during job interviews, or even worse, while on the job, that I scared people when I told them I stood 100% behind my work. Don't know why. That seems like a good characteristic to me, but it's never flown. People get spooked. Someone once asked me if I carry a gun.

Maybe a lot of them are scared to see someone care. Most of my working life has been in state government, where, if you swing through the trees, you see a lot of sleepy apes. The entire point of a bureaucrat's life is not to do anything. If you do anything you can be blamed, but you can never be blamed for not doing any one thing. Everyone in that kind of environment understands the idea of making decisions judiciously, without question: i.e., doing nothing.

That's why it can take a year to get a stapler unless you steal one from a desk that's just been vacated.

That world works that way because there is never a positive incentive. There is no profit sharing. No bonuses. You don't get big stock options if you bet your job and a lot of company resources on a bold gamble. There is none of that, only the opposite.

Negative incentives.

What is, is. The status quo is the highest good. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." "We've never done it that way." So, try something, muck up, and the only option is punishment. ("We warned you.") Do well and you mess up the status quo. The only option for that is also punishment. Keeping up appearances is the highest good, and it's not good to make the others look bad in comparison to yourself. ("You aren't being fair to everyone else.")

I've worked with people who were demoted and moved across town into jobs they knew nothing about only because they happened to work for someone else who lost a turf war. I've seen a talented and experienced programmer given a desk and chair and nothing else, expected to sit there until he gave up and quit, only because he once spoke the truth. I know someone who, as a project manager whose project failed, was promoted fol following the rules. Right into the ground.

No change, no gain. No gain, no pain. A small promotion is about the best you can get, and failure restores quiet, enduring balance to a bureaucrat's life. A few dollars more a month from a promotion seems like a positive incentive but it's really more of a threat. You have to work harder to keep up appearances, so maybe it's not a good thing to get. And you still have to show up every day for decades until they finally have to turn you loose. No matter who you are, how good you are, if you play in this system you weather down to the same level as everyone else. You want only to get through today, and live long enough to retire. Nothing more. Trying to actually do something only causes confusion and pain.

I was a member of two different Meetup groups based around web technology. This was years ago, but both failed. At the second one, there were 71 members and only nine or 10 ever showed up at meetings. The two organizers did the presentations and the rest sat there. People kept joining. And not showing up.

So easy. So clean.

I sort of know a web developer who lost his job when the big bust came a few years back, in the times following year 2000, after the world didn't end but other things had to, so... His name was Henry Shires. In 1999 he hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, using a shelter that he designed and made himself. He did it because he wanted to. He didn't sit around waiting for someone to ask, or to give orders. He needed to do the hike for personal reasons, so he went and did it. To help him do it, he designed a shelter that was sort of like a tent and sort of like just a tarp.

Later he got into web development. I don't know much about this part of his story, but having talked to him a time or two I heard that he lost his job. It was bad all over then. Happened to lots.

Sometime later, after he'd posted his original tarptent plans, then updated them with a new model or two (all free information for the taking), I found that he was in business. Making and selling tarptents.

Now he's one of the big names in the ultralight cottage industry class. Sounds like damning with faint praise but it's really praising with no damns at all. This is tough work, in a small, low-margin, highly-competitive market, and now he has a worldwide clientele and a reputation to go with it.

This is what personal responsibility is about.

First Henry had a dream, to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. And then he went and did it.

Then he had a job, and then he didn't.

Then he created a business and made it work.

This is real web development. Henry Shires had a stake in it. He had something to gain. Web development is no longer just something for his resume. It is a vehicle for his business. He had a reason to work with that, which was to develop his business, because he liked hiking and liked tarptents. So he took on the responsibility of it all. It gave him a payback. Not like what you get when you decide to become a member of an anonymous "Show up or not. Meh." group.

Not a big story at all, but nice. A nice story. Not like clicking a link on a web page and joining a group and never showing up. First Henry showed up at life and then the world joined him, with money in their hands.

Now if only I could be so smart.

Refs:
Tarptent.com
The original Tarptent

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? I've never done it that way, I swear!

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Good, Goodest, Or Goodenough?

Bruce Mau's "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" lists 43 items.

Number two is "Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

In other words, if I may paraphrase, excellence is not guaranteed by consensus. Results are not even guaranteed by consensus. Working toward consensus may lead only to deadlock.

Take a post by primo web designer Douglas Bowman. In "Goodbye, Google", part one, he tells of his resignation, and of some reasons why. "Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

Sounds like a good reason to leave, even for Twitter, which is where he went.

Some things cannot be decided by committee no matter how much time is put in.

In my own life I've seen a clear example of this.

First I lived in a state capital, where I was closely involved with a bicycling club. At that time my life was mainly bicycling. Day, night, weekends, and holidays. I lived for three years without a car.

When something needed doing, the club talked about it and then appointed a committee to study it.

I moved to another city, one not associated with government. I drifted into the bike club there to have some human contact, and although I was not a member, and not involved in running the organization as I had been in the first city, I noticed a difference.

It was obvious.

In this second place, when the bicycle club had an issue to confront, they'd discuss it for a few minutes, and then someone would say "I'll handle it." And it was done, and it was good. And it was settled.

True. This is different from creating a design for something, but the idea transfers.

Bruce Mau Design uses the power and promise of design to create an ethical sustainable future for our studio, our employees, our clients, our community and the world in which we live; for us, it is not about the world of design, but the design of the world.

It's like speech. Free speech. Which everyone is for until it is exercised.

Free speech is what no one wants to hear, but must hear. If you aren't offended or upset or opposed to what words muss your hair and run through your ears, then you aren't in the free speech zone. Free speech is what you don't want to hear, not what you agree with.

The same goes for "acceptable", "good", "excellent", and "Oh my effin god!!!!".

Committees do not surprise. They stupefy.

Keep thinking this: "Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

It might even hurt, but it's worth it.

 

Refs:
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
alt Mau link
Goodbye, Google
alt Bowman link

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Not as smart as you think you are.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Big Government, Big Business, And Poor Little You

Government is a tool, to be used, or not, rightly or wrongly. It has no inherent value, no goodness or badness by itself, but it has great utility, and can do either great good or great harm, or both simultaneously.

It is the responsibility of citizens to control and run their government. Complaining is both useless and pointless. Complaining about something that government does or does not do is like complaining that you have five fingers on each hand and so you don't know where to have lunch. It is completely irrational.

Shrinking government, or eliminating it entirely actually means converting from public government to private government. There is never a vacuum. Government will not go away by wishing it to. There will always be someone in charge of everything. If big public government were to go away it would be replaced by big private government. At that point citizens would lose the last bit of control and decline to the level of servants.

There is no free enterprise, never has been, and never will be. It's all about power and what power can get away with. Any segment of the economy left unregulated will be controlled by those with the power to control it. Unregulated economies move to monopoly.

Business does not result in better service or lower cost through competition. The way to make money in business is to charge the absolute maximum that the market will bear. Monopoly is vastly more efficient because it does less while charging more, and does not have to think.

There is no trickle-down economy. Never has been, never will be. All economies, especially the most lightly regulated, are trickle-up. Wealth always flows from the poorest to the richest. That is how the rich get to be rich. The rich do not create wealth, they take it. If the rich created wealth then everyone would get trickled and eventually be rich because wealth would overflow endlessly.

Money is useless by itself. It has no inherent value or utility. Money is stored power, and operates only by the rules of social convention. It is useful only for what it can cause to happen. Paying for something is equivalent to using force, but more compact and cleaner — more polite, if you will. Money is also more portable than troops or weapons. Not so messy.

Wealth is always redistributed. This is what economies do, whether or not they use money. It is not wrong for a government to move wealth from one part of the population to another, nor is it right. It is only an operation, sometimes tactical, sometimes strategic, for accomplishing societal goals. If private entities accumulate wealth, that is also wealth redistribution in the form of sequestering, of concentrating power. If left unchecked then power will be concentrated enough to destroy public government and replace it with private government.

If the wealthiest 2% of Americans control as much wealth as the poorest 90%, then the other 8% constitute the middle class, and they have no real effect on the economy or on politics. Meanwhile that bottom 98% continues to grow in numbers and shrink in wealth, and power, as their real income falls. This process will take us back to feudalism, when at least 98% of the population was equivalent to farm animals, at best.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Being a smartass again. It's kind of my calling.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Little By Little, Day By Day

Want to do something? Want to do something worthwhile? Something creative? Maybe something big?

Don't try to get it done this weekend. It doesn't work like that. Sometimes it takes your entire lifetime to get it right.

In fact, usually.

Writing is like that. Writers don't get older, they get wiser, creating great work only in the course of a lifetime, and you can't do a lifetime of work in a month. Much less if you plan on it.

• Item the first: You can't plan on it, it sort of happens.
• Item the second: Even if you wanted to plan on it, you wouldn't know what to plan on.

Anyway, doing anything worthwhile takes hours, days, months, years. It shaves away the decades from your allotted time, while you sweat and doubt and struggle. And along the way you also get to throw out most of what you do. Because most of it it is not worth keeping.

So why not just copy someone?

Because they did it, not you. They did it because they loved doing it, and you can't copy love.

Not by copying the product, or the effort, or anything else. You have to be an original, and you get to be an original by sweating away what isn't unique about yourself, over years of time. You become good at something only when you become good at something, and not before.

And you don't know when that will be. Or what it will be. Or who you will be.

Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Where he doesn't quite have it is the "persistence and determination". Both important, in their way, but the real truth is, when you've found something that you can't keep away from, then you've got it.

Something that still requires the hours.

And it's fine to start small. You should start small. You have the time.

Use your spare time, free moments that you might otherwise kill. Instead of killing them, give them life by working on your secret. This is true persistence. This is passionate persistence, for a thing, a place, a person, a process. It cannot be copied.

In other words no copying, no frantic mega-projects, no frenzied "multitasking", no faking. Time must unfold in good time. Good time which allows you to become an expert at your own specialty, in a way that no one else can be.

And if you don't make it? You can't know if that will happen. You just have to try. At least if you are being true and following that passion, then you do have a genuine treasure. You have a calling.

Few will agree with what you are doing, or accord it full value, but like the Reverend Sydney Smith you will get to say "Do not assume that because I am frivolous I am shallow; I don't assume that because you are grave you are profound."

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Never too sure about myself.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Getting More

How to negotiate to achieve your goals in the real world.

This is about a book.

This is not about a book.

There is a book by this title, and I read it. In the middle I thought hey, I understand this.

Living somewhere else would be constant negotiation. Maybe this method could provide a model for understanding, for living. For not being a doofus.

Maybe.

One thing I can say is this is a pleasant book to read. I can see why it is popular. It's the anecdotes. Anecdotes all over. It may be exactly 99 and 44/100ths percent anecdotes, but who's counting? The reading is breezy.

It is a smooth ride down a wide street with wind in your hair. Everything always works. Smiles abound. There are surpluses of satisfaction.

You forget that you expected to learn "How to negotiate to achieve your goals in the real world." You get all kinds of stories, with whipped cream and a pinch of catnip for Fritz as well. You forget that some negotiations fail.

Not to complain though. This is fun, done well. The core is there, a few pages in. You have to pay attention. You can still learn it. It's there.

Stuart Diamond wrote this. He is "one of the world's leading experts on negotiation", and taught at Wharton, and Harvard, and Columbia, NYU, USC, and Berkeley, and, in Dnepropetrovsk, put his hand right on the nozzle of a nuclear-tipped missile that had once been aimed pretty technically at Minneapolis, and negotiated there.

And I haven't, and didn't, and all that. Which is cool. We can't all do everything, which in turn is a good reason to read a book like this and find out stuff. He's good at this. I'm not. I need to learn.

Here is a spoiler: you can read "How to win friends and influence people", by Dale Carnegie instead. And get mostly the same story.

They are really the same book in a lot of ways, though Dale Carnegie is more general.

Key points:

• Goals are paramount: What you want? Get that.
• It's about them: Know the pictures in their heads.
• Make emotional payments: Logic helps but feelings rule.
• Every situation is different: Flex. Adapt. Scheme.
• Incremental is best: Like dawn, bring the light with baby steps.
• Trade things you value unequally: Big, small, tangible, intangible. Barter them.
• Find their standards: That's what they stand for, right? Then they stand for it, right?
• Be transparent and constructive, not manipulative: No faking, no bluffing, no bluster.
• Always communicate, state the obvious, frame the vision: Talk. Be open, be honest, be real. Listen.
• Find the real problem and make it an opportunity: Don't get lost in the fuzz.
• Embrace differences: More perceptions, more ideas, more options make better negotiations.
• Prepare - make a list and practice with it: If you are prepared, you do well.
• The short version: Get your head on straight, figure out what you need to get, be open about it, trade things you don't need for things you do, be honest, listen, listen some more, listen even more, think, plan, build emotional connections, see things as the other side does, get to the root, get what you need, and don't be a jerk.

"Done right, there is no difference between 'negotiation', 'persuasion', 'communication', or 'selling'." See?

If not Dale Carnegie, you could instead read "Dress for success", by John T. Molloy. It's almost the same too. Or if you want, you can pick up all this on your own, though a good book hands you a framework to mull over.

So the main point is, if you are living in a new culture, then bringing deep negotiating skills may be seriously smart. Once you are there, then what? Use them. Be all you can be.

I did wonder why all the stories about getting a few cents off one thing, a free upgrade on the other, but the material comes from the author's experience, and his classes emphasize learning this way. An early assignment is to get a discount on something. Anything. Then they proceed, probably repeating the same process until it's ingrained.

I generally agree with something Bruce Burrill, a Buddhist friend, told me around 1970. Which was, you don't solve problems, you leave them behind. Me in general, I normally leave money on the table and get on with it to avoid getting neck deep in the give and take.[1]

But mine is not the only way. Probably not the smart way. I'm not smart a lot. I keep hearing that. Maybe I should learn too.

Most of of life isn't a single transaction. Life is all day, every day, in the same place, with the same people, and they like it if you learn your way in and keep negotiating.

So if you establish relationships, join a community, fit in, be accepted, be respected, and do more than just showing up, you might be doing it right.

Getting back to Bruce, I'm thinking there may be two ways to move on: by leaving or by landscaping.

I need to learn this (especially for being immersed in a different culture): quit searching for a better garden and cultivate the one you're in.

More quickies from the book:

• Always communicate.
• Listen and ask questions.
• Value, don't blame them.
• Summarize often.
• Do role reversal.
• Be dispassionate.
• Articulate goals.
• Be firm without damaging the relationship.
• Look for small signals.
• Discuss perceptual differences.
• Find out how they make commitments.
• Consult before deciding.
• Focus on what you can control.
• Avoid debating who is right.

The stories are like this (imagine it in Spanish if you like):

"It was pouring rain, and Chuck McCall had forgotten his umbrella. His office was four blocks away, and he had an important meeting in thirty minutes.

"He spotted someone getting off the same train who worked in a building a block away. He didn't know her, but he'd seen her on the train before. 'Hi,' he said 'I work a block away from you and I forgot my umbrella. Can I buy you a bagel and coffee on the way if you walk me to work? I know it's a block out of your way.'

"'I'm Chuck,' he continued. He looked up at the sky. 'It's wet. Maybe I can return the favor someday.'

"They walked to work under her big umbrella. He bought each of them coffee and a bagel. When they arrived, she told Chuck she felt good about doing this. They had each made a new friend for the train. 'What I've learned the most,' said Chuck, now the CEO of Astoria Energy, a big energy provider to New York City, 'is that being candid about what you want is a key to success in business and life in general.'

"In a world that sometimes seems full of muggers and other threats, we still have to get through the day. We have dozens of small interactions from the time we get up to the time we go to sleep. Together they can spell a life of frustration, or one of mastery and joy. Using the tools in 'Getting More', you will have a greater consciousness about the world immediately around you in a million different ways."

The fundamental business is living, and this might help with that, especially in a new culture.

 

Getting More

alt link

[1] Doofus: A person with poor judgment and taste. Dimwit. A stupid incompetent person.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Might get myself recycled soon.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals