Paul M. Jones

If you don’t give staff time to recharge their batteries, they burn out. It’s one reason why Goerlich requires his staff to put aside 20% of their time for skills development. He hit on that number back when he ran a consultancy. In those days, he’d have a certain type of consultant out billing “rock-solid” hours, flat-out, wall-to-wall.

They tended to be the young ones.

They’d last six months.

Goerlich noticed that his consultants who weren’t maxing out on hours were hitting the mark at about 60% billable hours. Those people spent about 20% of their time recharging. “Those are people that, year after year, they didn’t have high peaks, but they maintained billables in the high level--say, the top 10%--while the others were going gangbusters for six months and burning out.”

Goerlich wants his current team to match that: Put the majority of yourself into your projects, then put at least 20% aside to get training and to just plain catch your breath.

“There’s a lot of work to get done,” Goerlich said. “It’s almost like a Chinese finger puzzle: You pull too hard, and you can’t get out. You put in too many hours, you get diminishing returns.”

He hasn’t lost a key member in a tenure of five years. He credits the training regime as one of the reasons the financial services firm has a high level of IT staff retention. “I tend to have a very motivated team,” he said. “It astonishes me how much they put into the environment, into their jobs. But then, it’s very stressful to try to do work when you don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t have the confidence that you know what you’re doing, you can’t be creative.”

via I Like My IT Budget Tight and My Developers Stupid. Hat tip to Cal Evans.

Recently, I was pondering why it is that programmers and employers have different attitudes toward the quality of the projects they collaborate on. I formulated it like this:

• The people who do the work are usually the ones who care more about quality. Why?

  • They have a reputation to maintain. Low quality for their kind of work is bad for reputation among their peers. Note that their peers are not necessarily their employers.

  • They understand they may be working on the same project later; higher quality means easier work later, although at the expense of (harder? more?) work now.

• The people who are paying for the work care much less about quality. Why?

  • The reputation of the payer is not dependent on how the work is done, only that the work is done, and in a way that can be presented to customers. Note that the customers are mostly not the programmer’s peers.

  • They have a desire to pay as little as possible in return for as much as possible. “Quality” generally is more costly (both in time and in finances) in earlier stages, when resources are generally lowest or least certain to be forthcoming.

  • As a corollary, since the people paying for the work are not doing the work, it is easier to dismiss concerns about “quality”. Resources conserved earlier (both in time and money) means greater resources available later.

Dismissing quality concerns early may cause breaks and stoppage when the product is more visible or closer to deadline, thus leading to greater stress and strain to get work done under increasing public scrutiny. The programmer blames the lack of quality for the troubles, and the employer laments the programmer’s inability to work as quickly as he did earlier in the project.

Two Different Definitions

While the above analysis may be true, I realized later that I was approaching the problem from the wrong angle. It's not that one cares more about quality than the other. Instead, it is that they have two different definitions regarding project quality.

• The programmer’s “quality” relates to the what he sees and works with regularly and is responsible for over time (the code itself).

• The payer’s “quality” relates to the what he and the customers see and work with regularly and are responsible for over time (what is produced by running the code; i.e., the product, not the program).

That's the source of the disconnect. When approached in this way, "quality" as judged in one view is now obviously not the same thing as when judged in the other view; code quality and product quality are distinct from each other (although still related).

One interesting point is that the developer has some idea about the product quality (he has to use the product in some fashion while building it), but the manager/employer/payer has almost no idea about the code quality (they are probably not writing any code).

The solution to the disconnect in software development may be to involve someone who understands both sets of concerns, and who has the authority to push back against both sides as needed. Then the business as a whole can address the concerns of both sets of people.

People, including economists, are imperfect decision makers because of their mental limitations. But this fact does not mean that markets fail. Indeed, markets do far more than induce improved allocation of resources, given wants and resources. Markets induce market participants to be more rational than they otherwise would be because they must pay a price for being irrational. Thus, markets allow--no, require--economists to assume that people are more rational than they are likely to be found to be in laboratory settings, absent meaningful information and incentives and absent market pressures.

via The Volokh Conspiracy » How Markets Make Us More Rational.

Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.

Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties.  A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets.  County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket.  Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.”  (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different types and sizes are entitled to receive.)

Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.

...

Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services?

via Grocery School.

The engineering metaphor has had its time in the sun, and maybe it even used to be accurate, but now it really only serves to help non-technical people have unrealistic expectations about how software gets built.

Via You are NOT a Software Engineer! - chrisaitchison.com, hat tip to Theo Schlossnagle (who once said to me that web development is "the easy part" ;-)..

Bin Laden’s death is not, as Peter Beinart suggests in the Daily Beast, the end of the war on terror.  Unfortunately a shadowy underworld of “Islamic” terror groups continue to pose an unprecedented threat around the world.  Unlike anarchist and communist terror groups in the past, they can kill hundreds and even thousands of people at a time, and they have the ability to disrupt commerce and the free flow of people around the world.  The threat that these groups could acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction is still very much alive; we live in an era in which non-state actors can wield levels of violence on a scale once restricted to states.

This underground, with links to organized crime, is opportunistic and evolving.  New leaders will emerge, new tactics will develop, and new attacks will come.  This remains a strategic threat, and whether we admit it or not, the state of war continues. We are winning that war by degrading the capacity and depressing the elan of these groups.  They are losing their popular support in most places; a decade of growing international cooperation has made the world’s counter terror measures significantly more effective.

So to amend Beinart, we are winning this war, but it isn’t over yet.

via Bad Man Down | Via Meadia.

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States, is dead, and the U.S. is in possession of his body, a person familiar with the situation said late Sunday.President Barack Obama was expected to address the nation on the developments Sunday night.Two senior counterterrorism officials confirmed that bin Laden was killed in Pakistan last week. One said bin Laden was killed in a ground operation, not by a Predator drone. Both said the operation was based on U.S. intelligence, and both said the U.S. is in possession of bin Ladens body.

via Sources: Al-Qaida head bin Laden dead - Yahoo! News.

For the Empire to actually exist as an institution, it needs to have the mechanisms in place to exist – namely, donks like Queen Amidala and Senator Jar Jar Binks who basically just sit around and handle boring government work. And you also need people everywhere. Like, if the Emperor controls everything, he needs to make sure every Speeder Registry office in every settlement on Tattooine has somebody working the counter except during major Imperial holidays. And he needs to pay them something (they can’t all just be clone slaves – that’s clearly not how the Empire works). If you don’t pay your people, they tend to first, be lazy, second, take bribes and be likely to betray you, and third, leave their posts or actively conspire against you.

To maintain order, the Emperor would generally need a MASSIVE, MASSIVE bureaucracy. The Old Republic built up a serviceable one over thousands of years, but that took a lot of time, money and effort, and in the end it was bloated, ineffective, and ultimately subverted against the Old Republic.

The more you spend on bureaucracy, the less control you have directly over your Empire. The less you spend on bureaucracy, the more you have to tighten your grip, and the more star systems slip through your fingers.

So, the Emperor and Tarkin focus on making one really huge, high-impact investment: The Death Star.

via Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction » Print | Overthinking It.

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day....

The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.

via The Volokh Conspiracy » Victims of Communism Day.

By popular demand, here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 2 packets of hollandaise sauce mix (dry). Typically you will also need 2 cups (one pint) of whole milk*, and 1/2 cup (a whole stick) of butter to prepare it.

• 1 cup shredded parmesan or parmigiano reggiano

• 2 10oz packs of frozen chopped spinach, thawed and pressed as dry as you can (use paper towels, or squeeze through a colander).

Preparation:

1. Prepare the hollandaise sauce mix per its instructions.

2. When then sauce is ready, remove from heat; add the shredded parmesan and mix until combined and melted.

3. Add the chopped spinach, mix until combined, and return to low heat just until it is warmed through; overcooking will ruin the consistency.

Makes about 3 cups, enough for 12 quarter-cup servings (or 12 four-ounce servings).

Excellent as a side dish for a good steak.

* Whole milk, people, whole milk. None of this 2% or lowfat junk. It's decadent; deal with it.

UPDATE (2014-02-19): Use 3 packs of spinach if you want it a little less creamy. Lately I've preferred it that way.