Web Comic #3

I still have trouble believing that this is popular enough to keep it going... It seems the trip back in time is interesting to people. But, the good folks at ReadWrite keep them coming.

This time we are mostly talking about the effects of Moore's Law. You need to remember that there was a time when we had computers, but typewriters were still mechanical and programmers punched cards:

One of the ideas I had hoped to get across is that before an idea can become reality, it must first be acceptable as fiction. Even in science fiction some ideas can't be used because even science fiction fans can only giggle at them. The other idea I wanted to get across is that things are changing so fast that even science fiction isn't keeping up with reality.

The Cult of the Coffee Cup

Let's face it, coffee is the life blood of programming. Oh, you can take your caffeine in other forms, Jolt cola was very popular at one time, I know a fellow who drank Mountain Dew by the gallon. There are other, newer,  powerful stimulant drinks out there And, of course, there are people who swear by Dexedrine and Adderall. Personally I am not a fan of Dexedrine or Adderall. Speaking from experience they are bad for both your mental and physical health. 

If you are in tech at all you will have noticed that we all drink a lot of coffee and as a result there is a Cult of the Coffee Cup. Since we all drink coffee one way to exert our individuality is to own a unique coffee cup. Companies that advertise to us have learned this and give out coffee cups as trade show swag. Companies that employee us have learned the same thing and give out coffee cups as rewards for completing projects or serving on a design team or.. or.. Hey if it weren't for the desirability of coffee cup swag Cafepress.com wouldn't be in business, would they? That is what they are for? Right? How else would my wife have managed to get me a grumpy programmer T-shirt and coffee cup for Christmas?

I just recently broke my Siggraph 2000 coffee cup. I loved that cup. It can not be replaced. I have a coffee cup from a company I worked for more than 30 years ago. And another from the company I worked for before that. Coffee cups mark our time in the tech world. They prove that we were there, we did that. Sometimes they prove that we were stupid enough to work for that company or take that class.

T-shirts are used much the same way as coffee cups, and they are more popular with some people because they are much more blatant, more out there and in your face. But, lets face it, T-shirts do not age well. A 30 year old T-shirt is a wash rag, not a garment. That's why I have gone through several "You can go to hell, and I will go to Texas" Davy Crockett T-shirts. 

Ok, I figured out the Cult of the Coffee Cup while working at the University of Utah as an undergraduate. I started collecting coffee cups and trying to walk around with subtly odd cups just to see how people would react. It takes a very observant person to get a subtle sight joke. People who got the jokes, and told me about it, were worth knowing.

When I moved on from college I went to work for Sperry Univac corporation. I was working in a converted manufacturing plant with bare concrete floors, high ceilings, and metal partitions that were only a few inches higher than my desk. We were crammed in four desks to a cube. The place did not have a great work environment. But, the work was fun, the folks were mostly interesting, and my managers were actually pretty good. Not to mention that it paid pretty well for Salt Lake City in the '70s. Oh yeah, did I mention that the place had no windows? During the winter I came to work in the dark and left in the dark without ever seeing the sun.

At Univac we had access to lots of coffee. Often stale, semi cold, poor quality coffee. But, it had caffeine and it was black and it kept the brain ticking over. Of course, everyone had a coffee cup or three. A few people had unique cups, and they were admired for it. Most had pretty generic cups that looked like they had been "borrowed" from the cafeteria. 

One day I was looking for a book at the U of U book store and came across a shelf of U of U themed beer steins. One of them was shaped just like a coffee cup. This cup was unique. This cup could hold nearly a quart (US). I bought it and took it to work and started using it as my coffee cup. I had the biggest coffee cup on plant. 

That huge coffee cup messed with people heads. One day I was filling that cup and a fellow walked up, looked at the cup, and took a startled step back. I said some thing like "I'll be done in just a minute" meaning that I would be done with the coffee pot in a minute. That poor fellow said "My" then stammered "that is a big coffee cup!". To which I replied truthfully "Yes, I have the biggest one on plant." He blushed. He turned and walked away.

For some odd reason I found out later that behind my back people were referring to me as "the guy with the big one." I do not think that hurt my career at all.

Many years later I was working for the company now known as AT&T. At the time they were SBC (Southwestern Bell Corporation). There is a long story about how one of the baby bells grew up and murdered it mother company. But, I am not going to tell it here.

SBC had the coffee habit something fierce. It came by it naturally from the need to have people fixing telephone lines on high poles during blizzards on the tops of mountains. SBC believed in coffee. Really bad coffee. They also believed in coffee cups. They gave out coffee cups to acknowledge truly outstanding accomplishments. Most accomplishments only rated plaques or nice formal letters. But, on occasion, they gave out coffee cups.

I was in Seattle visiting Microsoft (weirder in person than from far away) and wound up walking through a shopping mall. The mall had a Seattle's Best Coffee shop and I got a nice double espresso there. I could not help noticing that their initials were SBC and since I worked for a different SBC I decided to see if they sold coffee cups.

SBC sells coffee cups. I found the most amazing solid black coffee cup with the letters SBC in faux gold leaf surrounded by a laurel of faux gold leaf holly leaves. It was a thing of beauty. I bought it and took it to work.

For years after that I was questioned about that cup. I was stopped in the halls by corporate executives and asked what I had had to do, who I had had to kill, to be given a cup like that? I always answered truthfully that I bought it at Seattle's Best Coffee in Seattle. The look of stunned confusion on their faces was worth telling the truth. Messing with people's preconceptions is good for their mental health, isn't it?

Don't get me wrong. I am a member of the Cult of the Coffee Cup. But, once you know about something like that, it is OK to have a little fun with it!

Vive la France!

We have all heard the sad news about the attacks in Paris. By now you might have heard that the US messed up more than a little bit by not sending someone really important to participate in the million+ person march that took place the next day. The failure to show on the part of the US is pretty hard to understand. The only thing I have been able to think of is that most of the attacks of this sort have been against countries, and the US has had our share of those attacks and our representatives thought of the Paris attacks as pretty small compared to 9/11. Yeah, that sounds good. I think I will stick with that story.

But, the new attacks were not against France. They were against basic concepts of civilization as I know it.

The attacks in Paris were targeted against basic human rights. To be specific, the rights of free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. Not to mention Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. To my mind those rights transcend any one nation or time. They are greater than the US and France and deserve a much greater reaction than does an attack on any single country.

Oh well, we definitely messed up on that one. And, you know... I hope the French cut us a little slack. No matter what our government did or didn't do a lot of Americans shed tears over those attacks. I was really hard not to write a knee jerk emotional blog post titled "We Are All Charlie". But, I decide to write something in a lower key and maybe try to tell people how I see the relationship, the deep and abiding relationship, between the US and France.

The US and France have a "peculiar" relationship. I have spent much time and too much research on trying to come up with an analogy that comes close to describing the relationship. I finally decide that the US and France act like brothers, but brothers who both think of themselves as the older wiser brother.

People say that the US has a special relationship with the UK. Fine, I suppose we do. But, it is nothing like the relationship we have with France. It doesn't take much knowledge of history to be able to justify the claim that if there were no France, there very well may have been no US. On the other hand, if the US did not exist the modern history of France would be very different. France may not have survived at all. That is a tie that goes deeper than blood. We are family, adopted brothers in a very dysfunctional family perhaps, but historically when the chips are down you do for family, and the US has always -eventually- shown up for France, and vice versa. We are both countries born in revolution against tyranny. Both countries try (really the US does try) to remember that we are dedicated to the concepts of freedom, liberty, and justice for all people of all nations.

It certainly isn't all roses between the two countries. We can always count on France to let us know when they disagree with us, just like an older wiser brother would, and every time they do some know-nothing in congress tries to change the name of "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries". But, nothing can match the way the French can sneeringly say "filthy Americans". I won't even try to represent in text a sound that only the French can make. That French sneer is high art and deserves to be respected.

I just hope that the French, and everyone else, understand that the US is in this fight. We all need all the help we can get. Watching the way the French and the rest of the world reacted to this set of attacks made me proud to be a human being. The trouble is that the other side are also human beings. This is a conflict between incompatible cultures. Those do not end well. Not well at all.

Web Comic #2

The good folks at readwrite.com have posted the next episode of the web comic based on good old grumpy me!  It is about my life as a clueless noob...

As you can tell I am soooo lucky to have met my wonderful wife! Of course, it helps that she is a geek too. She is an PE ME and she has been putting up with my cluelessness for nearly 40 years.

Did you answer the question I asked?

The last cartoon told the story of a meeting that was trying to deal with a broken schedule but the real story is about broken communication. People hear what they expect to hear. If I ask you a question and you give me an answer that sounds reasonable, I am likely to believe that 1) you understood the question I asked and, 2) you answered the question I asked. That is rarely the case, it is never the case when people are scared. The complete story goes more like this:

I was hired at a company to help them develop a new product line that required a high speed long distance data network. I had been working doing network services research for what was then known as SBC, now known as AT&T, for the last five years and was very much the right guy for the job. (Not to mention that working for the phone company made me so depressed that I had gone to a shrink for help. It was either drugs or leave SBC. I left after I found out that most of the people I worked with were on anti-depressant drugs. Working for a soul sucking evil company is bad for your health.)

After I had been working there for only three or four days I was asked to sit in on a meeting about a project that was running about three months late and that didn't look like it was going to finish any time soon. The project as planned was to take one year. They were now 15 months into the project and were starting to panic.

This was a typical "come to Jesus" meeting where the company president was asking everyone to pledge their lives to the completion of the project. They were told that the future of the company depended on the prompt completion of the project.  (In other words they were told that they either had to complete the project soon or find another job.)

After the attempt to scare his employees to death the president went around the room and asked each person to give him a completion date for their part of the project. He spent a lot of time doing this. He made them swear to the dates. Then he turned on one poor engineer who had been working for more than a year trying to solve a critical technical problem. The problem had to be solved to get the performance they were planning for. Failling to solve the problem would make the system run 50% slower. Worse than that, failing to solve the problem might mean that the process could never be made faster. That was not acceptable. They had to make it faster.

The mistake of making one highly competent person responsible for the most critical part of a project is more serious than it sounds. It puts tremendous pressure on that person. If they fail, the whole project fails. The stress can ruin a great engineer. Everyone needs to have the support of a team and feel that they can always ask for help and get help if they need it. Even the most hard core lone wolf (like me when I was younger) needs to know they can go to management and ask for help without getting put down or beat down. The worse thing that management can do is to say something like "YOU! need help? Gee, I guess you aren't as good as we thought you were." You might as well just carve their heart out and leave them dead on the side of the road. Of course, it does give the manager a perfect scape goat when the project fails.

At the end of the meeting the president turned to me and explained "I know you are not part of this project, but I want your opinion of the new schedule". "Oh shit", I thought. This is the time to either lie or lose any chance I had of making friends here. I decided to tell the truth because I wanted to work there a long time. Better to be truthful with management than to make friends. (I wound up leaving after only nine months, just ahead of the lay off that got everyone over 40.) 

The situation in the meeting was particularly touchy because I was in my late 40s and most of the people in the room were in their late 20s and early 30s. They all had graduate degrees. They had been out of school for only a few years. Most of them had degrees from schools I couldn't even dream of going to. Almost all of them were from rich families, I was not. I was 15 years older than the president of the company. The age and social class structure of the group was out of whack. That all matters more than you might think.

The project was months over due and the engineers had just committed to finishing it in four months. I was being asked to tell them if this would happen or not. I said, "no one asked any questions about how long it was going to take to test the system and integrate it into the production environment". The president looked at me oddly and so did everyone else. I went on to the president "You were asking when the system would be in production and generating revenue. But, the engineers were talking about when development would be complete". You see folks, the question they heard was "When will you be done?" but the president was asking "When will is start making money?".  The engineers all agreed with me. They were telling the president when development would be complete, not when the system would go into production. 

I went on, "Also, there is no plan for what to do if the performance problem is not solved. You need to have a plan in place in case the problem is not solved. How do you know when to punt and go with the lower performance?" The engineer responsible for solving the problem looked damned angry at that point. Tight lips, white edges around the mouth and eyes. I said to her "I am not saying you can not solve the problem. I am saying that it might not get solved in time for this system." That calmed her down a bit.The real problem was that management had never considered any of the risks involved in the project. They planned for the best possible case and never even considered what to do it something went wrong.

I went on to tell the group that I expected at least a month, mostly likely two months, of testing and performance tuning, and at least a month for integration into the production system. I went on to say that I thought it was likely to take three months after the end of development to get the system into production. All the engineers slowly nodded "yes" the president looked like he was about to blow a vein.

It took three months to get the system into production after the end of development.

I talked to the president privately. He thought they had all been lying to him. I tried to explain that they had been perfectly truthful, but they were not hearing the question he was asking. They were hearing the question they thought he was asking. And, they answered that question with perfect honesty. The president could not accept that idea. He lost trust in his development staff.

How come I could spot the problems in the meeting? I spent four years working at the help desk at my university as an undergraduate where I got a lot of experience figuring out what people were actually saying. After school various corporations put me through listening training, requirements gathering training, and interviewing training. I have been a manager and an engineers and seen the same problem in meetings I've been in before. I have seen the problem from both sides and saw the terrible results. You can sum it up as "been trained, been there, done that, have the scars to prove it".