Social Glass

The philosopher in me found this interesting.  Alan Watts, a famous British philosopher, talks about nothingness:

I have come to loathe these removable seal covers that come with Netflix envelopes.  I have them lying all over the place in my house.  Garbage cans are always inconveniently distant when I take these things off in order to ship my DVD back to Netflix after watching it.

Yes, I’m lazy.

I’ve been reading a book called “Managing Humans” by Michael Lopp.  Michael is a Software Development Manager, and his book is more anecdotal than anything describing his experiences managing people and the conclusions he’s come to as a result.  They teach you in “Management Class”, as you climb the corporate hierarchy, that Software Development Managers should put away their IDEs and stop coding.  As the thinking goes, the temptation is just to great to dive in and write code to fix a problem when, instead, that problem should be delegated to those being managed.

I’m at a point where I manage Development Managers.  And I’ve made “stop coding” a goal for many of them.  They struggle with this.  And frankly I miss programming too.  I miss creating tangible output each day.

So back to Managing Humans.  Michael points out that he was wrong to tell his managers to put down the code.  Instead, he says it’s important to keep programming.  It’s important to stay up to date on new technology.  It’s important to understand the source control system, the IDE, the build process that the team is subjected too.

And frankly, I like the idea of being more like Alexander the Great.  He was in charge of half the known world in his time and yet he went charging into battle, with his troops, sword in hand.

Or how about this analogy.  In Cricket, the Team Captain (akin to a Manager in Baseball), plays with the team.  He bats.  He fields.  And sometimes he bowls (pitches).  But he also manages his team orchestrating them around the field strategically, or instructing them to swing away or bat more defensively.

I decided earlier this year that I would dust off my home computer system and get code fit once again.  While the opportunity isn’t there at work, I thought I’d create my own opportunity and launch Kompilr.  Kompilr is a small website, running in Ruby on Rails, that allows people to visualize their careers.  My Kompilr is http://www.kompilr.com/jeremythomas, for example.  Through this experience I’ve shot right back into relevancy.  I know how to do an automated deployment with Capistrano.  I understand why GitHub is so awesome.  I know how to write client-side libraries to integrate with Oauth providers.

So to all you Software Development Managers out there, code on.  Don’t listen to anyone who tells you to stop.  Software is your passion, it’s what you’re good at.  0.003% of the world’s population can write code.  Use your skill to create new things and inspire your teams.

Here’s a video I put together for my teams at Active.com:

Inspired by an article in the December issue of The Economist about business cliche words, I thought I’d add my own phrase to the list.  And that phrase is “from a ______ perspective”.  It is ludicrous how often I hear that phrase in my professional life .  A marketer, for example, might be giving a talk and say:

“From a consumer acquisition perspective we’re at our goal.  We need to strive harder to hit our goal from an ad impression perspective.  But we’re on the mark from an overall perspective”.

There are several other words that can substitute “perspective”, namely “standpoint” and “regarding” (if placed before instead of after the point being made).  But more importantly, we need to be more creative about how we deliver our thoughts.  We might rewrite the talk above to read:

“From a consumer acquisition standpoint we’re at our goal.  We need to strive harder to hit our ad impression goal.  But overall, we’re on the mark.”

This is a bit more succinct.

The other phrase I’ve noticed people saying recently is “your guys’s”, as in “What is your guys’s release date?”.  A piece of the linguist in me dies every time I hear this phrase. It would be better to say “What is your release date?”, where “your” implies “all of you”.

What are other work phrases that you hear?