The question is, how do the people at the top (or even the middle) get there?  How do people gain authority over others, how do they keep it, and why do the people who they have authority over listen to them?  What do they do with their power?  These all vary greatly in implementation and degree of fairness.  As you read this, please keep in mind that I don’t treat “power” itself as a bad thing.  How one gets it and what one does  with it may be, though.

Let’s start with the office.

Anyone who has worked in a company of 50 people or more has probably seen someone promoted that shouldn’t have been.  Maybe it was seniority.  Maybe it was social engineering, nepotism, or just plain sucking up to the people above them.  Sometimes the people above them see only their positive short-term accomplishments and not the damage they do to morale or other long-term costs.  Many people who quit work today do so because of bad bosses or bad working environment.  It’s hard to feel good about following someone who you don’t feel should be leading.

In a perfect world, employees follow their boss’s lead because they like and respect them more than because they are their boss.  That’s not always possible.  Good managers try to reach that state.  Others try to manage with carrots or sticks.  Nothing is as effective as having employees follow you because they want to.  That kind of power, wielded correctly, can make for a healthy business relationship where everybody wins.  I’ve worked for Managers like that, and it was great.

What about the government?

I heard a call-in discussion by some talk show hosts debating what percentage of politicians are in that field for “the right reasons”.  Estimates ranged from a measly 17% to a more optimistic 35%.  This is of course unfounded opinion with no relation to reality, but there’s no producing enough truth serum to find out for sure.  I would like to think it’s a lot higher than that, but if that’s how the people feel, then that say something either way.  When is the last time you felt strongly positive about a politician when they got out of office, as opposed to when they started?  It’s been a long time for me.  It’s been a long time since I’ve even trusted a politician I liked to act as advertised while in office.

If most people feel that way about politicians, where do they get their power from?  Only a brief look at political ad campaigns will tell you politicians move up by pushing others down.  Negative ad campaigns are the norm.  Sure, local politicians often send out postcards with their list of accomplishments, but when I’ve dug into their actual track records, many of the points on those postcards are either distortions of the truth, or a minor part of their record.

Often politicians try to hide their true record.  One blatant case that just happened is that the recent “bill to keep the federal government running” had several pork and entitlement riders attached which had nothing to do with keeping the federal government running.  Who put them there?  My least favorite politician Anonymous.  That’s right. Congressmen can anonymously attach things to bills when they’re in their committee.  That’s about as far from transparent government as you can get.

So why do we vote for these politicians?  Frankly, most don’t.  And many who do, do so out of party or cultural loyalty instead of the candidate’s own merits (which is both somewhat understandable and not entirely evil).  I myself am guilty of voting for “anyone but X”.  Is this a sound basis for a representative government?  Is it working?  What could we do to make sure that political power is meted out to those who will work for the good of their people?

All in the family

This is a scary, touchy one.  As long as there have been families, there have been power struggles, both spouse to spouse and progeny to parent.  The source of a parent’s power is clear in the beginning.  They are legally and morally responsible for their children, and have an emotional bond.  In a healthy family, when a child does as a parent asks, it’s usually more about that emotional bond than fear of punishment.  As the child grows older, they often test that authority more and more, no matter how much they still need their parents.  The nature of these conflicts change, as does the balance (and source) of power.  Just a few weeks ago I was talking to a mother who had an 8-year-old daughter that was extremely manipulative.  She always managed to get her way.  She even convinced them to have another child when they didn’t want to, because she wanted a baby brother.

The power of one spouse over another varies so widely I won’t talk about it here, other than to say that sometimes it’s a good thing.  In the best of relationships, spouses  function as partners.  They divide up the responsibilities of running the family (like a business), which leads to one spouse having more power in some areas, and the other having power in others.  Some people are just naturally better at handling the money, or the repairs, or the calendaring, or work.  Again, power over another in itself is not necessarily bad.  An imbalance of power can be (but isn’t always) bad though. We all have our weaknesses, and to the extent we rely on our significant others to help us in those areas, we willingly give them power over us.

Masculine power

This is the real reason that I am writing this post.  Someone forwarded an article to me recently about a cheerleader being sued by her school because she would not cheer for her rapist, and another one  called Redefining Masculinity.  I searched around and found several articles (here, here, here, here, and here) with similar messages.  The main point of these articles is that “masculinity” as it is defined in many cultures today, favors power derived from superior strength, aggressiveness, and risk-taking.  The Manliest Man is the one who takes what (or who) he wants.  The best athletes don’t have any problem with cheating in the game or on their spouses, and have interesting definitions of “consent”.  This is the path to misogyny, unfounded entitlement, bullying, abuse, and rape.  Almost every article that I found on the subject says that (1) There’s very little that women can do to change this that they haven’t already tried, and (2) If this is going to change, the change has to be when they are boys, particularly boys playing organizes sports.

Here’s the sad part.  I had hoped to include links to articles about men wanting to show their feelings and work things out more than in the past, and articles about women fighting against abusive men, but I really couldn’t find any recent articles from reputable sources with either theme.  Really.  Search for “men want to show their feelings”, and pretty much every match really says “Why won’t men show their feelings” or “Men should show their feelings”.  Search for “men want to show their feelings”, and pretty much every match really says “Why do woman put up with/stay with abusive men?”.  Rather than try to search deeper, or spin these articles as counterexamples, I will have to admit that we may not have made the progress in these areas as I had hoped.  Because that’s how science works.  It seems men seeking power (over women an other men) by asserting themselves over others instead of earning respect and working for equality is not quite the norm yet.

Feminine power

Women abusing their power, or deriving it in negative ways, is certainly not talked about as much as with men.  Finding articles on the subject that felt unbiased to me was a bit harder.  I did find this, this, this, this.  While it’s generally considered less prevalent (though in reality it may not be), here’s why it’s also a hard problem:

• Women more often abuse men emotionally, which is not only harder to see, but harder to even define
• “Manly men” don’t admit they’re being abused
• Men hesitate to fight back,because they know they will be seen as the antagonist, or don’t want to hurt the woman
• In the case of mother and child, there are no clear lines on what is good parenting and what is using guilt, threats, or violence to influence your child (this one, of course applies to fathers, too)
• Just like men, women may assert their power in non-productive ways like withholding sex, hurtful words, and other passive-aggressive behaviors.  These behaviors make reconciliation even harder, because they avoid or obfuscate the original source of attention instead of confronting it.  Once you get past the power struggle, you’re still left not knowing what drove the woman to that action.

Please stay tuned

I hope to get a lot of feedback on this post.  It’s certainly the longest post I’ve written in a while, and I spent hours on it.  I do want to add a section on power (and its abuse) in the workplace, and maybe one or two more sections.

©2013 /home/dkramer. All Rights Reserved.

This message applies to communication, but also the workflow itself.  Whenever you have one team “throwing it over the wall” to another team, you’re doing it wrong.  In Agile, we try to avoid that, but even if you consider the develop and test workflow as cyclical, it’s still effectively throwing it over the wall if that’s the first QA has seen of it.  Here’s another relevant article by Jurgen Appelo on how Lean/Agile will fail, just like so many other methodologies, if you don’t change how people communicate and work together.

In a recent “sprint 0″ on a new project I’m leading at work, I tried an experiment.  In addition to the normal planning meeting and story kickoff, I had another meeting about 3/4 of the way through the sprint for Testing Show And Tell.  The QA team showed the developers their test plan, and the developers showed QA what they covered, or planned to cover, in their unit tests.  This was to ensure both teams knew what to expect at the end of the sprint.  It was a big success in my eyes, because it uncovered expectations QA had that the developers had not, and that the QA plan had missed some changes to the acceptance criteria.  So much better to have that happen with a few days left than at the end of the sprint.

©2013 /home/dkramer. All Rights Reserved.

First and foremost, the more software/hardware you have, the more likely it is that some of it will have a bug.  That’s just law of averages coupled with the fact that no significant software project is really bug-free.

Then there’s the maintenance effort.  The more technology you have, the more effort needs to go into care and feeding of it.  Also the more you have to learn about.

Lastly, just how Agile teaches us to delay decision-making and development to as late as possible, because that’s the point where we know the most about what’s needed, the more technology you put in place before you need it, the harder you make it to implement what you really need when you do.

Where am I going with this?  About two weeks ago, I had a bashful server that decided not to start up again after I shut it down for maintenance.  This server handled my email, many of my websites, my MythTV recordings, and some other functions.  I had other issues with it that were equally mysterious.  Having just made an unrelated very expensive purchase,  I couldn’t just run out and drop five bills or more on new boxes.  Even if I did, that would save time, but I would still have largely the same reconstruction issue (albeit on more powerful, known-working hardware).  While it took much longer than I would have liked to get up and running again because I was doing it late at night, it could have been much worse.  Keeping it simple is what helped me.

• As a Software Engineer, not a Systems Administrator, I’ve never fully understood all the options available for RAID and LVM.  I knew if I had a crash that I would really be sunk not knowing a good deal about them before-hand, so all five hard drives in the system were JBOD.  That means I can simply shove them in another box to look at them.  For a home server that’s heavily used but doesn’t contain business data, I felt comfortable not having the redundancy that some levels of RAID offer.
• My backups are gzipped tar files copied to external USB hard drives (actually two- one at home and one somewhere else for an encrypted offsite backup).  Those backup drives are only live when I back up, so they should last a good long time.  Again, I can walk up to any other computer and extract or inspect my backups.  No need to get a baseline system up with just enough to run a restore program.
• I don’t have services running in VMs for isolation (though some are in chroot jails).

Obviously I don’t recommend these specific practices for anyone who can either take the time to use them right, or needs guaranteed uptime, but that’s kinda my point.  I’ve implemented what I need in the simplest way so that it’s easy to understand, maintain, and fix.

The same principle goes for companies, too.  I have a friend who works as a Release Engineer in a company that has such a complex tool chain that cutting a release and preparing for developers to work on the next release can sometimes take two weeks!  Most of that delay is because they’ve made things too flexible.  In order to support mixing and matching of components in ways which have never been needed before or are predicted to be needed, there are too many levels of indirection and too much separation, so they can’t just say “OK Revision 32274 in the source control system is release 4.0.  Let’s branch it….. Done!”.

A company I worked for a long time ago was effectively held hostage by the one person who knew and controlled the release process, until someone cracked the code and ended their Job Security Through Obscurity.  It was largely a manual process fraught with danger zones.  The system put in place afterwards took much less time, and was much more repeatable, because it was done using straightforward scripts instead of magic incantations.

Another group I know of has had two large server crashes, and both times, the last good backup was ancient, because the backup system was a complex mix of tarring files and transferring them from one machine to another, and no verification processes.  You might argue that the system was not complex enough because it didn’t verify the backups, but I maintain that it was too complex because that made verification hard.

The take-away from all of this is to Keep IT Systems Simple.  Learn from Agile and don’t put things in place before you need them.  Learn from POSIX and build up functionality from independently verifiable components that can be replaced as needed.  Learn from TDD and don’t put a system in place until you have a way of telling whether it’s working or not.

©2013 /home/dkramer. All Rights Reserved.

My first smartphone was a Windows Mobile 6.0 phone (bought months before Microsoft declared Windows Mobile 6.x an utter dead end), and eventually an iPhone.  But not the first iPhone.  Or even the second iPhone.  Why?  Because, as groundbreaking and powerful as they were, my research determined they were missing certain key features that I needed to do what I want, and being a relatively closed and restricted environment, those features were not going to be added on by someone else.  I did my research, and said “Not soup yet”.  How do you release a device you say surpasses anything else without cut/copy/paste??!?!?  I am very much NOT an Apple Fanboy, but why, being a Linux Fanboy, would I not go with an Android phone?  because (1) At least at the time, you couldn’t back up or sync any data with an Android phone without surrendering all your contacts, schedule, etc with Google, which is an unacceptable privacy violation to me, and (2) AT&T had modified the phones to be even more locked down than the iPhone!!!  But I wold not have known that if I just simply said “The Linux-based phone must be more open, so let me get that one”.

When the Kindle Fire was announced, I started thinking about getting that device, or something like it (7″ form factor Android device around $200 with a high quality display).  Days later the Barnes and Noble Nook Tablet was announce to be available for sale a week after the Kindle Fire, and I quickly narrowed down my choices to these two.  But the rumors and predicted specs on review sites differed enough I knew I had to wait until they were available and I could play with them.  I ended up developing a detailed, objective comparison between them, and the Nook Tablet won handily (for me. YMMV).  I got active in the Nook Tablet “hacking” community, and even started working on a wiki site on it. My research found that the boot loader was heavily locked down, and while there’s a lot of hacks to load other software and markets and customizations for it, it’s unlikely that a completely new ROM would be loaded on it any time soon.  I was OK with that, because while I wanted to do much more than originally intended with the device, I still wanted it to function as an ereader, too,

I noticed, long after the word had spread that you couldn’t [yet] replace the ROM as you could in its predecessor, that people were buying them and discovering this after the fact, and returning them.  These people had bought this device for $250 or more hoping to load the latest version of AndroidOS on it, use bluetooth keyboards, hook up external hard drives to it, and Skype their friends with it, without spending half an hour finding out whether any of this is possible (none of it is yet, though Ice Cream Sandwich is close)!

This leads to unhappy geeks.  Geeks and hackers, as a group, tend to expect the world to work they way they want it to, or at least be configurable to.  Only big corporations aren’t always on board with this.  In the case of the Nook Tablet, B&N had to lock the tablet down more than its predecessor in order for Netflix to allow streaming on it.  After the security vulnerabilities came out that allowed us to gain root access to the Nook Tablet and load software from wherever we wanted on it, B&N pushed an update to the software that closed those security holes, and that update got installed on Tablets with no warning, and certainly without consent.  There was an endless barrage of flame wars complaining that B&N should not have done that, and “how dare they”.  I would calmly point out each time that B&N was operating in their own best interests (protecting their relationship with Netflix and other companies), and it’s silly and unrealistic to expect B&N to act against their own best interest to enable a small group of people who will never buy books, movies, or apps from B&N to have their fun, any more that one would expect Apple to allow Adobe Flash on the iPhone or Ford to allow you to connect your computer to the diagnostic interface of their cars with a simple USB plug.

So here’s my message: When you’re planning on buying some sort of complicated and/or expensive item:

1. Make sure you’ve identified exactly what you want to do with it (establish acceptance criteria).  This not only helps you with your research, and help determine when you’re done with it, but it can prevent you from falsely claiming you’ve found “the perfect solution” if you really haven’t.  It also helps convey to others what you’re looking for.  Be honest with yourself.
2. Make sure you’ve made a reasonable effort to identify all possible items that could meet your needs.  “Premature optimization and/or filtering” can lead to excessive narrowing of the result set.
3. Make sure you look at both the good and bad features of each item, identifying any deal-breakers.
4. If you absolutely need a feature, and the device doesn’t have it yet, don’t assume that it will be added in the near future, or ever.  Even barring external influences like regulations and partnerships, their idea of the future of the device may be very different than your own.
5. If you can afford to wait even a week later, you will benefit from the experience of the others who were not so thorough.  Learning from other peoples’ mistakes is much cheaper than learning from your own.  Learning from other peoples’ successes can save you hour of research.
6. If you can’t find evidence either way whether the device can do what you want it to or not, don’t be afraid to ask.  And ideally, spread the new knowledge.

©2013 /home/dkramer. All Rights Reserved.

It’s often said that a broken watch is right twice a day (the joke presumes a mechanical  analog watch).  With a complex processes involving lots of parties like software development, misinformation can be much worse than no information at all, because you don’t know what you don’t know, so you make plans based on lies.  Here are some bad practices to watch out for:

• The list of requirements must be complete when the iteration begins.  Significant changes to requirements inside an iteration invalidates all the planning that went into it.  In my current day job, we’re trying to prevent this by having the UI team develop mock-ups and have them approved the sprint before the work is to be done.
• The list of tasks for a story must be complete and fully described.  I have seen iterations destroyed just because the planners forgot to task out creation of test data.  I’ve also personally experienced work stoppage because a task was insufficiently defined, and the stakeholder with the details was out of town.
• Done has to mean done.  And Done has to include the code being checked into source control, QA testing what’s in source control, and ideally integration tests.  The mindset of “It compiles, so let’s ship it” creates the worst kind of technical debt.

When I compare Agile to Waterfall to people with no Agile knowledge at all, I often compare a torpedo to a boat.  A torpedo will usually get to where it’s going quickly, but if the target moves (market changes, company changes focus, customer changes focus), or if anything does go wrong (available resources change, regulatory changes), the torpedo is most likely not going to be very effective.  It’s pretty “fire and forget”, so there’s no way to change course, or even tell that it’s no longer heading towards where the target now is.  A boat, on the other hand, moves slower than a torpedo, but is steerable and even stoppable.  It may (or may not) take more time to get where it’s going, but when it’s done it’s much more likely to be where you need it (the product does what the customer currently needs, whether that matches what the original goal or not).

If the pilot of the boat doesn’t know where the boat is or how fast it’s going, it can end up anywhere,  and just like the torpedo, the pilot won’t know until it’s too late to correct the boat’s course.

I’ll leave you with a real-world example I experienced.  A previous employer of mine developed a very large product that was really a platform to build applications from.  Each customer needed very heavy customization to make it suit their needs.  The product was designed to be that flexible.  The problem was that this process could take seven months or more before the system could pass user acceptance and we could get paid.  The company decided the solution was to develop several application templates for different target markets to use as a starting point to greatly speed up deployment.  That sounds like a sensible solution, right?  The problem is they spent more than $600,000 and close to a year to decide what those templates should be (you read that right, that’s just the market research to figure out what they should be, not the coding to develop them).  In that time, the market had totally changed, and their results no longer matched what their potential customers would need.

©2013 /home/dkramer. All Rights Reserved.

Take the aforementioned Anthony Bourdain episode.  He was in Haiti in one of the poorer areas.  He came across this woman selling food on the street.  Anthony noticed her sales were very low and she had too much food, and also that there were many hungry kids around that had no money to buy food.  He talked to the producer, who authorized him to buy her whole supply at full-price and give it out for free to the kids.  Win-win, right?  Wrong.  What ensued was massive fighting over the food, with kids whipping and beating up other kids over who would get the food.  In the end the strong and violent ones got the food, not the most needy.  I’m not trying to criticize Haiti, or even human nature, but point out an example of big change having unintended consequences that helping on a smaller level might not have had.

The book Switch contained an example of a health organization trying to decrease malnutrition in Vietnam with almost no budget and very little cooperation from the local government.  Instead of trying to solve the problems of food distribution, clean water, safe waste disposal, and hygiene, they did a study of what was different about the poor families who were not suffering from malnutrition, and spread those practices (it turned out that doing small changes like feeding kids the same amount of food but four times a day instead of two, and adding a little bit of crab and vegetable to their rice, was enough to make a huge difference).

Here are some personal examples:

• At a recent job, our software build system was “a bit finicky”, required several steps to do common tasks, and required the same command line parameters again and again.  I could have lobbied for changing the build system, but there was political/emotional commitment to keeping it the way it was.  Rather than tilting at windmills and not getting anywhere, I developed an environment that wrapped those commands, putting all the required steps into simpler commands, and reading the required parameters from environment variables.  I then advertised it and helped others use it too.  Immediate benefit for myself and others, without the political casualties.  At that same job, I spent a fair amount of time documenting what I learned on the intranet wiki as I learned it (I was the first developer they hired in years, so there wasn’t a culture of documenting things the newbies would need), so others that came after me wouldn’t have to go through the same discovery process of mind melding with the Elders.
• At my current job, our cafeteria uses disposable Styrofoam trays and cups, plastic utensils, and cardboard plates.  In order to reduce my ecological footprint, I bought a plastic tray at Target for $2 and brought in a plate and metal utensils from home.  I just did this a week ago, so nobody has done the same yet, but several have stated that they want to.  I could have petitioned them to switch to plastic trays and real plates, but even if they were willing, they don’t have the facilities or manpower to wash them all.  Instead of waiting for that big change, I am doing what I can now, and leading by example.  I also turn my monitors completely off overnight (the computer has to stay on in case I need to remote in from home).
• I tend to tip big.  I’ve worked in the restaurant industry (both in corporate and in the restaurants), and understand what those people are going through.  Most people don’t even know their salary is minimum wage less their expected tips.  Yes, if their customers tip poorly, they can make less than minimum wage.  Having been blessed with the desire and ability to work in the software industry for a long time now, I try to spread the wealth a bit.  Sorta like Robin Hood, but I’m stealing from myself
• Before donating to charities, I research just how much of the money goes towards the cause.  You would be totally shocked if you found out how much money went into just running some of the very large, very popular charity organizations out there.  In fact, some charities even spend money suing other charities.  Others don’t actually spend that much on solutions to their cause.  Do your research to make sure your money goes to what you want it to.  Or help directly.  That’s one reason I tip big.  Anyone working in a customer-facing service industry job needs help, even if it’s a little.  Even if it just makes up for those that don’t tip well.
• I volunteer for four different not-for-profit groups (one related to helping unemployed people, one related to Agile software development, one related to Linux, and one as part of my religious institution).  There are many reasons why getting involved with groups like this can benefit both you as well as the group (networking, new knowledge and skills, sense of accomplishment, etc), and these are all communities I feel strongly about helping.  All of these groups are trying to help others in the small ways that they can.  In many ways, the unemployment group is much more helpful than the federal or state groups, because they focus on people helping each other and giving out fishing poles instead of fish (small amounts of money the Division of Employment and Training are going to give you for training is not going to do as much good as a group that helps you handle tough interview questions and polish your elevator speech).

Maybe the tendency to do small changes now instead of waiting for big changes comes out of my Agile background, with its short iterations and active tracking of blockers.  Maybe it comes from my strong tendency for action over inaction.  Or maybe it’s just because I’m an impatient New Yorker.  Most of the time, though, hindsight has shown that course to be the right one.  So please, if you want to save the planet (or just your family, your job, or your sanity), strive for small changes you can do today.

©2013 /home/dkramer. All Rights Reserved.