Sunday 31 December 2006

2006 Year End Thoughts

Can't believe another year has come and gone. It seems like only yesterday that I wrote the 2005 Year End Thoughts, and only a few days ago that I came back to China and started my career in Exoweb. Time really does fly when you are having fun, and I certainly have been having a great deal of fun in the last few years. Sometimes stressful and sleepless fun, but fun all the same :)

General summary of thoughts:

Things that I am happy about:

  • Exoweb
    • Teams improving, growing
    • Culture
  • Personal
    • Facing the different challenges over the last year
    • Learning to delegate

Things that need to be improved:

  • Exoweb
    • Giving back to FOSS
    • Creating a continuous learning culture

  • Personal
    • Working with people

Goals for 2007:

  • Make self (almost) redundant
  • Teach, not do
Things that I am happy about - Exoweb

Teams improving and growing - This last year has really seen a dramatic growth in the quality of the people within Exoweb. While continuously improving our HR process has helped us get some really good people, the major change has been the steady improvement of people already within Exoweb. There are various reasons for this but ultimately, I believe it is because we have finally passed a critical mass of smart people and everyone is now learning from each other. Processes/practices such as code reviews, ExoForums and blogging have helped encourage the sharing of information and it appears to be self-perpetuating. People are demanding high standards from each other and everyone brings in their own knowledge and skills. My primary concern is no longer raising standards but knowing when to step aside and let people more knowledgable than me figure things out.

Culture - building a good company culture isn't easy and I'll be one of the first to admit that I haven't really got the faintest clue how to go about it. Culture building is all about people and people skills aren't my greatest strength. Perhaps it is because I'm so clueless about culture building that I'm amazed that Exoweb has somehow produced (possibly by accident) a relaxed, open culture that many people find really attractive and unique. It's not perfect by a long shot and there's still so much more we can improve. Yet it is quite gratifying to hear people tell me that they find the culture of Exoweb one of the key selling points of the company and that they have never worked in a better place. Not everyone feels that way of course, but enough do. Personally, I've never worked with a better bunch of people, in a more comfortable environment. I am naturally biased though.

Things that I am happy about - Personal

Facing and Surviving the Challenges of the 2006 - 2004 and 2005 had different, lower level challenges for me. I joined Exoweb in 2004 as a senior team lead, so my main concern then was ensuring the success of a project with a small (5 devs total) team. The challenges then were a lot simpler! 2005 brought the challenge of maintaining quality in a team that was growing too large for me to personally review all code. 2006 was quite different - Exoweb continued to grow and the challenges that came up daily kept changing. The early part of 2006 was a battle to figure out how to scale technically. Or rather, how to ensure that the things I used to do still were being done when it was becoming obvious that one person could not possibly do it all.

The technical aspect of that problem was solved in early to mid 2006, among other things by the growing abilities of the team and instituting a more scalable version of code reviews (we created a cool trac plugin for this). This had the most fortuitous side effect of promoting learning even more from each other. With a great team that is continuously learning, most of my earlier technical challenges faded away.

Late 2006 was more an issue of scaling Project and Human Resources (HR) management responsibilities. The funny part was that as my team got better (and larger), the seniors within the team came to the conclusion that they did not want to do either PM or HR work, pushing all that to me. As a result, the workload in this aspect grew a lot faster than the team did in 2006. Surviving the PM aspect was done by the fine art of delegation (more about that later) while the HR aspect is still a serious work in progress.

Ultimately, I'm happy that I survived all the challenges of 2006. Ken in 2005, looking at these challenges, would have been quite intimidated. It was a good idea that I went into 2006 blind to the challenges ahead :). Looking back, I can certainly see many areas I could have done things far better but at least I can say that I haven't made an absolute mess of things.

Learning to Delegate - Every book about management talks about how one needs to delegate. Yet they tend to gloss over how to delegate. One thing I quickly learned long ago was that if you just pass a task to someone and hope that they will do it right, 90% of the time things turn out badly. It took some experimentation and trial and error, but in the end, my great lesson in 2006 was realizing that it all boiled down to figuring out who I could delegate what to. Everyone is different, with different strengths and weaknesses. The challenge was to find someone (or combination of people) that had the right strengths to do the task on hand. Not a skill I am strong at (more later about this), so it was harder than it should have been. But as I write this today, I have a good team that functions very well together, with most of the critical tasks covered and working well together.

Yes, I realize this may seem blindingly obvious to some people but it wasn't that obvious to me.

Things that need to be improved - Exoweb

Giving back to FOSS - Despite being strong believers and users of Free/Open Source Software, we don't contribute back nearly enough. Sure, some of us personally have done some work in FOSS advocacy or have code contributions here and there. However, as a company, I am still quite dissatisfied with what we have contributed back. Besides contributing server space (python.cn, Beijing LUG, etc), software usage, bug reports and a few patches here and there, we have given very little back to the ecosystem that makes our business model possible. Despite having people who profess to genuinely believe in FOSS, despite having a contribute back policy and allocating a percentage of developers time to such activities, too little is contributed back. This is something that we will have to focus more on in 2007.

Creating a continuous learning culture - Possibly because most of the seniors of Exoweb possess either the Learner or Input talents (see First Break All The Rules), we tend to expect that everyone will be like us - given the opportunity, will always try to learn and improve themselves. Unfortunately, that is not really the case. Some really talented software developers don't seek out knowledge for the sake of learning but are satisfied with learning only what is required to complete their task. Or despite the best intentions, they need a little external pressure. So despite having a 10% time self-improvement/contribute back policy in Exoweb, too many people do not take advantage of this. Yet continuous learning is a vital aspect of continuously improving the abilities of the organization.

Things that need to be improved - Personal

Working with People - I've touched on this previously, but I'm basically much better at computers and hardware than people. To me, computers seem so predictable - given a fixed input, they typically produce a fixed output. Humans are so much more variable, with too many factors to consider. Yet management is about people, not about computers. According to the Peter Principle, I'm quickly rising to my level of incompetence :)

However, the level of understanding of people I'm looking for might be a bit higher than most. The ability to figure out a person's strengths and weaknesses and combine them with other people/processes that complement their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses is a very rare talent. If you look at most management practices today, they are built to solve this talent shortage. Most large organizations have processes that cater to the lowest common denominator - they allow the organization to survive mistakes made by less competent people, but they get in the way of the truly talented hitting their full potential. We sometimes call that bureaucracy.

Most managers are either poor at or unwilling to manage individuals. It is hard to manage individuals - you have to really understand your team and know how to combine them to achieve maximum results. Most prefer to assume that every human being is interchangeable, that one person can be swapped for another without problems. This only works if you are using people at the lowest of their abilities, so that the job can be done by almost anyone. It does not work when you are trying to make the most out of everyone's unique combination of strengths and talents.

This will probably be my primary challenge in 2007 - to become competent at managing individuals.

Goals for 2007

Make myself (almost) redundant - I have delegated a large amount of my work to others already. I hope to finish this in 2007. Might be a while before I can delegate all the HR management aspects, but all the technical and project management aspects should be possible within 2007. I certainly hope to organize things so that I can go on a month long vacation and no one would notice :)

Teach, not do - One thing that is really hard for me - delegating tasks to someone else instead of just rolling up my sleeves and getting it done in a couple of hours. Only problem is that there are only so few hours in a day and so many problems that need to get resolved. Making myself redundant requires that I restrain myself from digging into problems and instead focus on teaching/guiding others to take over from me. Teaching is a large investment of time - it is always faster to do it yourself than to teach. But without this investment, the organization will never scale.

2007 looks like it will be bringing quite some challenges, many in areas where my strengths do not lie. Still, I wouldn't have it any other way. Life isn't fun without challenges and I can't think of a better team of people to face the unknown with than the crew of Exoweb. Happy New Year everyone!

Thursday 28 December 2006

Time To Turn In My Geek License

Apparently, I'm spending too much time doing management and turning into a PHB. No one seems to think I'm technically competent anymore. Some recent conversations:

While training a junior project manager:

Me: "So remember, with new tickets, ask a technical senior to help you estimate how many hours are required to complete the task ..."

A few days later, during the usual morning meeting discussing what tickets to create, prioritize, etc:

Me: "... so I think we should put this task in Milestone x, priority critical, estimated time 8 hours"

Jr: "Ok, sounds good. I'll go get an estimate from senior x and take care of it."

Me: "Wha ... didn't I just give you an estimate?"

Jr: "Yes, but you said I needed an estimate from a senior ..."

While showing a relatively new developer the rankings of everyone in Exoweb:

Me: "... and here we have the mid-levels devs, split in 3 sub levels. Finally, these are the seniors ..."

Dev: "Wait, you're considered a senior?"

After relating the above two incidents to yet another developer:

Me: "... so apparently they don't think I'm a senior anymore ..."

Dev: "Well, if you don't tell them, it's not obvious ..."

If anyone wants me, I'll be out getting a haircut, buying some suits and gaining a lot of weight ...

Tuesday 5 December 2006

KISS (or why MS CS students have a bad time in interviews ...)

It's that time of the year when Master's students are hunting for jobs in China and we are flooded with resumes from students with Masters of Science in Computer Science (MScCS). We've spent the last couple of weekends interviewing the candidates that passed the front interviews and it has not been pretty. In fact, it has been pretty sad.

The biggest problem we encounter with MScCS grads is made very apparent in how they approach one of the our typical programming problems. This particular problem is fairly simple and with a little bit of thought, can be made into a linear (computer performs x more calculations for every element added to n, where x is a constant number) or O(n) type of equation. Most competent people will come up with a O(n^2) algorithm (computer performs n operations for every additional element added to n, resulting in rapidly increasing number of calculations per element added) to it at first, then after a little thought, realize that there are a lot of duplicated operations, refactor that out and come up with the linear solution.

MScCS are a little different - almost all the ones we have interviewed to date encountered this problem, probably came up with the O(n^2) equation ... then went off the deep end. They would inevitably come up with complex, fancy algorithms that utterly failed to solve the problem. These fancy algorithms would often handle the common case but fail on the boundary cases. They were fragile, easily tricked or prone to failure. When these flaws were pointed out, these candidates would come up with even more complex algorithms or add a lot more if/else checks ... resulting in even more brittle and unreliable code. None of them, if unaided, could come up with the ideal solution.

Well, that's not really true. One particular candidate, after coming up with 4 complex, unworkable algorithms, finally said, "well, since you have given me such a tight time limit, I have no choice but to brute force it." He then proceeded to give the ideal solution. Linear time, handles all boundary cases. But he would rather give 4 non-working solutions rather than the working, "inelegant" solution.

What I find strange and rather disturbing about these interviews is that it is somehow related to the mindset of those who are doing their MScCS. Bachelor level grads or people with several years of working experience rarely make this mistake. They either do it right or not at all. Yet for some strange reason, the MScCS students seem to value fancy algorithms over _working_ algorithms.

Maybe it's the MScCS curriculum here in China which tries to focus on fancy algorithms. Maybe it's just that the MScCS feel the need to prove that their abilities are above the norm for CS graduates. Maybe we just have incredibly bad luck with our candidates. Whatever the reason, extremely few MScCS fresh grads have passed our interviews. As you can imagine, in a production environment, we highly value working code and eschew the fancy algorithms, especially algorithms that needlessly complex. Simplicity and correctness is far more important in our craft.

The famous quote attributed to Brian Kernigham comes to mind:

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

When writing algorithms, another quote from Agile development comes to mind - "do the simplest thing that can possibly work." Keep It Simple ... er, let's call it Keep It Stupidly Simple (KISS) and avoid insulting anyone :)