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May
2

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What Your Job Descriptions Are Saying to Developers About Your Company

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: | 11 Comments

Every week I get a fairly steady stream of emails from recruiters, announcing an opportunity for some software development related job: engineer, programmer, senior developer, architect, and so on and so forth. These emails come in all shapes and sizes and, probably owing to my eclectic, polyglot background, they cover a range of different technologies and programming languages. One relatively common characteristic is that below the actual text of the email is pasted a job description. More often than not, I read this (or at least start to) out of general curiosity as to the state of the market. Some of them are reasonable and straightforward, making me think that the company in question would be a good, or at least decent, place to work. But others contain things that I’d call red flags.

Extrapolating beyond what gets sent to me via secondhand emails and generalizing to job boards and sites and other places where companies solicit talent (I can’t speak directly to these since I haven’t looked at them in quite a while), I think companies would be well served to consider what their job descriptions say to developers about them. It may not always be what’s intended. Consider some of the following characteristics of a job description and what they imply about the job.

Alphabet Soup of Technologies

“We favor and value superficial exposure and grandstanding over depth of knowledge and thoughtfulness.”

If your job description lists ten, twenty, even thirty (they get pretty ridiculous) different acronyms covering a smattering of programming languages, markup types, development methodologies, design patterns, and things that may not even actually exist, you’re sending the message that you value prospects that engage in a kind of bedpost-notching gamificiation when it comes to programming. If you stop and think about it, how would a developer acquire experience with all of those different technologies? Would you prefer he cram them all into a single project? Would you prefer that he pick or lobby for two to three new ones for each project he does and do a lot of projects? Would you prefer he never work on the same thing twice?

If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then you’re actively putting on the front porch light for people more concerned with playing with new toys than getting work done (like Fashionista). If the answer is “oh, well that’s not what we’re saying” then you’re asking the impossible. And you’re apparently targeting the sort of people who consider “I think I read a blog post about that once” a qualification for adding it to their resume. That leads to the hire of General Custer. So with this kind of ad, you’re targeting a group dynamic where people value breadth over depth of knowledge and are willing to exaggerate or even lie about either.

Emphasis on Years Spent on Particular Technologies

“We work harder, not smarter.”

Do you need someone that’s been banging out Java code for at least seven years? It has to be seven? Not six? If I’m at six and a half, should I follow the “always round up” method or the “round to even” method? I need to know so that I’ll know whether or not I’m qualified to program for you. I can round up? Great! Oh, wait. It says need four years of XML (whatever that means) and I only have three. I feel so inadequate. Unless… can I count non-contiguous years? I’m pretty sure that I “did XML” for a while about eight years back. Yessiree–I came into the office, day after day, and did XML. In fact, I think it was the same file, even. I did nothing but create the same XML file by hand every day for months, so that’s got to count for a lot, right?

WorkHarder

Here’s the thing. You don’t actually want people who have “done Java” or “done XML” or “done whatever” for X years. What you actually want is people who are good at Java, XML, or whatever, and you mistakenly think that a good measure (or at least indicator) of that is how many years they’ve spent doing it. The problem is that this assumes that people acquire skill at the same rate, which is demonstrably false. It also assumes that they are spending all of that time improving, which, I would argue, becomes increasingly improbable with each additional year of experience. Certainly there are people who simply like working with a technology and wouldn’t have it any other way, but if you find someone who has been banging out Java code day in and day out for a decade, it might occur to you to ask them things like, “why aren’t you a lead or manager or architect or something?” The answer might be that they love having their hands on the keyboard, but it also might be (not said, of course) “I’m just not good enough at it to achieve anything besides not being fired.”

Are those the people that you want to hire? Probably not, but are you that confident that you can cull them out in an interview when the stakes are pretty high? As an awesome saying goes, you run the risk of hiring not a Java developer with ten years experience but a Java developer with the same one year of experience ten times. If you want talent and achievement, what you should actually want is people who are good at programming and design in general. It really doesn’t even matter what language(s) the developer knows if she’s good, and it certainly doesn’t matter how many years she’s been cranking out code in it. But if you start focusing on years/tech metrics, you’re going to get candidates optimized for that–you’re going to have a department dominated by worker bees who’ve been churning out innovation-free code for decades.

Applicants will Take a Forty-Five Question Test

“However extensive your previous experience, you’ll always be junior to us.”

What you ask candidates to do resonates with them beyond the interview process and into their employment; it sets the tone for what their tenure will be like. And what do you think it says to them when you give them something reminiscent of an SAT subject test? It says, “alright young student, if you can pass this standardized aptitude test, you are deemed worthy of learning at the feet of our esteemed senior developers.” Standardized tests and the hiring process are both necessarily reductionist activities, since they involve culling a very large percentage of potential applicants down to a much smaller percentage, but there the similarities end. Standardized tests are administered by nameless teachers, graded by faceless graders, and judged by admissions officers the students will never know.

Standardized job application quizzes are administered by internet or hiring authority, graded by the same, and judged by the same. If the applicant doesn’t score an 80% or whatever is necessary to move on, then no big deal. But if they do wind up hiring on, it will be with people to whom they’ve submitted to a student-professor/grader/administrator/gatekeeper relationship. That person can always point out at any time during your tenure that you didn’t know when filling out your scantron that the C# compiler will not choke on “virtual public void MethodName.” I recognize that this could be claimed to some degree with any method of candidate evaluation, but nothing says, “you’re no different than an entry level kid” like simulating the kinds of standardized testing that most people haven’t done in years or decades.

NervousTestTaker

%Phases%SDLC%

“We’re embarrassingly waterfall and we don’t know how to fix it.”

Companies that are proud of waterfall development methodologies come right out and tout it as their way of doing things (or they call it something like “Rational Unified Process”). That’s not going to be ideal for a lot of top talent, and it might even be a deal-breaker for some of them, but at least it seems self-aware. If you swap this frank assessment for the rather meaningless term “SDLC” (short for “Software Development Lifecycle”), it says that you don’t actually want people to know your software development methodology is. Be honest–if this is on your job description, and a candidate asks whether or not your process is agile as part of the “questions from the candidate” section, how are you going to respond? My money is on hem, haw, and make a comment about how you’re “in the process of getting a little more agile but we kind of *ahem*, that is, ah, we’re kind of still somewhat, er mostly waterfall.” Why do I say that? Well your “SDLC” says, “kinda-sorta-maybe-something-other-than-waterfall,” but your “phases” says, “really, really waterfall.”

HiddenWaterfall

The reason that I say this is more of a bad sign for candidates than “waterfall and proud” is that “waterfall and proud” indicates that there is purpose and belief in that process, making it somewhat more likely that things are stable and sane. In smaller shops or places that do small fixed bid types of projects, for instance, you can probably have some success with a waterfall approach. Candidates recognize that (or else they’re simply unaware that there’s an alternative to the waterfall “procrastinate-rush” way of doing things). But if you hide your waterfall behind vague acronyms, it tells candidates that you’re aware that your process is far from ideal but you haven’t done anything about it. From this, candidates can only infer that you’re lazy/sloppy when it comes to process or else that you’re not competent when it comes to process. Neither one exactly rolls out the welcome mat for top-notch talent.

If you want to describe your development methodology and it isn’t something simple like “Scrum” or “XP,” I’d suggest asking for experience with exactly what you want: probably design, implementation, and stabilizing/sustaining. Whether your approach has “phases” or “sprints” or whatever, it’s going to have those activities, so you may as well list them by name. Rightly or wrongly, SDLC has drifted from being a way to describe software in different states of development and has come instead to describe a process that’s hard to pin down and even harder to follow. You don’t want to broadcast that, true or not.

Be Prepared to Answer Some Real Brain Teasers!

“We think we’re MENSA” or “We think we’re Google” (which thinks it’s MENSA)

Applicants get it. You want to hire clever people. You want to hire people that think outside the box. Literally. And not only that, but you want to demonstrate that you think outside the box by asking non-programming or heavily algorithm-related questions when gauging whether candidates think outside of the box. It would be so in the box to ask programmers questions about programming or to have them program. You’re looking for some kind of box-thinking-outside synergy where everyone has their secret puzzle decoder ring and the cliches flow like box wine.

MensaDude

To you, it looks selective. To most people, it just looks gratuitously self-congratulatory. If you actually are a Google or another respected tech titan and you have the rep to back it up, applicants will prostrate themselves and tolerate this silliness for a chance to punch their ticket with your name on their resume. But if you’re Acme Inc. and you specialize in making shoelaces, you’re threatening to drive away serious talent and be left with goofballs, word-game enthusiasts, and trivia experts more interested in standing behind metaphorical velvet ropes as VIPs than doing high quality work. Unless your business model is this, you’d be better served to hire people who can write code than people who know how to measure exactly four gallons using three and five gallon jugs.

So Then What To Say?

If it seems as though I’m impossible to please, I’m really not. In fact, just having these things in your job description in no way means that what I’ve said is true about your company–it just means that this is the vibe you’re giving off. But if you want to give off a better vibe, I’d suggest a simple description of what the job’s responsibilities are and what would be necessary in order to do that job successfully. There’s no number of years or soup of technologies that do that–what does it is something like this: “we’re looking for Java web developers who are familiar with IoC containers and can meet deadlines with minimal supervision.” No gimmicks, no window-dressing on potentially unfavorable realities, and no weird, degrading exams.

So then how do you go about separating the wheat from the chaff during the interview process? Without exception, the places I’ve found that seem best at doing this are the ones that dole out actual programming assignments. It’s one of those things that is apparently so blindingly obvious that most don’t think of it; if you want to determine whether someone can complete programming assignments, give them one to complete. If you try to interview developers the way you would project managers, middle management, salespeople, etc., it’s kind of crapshoot. A developer that’s very good at memorizing trivia about the compiler or reciting the benefits of object-oriented programming may not actually be able to program. A standard, two hour interview with the trivia lightning round, followed by classic tradeoff-type questions, will not uncover this nearly so well as asking the person to spend five to twenty hours coding up some sample assignment.

If that’s not practical for logistical reasons or because of hiring particulars at your institution, you might at least ask for code samples to evaluate. Or perhaps you could spend a few hours pair programming with the candidate or doing a code review of open source code. Whatever you do, though, the important thing to remember is that you want to send the message to developers that you’re looking for people who are competent and demonstrate as much when asked to do so. By all means, evaluate and select based on other important criteria–personability, communication skills, organization, etc. But what you’re looking for, at the core of it, are people who are going to be efficient and competent developers. So when you roll out the welcome mat for them in the form of a job description, consider the first impression that you’re making. Ask yourself if you think it’s one that will intrigue those efficient and competent developers.

Apr
29

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The Narrative of Mediocrity

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: | 9 Comments

I was defeated. Interested in getting off to a good start and impressing, I had overachieved in the course by working hard and studying diligently to make a good impression. And yet, when the first essay was returned to the class, mine had a big, fat B staring back at me, smug with the kind of curves that are refreshingly absent in a nice, crisp A. I didn’t understand how this had happened, and the fact that none of the other students had received As either was cold comfort. I’d sought to impress, but the teacher had put me in my place.

I got an A in that class. I actually don’t remember which class it was any longer because it happened in a number of them. It happened in high school, college, and graduate school. I started off a B student on subjectively-graded assignments and ‘improved’ steadily for the duration of the course until I wound up with an A. Many of my peers followed the same trajectory. It was a nice story of growth and learning. It was the perfect narrative…for the teacher.

What could be better than a fresh-faced crop of students, talented but raw, eager to learn, being humbled and improving under the teacher’s tutelage? It’s the secondary education equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting. It gives the students humility, confidence, and a work ethic, and it makes the teacher look and feel great. Everyone wins, so really, what’s the harm in the fiction? So what if it’s a bit of a fabrication? Who cares?

Well, I did. I was a relentless perfectionist as a student and this sort of evaluation drove me nuts. I sought out explanations for early B’s in classes where this happened and found no satisfaction in the explanations. I raged against the system and eventually cynically undercut it, going out of my way to perform the same caliber of work in the before and after pictures, doggedly determined to prove conspiracy. My hypothesis was confirmed by my experiments–my grades improved even as my work did not–and my triumphant proof of conspiracy was met with collective yawns and eye-rolls by anyone who actually paused long enough to listen to me.

I learned a lesson as a child and young adult about the way the academic world worked. Upon graduation from college, I was primed to learn that the business world worked that way too.

The Career Train

There are a lot of weird symmetries, quirks, and even paradoxes in the field of macroeconomics. It’s truly a strange beast. Consider, for instance, the concept of inflation, wherein everyone gets more money and money becomes worth less, but not necessarily in completely equal proportions. We’re used to thinking of money in a zero-sum kind of sense–if I give you ten dollars, then I am ten dollars poorer and you are ten dollars richer. But through the intricacies of lending and meta-transactions surrounding money, we can conceive of a scheme where we start with ten dollars and each wind up with six dollars some time later. And so it goes in life–as time goes by, we all have more money (at least in lending-based, market economics). If things get out of whack and everyone doesn’t have more money as time goes by, you have stagnation (or deflation). If things get out of whack the other way, you wind up with runaway inflation and market instability. They system works (or at least works best) when everyone gets a little more at a measured, predictable, and homogeneous pace.

The same thing seems to happen throughout our careers. We all start in the business world as complete initiates, worth only our entry level paychecks, and we all trudge along throughout our careers, gradually acquiring better salaries, titles, accessories, and office locations. Like a nice but not-too-steep interest rate, people have an expectation of dependable, steady, slight gain throughout their career. Two promotions in your twenties is pretty reasonable. Managing a team by your mid thirties. A nice office and a VP or director title in your later forties, and perhaps a C-level executive position of some kind when you’re in your fifties to sixties. On average, anyway. Some real go-getters might show their prodigious talents by moving that timeline up by five years or so, while some laggards might move it back by the same amount, topping out at some impressive but non-executive title.

Okay, so I know what you’re thinking. You want to shout “Mark Zuckerberg!” at me. Or something along those lines–some example of a disruptive entrepreneur that proves there is a different, less deterministic path. Sure, there is. People who opt out of the standard corporate narrative do so at large risk and large possible reward. Doing so means that you might be Zuckerberg or that Instagram guy, but it means that you’re a lot more likely to be working in your garage on something that goes nowhere while your friends are putting in their time in their twenties, getting to the best cubicles, offices, and corner offices a few years before you do. By not getting on the train when all your friends do, you’re going to arrive later and behind them–unless you luck out and are teleported there by the magic teleportation fairy of success.

So forget the Zuckerbergs and the people who opt out in the negative sense and never get back in. Here in corporate land, the rest of us are on a train, and there’s not a lot of variance in arrival times on trains. If you get right to the front of the train, you may get there a few minutes early, but that’s all the wiggle-room you get. The upside to this mode of transportation is that trains are comfortable, dependable, and predictable. A lot of people prefer to travel this way, and the broad sharing of cost and resources make it worth doing. It’s a sustainable, measured pace.

Everyone Meets Expectations

They don’t stop two trains on the track so that people who are fast and serious about going fast can sprint to the next train. It may be good for a few, but it would enrage the many and throw the system out of whack. That applies to trains, and it applies to your performance reviews. The train runs on time, and the only question is whether you’re in the front (exceeds expectations) or the back (meets some expectations). If you’re perennially in front, you’ll get that C-Level corner office at fifty, but perennially in back, and you’ll just be the sales manager at fifty.

Seem cynical? If so, ask yourself this: why are there no office prodigies? In school, there were those kids who skipped a grade or who took Algebra with the eighth graders while their fellow seventh graders were in Pre-Algebra. There were people who took AP classes, aced their SATs, and who achieved great, improbable things. What happens to those outliers in the corporate world, if they don’t drop out and go the Zuckerberg route? Why is there no one talented enough to rocket through the corporate ranks the way there was in school? Doesn’t that seem odd? Doesn’t it seem like, by sheer odds, there should be someone who matches Zuckerberg as a twenty-something wunderkind CEO by coming up through the corporate world rather than budging back in from entrepreneur-land? Maybe just one, like, ever?

I would think so. I would think that corporate prodigies would exist, if I didn’t know better–if I didn’t know that the mechanism of corporate advancement was a train, a system designed to quite efficiently funnel everyone toward the middle. You might exceed expectations or fail to meet them at any given performance review, but on a long enough timeline, you meet expectations because everyone meets expectations. It’s the most efficient way to create a universal and comfortable narrative for everyone. That narrative is that all of everyone’s work and achievement through life has built toward something. That the corner office is the product of forty years of loyalty, dedication, and cleverness. After forty years of meeting expectations, you, too, can finally arrive.

This isn’t some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. This is transparently enforced via HR matrices. All across the nation and even the world, there are corporate policies in place saying that level six employees can’t receive two promotions before level seven employees receive one. It wouldn’t be fair to pay Suzy more than Steve since Steve has three more years of industry experience. Organizations, via a never-ending collection of superficially unrelated policies, rules, regulations, and laws, take a marathon and put it on a single-file people-mover.

scan0009

Wither the Performance Review

So if I had a parallel experience with a manufactured narrative in school and the corporate world, how to explain grade-skippers and AP-takers? Simple. In school, the narrative occurs for the benefit of the teacher on the micro (single quarter or semester) level. In the work world, it occurs for everyone’s benefit for the rest of your working life.

So why do organizations bother with the awkward performance review construct? Well, in part because it’s necessary to make justifications about issues like pay, position, and promotions. If people receive titular, “career-advancing” promotions every three to four years, a review is necessary in the first year to tell them that they need to “get better at business” or something. Then in the second year, they can hear that they’re making “good strides at business,” followed in the third year by a hearty congratulations for “being great at business,” and, “really earning that promotion to worker IV.” Like a scout earning a merit-badge, this manufactured narrative will be valued by the ‘earner’ because it supplies purpose to the past three years, even if the person being reviewed didn’t “get better at business” (whatever that means). But the other purpose is providing the narrative for the reviewers. If the reviewers’ reports started out “bad at business” and ‘improved’ under his tutelage, his own review narrative goes a lot better, and so on, recursively, up the chain. What a wonderful world where everyone is helping everyone get better at a very measured pace, steadily, over the course of everyone’s career.

But just as I railed against this concept in school, so do I now. I’ve never received sub-standard reviews. In general annual review parlance, mine have typically been “exceeds expectations but…” where “but” is some reason that I’m ‘not quite ready’ for a promotion or more responsibility just yet. Inevitably, this magically fixes itself.

So what if we did as Michael O. Church suggests and simply eliminate the performance reviews along these lines? Poof. Gone. I don’t know about you, but I might just find a “we’re not promoting you because that’s our policy” refreshingly honest as compared to a manufactured and non-actionably vague piece of ‘constructive’ criticism. (This is not to be confused with a piece of feedback like “your code should be more modular,” or, “you should deliver features more quickly,” both of which are specific, actionable, and perfectly reasonable critiques. But also don’t require some kind of silly annual ceremony where I find out if I’m voted onto Promotion Island or if I’ll have to play again next year.) I certainly don’t have an MBA, and I’m not an expert in organizational structuring and management, but it just seems to me as though we can do better than a stifling policy of funneling everyone toward the middle and manufacturing nonexistent deficiencies so that we can respond by manufacturing empty victories. I can only speak for myself, but you can keep the guaranteed trappings of ascending the corporate ladder if you just let me write my own story in which my reach exceeds my grasp.

Apr
23

By

Guerilla Guide to Developer Interviews

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 1 Comment

Over the course of my career I’ve done quite a number of technical interviews, and a pretty decent cross-section of them have ended in job offers or at least invitations to move on to the next step. That said, I am no expert and I am certainly no career coach, but I have developed some habits that seem pretty valuable for me in terms of approaching the interview process. Another important caveat here is that these are not tips to snag yourself an offer, but tips to ensure that you wind up at a company that’s as good a fit as possible. Sometimes that means declining an offer or even not getting one because you realize as you’re interviewing that it won’t be a good fit. On any of these, your mileage may vary.

So in no particular order, here are some things that you might find helpful if you’re throwing yourself out there on the market.

Avoid the Firehose

Programming jobs are becoming more and more plentiful, and, in response to that demand, and contrary to all conventional logic about markets, the supply of programmers is falling. If you work as a programmer, the several emails a week you get from recruiters stand in not-so-mute testimony to that fact. If you decide that it’s time to start looking and throw your resume up on Dice, Monster, and CareerBuilder, your voicemail will fill up, your home answering machine will stop working, and your email provider will probably throttle you or start sending everything to SPAM. You will be absolutely buried in attempts to contact you. Some of them will be for intern software tester; some of them will be for inside sales rep; some of them will be for super business opportunities with Amway; some of them won’t even be in your native language.

DrinkFirehose

Once you do filter out the ones (dozens) that are complete non-starters, you’ll be left with the companies that have those sites on some kind of RSS or other digital speed dial, meaning that they do a lot of hiring. Now, there are some decent reasons that companies may do a lot of hiring, but there are a lot of not-so-decent reasons, such as high turnover, reckless growth, a breadth-over-depth approach to initial selection, etc. To put it in more relatable terms, imagine if you posted a profile on some dating site and within seconds of you posting it, someone was really excited to meet you. It may be Providence, but it also may be a bit worrisome.

The long and short of my advice here is that you shouldn’t post your resume immediately to sites like these. Flex your networking muscle a bit, apply to some appealing local companies that you’d like to work at, contact a handful of recruiters that you trust, and see what percolates. You can always hit the big boards later if no fish are biting or you start blowing through your savings, but if you’re in a position to be selective, I’d favor depth over breadth, so to speak.

Don’t Be Fake

When it comes time to the do the actual interview, don’t adopt some kind of persona that you think the interviewers want to see. Be yourself. You’re looking to see whether this is going to be a fit or not, and while it makes sense to put your best foot forward, don’t put someone else’s best foot forward. If you’re a quiet, introverted thinker, don’t do your best brogrammer imitation because there’s a ping pong table in the other room and the interviewers are all 20-something males. You’re probably going to fail to fit in anyway, and even if you don’t, the cultural gulf is going to continue to exist once you start.

And above all, remember that “I don’t know” is the correct answer for questions to which you don’t know the answer. Don’t lie or try to fake it. The most likely outcome is that you look absurd and tank the interview when you could have saved yourself a bit of dignity with a simple, “I’m not familiar with that.” But even if this ruse somehow works, what’s the long-play here? Do you celebrate the snow-job you just pulled on the interviewer, even knowing that he must be an idiot (or an Expert Beginner) to have fallen for your shtick? Working for an organization that asks idiots to conduct interviews probably won’t be fun. Or perhaps the interviewer is perfectly competent and you just lucked out with a wild guess. In that case, do you want to hire on at a job where they think you’re able to handle work that you can’t? Think that’ll go well and you’ll make a good impression?

If you don’t know the answers to questions that they consider important, there’s a pretty decent chance you’d be setting yourself up for an unhappy stay even if you got the job. Be honest, be forthright, and answer to the best of your ability. If you feel confident enough to do so, you can always pivot slightly and, for instance, turn a question about the innards of a relational database to an answer about the importance of having a good DBA to help you while you’re doing your development work or something. But whatever you do, don’t fake it, guess, and pray.

Have the Right Attitude

One of the things I find personally unfortunate about the interview process is how it uniquely transports you back to waiting to hear whether or not you got into the college of your dreams. Were your SAT scores high enough? Did you play a varsity sport or join enough clubs? Did you have enough people edit your essays? Oh-gosh-oh-gee I hope they like me. Or, really, I hope I’m good enough.

Let me end the suspense for you. You are. The interview process isn’t about whether you’re good enough, no matter how many multiple choice questions you’re told to fill out or how much trivia an interviewer sends your way in rapid fire bursts of “would this compile!?” The interview process is ultimately about whether you and the company would be a good mutual fit. It isn’t just a process to help them determine if you’d be able to handle the work that they do. It’s also a chance for you to evaluate whether or not you’d like doing the work that they give you. Both parts are equally important.

So don’t look at it as you trying to prove yourself somehow. It’s more like going to a social event in an attempt to make friends than it is like hoping you’re ‘good’ enough for your favorite college. Do you want to hang out with the people you’re talking to for the next several years of your life? Do you have similar ideas to them as to what good software development entails? Do you think you’d enjoy the work? Do you like, respect, and understand the technologies they use? This attitude will give you more confidence (which will make you interview better), but it also sets the stage for the next point here.

Don’t Waste Your Questions

In nearly every interview that I’ve ever been a part of, there’s the time for the interviewer to assess your suitability as a candidate via asking you questions. Then there’s the “what questions do you have for me” section. Some people will say, “nothing — I’m good.” Those people, as any career site or recruiter will tell you, probably won’t get an offer. Others will take what I believe is fairly standard advice and use this time as an opportunity to showcase their good-question-asking ability or general sharpness. Maybe you ask impressive sounding things like, “what’s your five year plan,” or, “I have a passionate commitment to quality as I’m sure you do, so how do you express that?” (the “sharp question” and “question brag,” respectively).

I think it’s best to avoid either of those. You can really only ask a handful of questions before things start getting awkward or the interviewer has to go, so you need to make them count. And you’ll make them count most by asking things that you really want to know the answer to. Are you an ardent believer in TDD or agile methodologies? Ask about that! Don’t avoid it because you want it to be true and you want them to make an offer and you don’t want to offend them. Better to know now that you have fundamental disagreements with them than six months into the job when you’re miserable.

As an added bonus, your interviewer is likely to be a pretty successful, intelligent person. She’s probably got a fairly decent BS detector and would rather you ask questions to which you genuinely want to know the answers.

Forge your Questions in the Fires of Experience

So you’re going to ask real questions, but which questions to ask… My previous suggestion of “ones you want the answer to” is important, but it’s not very specific. The TDD/agile question previously mentioned is an example of one good kind of question to ask: a question which provokes an answer that interests you and gives you information about whether you’d like the job. But I’d take it further than this.

Make yourself a list of things you liked and didn’t like at previous jobs, and then start writing down questions that will help you ferret out whether the things you liked or didn’t will be true at the company where you’re interviewing. Did you like way your last company provided you with detailed code reviews because it helped you learn? Ask what kinds of policies and programs they have in place to keep developers current and sharp. Did you not like the mess of interconnected dependencies bogging down the architecture of the code at your last stop? Ask them what they think of Singleton as a design pattern. (I kid, but only kind of.)

You can use this line of thinking to get answers to tough-to-ask questions as well. For instance, you’re not going to saunter into an interview and say, “So, how long before I can push my hours to second shift and stroll in at 2 PM?” But knowing things about a company like dress code, availability of flex hours, work-from-home policy, etc. is pretty valuable. Strategize about a way to ask about these things without asking–even during casual conversation. If you say something like “rush hour on route 123 out there seems pretty bad, how do people usually avoid it,” the next thing you hear will probably be about their flex hours policy, if the company has one.

Negative Bad, Zero-Sum Fine

Another piece of iconic advice that you hear is “don’t talk badly about your former/current employer.” I think that’s great advice to be on the safe side. I mean, if I’m interviewing you, I don’t want to hear how all of your former bosses have been idiots who don’t appreciate your special genius, nor do I want to hear juicy gossip about the people at your office. Staying upbeat makes a good impression.

That said, there is a more nuanced route you can travel if you so choose, that I think makes you a pretty strong candidate. If I’m interviewing you, I also know that your former positions aren’t all smiles and sunshine or you wouldn’t be sitting in front of me. When talking about past experience, you can go negative, but first go positive to cancel it out.

My current employer has some really great training programs, and I’ve enjoyed working with every project manager that I’ve been paired with. That’s contributed to me enjoying the culture–and feeling a sense of camaraderie, too. Of course, there were some things I might have done differently in our main code base, from an architectural perspective. I’d have liked to see a more testable approach and an IoC container, perhaps, but I realize that some things take time to change, especially in a legacy code base.

Now you’ve communicated that you recognize that the architectural approach to your code base was sub-optimal, but that you maintain a positive attitude in spite of that. Instead of the interviewer hearing, “man, those guys over there are procedural-code-writing cretins,” he hears, “some things were less than ideal, and I’d like them to improve, but I grow where I’m planted.”

Gather your Thoughts

After you’re done, stop and write down what you thought. I mean it. Walk out of the building, and in your car or on a nearby bench, plop down and write your impressions while they’re fresh in your mind. What did you like, what worries you, what questions should you follow up with, what specifics can you cite? Things will be fuzzy later, and this information is solid gold now.

Your brain is going to play weird tricks on you as time goes by and you’re considering an offer or the next round of interviews. Something that struck you as a red flag might be smoothed over in your mind as you grow increasingly tired of your job hunt. I know they said that they’re as waterfall as Niagra and proud, but I think the tone of voice and non-verbal cues might have indicated a willingness to go agile. You’ll fool yourself. You’ll talk yourself into things. That is, unless you write them down and bring them up as concerns the next time you talk with the company or a representative thereof.

Maintain Perspective

Interviewing is an inherently reductionist activity, both for you and for the company. Imagine if marriage worked like job interviews. The proposition would be put to you and your potential mates this way:

Alright, so you have have about two or three cracks at this whole marriage thing before you’re too old for it, so take your time and make a good decision and all that, but do it really fast. You’re going to meet for lunch, a little Q&A, and then you’ll have just enough time to send a thank-you note before you hear thumbs up or thumbs down from your date. If it’s thumbs up, you have a few days to decide if the prenuptial agreement looks good, if you have similar opinions on when to have children and how many, yadda-yadda, and hurry up, and, “do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded, blah, blah, you may now kiss, etc., whatever, done.

Think a few important details might get missed in that exchange? Think you might be left after an inexplicable rejection, stammering, “b-b-but I know how to cook and I really have a lot to offer… why… I just don’t get it.” It’s pretty likely. There are going to be a lot of bad decisions and the divorce rate will be pretty high.

Back to the interview process, just remember to keep your chin up. You might have interviewed for a job that had already been filled except for the detail of technically having to interview a second person. Maybe the CEO’s son got the job instead of you. Maybe you wore a gray suit and the man interviewing you hates the color gray with a burning passion. Maybe you had a lapse when talking about your WPF skills and said WCF, and someone thinks that makes you a moron. The list goes on, and it often makes no sense. It makes no sense in the way that you’ll look at a company’s website and see a weirdly blinking graphic and think it looks unprofessional and decide not to apply there. You make snap judgments, and so do they. It’s the name of the game. Don’t take it personally.

Apr
15

By

What Drives Waterfall Projects?

Category: Anti Patterns, The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

To start off the week, I have a satirical post about projects developed using the waterfall ‘methodology.’ (To understand the quotes, please see my post on why I don’t think waterfall is actually a methodology at all). I figured that since groups that use agile approaches and industry best practices have a whole set of xDD acronyms, such as TDD, BDD, and DDD, waterfall deserved a few of its own. So keep in mind that while this post is intended to be funny, I think there is a bit of relevant commentary to it.

Steinbeck-Driven Development (SDD)

For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure to read John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” any SDD practitioner will tell you that it’s a heartwarming tale of two friends who overcome all odds during the Great Depression, making it cross-country to California to start a rabbit petting zoo. And it’s that outlook on life that they bring to the team when it comes to setting deadlines, tracking milestones, and general planning.

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Relentlessly optimistic, the SDD project manager reacts to a missed milestone by reporting to his superiors that everything is a-OK because the team will just make it up by the time they hit the next one. When the next milestone is missed by an even wider margin, same logic applies. Like a shopping addict or degenerate gambler blithely saying, “you gotta spend money to make money,” this project manager will continue to assume on-time delivery right up until the final deadline passes with no end in site. When that happens, it’s no big deal–they just need a week to tie up a few loose ends. When that week is up, it’ll just be one more week to tie up a few loose ends. When that week expires, they face reality. No, just kidding. It’ll just be one more week to tie up a few loose ends. After enough time goes by, members of the team humor him with indulgent baby talk when he says this: “sure it will, man, sure it will. In a week, everything will be great, this will all be behind us, and we’ll celebrate with steaks and lobster at the finest restaurant in town.”

Spoiler alert. At the end of Steinbeck’s novel, the idyllic rabbit farm exists only in the mind of one of the friends, shortly before he’s shot in the back of the head by the other, in an act that is part merciful euthanasia and part self-preservation. The corporate equivalent of this is what eventually happens to our project manager. Every week he insists that everything will be fine and that they’re pretty close to the promised land until someone puts the project out of its misery.

Shooting-Star-Driven Development (SSDD)

Steinbeck-Driven Development is not for everyone. It requires a healthy ability to live in deluded fantasy land (or, in the case of the novel, to be a half-wit). SSDD project managers are not the relentless optimists that their SDD counterparts are. In fact, they’re often pretty maudlin, having arrived at a PM post on a project that everyone knows is headed for failure and basically running out the clock until company bankruptcy or retirement or termination or something. These are the equivalents of gamblers that have exhausted their money and credit and are playing at the penny tables in the hopes that their last few bucks will take them on an unprecedented win streak. Or, perhaps more aptly, they’re like a lonely old toy-maker, sitting in his woodshop, hoping for a toy to come to life and keep them company.

This PM and his project are doomed to failure, so he rarely bothers with status meetings, creates a bare minimum of power points, and rarely ever talks about milestones. Even his Gantt charts have a maximum of three nested dependencies. It’s clear to all that he’s phoning it in. He knows it’s unlikely, but he pins his slim hope to a shooting star: maybe one of his developers will turn out to be the mythical 100x developer that single-handedly writes the customer information portal in the amount of time that someone, while struggling to keep a straight face, estimated it would take to do.

As projects go along and fall further and further behind schedule and the odds of a shooting star developer become more and more remote, the SSDD project manager increasingly withdraws. Eventually, he just kind of fades away. If Geppetto were a real life guy, carving puppets and asking stars to make them real children, he’d likely have punched out in an 19th century sanitarium. There are no happy endings on SSDD projects–just lifeless, wooden developers and missed deadlines.

Fear-Driven Development (FDD)

There is no great mystery to FDD projects. The fate of the business is in your hands, developers. Sorry if that’s a lot of pressure, but really, it’s in your hands.

The most important part of a FDD project is to make it clear that there will be consequences–dire consequences–to the business if the software isn’t delivered by such and such date. And, of course, dire consequences for the business are pretty darned likely to affect the software group. So, now that everyone knows what’s at stake, it’s time to go out and get that complex, multi-tiered, poorly-defined application built in the next month. Or else.

Unlike most waterfall projects, FDD enters the death march phase pretty much right from the start of coding. (Other waterfall projects typically only start the death march phase once the testing phase is cancelled and the inevitability of missing the deadline is clear.) The developers immediately enter a primal state of working fourteen hours per day because their very livelihoods hang in the balance. And, of course, fear definitely has the effect of getting them to work faster and harder than they otherwise would, but it also has the side effect of making the quality lower. Depending on the nature of the FDD project and the tolerance level of the customers for shoddy or non-functional software, this may be acceptable. But if it isn’t, time for more fear. Consequences become more dire, days become longer, and weekends are dedicated to the cause.

The weak have nervous breakdowns and quit, so only the strong survive to quit after the project ends.

Passive-Aggressive-Driven Development (PADD)

One of the most fun parts of waterfall development is the the estimation from ignorance that takes place during either the requirements or design days. This is where someone looks at a series of Visio diagrams and says, “I think this project will take 17,388.12 man-hours in the low risk scenario and 18,221.48 in the high-risk scenario.” The reason I describe this as fun is because it’s sort of like that game you play where everyone guesses the number of gumballs in a giant jar of gumballs and whoever is closest without going over wins a prize. For anything that’s liable to take longer than a week, estimation in a waterfall context is a ludicrous activity that basically amounts to making things up and trying to keep a straight face as you convince yourself and others that you did something besides picking a random number.

Well, I broke this task up into 3,422 tasks and estimated each of those, so if they each take four hours, and everything goes smoothly when we try to put them all together with an estimate for integration of… ha! Just kidding! My guess is 10,528 hours–ten because I was thinking that it’d have to be five digits, the fve because it’s been that many days that we’ve been looking at these Gantt charts and sequence diagrams, and twenty-eight because that was my number in junior high football. And you can’t bid one hour over me because I’m last to guess!

But PADD PMs suck all of the fun out of this style of estimation by pressuring the hours guessers (software developers) into retracting and claiming less time. But they don’t do it by showing anger–the aggression is indirect. When the developer says that task 1,024, writing the batch file import routine, will take approximately five hours, the PADD PM says, “Oh, wow. Must be pretty complicated. Jeez, I just assumed that a senior level developer could bang that out in no more than two. My bad.” Shamed, the developer retracts: “No, no–you’re right. I figured the EDI would be more complicated than it was, so I just realized that my estimate is actually two hours.”

Repeated in aggregate, the PADD PM is some kind of spectacular black belt/level 20/guru/whatever metric is used to measure PM productivity, because he just reduced the time to market by 60% before a single line of code was ever written. Amazing! Of course, talk at the beginning of the project is cheap. The real measure of waterfall project success is figuring out who to blame and getting others to absorb the cost when the project gets way behind schedule. And this is where the PADD master really shines.

To his bosses, he says, “man, I guess I just had too much faith in our guys–I mean, I know you hire the best.” To the developers, he says, “boy, your estimates seemed pretty reasonable to me, so I would have assumed that everything would be going on time if you were just putting in the hours and elbow grease… weird.” To the end-users/stakeholders, he says, “it’s strange, all of our other stakeholders who get us all of the requirements clearly and on time get their software on time–I wonder what happened here.”

There’s plenty of blame to go around, and PADD PMs make sure everyone partakes equally and is equally dissatisfied with the project.

Apr
8

By

Up or Not: Ambition of the Expert Beginner

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: | 11 Comments

In the last post, I talked about the language employed by Expert Beginners to retain their status at the top of a software development group. That post was a dive into the language mechanics of how Expert Beginners justify decisions that essentially stem from ignorance–and often laziness, to boot. They generally have titles like “Principal Engineer” or “Architect” and thus are in a position to argue policy decisions based on their titles rather than on any kind of knowledge or facts supporting the merits of their approach.

In the series in general, I’ve talked about how Expert Beginners get started, become established, and, most recently, about how they fend off new ideas (read: threats) in order to retain their status with minimal effort. But what I haven’t yet covered and will now talk about is the motivations and goals of the Expert Beginner. Obviously, motivation is a complex subject, and motivations will be as varied as individuals. But I believe that Expert Beginner ambition can be roughly categorized into groups and that these groups are a function of their tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

Wikipedia (and other places) defines cognitive dissonance as mental discomfort that arises from simultaneously holding conflicting beliefs. For instance, someone who really likes the taste of steak but believes that it’s unethical to eat meat will experience this form of unsettling stress as he tries to reconcile these ultimately irreconcilable beliefs. Different people have different levels of discomfort that arise from this state of affairs, and this applies to Expert Beginners as much as anyone else. What makes Expert Beginners unique, however, is how inescapable cognitive dissonance is for them.

An Expert Beginner’s entire career is built on a foundation of cognitive dissonance. Specifically, they believe that they are experts while outside observers (or empirical evidence) demonstrate that they are not. So an Expert Beginner is sentenced to a life of believing himself to be an expert while all evidence points to the contrary, punctuated by frequent and extremely unwelcome intrusions of that reality.

So let’s consider three classes of Expert Beginner, distinguished by their tolerance for cognitive dissonance and their paths through an organization.

Xenophobes (Low Tolerance)

An Expert Beginner with a low tolerance for cognitive dissonance is basically in a state of existential crisis, given that he has a low tolerance for the thing that characterizes his career. To put this more concretely, a marginally competent person, inaccurately dubbed “Expert” by his organization, is going to be generally unhappy if he has little ability to reconcile or accept conflicting beliefs. A more robust Expert Beginner has the ability to dismiss evidence against his ‘Expert’ status as wrong or can simply shrug it off, but not Xenophobe. Xenophobe becomes angry, distressed, or otherwise moody when this sort of thing happens.

But Xenophobe’s long term strategy isn’t simply to get worked up whenever something exposes his knowledge gap. Instead, he minimizes his exposure to such situations. This process of minimizing is where the name Xenophobe originates; he shelters himself from cognitive dissonance by sheltering himself from outsiders and interlopers that expose him to it.

If you’ve been to enough rodeos in the field of software development, you’ve encountered Xenophobe. He generally presides over a small group with an iron fist. He’ll have endless reams of coding standards, procedures, policies, rules, and quirky ways of doing things that are non-negotiable and soul-sucking. This is accompanied by an intense dose of micromanagement and insistence on absolute conformity in all matters. Nothing escapes his watchful eye, and his management generally views this as dedication or even, perversely, mentoring.

This practice of micromanagement serves double duty for Xenophobe. Most immediately, it allows him largely to prevent the group from being infected by any foreign ideas. On the occasion that one does sneak in, it allows him to eliminate it swiftly and ruthlessly to prevent the same perpetrator from doing it again. But on a longer timeline, the oppressive micromanagement systematically drives out talented subordinates in favor of malleable, disinterested ones that are fine with brainlessly banging out code from nine to five, asking no questions, and listening to the radio. Xenophobe’s group is the epitome of what Bruce Webster describes in his Dead Sea Effect post.

All that Xenophobe wants out of life is to preserve this state of affairs. Any meaningful change to the status quo is a threat to his iron-fisted rule over his little kingdom. He doesn’t want anyone to leave because that probably means new hires, which are potential sources of contamination. He will similarly resist external pushes to change the group and its mission. New business ventures will be labeled “unfeasible” or “not what we do.”

KingOfSmallKingdom

Most people working in corporate structures want to move up at some point. This is generally because doing so means higher pay, but it’s also because it comes with additional status perks like offices, parking spaces, and the mandate to boss people around. Xenophobe is not interested in any of this (beyond whatever he already has). He simply wants to come in every day and be regarded as the alpha technical expert. Moving up to management would result in whatever goofy architecture and infrastructure he’s set up being systematically dismantled, and his ego couldn’t handle that. So he demurs in the face of any promotion to project management or real management because even these apparently beneficial changes would poke holes in the Expert delusion. You’ll hear Xenophobe say things like, “I’d never want to take my hands off the keyboard, man,” or, “this company would never survive me moving to management.”

Company Men (Moderate Tolerance)

Company Man does not share Xenophobe’s reluctance to move into a line or middle management role. His comfort with this move results from being somewhat more at peace with cognitive dissonance. He isn’t so consumed with preserving the illusion of expertise at all costs that he’ll pass up potential benefits–he’s a more rational and less pathological kind of Expert Beginner.

Generally speaking, the line to a mid-level management position requires some comfort with cognitive dissonance whether or not the manager came into power from the ranks of technical Expert Beginners. Organizations are generally shaped like pyramids, with executives at the top, a larger layer of management in the middle, and line employees at the bottom. It shares more than just shape with a pyramid scheme–it sells to the rank and file the idea that ascension to the top is inevitable, provided they work hard and serve those above them well.

The source of cognitive dissonance in the middle, however, isn’t simply the numerical impossibility that everyone can work their way up. Rather, the dissonance lies in the belief that working your way up has much to do with merit or talent. In other words, only the most completely daft would believe that everyone will inevitably wind up in the CEO’s office (or even in middle management), so the idea bought into by most is this: each step of the pyramid selects its members from the most worthy of the step below it. The ‘best’ line employees become line managers, the ‘best’ line managers become mid-level managers, and so on up the pyramid. This is a pleasant fiction for members of the company that, when believed, inspires company loyalty and often hard work beyond what makes rational sense for a salaried employee.

But the reality is that mid-level positions tend to be occupied not necessarily by the talented but rather by people who have stuck around the company for a long time, people who are friends with or related to movers and shakers in the company, people who put in long hours, people who simply and randomly got lucky, and people who legitimately get work done effectively. So while there’s a myth perpetuated in corporate American that ascending the corporate ‘ladder’ (pyramid) is a matter of achievement, it’s really more of a matter of age and inevitability, at least until you get high enough into the C-level where there simply aren’t enough positions for token promotions. If you don’t believe me, go look at LinkedIn and tell me that there isn’t a direct and intensely strong correlation between age and impressiveness of title.

So, to occupy a middle management position is almost invariably to drastically overestimate how much talent and achievement it took to get to where you are. That may sound harsh, but “I worked hard and put in long hours and eventually worked my way up to an office next to the corner office” is a much more pleasant narrative than “I stuck with this company, shoveled crap, and got older until enough people left to make this office more or less inevitable.” But what does all of this have to do with Expert Beginners?

Well, Expert Beginners that are moderately tolerant of cognitive dissonance have approximately the same level of tolerance for it as middle management, which is to say, a fair amount. Both sets manage to believe that their positions were earned through merit while empirical evidence points to them getting there by default and managing not to fumble it away. Thus it’s a relatively smooth transition, from a cognitive dissonance perspective, for a technical Expert Beginner to become a manager. They simply trade technical mediocrity for managerial mediocrity and the narrative writes itself: “I was so good at being a software architect that I’ve earned a shot and will be good at being a manager.”

The Xenophobe would never get to that point because asking him to mimic competence at a new skill-set is going to draw him way outside of his comfort zone. He views moving into management as a tacit admission that he was in over his head and needed to be promoted out of danger. Company Man has no such compunction. He’s not comfortable or happy when people in his group bring in outside information or threaten to expose his relative incompetence, but he’s not nearly as vicious and reactionary as Xenophobe, as he can tolerate the odd creeping doubt of his total expertise.

In fact, he’ll often alleviate this doubt by crafting an “up after a while” story for himself vis-a-vis management. You’ll hear him say things like, “I’m getting older and can’t keep slinging code forever–sooner or later, I’ll probably just have to go into management.” It seems affable enough, but he’s really planning a face-saving exit strategy. When you start out not quite competent and insulate yourself from actual competence in a fast-changing field like software, failure is inevitable. Company Man knows this on some subconscious level, so he plans and aspires to a victorious retreat. This continues as high as Company Man is able to rise in the organization (though non-strategic thinkers are unlikely to rise much above line manager, generally). He’s comfortable with enough cognitive dissonance at every level that he doesn’t let not being competent stop him from assuming that he is competent.

Master Beginners (High Tolerance)

If Xenophobes want to stay put and Company Men want to advance, you would think that the class of people who have high tolerance for and thus no problem with cognitive dissonance, Master Beginners, would chomp at the bit to advance. But from an organizational perspective, they really don’t. Their desired trajectory from an org chart perspective is somewhere between Xenophobe and Company Man. Specifically, they prefer to stay put in a technical role but to expand their sphere of influence, breadth-wise, to grow the technical group under their tutelage. Perhaps at some point they’d be satisfied to be CTO or VP of Engineering or something, but only as long as they didn’t get too far away from their domain of ‘expertise.’

Master Beginners are utterly fascinating. I’ve only ever encountered a few of these in my career, but it’s truly a memorable experience. Xenophobes are very much Expert Beginners by nurture rather than nature. They’re normal people who backed their way into a position for which they aren’t fit and thus have to either admit defeat (and, worse, that their main accomplishment in life is being in the right place at the right time) or neurotically preserve their delusion by force. Company Men are also Expert Beginners by nurture over nature, though for them it’s less localized than Xenophobes. Company Men buy into the broader lie that advancement in command-and-control bureaucratic organizations is a function of merit. If a hole is poked in that delusion, they may fall, but a lot of others come with them. It’s a more stable fiction.

But Master Beginners are somehow Expert Beginners by nature. They are the meritocratic equivalent of sociopaths in that their incredible tolerance for cognitive dissonance allows them glibly and with an astonishing lack of shame to feign expertise when doing so is preposterous. It appears on the surface to be completely stunning arrogance. A Master Beginner would stand up in front of a room full of Java programmers, never having written a line of Java code in his life, and proceed to explain to them the finer points of Java, literally making things up as he went. But it’s so brazen–so utterly beyond reason–that arrogance is not a sufficient explanation. It’s like the Master Beginner is a pathological liar of some kind (though he’s certainly also arrogant.) He most likely actually believes that he knows more about subjects he has no understanding of than experts in those fields because he’s just that brilliant.

This makes him an excellent candidate for Expert Beginnerism both from an external, non-technical perspective and from a rookie perspective. To put it bluntly, both rookies and outside managers listen to him and think, “wow, that must be true because nobody would have the balls to talk like that unless they were absolutely certain.” This actually tends to make him better at Expert Beginnerism than his cohorts who are more sensitive to cognitive dissonance, roughly following the psychological phenomenon coined by Walter Langer:

People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one. And if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner than later believe it.

So the Master Beginner’s ambition isn’t to slither his way out of situations where he might be called out on his lack–he actually embraces them. The Master Beginner is utterly unflappable in his status as not just an expert, but the expert, completely confident that things he just makes up are more right than things others have studied for years. Thus the Master Beginner seeks to expand aggressively. He wants to grow the department and bring more people under his authority. He’ll back down from no challenge to his authority from any angle, glibly inventing things on the spot to win any argument, pivoting, spinning, shouting, threatening–whatever the situation calls for. And he won’t stop until everyone hails him as the resident expert and does everything his way.

Success?

I’ve talked about the ambitions of different kinds of Expert Beginners and what drives them to aspire to these ends. But a worthwhile question to ask is whether or not they tend to succeed and why or why not. I’m going to tackle the fate of Expert Beginners in greater detail in my next post on the subject, but the answer is, of course, that it varies. What tends not to vary, however, is that Expert Beginner success is generally high in the short term and drops to nearly zero on a long enough time line, at least in terms of their ambitions. In other words, success as measured by Expert Beginners themselves tends to be somewhat ephemeral.

It stands to reason that being deluded about one’s own competence isn’t a viable, long-term success strategy. There is a lesson to be learned from the fate of Expert Beginners in general, which is that better outcomes are more likely if you have an honest valuation of your own talents and skills. You can generally have success on your own terms through the right combination of strategy, dedication, and earnest self-improvement, but to improve oneself requires a frank and honest inventory of one’s shortcomings. Anything short of that, and you’re simply advancing via coincidence and living on borrowed time.

Edit: The E-Book is now available. Here is the publisher website which contains links to the different media for which the book is available.

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