Prove It

I’m thinking this is going to wind up being a shorter post, and so might some others going forward. Fact of the matter is that I’m burning the candle at both ends a bit lately. I’m under contract for my next Pluralsight course, and I’m also mired in the bureaucratic morass of marching toward a real estate closing, so between that and 55-60-hour work weeks, I’m a little pressed for time. But, that said, we’ll see how it goes.

I was sitting in a meeting today where participants were discussing a recent initiative. (I was, at this point, a relatively passive observer with no horse in the race.) The gist of it was that the initiative was something that would be mildly pleasing to the user base but had some cost associated with it. It was accepted that this would be a bit of a financial loss on the balance sheet but that the ROI would be an eventual bolstering of the brand via goodwill and reputation points, so to speak. The leader of the meeting put a halt to this talk of generalities saying something to the effect of, “okay, so how much is it costing us, how many users are aware of it, and how positive was their response?” The people who had been discussing this got sort of deer-in-headlights. They seemed nonplussed that they were being asked to quantify something like this. I loved the questions, personally. I thought, “yeah, get those metrics, and then we can at least begin modeling scenarios for evaluating if this is worth doing.”

After that meeting, I retreated to my desk, and worked into the evening at the kind of tidying up that I can only seem to get done after business hours when I close the office door. One of the miscellaneous tasks was to come up with material to present tomorrow at the inaugural team lunch and learn — an initiative that I recently started. I don’t have a talk in my back pocket at the moment, so I was weighing options for it and settled on showing a video of a Michael Feathers talk about the synergy between testability and good design. I’ve recently introduced unit testing to the team, and it seems like a good perspective about unit testing beyond some of the more standard rationales. In the early part of the talk, Michael says (paraphrased from memory) that he often annoys developers by telling them that if their design isn’t testable, it’s not a good design. It’s quite a concept — if it can’t be easily verified, it isn’t very good.

Earlier this evening, I was relaxing and working my way through The Clean Coder by Uncle Bob Martin. In it, Bob cites something that Kent Beck told him about arguing — if an argument goes on for more than five minutes or so, then it’s really a religious war. If arguments are being based on facts, data, and empirical evidence, they’re settled pretty quickly. Rather than continuing to argue and get angry, both sides should regroup, do some research, and revisit the issue later. You can’t make a persuasive case for something without raw, hard data.

This struck me as interesting. Within the span of half a day, I was exposed to three separate events with a very fundamental and powerful underlying theme: “prove it.” If it can’t be proved, what good is it? As the characters in the Game of Thrones books seem to like to say, “words are wind.” Don’t tell me that users like it so it’s worth doing; show me evidence of that. Don’t tell me that your design is great; show me that it works for the required inputs. Don’t argue with bluster; show me that you’re right in such excruciating detail that there is simply no argument.

I don’t think anybody would find what I’m saying here controversial — proving and demonstrating are obviously better than simply claiming things without support. But I think the challenge for all of us is to prove (or at least to attempt to prove) things that we wouldn’t necessarily think of proving. How do you prove that user goodwill justifies spending X dollars? I don’t know, but it’s an interesting challenge. And beyond being an interesting challenge, it’s the kind of question that being able to answer will set you apart from the people you work with and make you in high demand. Do everything that you do in your professional life operating under the assumption that someone will audit your thought process and demand, on the spot, to know why you decided to do what you did. Why did you spend a day changing all methods in the code base from Pascal to camel case? Can you justify what that cost your group in terms of labor? How would you make the case for that?

I’m not suggesting that we should all operate constantly as if there were some insane, whip-cracking micromanager monitoring our every movement. What I am saying is that you can stand out by constantly and easily demonstrating the value and sense in the decisions that you make and the actions that you decide to take. Be that guy or gal. It’s less common than you think.

Notes on Job Hopping: Millennials and Their Ethics

For those that have been reading my more recent posts, which have typically been about broad-level software design or architecture concerns, I should probably issue a rant alert. This is somewhat of a meandering odyssey through the subject of the current prevalence of job hopping, particularly among the so-called millenial generation.

I thought I might take a whack today at this rather under-discussed subject in the field of software development. It’s not that I think the subject is particularly taboo, especially when discussed in blog comments or discussion forums as opposed to with one’s employer. I just think the more common approach to this subject is sort of quietly to pretend that it applies to people abstractly and not to anyone participating in a given conversation. This is the same way one might approach discussing the “moral degradation of society” — it’s a thing that happens in general, but few people look immediately around themselves and start assigning blame.

So what of job hopping and the job hopper? Is the practice as career threatening as ever it was, or is viewing it that way way a throwback to a rapidly dying age in the time of Developernomics and the developer as “king”? Is jumping around a good way to move up rapidly in title and pay, or is it living on borrowed time during an intense boom cycle in the demand for software development? Are we in a bubble whose bursting could leave the job hoppers among us as the people left standing without a chair when the music stops?

Before considering those questions, however, the ethics of job hopping bears some consideration. If society tends to view job hopping as an unethical practice, then the question of whether it’s a good idea or not becomes somewhat akin to the question of whether cheating on midterms in college is a good idea or not. If you do it and get away with it, the outcome is advantageous. Whether you can live with yourself or not is another matter. But is this a good comparison? Is job hopping similar to cheating?

To answer that question, I’d like to take a rather indirect route. I think it’s going to be necessary to take a brief foray into human history to see how we’ve arrived at the point that the so-called “millenials,” the generation of people age 35 and younger or thereabouts, are the motor that drives the software development world. I’ve seen the millenials called the “me generation,” but I’ve also seen that label applied to baby boomers as well. I’d venture a guess that pretty much every generation in human history has muttered angrily about the next generation in this fashion shortly after screaming at people to leave their collective lawn. “They’re all a bunch of self-involved, always on our lawn, narcissist, blah, blah, blah, ratcha-fratcha kids these days…”

It’s as uninventive as it is emblematic of sweeping generalizations, and if this sort of tiresome rhetoric were trotted out about a gender or racial demographic rather than an age-based one, the speaker would be roundly dismissed as a knuckle-dragging crank. But beneath the vacuous stereotyping and “us versus them” generational pissing matches lie some real and interesting shifting ethical trends and philosophies. And these are the key to understanding the fascinating and subtle shifts in both generational and general outlook toward employment.

Throughout most of human history, choice (about much of anything) was the province of the rich. Even in a relatively progressive society, such as ancient Greece, democracy was all well and good for land-owning, wealthy males. But everyone else was kind of out in the cold. People hunted and farmed, worked as soldiers and artisans, and did any number of things when station in life was largely determined by pragmatism, birth, and a lack of specialization of labor. And so it went pre-Industrial Revolution. Unless you were fortunate enough to be a noble or a man of wisdom, most of your life was pretty well set in place: childhood, apprenticeship/labor, marriage, parenthood, etc.

Even with the Industrial Revolution, things got different more than they got better for the proles. The cycle of “birth-labor-marriage-labor-parenthood-labor-death” just moved indoors. Serfs graduated to wage slaves, but it didn’t afford them a lot of leisure time or social mobility. As time marched onward, things improved in fits and starts from a labor-specialization perspective, but it wasn’t until a couple of world wars took place that the stars aligned for a free-will sea change.

Politics, technology, and and the unionized collective bargaining movement ushered in an interesting time of post-war boom and prosperity following World War II. A generation of people returned from wars, bought cars, moved to suburbs, and created a middle class free from the share-cropping-reminiscent, serf-like conditions that had reigned throughout human history. As they did all of this, they married young, had lots of children, settled down in a regular job and basically did as their parents had as a matter of tradition.

And why not? Cargo cult is what we do. Millions of people don’t currently eat shellfish and certain kinds of meat because doing so thousands of years ago killed people, and religious significance was ascribed to this phenomenon. A lot of our attitudes toward human sexuality were forged in the fires of Medieval outbreaks of syphilis. Even the “early to bed, early to rise” mantra and summer breaks for children so ingrained in our cultures are just vestigial throwbacks to years gone by when most people were farmers. We establish practices that are pragmatic. Then we keep doing them just because.

But the WWII veterans gave birth to a generation that came of age during the 1960s. And, as just about every generation does, this generation began superficially to question the traditions of the last generation while continuing generally to follow them. These baby boomers staged an impressive series of concerts and protests, affected real social policy changes, and then settled back into the comfortable and traditional arrangements known to all generations. But they did so with an important difference: they were the first generation forged in the fires of awareness of first-world, modern choice.

What I mean by that is that for the entirety of human history, people’s lots in life were relatively predetermined. Things like work, marriages, and having lots of children were practical necessities. This only stopped being true for the masses during the post-WWII boom. The “greatest generation” was the first generation that had choice, but the boomers were the first generation to figure out that they had choice. But figuring things like that out doesn’t really go smoothly because of the grip that tradition holds over our instinctive brains.

So the boomers had the luxury of choice and the knowledge of it, to an extent. But the old habits died hard. The expression of that choice was alive in the 1960s and then gradually ran out of steam in the 1970s. Boomers rejected the traditions and trappings of recorded human history, but then, by the 80s, they came around. By and large, they were monogamous parents working steady jobs, in spite of the fact that this arrangement was now purely one of comfort rather than necessity. They could job hop, stay single, and have no children if they chose, and they wouldn’t be adversely affected in the way a farmer would have in any time but modernity.

But even as they were settling down and seeing the light from a traditional perspective, a kind of disillusionment set in. Life is a lot harder in most ways when you don’t have choices about your fate, but strangely easier in others. Once you’re acing the bottom levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy, it becomes a lot easier to think, “if only I had dated more,” or, “I’m fifty and I’ve given half my life to this company.” And, in the modern age of choices, the boomers had the power to do something about it. And so they did.

In their personal lives, they called it quits and left their spouses. In the working world, they embarked on a quest of deregulation and upheaval. In the middle of the 20th century, the corporation had had replaced the small town as the tribal unit of collective identity, as described in The Organization Man. The concept of company loyalty and even existential consistency went out the window as mergers and acquisitions replaced blue chip stocks. The boomers became the “generation of divorce.” Grappling with tradition on one side and choice on the other, they tried to serve both masters and failed with gritty and often tragic consequences.

And so the millenials were the children of this experience. They watched their parents suffer through messy divorces in their personal lives and in their professional lives. Companies to which their parents had given their best years laid them off with a few months of severance and a pat on the butt. Or perhaps their parents were the ones doing the laying off — buying up companies, parceling them up and moving the pieces around. Whether personal or corporate, these divorces were sometimes no-fault, and sometimes all-fault. But they were all the product of heretofore unfamiliar amounts of personal choice and personal freedom. Never before in human history had so many people said, “You know what, I just figured out after 30 years that this isn’t working. So screw it, I’m out of here.”

So returning to the present, I find the notion that millenials harbor feelings of entitlement or narcissism to be preposterous on its face. Millenials don’t feel entitlement — they feel skepticism. They hesitate to commit, and when they do, they commit lightly and make contingency plans. They live with their parents longer rather than committing to the long-term obligation of a mortgage or even a lease. They wait until they’re older to marry and have children rather than wasting their time and affections on starter spouses and doomed relationships. And they job hop. They leave you before you can leave them, which, as we both know, you will sooner or later.

That generally doesn’t sit well with the older generation for the same reasons that the younger generation’s behavior never sits well with the older one. The older generation thinks, “man, I had to go through 20 years of misery before I figured out that I hated my job and your mother, so who are you to think you’re too good for that?” It was probably the same way their parents got angry at them for going to Woodstock instead of settling down and working on the General Motors assembly line right out of high school. Who were they to go out cavorting at concerts when their parents had already been raising a family after fighting in a war at their age?

So we can circle back around to the original questions by dismissing the “millenials are spoiled” canard as a reason to consider modern job hopping unethical. Generational stereotyping won’t cut it. Instead, one has to consider whether some kind of violation of an implied quid pro quo happens. Do job hoppers welch on their end of a bargain, leaving a company that would have stayed loyal to them were the tables turned? I think you’d be hard pressed to make that case. Individuals are capable of loyalty, but organizations are capable of only manufactured and empty bureaucratic loyalty, the logical outcome of which is the kind of tenure policies that organized labor outfits wield like cudgels to shield workers from their own incompetence. Organizations can only be forced into loyalty at metaphorical gunpoint.

Setting aside both the generational ad hominem and the notion that job hopping is somehow unfair to companies, I can only personally conclude that there is nothing unethical about it and that the consideration of whether or not to job hop is purely pragmatic. And really, what else could be concluded? I don’t think that much of anyone would make the case that leaving an organization to pursue a start-up or move across the country is unethical, so the difference between “job leaver” and “job hopper” becomes purely a grayscale matter of degrees.

With the ethics question in the books on my end, I’ll return next time around to discuss the practical ramifications for individuals, as well as the broader picture and what I think it means for organizations and the field of software development going forward. I’ll talk about the concept of free agency, developer cooperation arrangements, and other sort of free-wheeling speculation about the future.

Multitasking that Actually Works – Suggestions Requested

There are a lot of ways in which you can do two or more things at once and succeed only in doing them very poorly, so I’m always in search of a way to do multiple things at once but to actually get value out of both things. As a programmer with an ever-longer commute, a tendency to work well over 40 hours per week, and a wide range of interests, my time is at a premium.

Two things that have come to be indispensable for me are listening to developer podcasts (.NET Rocks, Deep Fried Bytes, etc) while I drive and watching Pluralsight videos while I run on machines at the gym. Podcasts are made for audio consumption and I think probably invented more or less with commutes in mind, so this is kind of a no-brainer fit that infuses some learning and professional interest into otherwise dead time (although I might also start listening to fiction audio books, potentially including classic literature).

Watching Pluralsight while jogging is made possible with the advent of the nice smartphone and/or tablet, but is a bit interesting nonetheless. I find it works best on elliptical machines (pictured on the left) where I’m not bouncing much or making a ton of noise and can lay my phone sideways and facing me. I don’t think this is a workable strategy for jogging outdoors or even on a treadmill, so having a gym at my office with ellipticals is kind of essential for this.

These two productive examples of multi-tasking have inspired me to try to think of other ways to maximize my time. There are some important criteria, however. The multi-tasking must not detract significantly from either task so “catching up on sleep at work” and “watching TV while listening to the radio” don’t make the cut. Additionally, at least one task must be non-trivial, so “avoiding bad music while sleeping” also does not make the cut. And, finally, I’m not interested in tasks that depend on something being inefficient, so “catching up on my RSS reader while waiting for code to compile” is no good since what I ought to be doing is figuring out a way not to be blocked by excessive compile time (I realize one could make a philosophical argument about my commute being inefficient, but I’m asking for some non-rigorous leeway for case by case application here).

This actually isn’t trivial. Most tasks that are worth doing require the lion’s share of your attention and juggling two or more often ensures that you do a haphazard job at all of them, and my life already seems sort of hyper-optimized. I work through lunch, I don’t sleep all that much, and double up wherever I can. So, additional ways to make this happen are real gems.

Anyone have additional suggestions or things that they do to make themselves more efficient? Your feedback is definitely welcome and solicited in comment form!