DaedTech

Stories about Software

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Are Your Arguments Falsifiable?

Editorial note: I’d like to clarify something here upon re-reading this post.  When I refer to not engaging comments, I’m talking about in other venues (other blogs than mine, social media, and sites like reddit).  On this blog, I do my best to engage with everyone that takes the time to leave a comment, regardless of its contents.  Please don’t read this as any sort of deterrent to commenting — keep ’em coming!

These days, I’m writing for 6 blogs besides my own.  All of the posts get announced on social media and some of them wind up on commentary sites like Hacker News or Reddit, which means that there’s a lot of surface area, so to speak, for comments.  I make a good faith effort to respond, but I must confess that my response/comment ratio is declining amidst lots of writing and my consulting practice.

My failure to respond to a comment tends to fall into one of three categories.

  1. Never saw it.
  2. Saw it, made a mental note to come back and respond later, but “later” never came.
  3. /Sigh/

It’s this last, and admittedly enigmatic category, about which I’d like to talk today.

The Ones that Make Me Sigh

You’re probably thinking here that I’m talking about the occasional piece of random insult or profanity.  Perhaps someone leaves a comment on the site saying, “you’re a #&%$ing idiot.”  But no, it’s not that.  A comment like that (which is actually refreshingly rare) doesn’t induce much reaction in me one way or the other.  Just a half amused, half bemused, “well, okie dokie.”

OppenheimerChoking

The ones that make me sigh are comments that I think of as “specious definers.”  They are thoughts offered as correction and conversation advancement, but that wind up falling flat in a subtle way.  Make no mistake — these are thoughts offered in earnest, and I’m not complaining about tone or being corrected or anything like that.  Rather, I’m lamenting that I read, re-read, and re-read again, and realize that what I’m looking at is a near tautology.  It’s a non-falsifiable closed loop, to borrow slightly from Karl Popper.

Let’s get out of generalities and deal with a couple of examples.  Please note at this point that I’m operating off of admittedly imperfect memory, and thus paraphrasing.  I don’t know where either of these examples is nor even in what medium it was offered.  But please believe that I have no real interest in distortion here — the critiques are not objectionable.

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The Cost of Being Right

I stopped in the gas station today to pick up a few sodas and iced teas.  It was a time-poor man’s grocery run here in Lousiana, where it was in the 80s today.  This expedition left me with a plastic bag full of sweating drinks, a soggy receipt, and a lesson about the cost of being right.

First off, let me just say that I was and am right.  About what you ask?  About the fate of my receipt.

The receipt wound up in the bag with the sweating sodas, where it became sodden.  This wouldn’t have happened if the clerk had done the right thing and handed me the receipt, or even the slightly less wrong thing and asked me whether I wanted the receipt in the bag or not.  Instead, she did the wrong thing, and stuffed it into the bag where it became waterlogged.  “Receipt’s in the bag!” she informed me cheerfully.  Ugh.

Here’s the problem.  I take all of my credit card receipts, fold them, and put them in my wallet.  When I get home, I record the credit card transaction in Quicken so that when I download actual transactions from the financial institution in question, I can compare and make sure there are no spurious charges.  This scheme requires a dry, legible receipt.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — this is a matter of personal preference.  I prefer being handed my receipt whereas you prefer to have it in the bag.  That’s an understandable sentiment, but I assure you that it’s wrong.  I have empirical thinking on my side.  If the clerk hands me the receipt and I want it in the bag, it takes me less than a second to stuff it in there.  If the clerk stuffs it in the bag and I want it in my hand, I have to hold up the line while I go rooting around in the bag, looking for it, only to find it plastered between two Diet Mountain Dews.  So, as you can now see, I’m right.

SoakedReceipt

By the way, I’m willing to keep up this line of argument until you get exhausted and concede that I’m right.

You might, then, think that I explained the error of her ways to the clerk.  Or not, if you know me well at all.  I didn’t.  I thanked her, smiled, and left the store.  Once home, I extracted my soggy receipt, did my best to make out the figures on it, and entered them into quicken.

You see, it’s not that I’m any less convinced receipt-handing is optimal (though I could be persuaded).  It’s just that being right about this isn’t important.  It’s not important enough to me to think any further on (after adding a note to use this as a blog post intro), and it’s certainly not important enough for me to comment on to the clerk or anyone else in my life.

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The Trouble with Career Sites

Last week featured some unexpected alterations (read: extensions) to my travel plans, and this week featured me playing a bit of catch up.  So, Monday featured no post at all, and Wednesday was a cross post.  If I do one thing this week, it’ll be to remain true to my attempts to regularly answer reader questions.  Here’s the question in question.

You mentioned in your “Avoiding the Dreaded Experience Tuples” post that there are better ways than monster.com to look for jobs…

Do you group the other common jobs sites with monster (i.e. dice, muse, hired, indeed, stackoverflow careers)?

Or is monster just bad?

First of all, an advanced caveat.  I am not familiar with muse or indeed, so I I’ll skip them and speak to what I know.  The short answer to the question is “I mostly group these sites together, and I think that using any of them to look for jobs is the Greyhound Bus of finding jobs.”  But, not all Greyhound Bus rides are equal — on some a drunk hobo throws up in your lap, and on some the drunk hobo just falls asleep on your shoulder.  And, with one of the sites here, I’d say you’re not really even riding a bus.  Let me do a bit of forced ranking.

BusHobo

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Value Theater and Pencil Sharpeners

I had some grand plans this week to do a Chess TDD post and a reader question post, but I wound up agreeing to do a quick contract gig that was very time sensitive, so I’ve been coding furiously all week, logging 50 billable hours in 4 days and still going strong.  That’s why, instead of any of my best laid plans, I offered cross posts.  Ah well, it turns out the cross posts tend to be quite popular, so I suppose everyone wins.

Given that I’m tired from all of this work and just kind of freewheeling a bit here, I’ll just type extemporaneously (or as close to that as you can manage with typing).  It’s been a while since I just typed what was on my mind in a stream without structure, so this is kind of fun.  This is a topic that’s bubbled near the surface for some years, but never quite made it into a post.  I’d like to talk about what people do in professional situations with a high degree of ambiguity.  This comes up a lot, often during transitional situations for groups or organizations.

To be a little more concrete about it, let’s say that you’re part of a team that’s just delivered a multi-year project, and it’s time to figure out what’s next for you as a group.  There’s an idea that, while the C-levels figure out the next long-term play, your team will spend a few months “cleaning up” an internal, legacy app.  What “cleaning up” means is yet to be determined.

At this point, all you know is that you’re going to do stuff to this application.  This lack of specifics is the ambiguity to which I’m referring.

Dealing with Ambiguity

Watching how people react in a situation like this is interesting.  Sure, at some point, circumstance will squeeze specifics out of some reluctant manager and the team will have their marching orders, but until that happens, you can witness a small study in human psychology.

Some people will interpret this situation as either quasi-time off, or else as unplanned “20% time,” triggering a period of some degree of coasting.  They’ll bone up on general knowledge, work on a little project they’ve always thought the company could use, work on a side project of their own, or maybe even just spend all day on Facebook.  The common theme here is that they’re content to wait for more specifics before proceeding.

Other people will fill the ambiguity with virtuous specifics according to their own office ethos.  I think of this as “sharpening the pencils,” and it’s usually accompanied by a crisp, earnest, and slightly urgent, “alright. come on, guys, let’s all {sharpen the pencils}.”   For some people, this means filling in the void with comfortable structure.  “Let’s decide who is going to be the liaison, the project manager, etc.”  For others, it’s haggling over tools of the trade — “alright, well, I think we should use that new text editor and it might make sense to update this code base to node.”  For others, it may simply be “time to lean, time to clean” activities, like “we don’t know what we need to do, but it couldn’t hurt for us to get started adding comments to every method in this thing.”

I call this “sharpening the pencils” because in my mind, it can be crystallized to this image.  “Well, we don’t know exactly what’s coming, but it can’t hurt to greet it with pencils sharp, ready and willing to take notes and get started on whatever comes!”

FranticStudent

Getting it Right

In my opinion, one of these camps is decidedly the ‘right’ camp, and it’s the former.  No, I didn’t confuse directional words.  I think the non-pencil sharpening loafers are doing the right thing, both for themselves and for the business.  And it’s not because I find “let’s all sharpen pencils” enthusiasm to be hard to take (though that can be the case).  It’s a lot more pragmatic than that.

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Selling Your Boss On That Shiny New Tool

Editorial Note: this was a post originally written for the SmartBear blog.  You can read the original here, at their site.  Check out the other authors over there, too.

Have you ever attended a trade show or conference that left you feeling like the proverbial kid in a candy store?  You had delectable food, met really smart people, attended eye-opening talks, and took tons and tons of notes.  The only complaint you had, in fact, was that you were forced to choose between multiple awesome sessions that were happening at once.  You were practically glowing as you said your goodbyes and headed back to your normal job, prepared to dazzle your coworkers with all of the new techniques that you knew would be real difference makers.

But even if they didn’t necessarily buy into everything to the extent that you did, there was that one tool that was just such a no brainer that it would sell itself once you explained it. But it didn’t. There’s nothing quite like having your proposal flatly and unenthusiastically rejected to shock you out of the post-conference glow and throw you right back into the daily grind. You were so convinced that people would see the incredible benefits that you find the actual results inconceivable: your coworkers shrug indifferently and your manager says, “We’re doing fine right now, so we really don’t need to introduce anything new.”  Is this situation avoidable?

I wish I could tell you that I had a bulletproof pitch that would never be rejected. Persuasion skills like that would be nothing short of a super power.  But while there’s no guarantee that you’ll succeed in selling your manager on a tool, you can certainly improve your odds.  The way to do this is by making a business case for the tool.

ProjectManager

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