• “Professional” Managers

    Computers, Rants and Raves, Software Development 16.06.2006 1 Comment

    I just read the latest article by Joel Spolsky over on Joel on Software (a site you really should bookmark). Joel reminisces about the time he had his First BillG Interview where he had to present the spec for what was going to be Visual Basic for Applications to Bill Gates. It’s a good read, and Joel’s writing style is very entertaining. While Joel and I have differing opinions on some things, I certainly respect his experience and knowledge, and I suspect that the things we disagree about are simply related to the fact that he takes some concepts too literally (especially with regards to such Agile concepts and no BDUF, but’s that’s for another post).

    Towards the end of the post, Joel makes this observation:

    Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

    Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.

    "It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!" they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.

    Hear! Hear!

    You know, it’s not that I don’t respect management as a discrete set of skills, a seperate discipline if you will. Managing anything successfully requires a particular mindset and approach that is quite specific to the task of management, and the actions that a manager does (and the skill required to carry them out effectively) are specific and distinct from those needed in other endeavours (like, oh, I don’t know… developing software, for example).

    That does not mean, however, that those skills are all that a manager needs in order to be effective.

    I guess it is theoretically a possibility that somewhere there is an activity that can be managed by someone who has no understanding about that activity. (I am not saying that there is such an activity, just that there might be.)

    But developing software is not it.

    It is simply not possible to manage a software development business without a reasonable understanding of software development. I am not going to try to justify that statement here, because quite frankly either you know that this is true, or you can’t possibly be convinced that it is. What I will say, after 28 years in this game, is that whenever I have had to work with a "manager" that does not understand software development, the end result has invariably been sub-optimal. And by "sub-optimal" I mean a disaster, except where this was avoided by those who did understand and who went far beyond what could be expected of them and worked around that manager to get things done.

    While it is not necessary (indeed, it may not even be desirable) for a manager in a software business to be the most technically competent developer, it is an absolute requirement that he or she be able to understand if something is easy or hard, if it is high risk or low risk, if it is reasonable or unreasonable, if it is obviously wrong, obviously right, or just plain not known. He or she needs to understand whether an estimate is reasonable, or whether it is too optimistic or too conservative.

    If the manager can’t do these things, then how can he or she manage? Can you imagine this scenario? If I were asked to manage a banana farm (an activity I know absolutely nothing about) then here is a conversation with the farm workers:

    Me: The buyers want bananas that are more uniform in size. How can we do this?

    Workers: You can’t. Bananas have a certain variation in size. Indeed, the particular species we grow is internationally recognised as the most uniform in size.

    OK. Now what? Is this true? What do I do next?

    Worse still, the previous day, in the meeting with the buyer, the conversation had gone like this:

    Buyer: Our consumers are complaining about the variation in the size of the bananas. We need them to be far more uniform.

    Me: Oh, I’m sure that is not going to be a problem. After all, we employ world best practice farming techniques. I am sure we can do something about that. So if we add a clause to that effect into the contract, you will sign an order today?

    Buyer: Yes, but only if you can assure me you can have a smaller variation in the size.

    Me: No problem. Sign here, please.

    If this sounds ridiculous to you, welcome to my world…

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  • Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

    Rants and Raves, Self Improvement 30.05.2006 4 Comments

    I don’t remember quite how long ago I first read this book, but today I just had to go and pull it off the shelf in my office at work, where it normally lives. Very near to the front, it tells of one study where the authors took two pieces of corporate writing, one in typical corporate-speak, and one straight-talking and clear. The identities of the companies was not evident or otherwise discernable from the content.

    They took these two pieces and showed them to a number of people in the local (to them, Atlanta) Starbucks, and asked them to select from a list of 30 words the ones that they would associate with the companies involved. There were 15 "positive" and 15 "negative" words in the list. Interestingly, the Starbucks crowd didn’t like the bull, so the four words most strongly associated with the writer of the corporate-speak were obnoxious, rude, stubborn and unreliable. And none of the 15 "good" words were associated with this company’s literature.

    The other piece fared much better — it was associated with the words: likable, energetic, friendly, inspiring and enthusiastic. None of the "negative" words were assoaciated with it.

    Let me quote from the book:

    The short story is that people find straight talkers likable, and that’s a big deal. In his book ”The Power of Persuasion”, Robert Levine, a professor of psychology, says:

    If you could master just one element of personal communication that is more powerful than anything … it is the quality of being likable. I call it the magic bullet, because if your audience likes you, they’ll forgive just about everything else you might do wrong. If they don’t like you, you can hit every rule right on target and it doesn’t matter.

    The authors also note that two if the words that were included in the list were "intelligent" and "educated". There was no statistical difference between the straight-talk sample and the bull sample. This means that an attempt to appear smart by (as they put it) using fifty-cent words to make 5-cent points, is pointless — there is simply no payoff for the verbosity.

    Quoting again:

    The bottom line: Bullshit eats away at your personal capital, while straight talk pays dividends. Invest wisely.

    Amen to that!

    Today I have endured more double-speak and, well, absolute nonsense than anyone should ever need to be exposed to, because of some fear of being absolutely clear in some communications. A futile attempt at stealth management.

    I’ll feel better soon.

    Really I will.

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  • Too many levels of Abstraction

    Rants and Raves, Software Development 22.05.2006 2 Comments

    I have been reading a great book over the past couple of days. It is called The Best Software Writing I and I picked it up at the local Borders when I dropped in to browse as I am wont to do on the odd occasion. Reading it fired up the creative juices, so I thought I would put finger to keyboard about something that has been gnawing at me for a while now: the fact that we seem to be making things more complex than they need to be because of some misguided attempt to model the "real world".

    Now, I am the first to admit to being an old-world developer. I learnt how to program in the late 70s, at at time when OOP was simply unheard of out in the wild. I clearly remember the famous hot air balloon cover on the issue of Byte that introduced Smalltalk. Yes, not only was I alive then, I was old enough to buy Byte and read it.

    I have worked through the evolution of our craft and the changes in the way we approach the development of software. By virtue of the fact that I learnt to program before there was OOP, intially I had a tough time really understanding how OOP worked, simply because there was a lot of unlearning that I had to do. It took me a while, and there were many times when I told myself that now I ‘got’ OOP, only to admit a little while later that I really didn’t get it at all.

    If that sounds at all negative about OOP, it isn’t meant to. I am actually a big proponent of the benefits of OOP and think that the binding of data with the procedures that operate on it is A Good Thing.

    What I am finding, however, is that a new generation of programmers who don’t know anything except OOP are losing track of the objective. When you learn OOP, you are inevitably given examples of real-world objects that you try to model. I think that if I ever see another example of an Animal class, with Dog and Cat descendents, I will scream, even though I actually wrote a student manual for a VB4 course that used these self same classes. We learn about inheritance and its use to create polymorphic behaviour by having Cat.Speak emit a mieaow while Dog.Speak emits a woof. Or we have traffic lights control their own sequencing by sending messages to each other. All very cool.

    Then off we go to do commercial programming. Except, there is a real disconnect at this point. ‘EDP’ (to use an outdated but nonetheless expressive term) is not the same as traffic control. In most business data manipulation, the entities we are dealing with are nothing but data points. The only reason the system exists it to maintain a repository of data, furnish a controlled view into that repository and provide a mechanism to allow a predifined set of transformations of that data to take place in a controlled manner. There are no dogs or cats in the wild that we are trying to model. What exactly does an account do when it is not being "modelled" by a piece of code? The answer, of course, is nothing at all — it just sits quietly in a database somewhere.

    I have seen too many systems that model an Account object with all sorts of complex behaviours. From one perspective, this can be useful — we can encapsulate all the things that we can do to an account as methods of the Account object, thereby binding the data with the code and (at least in theory) hiding the implementation details. I have no problem with this; in fact, this is exactly what makes sense.

    The problem arises when we refuse to acknowledge that the account lives in a database with a whole lot of other accounts. Worse still, we refuse to acknowledge that the database exists at all. Instead, we abstract it away with a "factory" the magically produces Account objects. It can give us a particular Account object if we can give it some distinguishing attribute, like an ID. But heaven forbid that we ask for any complex filtering — why, that’s almost like SQL, and we wouldn’t want to pollute our neat, abstract, HashMap in the Sky with any of that old "relational stuff".

    So instead of crafting a simple SQL statement that reflects the set of data we actually need, we write code that does all but the simplest filtering on the client side. You don’t want all the columns of data?  Who cares? Just don’t reference those attributes of the objects. You don’t want all the rows? Well, use one of the simple factory methods to do a first cut at the filtering, then just iterate through the list of objects that are returned and remove the ones you don’t want.

    Does anybody else see a problem here?

    Decades ago, we came up with a way to manage operations on tabular data. A whole relational alegbra was developed that provided a clean set of operations that could be requested by a client program, so that only the data it actually wanted would be returned by the database. The SQL language provided a reasonably straightforward way to express those operations, and databases got really, really good at processing SQL, so that, at least in most cases, they could quickly and efficiently get just this required data together. That’s what they are designed to do, and they do it very well. And when they have done this, just that data that is actually required goes over the wire to the program that requested it, which in turn can be simpler because it doesn’t need to do the whole post-processing dance.

    Today, OOP developers think that their code has somehow become impure if it contains an SQL statement, or acknowledges the existence of a database, or a table, or a row or column. Yet these are the actual big-O Objects that are being manipulated. The row in the table (OK, the rows in related tables in the database) are the account. That is the object we are dealing with. Why do we feel the need to abstract it away?

    It’s not like a cat. It is not practical for a program to deal with an actual Cat object. The Cat interface is not well understood, and the Cat Query Language is still in its infancy. When dealing with cats, it makes sense to create a simpler abstraction of a Cat, that models all the attributes of a real cat that we are interested in, and use that as a surrogate for a real cat in our program. Besides, cat fur really clogs up the fan vent in a computer case.

    An account, on the other hand, like a large number of the "objects" we deal with in business software development, is quite easily accessible directly.

    We don’t need no steenking abstractions.

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  • Weight control, food and exercise.

    Rants and Raves, Self Improvement 13.04.2006 7 Comments

    The following is a post that I made over on the Powerbasic programmer forums, in response to Paul Pank’s posting asking dietary advice. Why he thought to ask about diet on a programming forum is beyond me. I have edited out the references to other posts but the entire thread can be seen at the PowerBasic Forum.

    First, let me get some credibility here, then make a disclaimer, then express my opinion.

    I am 47 and have been overweight pretty much all my life. My dad’s side of the family is very prone to Diabetes. In 1994, I was diagnosed with diabetes. At the time, I weighed about 130 kg (about 295 lb and I am 177 cm tall). I led a very sedentary lifestyle — my thinking was that exercise doesn’t really make you live longer, it just feels that way .

    When diagnosed with diabetes, I went through the brainwashing — err, pardon me — nutrition education. I was on 4 insulin injections a day, and had the whole food pyramid thing drummed into me. You know the one — lots of complex carbs with fibre (like vegetables and grains), far less proteins and even less fats.

    I followed the advice. Strictly. Under supervision. Really.

    And I ended up in 2003 weighing nearly 160 kg (360 lb)!

    So I took matters into my own hands, educated myself and did what I needed to do.

    Today, I weigh in at around 105 kg (240 lb: yes, that is over 50 kg/110 lb lost). I take no insulin or any other diabetic medication. My blood pressure is 110/70 and my bloodwork is terrific.

    Disclaimer: do your own research and make your own decisions. This may NOT be right for you!

    I read everything I could find. I went through Atkins and thought he had part of the picture. Then I found out about Glycemic Index (GI) and that completed the picture for me.

    Here’s how I understand it. Insulin is the hormone that allows sugars to cross over the cell membrane and be used for energy. If you don’t have enough, or it is somehow flawed, you are diabetic — the sugars accumulate in your blood while your cells slowly starve.

    But insulin does something else, too: it causes excess sugars in your blood to be stored as fat.

    This is important: it is the excess SUGARS (ie carbs) that are stored as fat, and this is done in the presence of insulin.

    To avoid this, you need to ensure that the food you eat does not cause a spike in insulin production. Foods that cause a rapid rise in insulin levels have a high GI. Glucose has the maximum of 100, and pure water has 0, with everything else inside that range. If you eat low to medium GI foods at each meal (so that the combined GI is low to medium) then your body’s ability to store fat is severely curtailed, so that even if you do eat a bit more than you absolutely need, most of the excess is not stored. That’s not to say you can pig out, but it does mean you don’t need to live your life counting calories or fat-grams or whatever.

    As for eating fats, the actual evidence of their effect on things like cholesterol is flimsy. Recently, here in Australia, the National Heart Foundation said words to the effect of “we were wrong: go ahead and eat the egg yolk too — it’s good for you and does not raise cholesterol”. My personal experience is that the level of cholesterol is largely genetic, and the environmental factors that influence it are far more likely to be related to simple starches (high GI foods) than fats. Consider this: what foods are high in fats and not also high in simple carbs? Pretty much nothing. If you eat a fast-food burger, the bun is not only white bread, it has added sugar. Fries? They’re potato! Chocolate? Sugar. Think about it.

    Calorie intake is important, but don’t get too hung up on it. If you restrict your calorie intake too much, your metabolism slows down, and stores fat more aggressively. It is better to eat regularly throughout the day, and DON’T SKIP BREAKFAST whatever you do! I try to eat six small meals every day. It is also good to give yourself a regular “free” day, where you don’t do any workouts and you eat freely. For me, that is Sunday. Nothing is off-limits on that day. The first few weeks, you go a bit nuts, but the novelty soon wears off, and knowing that you can have that chocolate “on Sunday” seems to make it easier to not have it the rest of the week. It is important to have more calories on these days, because you want to use it to kick-start your metabolism again.

    Hydrogenated oils are really bad karma. The evidence against them may not be concrete, but the anecdotal evidence is pretty overwhelming. I’ll eat butter, but not margerine.

    Finally, BMI is the biggest load of codswallop ever. It is a formulaic representation of the old height/weight charts which have been discredited for decades. You see, a given volume of muscle weighs about four times what the equivalent volume of fat weighs. So if you have a low percentage of body fat, you will way MORE than a person with exactly the same dimensions with a higher percentage of body fat. Elite athletes have TERRIBLE BMI scores — they are HEAVY for their height because they are very lean.

    And you want to be lean (and therefore heavy for your size) because that means that you need to burn more food just to live. As well as being stronger, both in terms of muscles but also in terms of calcium retention in bones, you will be able to eat more without putting on weight. So while aerobic exercise is good for you, losing fat really requires you to add muscle mass, and that needs strength training. Someone mentioned martial arts in a previous post — I would strongly recommend that, even if you are not particularly young. I started at 45, and am now a 1st Kye Brown Belt in the Kempo style. Find a good, family-friendly school. You will find that martial arts training is a really good mix of strength (resistance) and stamina (aerobic) work. Aikido is great — that is next on my list after I achieve Black in Kempo.

    To summarise (with all the disclaimers assumed):

    • eat low and medium GI foods. If you eat anything with a high GI, include something low GI with it at the same meal.
    • don’t stress about fat intake (be sensible here).
    • avoid hydrogenated oils
    • get into a regular, weight-bearing exercise regime
    • do NOT starve yourself
    • try to eat more, smaller meals
    • forget your weight — instead, focus on your belt size, the only figure you really need to care about
    • enjoy life – the point of looking after yourself is to enjoy yourself

    Again, do your own research.

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  • AAARRGGHHHH!!!

    Apple, Computers, Rants and Raves 25.07.2005 No Comments

    It’s been a couple of weeks since I last blogged, and in that time I have been using the iBook a lot. I have to say that I really like this little computer. While I am still more productive using Windows when my Windows box is actually working OK, the fact is that I have to spend a LOT of time keeping my Windows machine ticking over. I’m pretty careful, and I run anti-virus and anti-spyware all the time. But that only means that I go for many months before something slips through and I need to rebuild my machine yet again. The kids — well, I’m sure that they try, but I seem to be rebuilding their machines every few weeks.

    Joanna is a case in point. I bought her a new Windows (Acer) laptop recently. Clean install of Windows XP Pro, latest service packs, all updates applied and auto updates enabled, anti-virus and 3 — yes, three! — anti spyware tools. Yesterday, she was having a problem saving a Powerpoint presentation and asked for help. There in her task bar was a little dog, saying she could get paid to surf the web. She has no idea where that came from.

    And did I mention that Powerpoint couldn’t save? Anywhere? Not locally, not on the network, not on a flash drive — nowhere? So, I tried a voodoo cure and did a “Save as Powerpoint 95″. This worked after warning me that some features might be lost. A quick bounce of Powerpoint, re-load the file (which triggers a conversion that took forever) and all is well with the world again. Except there goes a good 20 minutes of my time, not counting the interruption overhead.

    Compare that to the Apple. Now admittedly, I have only had it a few weeks, but I am using it as my main machine for everything I do except the actual coding at work (where we use the supplied Windows/Intel clones) and — yes, I know this phrase is becoming a cliche — it just works. This seems to be the comment I am hearing from everyone who is moving across to the Mac platform from Windows, and I am now joining the ranks.

    Is it perfect? Of course not. I couldn’t connect to my networked printer (an Officejet G55 hanging off a Dell XP Pro workstation whose role in life is to be our server). Turns out that there is some bug or configuration error (is there a distinction there I am not aware of?) in Tiger that prevents the authentication from working right. Don’t get me wrong, it only took a few minutes on Google to find a workaround, but it shows that even Apples have issues sometimes.

    But overall, well, I really like this computer. It really gets over 4 hours of use on a charge even with a WiFi link active, so I actually use it on the battery. I’ve never done that with a laptop before, because the Wintel laptops I have owned can’t reliably get more than about an hour and a half (although I believe that the Centrinos a pretty good).

    My current thinking is that I will leave Joanna and Peter with the Windows laptops for the rest of the year, and give Costa this iBook. It is perfect for me except that it doesn’t have Bluetooth built in, and I really want that. I like the 12 inch form factor — after all, the whole point of a laptop is that it is portable. I would really like a PC Card slot, because that would give me the ability to run the iBurst card, but the smallest Apple that has one of those is the 15 inch Powerbook. And the price — well, more than I want to spend right at the moment. I will probably end up buying myself a new 12 inch iBook with minimum RAM (because 3rd party RAM is much cheaper and easy to install) but with the biggest hard drive I can get and with the built-in Bluetooth. That comes to under $1900 delivered, probably just over $2K by the time I add 1G of third-party RAM. I’ll check whether I can get a better price online. Then over the next year or so, I can cycle my new one down to the kids while I upgrade as funds allow.

    Apples also seem to have a longer useful life, so I actually think that the cost of running Apples will be lower when taken over their effective life, even if they do cost more to start with. Time will tell.

    That’s all for now. I really need to learn some lines for tomorrow night, and it is getting late.

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