Build Anything
As an engineer, if you want to piss off someone who is asking you whether you can or can’t build a thing, just say, “Given enough time, I can build anything”.
They’ll believe you’re dodging the question, and they’ll think you’re arrogant.
As a means of negotiating a schedule or a feature, this answer is not helpful. You need to take the time to explain your thinking to this person. You need to walk them through your development process. It’s an opportunity to educate and not come off like a jerk.
However.
Given enough time, an engineer can build anything.
I’m optimistic.
And I hire optimists.
Like any profession, software development is chock full of radically different personalities, but I want the optimists. I’m not looking for Yes-folk; I’m looking for those folks who, when backed into a corner with a gun to their heads, respond with, “Fuck it, we’re going to figure it out”.
This base optimism can be hidden in all types of personalities, but when the shit hits the fan it shows up and often creates the impossible.
In my two decades of working in Silicon Valley, I am happy to confirm that this valley is full of these insane optimists. These are people who:
- Work hard
- Over-commit and still deliver
- Rampantly go out of their way to help each other
- Have a track record of stunning success
This is not a population limited to the valley, it’s a population spread across the country and across the globe, but today I’m thinking about my country.
We’re nowhere near the bottom of this disaster we’ve voted onto ourselves. I don’t think the majority of Americans fully understand the severity of our financial crisis. We’re all fervently staring at Christmas, confusing the holiday spirit for hope.
Yet, I remain optimistic.
Regardless of who wins the election, the question remains, “Do we have it in us to re-invent ourselves? Can we rebuild our country into a place we respect?”
Yes, we can.
I live on the west coast of the United States, which is a region pioneers traveled to so they could choose how to define their home, but this whole country is built on that idea — we choose who we will be.
Where I sit, with the cranky engineers —the insane optimists — I hope we all share this optimism because, given enough time, we can build anything.
FriendDA
The lesson of the Holy Shit is that when you stumble upon a truly revolutionary idea, you have the ability to recognize it. There are lots of people who, when they first saw a web page, thought, “I can order pizza on the phone with a live person. Why would I do it on the computer via, what’d you call it? A browser? Also, why is that text blinking?”
You didn’t see pizza. You didn’t even see the blinking text. In fact, you saw nothing in particular; you just had a gut feeling. There was no logic or strategy behind the gut feeling, it was a sense of deep potential. Your amorphous thought was, “I can’t think of anything I won’t be able to do on the web.”
A Holy Shit is the instant of instinctually recognizing massive potential.
As epiphanies go, Holy Shits are few and far between. My gut says you’re lucky if you stumble upon one a year. However, smaller versions happen all the time.
A by-product of obsessively, constantly surfing the net to discover the bright and the shiny is a steady flow of promising new ideas. Mostly slight variations on existing great ideas that tickle your fancy. For example, after staring at Twitter for nearly two years, I’m guessing I’ve had a dozen bright ideas about Twitter-inspired products. These ideas tend to show up in the morning during the drive, after appropriate caffeination, and more often than not they fade the moment I walk into the office.
But some stick.
My rule is: if I’m still thinking about a bright idea when I’m driving home, it’s worth writing down. By passing the idea through my fingers I make it slightly more real… I give it definition.
And then I sleep on it.
The following morning, if I’m still chewing on the bright idea, I start to worry because the logical next step is to pitch a friend. The rule here is: all ideas improve as a function of the number of eyeballs that see them. The troubling converse rule is: as soon as your idea gets out in the wild, it’s no longer yours.
In the corporate world, there’s a legal instrument to protect bright ideas generated inside of the business and it’s called a Non-Disclosure Agreement or an “NDA”. When you sign an NDA for a company, you’re legally saying, “I’ve agreed to take on the responsibility of protecting and not revealing the company’s intellectual property even if that intellectual property consists of ideas that came out of my head in the first place.”
There are lots of interesting variations of the NDA, but the two significant ones are: the Two-Way and the One-Way.
The Two-Way NDA says, “Anything either of us says is private”. The more scary One-Way states, “We can use anything you say, but you can’t use anything we say”.
Neither of these legal instruments is useful to me when I merely want to pitch a friend about my idea. The concept of getting Phil to sign an NDA over a beer while we shoot the shit about my random drive-to-work idea makes no sense. Phil’s a friend.
But I want Phil to know that what I want to chat about is more than our average conversation. I want slightly more than a smidge of ceremony before I spill the beans about my bright idea and I call this ceremony the FriendDA.
The FriendDA is a non-binding, warm blanket agreement that offers absolutely no legal protection. I’d suggest if the idea of legal protection is even crossing your mind that the FriendDA is totally inappropriate for your current needs.
Ideally, the understanding you want to get to with the FriendDA requires only a simple question. The moment you’re about to pitch Phil on the idea you ask, “FriendDA?”
Phil takes a sip of beer and nods.
And you’re off.
The Culture Chart
They played bridge every Wednesday at Netscape. In the middle of the cafeteria. Like clockwork.
The players were a collection of ex-SGI guys and they worked for a variety of different groups at the company, but as I learned a few months later, this core group of men quietly defined the engineering culture of the company… with a bridge game.
Ninety Days
If you follow the rules in Ninety Days, you’re going to have a solid feel for the construction of your immediate team. Who is who. Who does what. What they know. Who the freak is. Who the free electron is. In a start-up when there are only 12 of you, you’re done. You know the people landscape because, from where you sit, you can see them all and you interact with all of them regularly. In a larger company, however, ninety days is only going to give you a brief glimpse of what you need to know about your co-workers, the company, and its culture.
Fortunately, in a large company, tools and documents have been created to help you traverse the culture and process and figure out where people fit. For example, what do you do when you get a random urgent mail from a co-worker stranger? Even if the stranger takes the time to explain who they are and what they do, you still fire up the corporate directory with the simple question: “Who does this bozo work for?”
The corporate directory is the digital representation of a formerly very important document: the organization chart.
A quick glance at the org chart answers a lot of ego-based questions like:
- Which org does he work in? A cool one?
- How many direct reports does he have? More power?
- How close is he to the CEO? More influence?
As sources of information go, the org chart is essential, but it is an incomplete picture of your company, which brings us back to bridge at Netscape.
Bridge
If you looked up the four core bridge players on the org chart, you’d learn a bit. One engineering manager, another guy from some oddly named platform team, another guy who had a manager title, but no direct reports, and the last guy who looked like a program manager.
My org chart assessment: Meh.
What I learned months later was that the folks sitting at that regular bridge game not only defined much of what became the Netscape browser, they also continued to define the engineering culture or what I think of as a culture chart.
Unlike the org chart, you’re not going to find the culture chart written down anywhere. It doesn’t exist. The culture chart is an unwritten representation of the culture of your company and understanding it answers big questions that you must know:
- What does this organization value?
- Who created this value system?
- Given this value system, who contributes high value?
- Who is most aware of how value is being created?
This is fuzzy philosophical mumbo jumbo, so let’s bring it home. In your current job, right now, tell me what it’s going take to get you a promotion.
“I need to work really hard.”
Ok, so you knew you need to work hard to get a promotion before you set foot in your current gig. My question is, what specific thing do you need to do in order to be promoted? I’d argue that for any engineer who is actively managing their career, it’s essential to figure out the answer to this question as quickly as possible, and to do so you need to understand the culture.
Detecting Culture
If you are going to be promoted, you are going to succeed in a group of people when you provide that group things that it think it needs. Now, your gut instinct is that this group of people is the management team, and that’s a good org chart-centric answer. The problem is it’s your job to stay ahead of your manager. You’re not going to get promoted giving your manager what he wants; a promotion comes when you give him what he wants as well as what he does not expect, but desperately needs.
It’s unfair. This guy is tasked with your career development and I am saying it’s your job to tell him what he wants. You don’t have to do this; you can take the reactive cues from your boss, but I derive intense professional satisfaction when I deliver the unexpectedly needed and I discover the unexpected by first finding the culture.
To deduce the culture of a company, all you have to do is listen. Culture is an undercurrent of ideas that ties a group of people together. In order for it to exist, it must move from one individual to the next. This is done via the retelling of stories.
“Max was this nobody performance nerd and three weeks before we were supposed to ship, he walked into the CEO’s office with a single piece of paper with a single graph. He dropped the graph on the table, sat down, and said, ‘No way we ship in three weeks. Six months. Maybe.’ The CEO ignored the paper, ‘We lose three million dollars if we don’t.’ Max stood up, pointed at the chart, and said, ‘We lose ten if we do. We must not ship crap.”
Whether this story is true or not is irrelevant. The story about how Max saved the company ten million dollars by telling the CEO “No” is retold daily. In hallways. At the bar over beers. The story continually reinforces an important part of this company’s culture.
We must not ship crap.
There isn’t a corporate values statement on the planet that so brutally and beautifully defines the culture of a company.
There are other stories that you’re going to hear over and over again, and inside each of these stories are the real corporate values. Each one, while designed to be entertaining, teaches a lesson about what this particular company values, and these are the lessons that are going to get you promoted.
There’s a chance you’re not going to find these stories. My hope is that you’re in a company where engineering is valued and, as such, has an influence on the culture of your company. If it’s been six months, you’ve been actively looking, and no one has told you a great story about how engineering shaped the fortunes of your company, there’s a chance that in your company engineering doesn’t have a seat at the culture table. My question is then, “How are you going to succeed, how are you going to be promoted, where engineering isn’t an influential part of the culture?”
Culture Definers
After you have a healthy collection of stories, you’re going to have a good idea about some of the culture, but you’re still missing essential data for your culture chart. See, the folks who tell the stories about culture usually aren’t the folks who created them.
Stories are told, but first they are born.
The people who are responsible for defining the culture are not deliberately doing so. They do not wake up in the morning and decide, “Today is the day I will steer the culture of the company to value quality design”.
They just do it. The individuals who have the biggest impact on the culture and company aren’t doing it for any other reason than they believe it is right thing to do, and if you want to grow in this particular company it’s a good idea to at least know who they are and where they sit. You need to pay attention to this core group of engineers because as they do, so will the company.
Game Over
Your company is networked in more ways than you can possibly imagine. Just because you’ve reverse engineered the development culture in your organization doesn’t mean you’ve got a complete map of the overall culture. There are endless connections tugging any decent sized group of people in multiple directions at once. There’s the been-here-forever network, the I-survived-the-layoff people, and the untouchable-did-something-great-once crew.
Culture assessment is an information game and it’s never over. Your job is to continually situate yourself in such as a way that, as quickly as possible, you can assess subtle changes in the culture of your company.
I wasn’t concerned when Netscape started losing market share to Microsoft. I didn’t sweat it when the stock price stalled. The reason I started thinking about my next gig was, months before either of these two events occurred, one of the lunchtime bridge team left.
The game stopped. The small group of four no longer spent a long lunch quietly, unknowingly defining the culture of the company and everyone who was watching noticed.
They noticed when one of those who had humbly done the work that defined the company no longer believed enough to stay.
Horrible
I can turn a phrase.
High school journalism is where I discovered this. Mrs. Wickett kept bringing stories to me in my junior year “Needs a clever headline.” I’d read the story and throw out a terse, clever headline.
No clue where this ability come from. If I actually think about how I pick the words and construct the idea, the ability vanishes. The less I know about it, the better.
I’ve been riding this talent for years. Turns out the ability to summarize isn’t only handy for writing headlines; it’s useful in meetings, too. “He just said that, you think this, let’s move on and stop saying the same thing over and over again.”
It was this appreciation of summarization that I took into my first executive product presentation at the last gig. 10th floor of corporate headquarters. Four VPs and their minions surrounding the table. My thought: Wow them with crisp, clean, and clever thoughts. Alliteration. Witty. Headlines.
So I did.
“This is the product. Here are the 20 clever phrases to describe it. Thank you very much!”
Silence. 30 seconds of awkward silence followed by the VP of Marketing breaking the tension, “What exactly are we reviewing here?” The next five minutes were less pleasant as the room realized I was done and all I’d accomplished was filling the air with clever alliterative phrases. There was no obvious strategy behind the headlines.
The Russian Lit Major was standing outside my door as I limped back from the beat down “How’d that feel?”
“Disaster.”
“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”
“… I what?”
I See Bell Curves
You are horrible at something.
You are a bell curve. A standard distribution. At one end of the curve, you have your talents. You’re naturally and uniquely good at them, but you’re not quite sure why. At the other end of the curve, you have your natural deficiencies and, while I am an optimist and I do believe you can learn your way through just about anything, you’re genetically predisposed to be pretty bad at these things.
Now, chances are you are a horrible at a whole bunch of things, but I want to focus on one thing. It’s the thing that will have the most impact on your career. By being bad at this thing, you limit your career growth.
I’m going to make a leap and assume that you’ve already identified your horrible. At some point in the past, you realized you were bad at this thing. “I am unable to read people.” “I love to program, but I am a lousy architect.” “I dress like a goofball.” Whatever your realization was, you become aware that you were deficient relative to the rest of the world, and you took one of two paths.
The first path: you structured your days and your life so that you wouldn’t stumble over this deficiency. Bad programmer, but deeply technical? Ok, you stuck with QA. Unable to read people? Ok, stick with code, don’t manage. Horrible fashion sense? Right so, you’re not first in line for customer visits. As path of least resistance strategies go, this can work. You can sit there and hide from the horrible, but my thought is, if you’re reading this weblog, you chose the other path and you attacked the horrible.
Your thought, “I refuse to suck at this,” so you took the other path and forced yourself to learn through the horrible.
Educating yourself in your deficiencies. Learning. Researching. Practicing. I’m a fan. There is nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment when you know that Darwin is rooting against you. I would go so far as to say that success at overcoming the horrible is far sweeter than success when you know what the hell you’re doing.
And yet… you still might suck at your horrible.
I Want More of You
Back to the Russian Lit Major lurking outside my executive disaster,
“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”
“… I what?”
“You have a product there, but your problem is that you believe that since you can see, everyone else can. They can’t. You need to stitch together the details of how you discovered the product and you need to say it in the language of executives. I’ll show you.”
That night, she took my presentation home and ripped it to shreds. The following morning she sat me down with a completely revised presentation and she walked me through it, slide by slide, pointing out that while I was making fine points, I was skipping over essential details the executives needed to hear. My thoughts were big, but they lacked meat and executive-friendly messaging.
It sucked. It’s one thing to know you’re horrible at the something, but discovery of this horribleness by the rest of the team is a whole other order of magnitude of embarrassment.
Except the slides were better. My messages were still there, but the deck made sense to someone other than me. Two weeks later when we presented again, the questions were enthusiastic, not problematic. I was saying the same thing, but the additions of the Russian Lit Major’s natural ability made my message clear.
Big Trust
There’s a defining moment in your career when you choose to trust someone beside yourself. I’m not talking about trusting them with the small stuff: “Hey, can you fix this bug for me?” I’m talking about big trust “Hey, your design sense is 10x mine, what the hell is wrong with this dialog? Be brutal.”
It’s tricky to leave that swell little island of you. It’s hard to suck up your pride and acknowledge there are those who excel where you suck. But whether you’re an individual or a manager, your job is to learn to scale at what makes you great. Yes, you want to fill your professional experience gaps, but if you work where I work, you’re in a hurry. Getting anything done requires a balance of your natural talent and your ability to find and leverage the talents of those around you.
By putting big trust in someone else, you’re solving three problems: you’re increasing the chance you’ll get your project done, you’re building a strong team, and, oh yeah, you get to watch and learn as someone deftly works in a place where you’re horrible.
By watching someone be great, you’ll learn just like I learned. I don’t need the Russian Lit Major for every presentation, but I know whenever I want to be great, I’ll go and find her.
