wrong tool

You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.

The pursuit of the 10x engineer

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I had the good fortune of reading an article about how we’re getting better at getting better in the New Yorker.  And it got me thinking about the pursuit of the 10x engineer and the lack of on-the-job training at most tech companies.

One of my beliefs is that as the size of a company expands the engineering population becomes average through sheer force of numbers. You can fight this problem indefinitely like Google and NetFlix do, or you can ask yourself – what the hell am I supposed do about this?

The general approach most companies take is to lather process on top of everything in attempt to prevent anything bad from happening. In effect, acknowledging that the average employee is no longer good enough to do their job, you rely on a small number of gatekeepers to act as fulcrums on your product quality. Hence the emergence of architecture reviews and design reviews and gatekeepers of quality.

We look at small high-talent density teams and wonder why can’t the entire company be like those teams? Heck we fantasize about the small high-quality teams and their productivity.

We rarely ask the question of how do we systematically improve our teams. We rarely approach making engineers better a core part of our core values. We make our value hire only the best, not make the best better.

The wasteful approach we take to talent, and to people will get disrupted by a company that realizes that it’s better to systematically train hundreds of engineers than to keep trying to find the best…

Our industry’s approach to talent is wasteful in the extreme – we discard 50% of the human race, we don’t train people, we love youth at the expense of the old, we think that insane hours that burn people out are okay and we’re able to do that because there is this almost endless supply of new kids coming in from every corner of the world dreaming of getting a piece of the action.

This approach reminds me of a company that never asks the question of what happened to the OLD users because of all of the NEW users that are joining every day.

I hate to leave a post with only a problem. What are some things that need to change?

Two things that need to happen:

  1. Change the review process. Right now we are loathe to evaluate and improve people’s work because it ties so intimately with salary and promotion discussions. We need to find a way to continuously evaluate people’s work not to punish or reward but to improve. Evaluations all feel punitive because we don’t use them to specifically target ways to improve just to ding people.
  2. Invest in teaching. Too much of training is done on the job through osmosis and practice because that’s all that’s available. And if someone is teaching the guys doing the teaching are very bad at it because we don’t train them on how to teach. We ask people who suck at teaching to create training materials and are surprised at how little value anyone gets in them.

This space feels like there is a lot of opportunity for innovation because of how little is currently being done. And if you believe that companies success is a function of the people, then a deep and sophisticated training program may be a strategic differentiator.

Something to ponder.

 

 

 

The iPhone did change everything revisiting my predictions from 7 years ago.

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7 years ago, I wrote a post questioning the Apple Fan Boys statements that the iPhone changed everything.

I got somethings very right. And I, obviously, got some things very wrong.

My assumption that unlike the iPod Apple would not rule the cellphone market turned out to be correct. My other assumption the iPhone would push the design of phones like the original Mac did turned out to be right.

My original assumption that MS and the cellphone vendors would create a viable alternative ecosystem that would own a much broader chunk than Apple turned out to be partially correct. Instead of MS, the real winner was Google who released the Android.

 

Let’s look at what I said and got right and wrong.

  1. The iPhone was crucial to Apple. And yes it was.
  2. The iPhone was going to push technology trends. Oh boy did it ever
  3. That it was going to be a marginal player. Oh boy was I wrong! WRONG. The share of profits is staggering.
  4. That integration with laptops was important. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Obviously I had no idea how much more important integration with cloud services was going to be.
  5. That Microsoft was going to be the bigger threat. OOOPS! Google wasn’t even mentioned! Of course, I wrote the post before Android shipped so that’s my defense. I could not imagine that it would take MS so frigging long to build a credible OS for the phone. And I suspect that Nadella will end that experiment soon.
  6. That the mobile phone providers were going to compete and push Apple into a niche. Right but I guessed wrong on who would do that. Samsung did. Nokia made the strategically boneheaded to go with Windows Mobile instead of Android. A bunch of other players did some good stuff.
  7. The laptop market that I thought was important turns out to be less important than I ever could have imagined for Apple.
  8. And of course, I completely misunderstood the app economy.

7 years later many it’s fun to point out how wrong everyone else got it – it’s even more fun to see how wrong YOU got it 😉

Market signals and the shortage of CS majors

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One of the ongoing themes in the tech industry is the shortage of qualified engineers and what can be done about it.

Having lived through one bubble, I thought I might share this picture:

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This image was taken from a talk delivered by Ed Lazowska at the NCWIT 10th anniversary Summit in 2014. The notes are mine.

The general theme of the talk was what to about the increase in computer science students and was this increase a one time event or part of a broader secular growth.

What was of interest to me was the sudden increase in computer science graduates coinciding with a sudden perceived increase in the financial outcomes of CS students.

Very smart people have a lot of options. And all things being equalled, people will choose things that have a higher payout. If the payout is significantly larger than other options, then they will pick a sub-optimal option to get the money.

Philip Greenspun has a really good post about this. The money quote is the following:

A good career is one that pays well, in which you have a broad choice of full-time and part-time jobs, in which there is some sort of barrier to entry so that you won’t have to compete with a lot of other applicants, in which there are good jobs in every part of the country and internationally, and in which you can enjoy job security in middle age and not be driven out by young people willing to work 100 hours per week.

This is how people actually make professional decisions. And as long as the tech industry compares unfavorably to other career choices there will be a smaller number of people in tech than other fields.  And that shortage is not just about exposure to CS, it is also about financial outcomes. And yes, articles about ageism don’t help.

Update: A friend of mine made another interesting observation about cyclicality of software. Given that stability is important, the cyclical nature of software also pushes people away from this industry. People who are unwilling to tolerate the kind of risk profile that might result in protracted periods of unemployment or work at substantially lower pay.  Combine salaries with job uncertainty and ageism it’s a frigging miracle that anyone is in this industry… Of course, if you read the rest of Greenspun’s article about why men predominate in science you realize that there is analogous argument to be made about the computer industry. Hmm….

As a personal anecdote, in 1994 a very famous professor of computer science told everyone in the room that was studying to get a degree in CS at Brown that we were all doomed. That our jobs were going to go to India. Unsurprisingly the total number of CS graduates that year was 13.

By 2001 the total number of graduates at my school had gone over 100 (in a class size of 2001) a 10x increase.

The dot-com bubble had made CS and the web the way to make money.

And then it collapsed in 2004.

I always wondered if that was a Brown University phenomenon. Turns out it is an industry wide phenomenon.

And … here we go again… As the payout increases, the number of CS majors increases…

My one – obviously self-serving –  observation is that if tech companies really are experiencing a shortage of employees, they do have a strategic option open to them – dramatically increase the salaries of folks in tech to compete with other industries like finance.