Managing Geeks

Not a long post today. Primarily wanted to share that when it comes to managing geeks and IT people in general, they tend to self-organize under a form of meritocracy built on a foundation of respect.

Definitely a good editorial. Too bad more Pointy Haired Bosses and managers don't seem to "get" this idea.

Check the post out at this link.

Is Your Workplace Proactive or Reactive?

Reactive:

1 : of, relating to, or marked by reaction or reactance
2 a : readily responsive to a stimulus b : occurring as a result of stress or emotional upset <reactive depression>

Proactive:

1 [¹pro-] : relating to, caused by, or being interference between previous learning and the recall or performance of later learning <proactive inhibition of memory>
2 [²pro- + reactive] : acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes

I've been thinking about this in my workplace lately. I've had the revelation that much of my induced stress is related to the fact that my job is largely reactive. In my workplace we are encouraged to respond to requests for assistance and repairs. We are essentially on a treadmill where every day is another pile of problems, and no matter how much extra time you put in there's still another wave that threatens to sweep you away the next day.

I've had my doctor...nay, two doctors...tell me I need to reduce my stress levels. My blood sugar levels (I'm a diabetic...you knew that, though, after following my bariatric surgery progress, right?) seems to fluctuate, in part, in reaction to stress at work.

There's little in the way of a consistent methodology of measuring progress. You may have read this entry on how important that can be in the workplace.

Essentially the work environment is entirely dependent on putting out fires and there's no sign of those fires stopping. Ever. This makes it a reactive environment where we are always reacting to the next problem.

In a proactive environment we invest in the future. We would spend time trying to make things fireproof instead of putting out the fires after the fact. It could mean more training, making things easier for people to use (or for us to fix after the problems become apparent), and/or generally trying to head off issues before they become issues. It means investing time in intangible things like training the employees (including myself) and things that don't necessarily make quantifiable returns on a balance sheet, but improve morale and quality of life.

I work in a semi-professional position. In truth it is professional, but it is regarded as something less, and while it gives me less respect I suppose I do benefit in that I get taxed less for it (yes, we get taxed for having a job. They call it an occupation tax. I have another less family friendly name for it.) But I bet that just about any job can have steps taken to be more proactive than reactive.

This is just a thought that's been bouncing around my head lately. Maybe it's a personal preference; do you work better in a proactive or reactive environment? Which better describes your work environment? And does it affect how you feel about your job?

Overnight Delivery in Just Four Days

I recently had the good fortune of discovering my CPU cooler's fan had seized up. If you're unfamiliar with the internals of your computer, modern processors get hot. Very hot. Like, burn your bare finger hot. If allowed to stay that hot, it seizes up and dies. Or with today's processors they have a sensor that triggers when they overheat and the computer goes into thermal shutdown...*bloop*.

The CPU cooler is a radiator that is designed to pull heat off the processor and circulate it out of the case. On my particular computer the cooler with the radiator baffles is bigger than my fist, and mounted on it is a fan to push air through the baffles and keep the processor at a cool 50 degrees Celsius, give or take, depending on the load I'm putting on it.

Well, without air circulating through the baffles, the thing will heat up. Fortunately my computer, built by Puget Systems, is built like a tank. The freakin' thing warmed up, but not enough to kill the processor. Nice work! It had enough redundancy with cooling inside that the system was kept safe. My computer has a case with a clear panel on the side, so I just looked over and saw that the fan was seized up.

It happens over time. Dust, age, worn bearings...fans die.

A side note-while waiting for the new part, I installed a program to read temperatures and display them on the panel at the top of my Linux system's desktop. I had temps...but what was too much? I emailed Puget and asked them, along with current numbers. Their techs emailed me back the next business day with assurance that the numbers were well within tolerance. I emailed back a thank you, and they emailed again telling me, "Hey, no problem, any other questions don't hesitate to let us know." This computer was purchased a few years ago...they still were uber-responsive to me as a customer. Strong incentive for me to look to them for my next set of systems, if I don't go with a Mac-centric home...

Anyway, I ordered a new one on NewEgg, a great source for techie toys. Exact same model cooler. This was a Thursday night. I specified, next day UPS, expedited order. Cost me a total of $65...twice as much as the cooler alone.

My wife said I probably wouldn't get it on Friday. I didn't.

I got it Monday night.

Oddly enough, I'm still going to be billed for overnight delivery.

In a time when packages could be tracked to the point when they're dropped on my porch, why am I paying for what I'd like my delivery to be, instead of what the delivery ends up being?

I shouldn't have to pay overnight when I didn't get it for FOUR days!

Am I the only one that thinks this makes some sense?

The iPhone Vs. LG Voyager

It's official. The iPhone 3GS has smashed records for AT&T and Apple.

I would love to have an iPhone but the only carrier in the US is AT&T and I'm already quite invested with Verizon. Every carrier has horror stories associated with them, but in our relations with Verizon we've had good luck with customer service as well as technical service.

AT&T didn't come into our area with coverage until late in the game and when they finally did put in tower coverage the coverage was unreliable and spotty.

In other words, they left a bad taste in my mouth after seeing how they ran their business. If you followed my blog you know how I feel about businesses that seem incompetent with their customer relations.

I'm told that they're better today. I don't particularly care. There's a similar effect for restaurants. It's quite common for a restaurant to work long and hard at building a loyal number of regulars, but it takes only one bad experience to lose a customer forever.

That doesn't mean I don't wish I had an iPhone. I have an iPod Touch, the iPhone's close cousin, and I owned a Verizon LG Voyager. The iPod gives a pretty close experience to what an iPhone is like in most areas other than actually calling and texting (and a couple other features like taking photos and GPS, since the hardware isn't available on an iPod). The iPod does give the computer integration, music, podcast, and touchscreen as well as close form factor to the iPhone as well as the app store integration. It runs the same operating system as well.

Having used both the iPod Touch and Voyager, I can tell you that the interface to the iPod is light years beyond the Voyager and it's Verizon technology kin.

The touch interface on the iPod is responsive and probably three to four times more accurate than the Voyager's.

The app store on Apple is convenient and makes the iPod more flexible. Yes, Apple acts as the gatekeeper for all applications on the iPod and you won't (intentionally) find porn-based applications on the iPod/iPhone, but overall there are a simply huge number of various applications to choose from and they aren't tying you directly to Apple's brand overtly. Verizon requires you to do everything through Verizon and they're quite limiting in what I could and couldn't do on their phone.

The iPod allows for wifi access. Not so sure about Verizon's phones. It's not on the Voyager.

The iPod/iPhone was integrated with my computer. I could back it up and sync data easily with my computer, without having to find some kind of accessory kit with the proper cable for use with my particular phone. There are even applications to allow you to explore and navigate your iPhone/iPod from your computer. My Verizon phone was very much a separate accessory; it is as if Verizon is afraid of diluting their brand by allowing the customer to have any control over the product.

The only place I preferred my Voyager was the tactile keyboard. I could type significantly more quickly than on my iPod. However I could learn to work the iPhone's key display in a pinch (on the Voyager you almost had to get proficient with the full keyboard; the touchscreen was horribly inaccurate and lagged, making it nearly impossible to use.)

The Voyager was barely usable with the touch screen. For anything more complicated than viewing text messages I often had to drop to using the keyboard to get anything done; I can't count the number of times my phone thought I wanted to edit or view a contact entry when I was trying to get the damn thing to scroll. The iPod? No problem. If anything the iPod was almost too responsive, the screen just begged to be touched. The Voyager was so finicky and glitchy that it was just the opposite.

I don't know if it's a problem with Verizon just not "getting it" or if they're so stuck in some paranoid business model of controlling the brand rather than creating a great customer experience that limits them so much. Verizon has a great network, I've had excellent luck with coverage. The services offered by their website have worked well for us.

Now I just wish they had good products to match those services. I'm hoping that at some point Apple will cut their exclusivity with AT&T and create a product with Verizon...so far Verizon has show zero ability to "get it".

I Go to the Movies Apparently to Watch TV

My wife and I went to see the movie Hangover a few weeks ago. It was a pretty good movie, by the way.

The problem is that we paid quite a bit of money to get in; anyone who has been to the theater lately knows what I'm talking about. We didn't see the matinee time. We went in at a late-night showing. It was a multi-cinema theater, not a small town 2-screen theater; a major name place who shares its name with an adjective for a monarchy.

We sat down around 8:00 in our seats. The lights dim.

We watched over 20 minutes of commercials and previews.

Previews I don't mind so much. I sometimes enjoy seeing peeks of what's coming up soon. But commercials?

This theater already shows a loop of some trivia and information before the movie starts...I don't count that since if you're ten minutes early, you're going to have 10 minutes of that loop. I do get slightly irked at the whole, "this movie trivia is brought to you by Coca-Cola" thing they have going on, but hey...I have some control over how much of that I'm exposed to.

But when the movie is supposed to start it would be nice if the movie started.

Worse, they're showing commercials. Actual commercials. For cars and trucks. And soda.

WHY?

I don't want any of that crap just because they're ticking me off when I came here to see a @#$ movie. I associate their products with being annoying crap now.

Because they're actual commercials. Like what I see on TV. As in the reason we're paying a big bundle of cash to sit in the theater and get away from them in the first place.

In a time when people are literally turning their living rooms into small theaters with surround sound and projectors or ginormous LCD televisions, why would theaters go out of their way to try turning their theaters into giant living rooms by creating a crappy viewing experience? I could pay a boatload of money to watch pay per view in my underwear at home. I'm paying a quite a bit more to sit in your theater and be forced to sit through you trying to push the same commercials on me that I get already at home.

Basically it's a reason I don't go to the theater unless it's a movie I really want to see. Otherwise I wait for it to come out on DVD. I am simply too irritated at the onslaught of ads that waste my time and worse, I'm paying them to irritate me. It's a personal pet peeve.

Incompetent fast food restaurants led me to simply stop going to them and tell other people how crappy they are. If I keep getting this from theaters I think I'm going to add them to my craplist as well. I'm very close to sending a letter to the CEO asking he or she to pull his or her head from his or her butt and stop showing me the same crap I already get on my TV at home.

Feeling My Way Through A Manager's Role

I recently was put in charge of a handful of temporary help. They are working on some tasks that don't fall under the heading of "skilled labor", and chance are we'll never see them again after their temporary hiring period passes. They know this. We know this.

But this was the first time I was put in charge of a group.

I've never done this before. I've wondered what it would be like to manage a business or be a supervisor over other people; it's kind of like the "not my parent" syndrome, where we promise we'll be better parents than our own parents because of course we know everything our parents did wrong.

The problem is that we don't focus on what they did right. Granted, in some cases you may not have had good management over you before. But this is a problem when you're suddenly thrown into that position with little to no experience in the field, so I am going through this with a trial by fire.

One problem is that these aren't full time workers. They're temporary. They have no investment in the organization, so if they decide to screw around the worst that can be done is they are told not to come back...because they are young temporary help this really isn't a huge blow to them in the long run.

Here are some observations and tenets by which I try to work with:

1. Never dress down/criticize employees in front of other employees.
2. I try to make clear notes and instructions of what is expected of the people being managed.
3. I don't micromanage them. They have a set of goals and a deadline by which to achieve them. If they give reason for me to watch over their shoulders I will. Otherwise I keep tabs on their progress through spot-checks.
4. I believe in not asking them to do what I wouldn't do. But at the same time...related to the item above...I'm not watching over their shoulders and double checking every line item. Otherwise I might as well do it myself; I'm repeating effort and it's a waste of time if I do that.
   
5. Scheduling and organizing is hard if you're not at the top of the chain. I have sent several queries to other department on which our schedules depend on their progress and goals with their projects. I get very little response to those questions and continue to get last minute surprises from people.
6. My Asperger self likes to schedule and project and derive useful statistics and be able to keep track of our group's progress. Other people, I think, don't plan at all. Things I thought would have been roughly mapped out with other groups yield blank stares when I ask. This means that there is a good chance that at least part of our goals won't be realized in large part because other groups are throwing up roadblocks.
7. I want to give people a chance to prove they can't do the job rather than vice-versa. I also want to give them feedback along the way.
8. I always try to tell them if they're doing a good job with a particular task without going overboard. Compliments are meaningless if doled out like candy, but morale suffers if the workers don't know what they're doing right or wrong.
9. I think employees want to do well with their jobs. I try to keep that in mind while working with them.
10. I try to facilitate their work. That means providing the tools they need to get the job done and being available for questions and help. If I'm not going to be around I make sure they know who to contact and how to reach them.
11. I do have them keeping lists and charts of their progress. This doesn't mean that they will always stick with it, but this should reduce the number of items overlooked while trying to get tasks completed.
    

I really don't know what else I can do. I am trying to take over some of the work that most people find tedious and I've spent a lot of time trying to get things organized and covering bases with what they'll need to do in order to cover the goals before the end of their work period and I'm hoping that they can appreciate the clarity I try to bring to their goals. I think that clear-cut goals give them milestones and a sense of accomplishment. At least I hope that is what it does.

At some point I'm going to try finding a way to get feedback from them on how they think I'm doing as a manager, but I don't know how to do that. If anyone has any ideas I'm open to hear them...

Microsoft's PC Ads

I know this has been known for awhile in the blogosphere (or people with common sense) but I was thinking about it because I saw the ad campaign on TV again.

You may have seen it...some doofus off the street, a real Jane Average Consumer only this time she's named Lauren, is given a little over a thousand bucks and told that if she can find a system with a particular set of specs for that amount or less she can keep the computer. It's like winning the lotto!

Lauren goes to the Apple store and immediately heads back out to report to the camera that there's nothing within that price range that is near those specifications. "I guess I'm not cool enough to be a Mac person." Ooh, SLAM!

She ends up buying a wonderful WINDOWS computer from someplace...Best Buy, maybe? Woo hoo! Jackpot!

One problem. She never went into the Apple store. The proof is in the still shots captured from the advertisement.

C'mon. How can you screw up staging something so simple? Really. How dim do you have to be to screw up something like that?

Quick business tip. When you're dealing with the subject matter of technology, even if your target audience is meant to be the average computer-ignorant consumer, don't skimp on the details because geeks will call you out on it. Then they'll advertise it in the same Webbertubes that your average computer-ignorant consumer in the market for a computer may run across the information.

Know your audience as well as your potential audience.

And don't mess with geeks.

Enjoying the Experience, Part Two

Okay I promised it yesterday so here it is, the followup.

I posted that information hoping to give some background on why I feel justified in mentioning this particular pet peeve. Hey, I did say that it would loosely tie to that experience issue...and it does. Every time I run into this issue it kind of leaves me peeved.

I was recently involved in troubleshooting an issue with some software in which part of the problem was tied to printing. In talking to the tech person, who also happened to be one of the developers of the product (good hint this is a smaller software vendor, but it's a mixed blessing...yes, you get good support from someone who knows the intimate details of how the software goes about a task to accomplish a goal, but you also have to deal with people who are juggling fixing bugs and issues with your incessant neediness to have a product that works and your subsequent whining when it doesn't). I'll call the developer Carl.

We had a printer, shared from a Windows print server, set up on the computer. Try sending the print job and it acted like the program was getting "stuck" and the program would hang. Killing the application would corrupt some data files. Real pain in the rear issue.

I looked at the logs on the printer server system and it was seeing the print job; it listed the username under which I was logged in and a document called "no name" followed by a job size and then it said it printed zero pages.

Huh?

"The server sees the print job and it has a size with it, but said the job was zero pages long. Could there be an embedded code in the print job that's keeping the printer from rendering it?" I'd run into issues like that before with bad PDF files and certain print jobs on particularly buggy drivers.

"No, that's normal. We don't use the Windows GDI or anything like that to render the print job. We send it straight to the printer in PCL."

Uh oh.

Carl is basically telling me that their print system from their application is bypassing Windows for certain things...I have to have the printer set up on Windows, then open their app's settings, select the printer, at which point their software is doing something to render the print job and send it to the printer rather than a "good" application which hands the print job to Windows and says, "Here, print this," and Windows runs off giggling to do just that. A second system didn't have the printers installed that the application said it was pointing to in order to print...and the application worked on that machine.

Let me reiterate. Windows did not have the printer installed. But the application had it in the printing settings. And the application worked. Carl speculated that at one time the printers were set up in Windows and that's how the application got the initial settings and so deleting the printer from Windows didn't affect the application...

Adding to the confusion was the fact that despite Carl telling me their product doesn't interact with the Windows printing system, it was obviously doing something with it or else I wouldn't see it showing up in the Windows logs on the server. Going directly to the printer would bypass this step. What was showing up was goofy (it printed fifty pages, but the logs said it was a 0-page job. Figure that one out.)

Ugh.

This is where user experiences come into play. I get a bad taste in my mouth whenever a developer decides he or she knows better than the OS "way" of doing something and boldly leaps forward with their idea of how something should be done, everything else be damned.

One of the few things Windows did right was unifying the printing system for applications. In the DOS days every app that wanted to print had to include some set or subset of drivers and you configured each application to see your printer. If your word processor didn't support your particular printer or you couldn't find a driver for your word processor to see your printer you prayed that the word processor had a printer driver that was "close enough" to work. Then you repeated this process with your spreadsheet software. And any games that happened to print maps or scores. It was a nightmare at times.

Once Windows hit the personal computing scene every application could just include a library that allowed them to hand the job to Windows. Windows needed a driver to print, and from there it took over and did the grunt work. One driver! Not fifty! Yay!

But there were people who insisted this wouldn't do. I remember WordPerfect ported their word processor from DOS to Windows and it had its own printer spooler system. You printed, it handed it off to the spooler (their own stuff) which rendered the print job and then I think it handed it off to Windows to finally print. I hated having to troubleshoot wonky print jobs that would get stuck in their rendering engine or crashed because of some weird bug in their print system.

How does this tie to my previous post, aside from the fact that my experience with this WordPerfect architecture abomination left me with a bad taste in my mouth for other programs trying to go rebel with dazzling me in programmer cleverness?

Because I'm not entirely sure how the program at hand was actually working (the program I was just troubleshooting). The application had to deal with software that was really meant to run on "old iron"...mainframe type stuff. Basically this program was to take output from another application mean for human resources stuff and render, format, and print that to a printer system (confused yet?). To put it in simple terms I'm working on software that was a port...an evolutionary step with roots in mainframe computers. Non-graphical, probably. The culture behind such designs is one of "I don't wanna change and you can't make me unless I absolutely must," so all the software with roots in IBM mainframe-type systems definitely shows the heritage.

So maybe there's a good reason they chose to do something weird with the printing.

Maybe their programmers were just more comfortable playing with the file contents directly. Maybe they had source code on hand and just wanted to port the software to a Windows graphical interface, and never quite left that mentality.

But please, for the love of whatever deity you subscribe to...please stop trying to fight what few usable features Windows has. Or any operating system on which you're developing. They are there to make life a little easier for you and the end user, and it seems that almost every time someone comes up with some clever enhancement to the way things "should" be done, something ends up breaking and your clever little whiz-bang improvement becomes a detriment to the end user.

My user experience has been horrible with such schemes. Of course Carl would defend his decisions in the way he chose to code his contributions to the application...he's invested in the product. Others at the company he works in are equally invested. It seems that eventually developers are so close to their "baby" that any user having issues with things like this become regarded as morons or it's just a case that the user's computer is misconfigured; their system is an improvement on the crappy Windows way of doing things, after all! It's obviously my fault.

Developers totally lose perspective of what it's like for their users. Whether Carl had good reason or not for how and why this was implemented...aside from the fact that I was working to troubleshoot the issue as a system administrator, the reasons that he and his team did this don't really matter to me. I'm the customer. I just wanted to use the product. He can justify the design by all their meetings or directives or "it works for me" or even the voices in the heads of the development team. I don't care. What I care about is that I need those print jobs working and they're not.

Which means my user experience is leaving me with a really bad taste in my mouth for your product as well as your company name.

I had another issue a few years back with a certain point-of-sale company while consulting for a cafeteria. The company that was initially decided to get the contract...not my choice...put in a product that was experiencing issues with transactions to the database being unreliable. While troubleshooting I found that they were using Microsoft Access as the back end.

We were feeding data from about ten registers in different locations to this central point-of-sale system. And they were feeding it into MS Access. I'm not a database programmer or architect, but I never heard of this being a good idea.

The vendor wanted us to keep throwing hardware at the problem. It was obviously because we were short on RAM, our switches weren't configured to handle the traffic reliably, even power fluctuations were causing issues so they were having us put line filters and UPS's on various systems and equipment before finally someone...like yours truly...wrote up a nice long report on why the bottleneck was the way they built their system and there was no fix without replacing it. A replacement vendor was using a database based on Advantage, and later MS SQL server, and for the most part issues disappeared.

That vendor has a permanent black mark for making what, in my experiences, was a very stupid design decision and then trying to shove the problem onto us. Bad customer experience.

So keep these things in mind if you're offering a product and service. It can take a very very long time to make a loyal customer but only one bad experience to make an enemy who is very willing to share their opinions of your product with others looking to spend a lot of bucks on a product in your industry...

iChat, Update, and User Experience

Mac OS X update 10.5.7 was released yesterday. I was listening to the Mac OS Ken podcast and heard that among all the changes was a mention of an update to iChat.

My immediate thought was, "Could they possibly have fixed that @#% connection bug??" I previously wrote about it here; sometimes I can video chat with people, often I get the "connection declined" error repeatedly. Sometimes it'll manage to connect. Frustrating, frustrating, frustrating...until I got tired of swearing at it and installed Skype, sent a message to my wife to download and install Skype on her system as well, and it Just Worked (tm).

I pulled up an article on Macworld's site that discussed the 10.5.7 changes. The author found that yes, there were changes made to iChat, but from the sounds of them they were cosmetic (although it seems he couldn't find the changes when he checked between 10.5.6 and the updated system).

Disappointing, but I guess I wasn't too surprised.

That got me to thinking...after all the hassle I had before, would I want to use iChat again now that I have Skype working?

This is an issue with the User Experience, something so many people just can't seem to grasp as a concept. I have bad memories of iChat, and I eventually got so fed up with it that I found my own solution that works well in my situation. I may use iChat if the issue is fixed, but I'm always wary of it and the only reason I'd go back is if I don't have time to get some new user to download and install Skype but rather use the software pre-installed on their Mac.

If you work in technology, especially in support, you cannot underestimate the importance of the user experience. Yes, users do dumb things. Yes, users make you want to stab yourself with a dull spoon sometimes to make the frustration go away. But the users make up the community with which you interact on the webbertubes and if their user experience sucks, you're going to have problems with your product's reputation, your company's reputation, or if you're a sysadmin, your users with find their own solutions and ignore you because to them you're an incompetent boob not worth listening to. They also will hate you for not listening to their issues and addressing their needs.

Thus leading to more frustration for you having to support them, leading to resentment, leading to more sales of Dilbert books.

Unfortunately technology today is about compromise. This issue with iChat has been ongoing for quite some time and a lot of people are having to deal with it and are left to find their own workarounds. Because of the many things Apple does do right combined with the alternatives...Windows? AAAHH! Linux? Most users would rather poke their eyes out than have to deal with various tech issues related to using Linux on their own...the Mac is still the best value for usability and system stability (and security) for the average home user.

There is a caveat. As a geek, we take our warts very seriously. We don't forgive when our favorite things are blemished and we feel we're wronged. This annoyance is not something that will be easily forgiven, and the longer we're ignored over an issue the more vocal people will become about hating you for it. Worse, you have a competitor that has a solution that works. So what's the holdup, Apple? Why can't you get this right when some left-field startup managed to have a cross-platform solution with your features...video, audio, text chat...that just works?