Roman's miles

Marathon and my 17 weeks

So I've decided - I'm preparing for my first marathon!

The target doesn't look astonishing and if I do it I don't think I'll memorize next year as a year when I did my first marathon. It looks rather a bit frightening and intimidating but still appealing. It's a challenge - no doubt. I never was an athlete and never attended organized trainings. Episodically I attended a gym and ran few times a week 3-5 kilometers.

I started running again maybe 3-4 months ago and started with 2,5 miles. Then I increased the distance to 4-5 miles and went to the gym 6 days/week. I couldn't run without a target just for fun. I needed some mission to accomplish and I decided to start this preparation. I've chose the LA marathon that will happen on March, 19 next year. As a program to prepare I stick to Hal Higdon program that spans over 18 weeks and I have only 17, so I'll skip over a week. Yesterday I started my first week. It's a tough program: this weekend I'll run 6 miles but in 9 weeks I'll run 15 miles already. I told you it's frightening:-)

As you see I opened a new category "Running" and will publish blogs related to the marathon preparation only there (to let my readers distinguish and skip if they want). Wish me some luck and you're welcome to read about my runner's experience:-)

Technorati tags: marathon, running, target

A marathon, a certification program, and target setting

What a marathon (I mean a standard running 26.2 mile marathon) and a professional certification program (like I explained here) have in common? Probably nothing but I think there is a verge of vision showing both in a very similar way.

Why one decides to run a marathon? Among a variety of reasons there is a desire to prove to your self you can do such a crazy thing (many considering next to insane:-) or an aspiration to become a big target achiever and, more important, big target setter. It's all true and many will tell other valuable reasons.

Why one decides to undertake a certification? There is nothing to prove to your self and if this idea looks insane to somebody then only due to the fact it's gains are still doubtful. Seriously speaking a professional certification can wider a novice's knowledge and straighten his confidence in the topic.

But one thing the both have in common is establishing a concrete path to move a hobby to a professional level. One who runs for fun to bring a challenging aspect to his sessions may consider preparing to a marathon. It's far and away very challenging target if you've ran only 5 or even 10 miles in your life. A preparation program may span over 4 months but it's planned, organized, and requires commitment.

A novice learning, let's say Java, can choose a certification from SUN, and by taking this path will learn many things this realm has othervise he may not meet for years. His vision will be enlarged and his confidence brought to a new professional level.

I'm not saying a standard formal way is the only way to become a pro. I know a few of athletes training on their own without a single marathon and a plenty of very smart geeks having no degree, leave alone a certification. Such solo discoverers can build their own path and then dig through and beat their way to the target they set (or reset as they go). Eventually it's all about setting targets and committing to them.  If you're not one of the solo discoverers considering an official path in everything you do may be a pragmatic approach in making an achiever from your self.

Technorati tags: certification, marathon, target, achiever

The king of analogies!

Usually I refrain from creating linking blogs but this one struck the chord with its vivid examples:

Somebody who drives a car might be sitting in a long queue of traffic someday and see a motorbike go sailing past him. He might envy the biker's ability to largely ignore something that is a crippling problem to a car. If that driver then said "I know all about cars, so I must know all about motorbikes!" then he'd be wrong.

• If that driver bought a bike and then found that he was confused by the accelerator being a hand-controlled twist-grip instead of a foot-controlled pedal, he might complain that motorbikes should be fitted with a gas pedal.  
• If that driver had a wife and two kids, he might find the bike's single passenger capacity a flaw. He might suggest that bikes be re-built so they could carry four people, two abreast.  
• If that driver were to try and drive away, only to find that he fell over because he wasn't used to having to keep balance, he might suggest that bikes should be re-designed with four wheels.  
• If the driver were to find himself leaning around the corners, he might suggest bikes should be fitted with stabilisers to keep them upright when cornering.  
• If the driver wanted to keep his bike from being stolen, he might complain that there were no doors to lock potential thieves out, making his bike much more likely to be stolen than a car.
• If the driver found a crash helmet an encumberance, he might suggest that an airbag in the bike's handlebars could be fitted as an alternative to the annoying helmet.

And in every case, he would be wrong. Because he thinks that a motorbike replaces a car, he thinks it can and should do everything a car can do. He thinks it can work in the same way that a car does, that 'missing' car features can just be grafted on.

What's the creativity in making the point clear, precise, and simple! The analogy is somewhere on the verge of being hurting the "auto drivers" starting their Linux bike but at the same time I know how the real "Linux bikers" feel when they hear complains from such perversion. Again, nice plain English, brilliant analogies, interesting reading. Recommended for "hackers" and "lamers":-)

The blog is here

Technorati tags: linux, windows, hackers, analogy

An escape door

Some people call it procrastination, others just laziness, thirds claim the motivation wasn't strong enough. It does all truly exist there but naming the problem doesn't help much in resolving it. The problem is how to advance you self in overcoming procrastination, attacking laziness, and fueling motivation towards the targets you've set up.

Each of us knows it from own experience. You set up a goal, start it with enthusiasm and passion then reach first blocks on the road. If the goal is well attractive you overcome it and drive farther but soon reach another obstacle on the way. You go over and keep on driving to the goal and new blocks appear and you strike back. But sooner or later you meet a point where the energy to gear is not as strong as desire to miss or escape. Your creativity in finding a valid, legitimate, solid reason to not to meet this obstacle becomes almighty indeed. A couple of examples.

Decided to loose weight and chose a program demanding not to eat after 7PM. The first day it was a pleasure to put to the test your willpower, the second day you still enjoyed your strength of mind and stuck to the program, the third day it was already tough: you hadn’t lost much weight yet but you’re very hungry! What’s a mistake to open the fridge at this moment! The stomach and the eyes fed the brain at a speed of a thousands thoughts per second by the reasons why you COULD catch a piece from the fridge.

Giving up smoking? Hadn’t smoked for already a week and got to a pub with your friends? All the receptors immediately started locating well known attributes preceding a good cigarette. Mix of smells, pub music, taste of alcohol, friendly environment – and you again found a million well-grounded reasons why one cigarette wouldn’t make you a smoker again.

My favorite example is early awakening. What’s unnecessarily creativity our drowsy brain displays in finding a thousand of meaningful reasons why it makes sense to put the alarm clock forward on an hour! All pragmatic plans set up previous evening are forgotten at that miserable instant and the big exciting target to become an early riser is literally in coma requesting an emergency treatment.

Not pretending to reveal a silver-bullet method I claim the problem in all the cases is discipline and finding a strong basis in reasoning not to give up. If you’re disciplined you don’t eat after the you diet doesn’t allow whatever tempting dish you see/smell. If you’re disciplined you don’t smoke however pleasant and comfortable it may be. If you’re disciplined you wake up a minute before the alarm clock is set. There are many ways to become disciplined and maintain the discipline on a high level. Here I want to present a good analogy helping me fighting giving-up a lot.

Imagine you’re taking a stair race. There is a hundred of floors in the building and of course participation is more important than victory. You start at the very bottom level at the parking with other runners in presents of reporters, friends, and supporters. A starting gun shoots and the crowd runs forward and up. You’re excited and vividly depicture your finish: there are your friends, colleagues, maybe your kids and your wife in the crowd of supporters; you’re exhausted bug happy, you’ve done what you wanted. But here you come back to reality and see it’s only 4^th floor – other 96 yet to go! You fight a pity feeling to your self and run farther. But passing 28^th floor the feeling supported by muscle pains and broken breath calls again and a tiny voice starts asking: why do you want to go so up, maybe if you could just skip off the 30^th stair-well it would be good enough? What a crazy idea was to go so high (and you’ve jut passed the 43th) - you clench the teeth and keep on. The voice becomes stronger and already is heard loudly – why? (floor #58). Your anti-reasons generator starts working in a full-power mode: maybe I’m not ready yet, maybe I need more daily trainings (that I’ll of course start tomorrow), maybe next time I’ll not start so fast, maybe I had to sleep more yesterday and had special diet for previous month. You’re seeking for an idea to justify giving-up (80^th floor) and here you see this – the escape door! What’s the luck! You’re rescued! You’re saved. You skip off this race and you’ve done it. But wait a second, there are no colleagues and friends on floor 80, it’s a silent corridor and nobody’s waiting for you there. You broke your plan, you worked hard but haven’t achieved the target and what’s most painful here is you and only you found this escape door. You didn’t believe you could go to the roof but were looking for a reason to escape. Once such a “reason” appeared [in your imagination or in reality] you immediately took occasion…

This analogy helps me to go to the end, not to give up, not to get out off the way. When I set up a goal I imagine a hundred floor stair race and visualize stair-wells. When I hear that tiny voice I don’t let it seize me and drive to the escape door. No escape door but the roof is the only meaningful target. Whatever creative thought comes to me when I’m in the middle of the race I ask my self: “isn’t it an escape door?” Every time I change my original plan to adjust it to new things I found on the way I check it very carefully not to get led astray to an escape door. I need the roof. I hope this analogy will help you to push back the destroying voice of doubt each of us hears when we’re on a mission.

Technorati tags: GTD, motivation, discipline, target

How to make your startup a "cool to be working in" company?

I thought what could make people wanting to join and stay in a company even if a next door neighbor offers 20% more. I don't have a magic answer rather few candidate-like suggestions but before I go there let me tell you why I think it's important to retain your colleagues with you. The key factor is consistency and trust. People you can trust (not only in professional but more important in personal or even private  perspective) is the real edge in team building and the more such people work with you the more stronger this relationships and the team became. Your resource needs tomorrow may change but trusted people tha want to work with you will remain. Of course it means you have to "retain" only good people and ones you wouldn't take in your next start-up you should fire already today.

I think for a start-up it's better to have only real hackers in the team. I call a hacker one who would still continue playing with computers even if he wins a million dollars tomorrow. People who program not for living (or not only for living), people who don't leave their notebooks on evening and weekends in the office:-) A potential advantage of start-ups is due to a small number of needed people they can (theoretically) build the whole team from hackers. Joel promotes a similar idea providing numbers and reasons from his vast experience. So how to attract hackers to work for you? Here are few ideas without any preference order.

1. Office layout. Avoid cubicles! Just don't do it. So many friends of mine resisted to apply for big well known companies with one phrase - "donn' wanna work in cubicles!" Why, for God's sake, would you put  your best brain power into a 2x2 cell making them feeling like a factory cog? Layout your office with separate rooms for 2-3 people that like to have more privacy. Make spacious rooms for group work for people preferring collective environment - I mean seriously spacious rooms not meeting rooms remaining smoking lockups  in airports. Buy there a divan or comfort chairs, make people willing to stay there:-)
2. Office equipment. Buy comfortable working chairs. A chair is a working tool of a programmer, show them your respect their work (and over-work). Invest in cool boards (like this) or install cameras in meeting rooms to grasp and send board's drawing, buy phones with high quality speaker phones (for group discussions) and personal ear-phones. Buy a cool coffee machine!
3. Tools. Give only notebooks to the developers. Not a 17' screen 'game station but a good notebook for development. Undoubtedly it costs more than a desktop and hardly upgradable but for sure it will attract hackers (and retain too). Most important thing is if you hope they will think about your product evenings, nights, and weekends let them really do it. Give them home Internet for free.
4. Job duties. Let people deal with exciting things. I know it sounds strange but here is what I mean. People hate doing the same things (and those who like probably shouldn't be in your dream-team). Even if it was interesting in the beginning.  Give boring jobs to ones for whom it's still new. Write an installation? How exciting is it to create a new version for such a 'project'? Hire students for it and give somebody to lead them to try him in a position of a team or a project lead. To be a technical lead of the installation project is much more interesting/challenging/exciting than to customize it 15th time.
5. Horizontal promotions. People expect promotions and often leave the company seeking promotions. You can't promote everybody vertically - it's a bad idea to make all the programmers team leaders without a team. But you can give distinguished people new opportunities. An installation project lead is just one of the options. For people having strong technical experience offer to try the customer site - get involved into business aspects, interact with consumers, try to be on the front end. Give people opportunities to try themselves in the areas they probably never would apply for next job. An excellent QA engineer may try to take a small operation project and challenge a task the operations team lead has been dreaming of taking but didn't have resources. Such 'castles' may happen on a  temporary basis with part-time involvement. Isn't it a good bonus to let people a privilege to try something they may want for free?
6. Professional bonuses. Instead of paying money bonuses (or if you financial situation allows - besides that) let people think out a two week long project not related to your business directly and undertake it. If the team writes in Java let them write something in Ruby. Let them play with Linux if all running workstations are Windows. Let a HTML team create a prototype in Flesh. Let them study and then teach new technology. Let them be creative and offer projects that a) - interesting for them, b) - have more than zero probability be used in the future. Such professional bonuses may vary in conditions. For example prize #1 may be a project lead for full time, prize #2 - a team member with 50% involvement, #3 - 25%. At the end the project has to be presented to the entire team and the experience shared.

There are many ways to attract people and to make them willing working in your cop many even if the salary is not the highest. I put here my preliminary ideas came to me when I tried to answer to myself what would catch me in a company for a long period. What do you think should such a company has in its philosophy?

Techorati tags: job, startup, career, team

 

Mossad, French Legion or Taliban - what does your company look like?

Being a big fan of analogies I admit this one may not work precisely as I expect. Probably you'll help me find something better while I'm trying to explain what I meant.

I think any IT group or high-tech company may be classified in such an analogy and the criteria of the classification depend on the answer to the following questions:

• how rigid are your duties defined and how granular are the positions in the company?
• how easy can you reach the boss making decisions and how numb are the rules?
• how professional (in their specialities, discipline, soft skills) are your colleagues?

What I call a Mossad-like company is a flexible, agile group with duties although assigned to the titles still loosely confined;  where everyone volunteers for what's needed to be done with high responsibility and discipline; where no rules or confining policy have been erected to control and manage employees but where success of the group lies on trust, discipline, and initiative. Small special forces (of course not only Mossad's groups) act based on the same principals where high professionals are gathered together to accomplish one common mission.

In the civil world, or more precisely - in high-tech, start-ups by nature have good chances be placed into this category. Especially during bootstrapping phase when the crew size is reasonably small so there is no unnecessary people and everyone has to deal with everything. Unfortunately it's not always the case. There are even small companies contriving squandering precious time and money on non-efficient communications (needless meetings, discussions, working plans) and building complex working processes and internal hierarchies (assigning high titles, creating policies and rules). The drawback of Mossad-like companies is not are the special force member's biographies secret in such divisions but the parallel high-tech employees' histories will not tell much about their owners unless the start-up mission becomes very successful and well known.

A French-legion company is (usually) a big corporation with very well known brand name. The analogy here is it's honorably and lucky to get to such companies as to get to the Legion (probably instead of the Legion I should have used more abstract example like "elite army forces", but I hope you understand me).
Undoubtedly the company's name in the resume has its own weight and people getting offers from Fortune 500 clearly understand it. Usually there is a complex system of rules, policies, and deep hierarchy in place and even your three-level-up boss rejecting your request refers to THE system and THE processes everybody ought to follow. The flip side of this type  is the employees in such companies feel very protected, they have enough opportunities to build their career since they can dramatically change positions not leaving the company, and the social benefit grows up with the long service. Of course this kind of companies has its own exception and if you're lucky to find a "special forces group" inside a Top-500 company you get the best of the two worlds:-)

The third type in the list is already sunk into oblivion group - Taliban. Authoritative management, "personal" approach to career advancement, absence of initiative, mediocrity and ignorance of the management and an "average employee", devastating level of cynicism in company jokes - typical characteristics of these companies. There is no team solidarity but politics and intrigues are the second nature of the company. People work there because they have nowhere to go, they lost belief in the company and themselves. Nobody feels responsible for the situation but afraid to try to change something.

I'm far from the idea that every company fits exactly to one of the above types. I think a mix of the first and the second may create a good team environment. But even in such happy companies it's responsibility of everybody to take full care the brave crew doesn't drift to the third type. I admit again the analogies may not be ideal and welcome you to share your vision on what the companies look like.

Technorati tags: team, crew, IT, startup, working environment 

 

F*** the rules!

Well, I stole the title. It is precisely to the point and too appealing. Kathy talks about internal rules a company erected as dogma that bind creativity,  brake talents from doing challenging things, alienate customers, and eventually destroy the business. She urges to put every rule in doubt and not to threat every assumption ("how exactly do we KNOW this") as gospel. Another interesting blog talking about managerial rules and the danger of becoming their slaves is here. The essentials  from it: "That said, I have seen many situations in which an overreliance on rules made management look plain dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb." Both blogs explain how destructive rules may and they're worth reading. I  rather wanted to write here about areas where some rules or policy we do need.

Usually when authority establishes rules it's motivated by desire to prevent anarchy and/or to create directions so to not handle every situation manually (on personal basis). My point is it's not enough to cancel all the rules in such cases but to create rules that clear, simple, obvious, logical, and drive to mutual satisfaction. Few examples of bad rules and options to fix them:

1. Travel policy. In a big organization it's impractical to allow every employee to order itineraries. It's hardly controllable and may be expensive. But what's a stupid rule to say that the company can acquire tickets only from one travel agency! Driven by desire to cut expenses it sometime has the opposite effect. If you find a deal in the Internet that is cheaper by $1k than the agency can offer but neither you (you can't buy anything) nor the agency (can't buy from the Internet) can buy it what is the idea of the rule? A win-win rule could be: you can still buy from the agency only but if you find a cheaper deal you can get 50% of the difference as a one time bonus (and the company should start thinking about changing the agency).
2. Travel policy 2. The rule says: you're allowed to take international flights in business after you've already taken one such a flight in a year in economy. Great rule but what it's worth if it's published in January and in July it's frozen to cut the company costs. The result - people stop flying to some boring distant destinations. The cost is cut but the business is hindered. A win-win rule could be: if you're allowed to take business but take nevertheless economy you get 50% of the difference as a one time bonus. Or you can take your spouse with you in economy (two economy tickets are still cheaper than one business).
3. Working from home. Why an isolated group of programmers/designers/consultants/analysts must work in the office if the rest of the company works in the office? For the sake of stupid rules people are compelled doing things making no sense. A win-win rule could be: allow to work from home anybody as soon as her boss approves it and takes responsibility on such a working mode. If the team performance is not affected than why somebody has to come to the office?
4. Yearly bonus. If an employee leaves the company until February, 28 then she doesn't get the annual bonus even she was told she would get it this year as the best performer. Why the company wants to earn on this poor employee her bonus without thinking what the negative effect such behavior will make on the staying employees? If she knew the rule she wouldn't have left the company until February, 28 but what performance can the company expect from her then? I don't think I have to propose a win-win rule here: if the company pays the bonus everybody has to get it regardlell the date they leave the company.
5. Home Internet. The Internet is given for free. But it's either Internet or nothing. So if both husband and wife work in one company then one misses this attraction. A win-win rule: give a budget for utilities and gadgets for home office (free Internet, phone, printers/cartridges, home computer...) and everybody can pick up what she needs.

The idea here is not to create rules that barely confine the employees but rules that a) make sense, b) adjustable and adoptable, c) cultivate feeling that the company cares about the employees and not merely does things the HR read in an article "how to make your employee happy". By "adjustable and adoptable" I mean that the rules are created to serve and not to be overcome. If the rules change in the middle of the game the changes must be to the better (for the employees!)  or at least understandable (by the employees!) and fair (towards the employees!).

Technorati tags: rules, office, employee, company