Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

Did you ever wonder what happened to early nineties one-hit-wonder MC Hammer? Well neither did I, but apparently he is throwing his hat into the “Web 2.0″ startup scene, by starting a company called “Dance Jam”, which is best described as a “social network meets YouTube for home made dance videos” sort of site, where people can post their own videos of themselves dancing, and challenge other users to “dance offs”.

To most of us, the concept might sound just about as silly as MC Hammer’s pants, but if they just clear the obvious potential copyright issues and get the rest right, I actually think it might be the sort of thing that can get a niche and/or cult following on the Internet (stranger things have happened)..

It is a well known fact that the infrastructure of southeast England is creaking, woefully inadequate and underdimensioned for the size of the population living and working there - rush hour traffic on the motorways surrounding London is “flowing” at pretty much the same pace as rush hour traffic in central Stockholm or Helsinki city. Trains are undependable, late, infrequent and always being cancelled and/or breaking down.

Another sort of infrastructure came to my attention when I got back to my Central London flat today: I have worse mobile network coverage in central London than I do out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in Finland or Sweden. At my dads house, which is pretty much out in the middle of nowhere in central Finland I have a consistent 100% quality network connection on an EDGE network with my mobile phone. In central London it usually differs between 60-80% on GPRS. For those not “in the know”, I can enlighten you by saying that EDGE is a much higher speed, better quality version of GPRS, sort of a “3G - .25″ if you want.

If it wasn’t for the Brits being highly skilled at financial engineering, the UK would most definitely be a third world country.
Side note: those who know their history will know that the British Empire was actually built and enabled by their superiority in financial engineering - innovations such as modern banking theory, the limited liability company and many other pillars of modern finance were all first introduced on these isles, so my assertion is correct in a historical perspective.

I have just come back from my yearly Christmas tour of visiting my mother in Sweden and my father in Finland. Doing what I do, I am always asked to look at one or the other computer related problem on my visits.
Suffice to say, it is a thoroughly humbling experience to help my mother or my father - their computer literacy is limited to say the least, but probably indicative of at least 50% of computer users. Sending and receiving e-mails is a big problem (biggest culprit in computing problems: Outlook, I always get Outlook related questions, most of them related to “send and receive”..), any website with more than rudimentary navigation and very simple forms are challenging to the degree that they are close to giving up.
To give a “for instance”: this summer when I was on holiday I received an empty e-mail from my dad, I knew instantly that if he bothered with trying to send me e-mail something important was going on, and just as I assumed, when I called him up it turned out that my 90 year old grandmother had been admitted to the hospital at the time (she is fine now and with as sharp a mind as ever, although of fragile health as you would expect of a 90-year old).

The point of these observations is that the flashy, feature rich “Web 2.0″ sites of the last years are for the most part too complex and too feature rich for a big subset of internet users, no matter what they say or claim about emphasis on “user friendliness”. If sending and receiving simple e-mails in Outlook or Gmail is hard work for a lot of Internet users, you can only begin to imagine what social networking, blogging or any number of other internet activities are to them: overwhelming and overcomplex (example: I’m sure my mother or father would love a service like Flickr - but Flickr in its current incarnation is just too complex for them to even remotely understand how to use).

This brings me to the value proposition of keeping things simple - not only in terms of what you, as a super user perceive as simple, but keeping things super simple. To make an analogy to my toys of choice from my childhood: the average reader of this blog is probably the computer and internet user equivalent of a Technic Lego enthusiast, but the fact remains that a big subset of users, my parents included are barely comfortable with the equivalent of Duplo Lego internet- and computing usage.

If you really want to make your software or website accessible to a large mass of internet users, it is probably worth putting extreme constraints on your product: cut out any feature or “user friendly” bells and whistles that are not absolutely essential for the use of it. Cut down choices and options to a bare minimum, so that most tasks can be executed in a straight linear fashion with a minimum of confusion.
If you don’t, the early adopters may like your product, but your mother and father most likely won’t.

People in more senior positions on software projects are often asked to make estimates, sometimes without consulting the person who (or even knowing, or knowing who) will develop a certain piece of software. This brings a few problems with if:
Firstly, not all software developers are equal, the most productive ones can be 10 times more productive than the average ones, not to even mention the poor ones. There is a very wide span of productivity - if you don’t know if it is Slow Steve or Productive Pete that is going to do the work, how can you give a somewhat accurate estimate with any level of confidence?
Second, even if you know who is going to do something, you don’t necessarily know their personal strengths and weaknesses as well as they do themselves - maybe Slow Steve is actually rather good at a given task, or Productive Pete struggles badly with a specific type of problem?

There are a lot of factors playing in that make making estimates for other peoples work littered with dangers that can create a massive margin of error in your “guesstimate”.
Personally, I’m a big fan of people doing their own estimates, on functionality that is sufficiently unambigous for them to make a reasonable estimate for - not only will you get more accurate estimates than your own stabs in the dark, but the people making the estimates will tend to get better at making their own estimates (at least if you check back and see how it went), all of which means your teams estimates as a whole will tend to become more and more accurate over time.

Integrity is a scarce commodity not only in business and politics, but in mankind as a whole. Most people are either too afraid to say “no”, or too focused on short term gain at any cost to possess it.

Having integrity is not easy, it means disappointing people, sometimes on a regular basis, and most people do not feel comfortable hearing things they don’t like, or saying things they know others do not like. Integrity can imply a number of things, for example:

• Do not promise what you are uncertain of being able to deliver.
• Do not pass the buck, blame others or grab glory that should belong to others.
• Acknowledge the contributions others have made to your success.
• Admit when you are wrong, but don’t dwell on the past - fix the future.
• Do not make compromises that compromise your own core values - be prepared to walk away, but don’t be a primadonna and drama queen.
• Do not indulge yourself in fantasies and wishful thinking - see your situation as it is, and deal with it.

I’m guessing most people struggle to tick even three out of the six boxes above on a consistent basis. Integrity may not always please people, but at least it will grow trust - people will know that your word is worth something, and that they can trust you come rain or shine.
But if integrity was an easy thing, it would not be such a valued commodity: it requires constant vigilance, self-awareness and an iron discipline. Even the strongest characters will succumb to the primal instinct of ducking responsibility and pleasing people in the short term from time to time. The only question is, what will you do and what kind of an individual do you want to be?

The above comic made me laugh out loud today - it is very accurate to the attitudes of a lot of people (myself included in the past). However “working harder” implies a couple of things, first that people are currently “slacking off”, and second, that people can maintain a consistent level of productivity even when working tired and under extreme pressure. If people are not already “working hard”, you are in trouble.

But the second point is more interesting: there seems to be a certain level of machismo around working long hours - it shows that you are a mans man, prepared to do what ever it takes to deliver. However there is a distinct diminishing return to working longer hours, to the point that it can actually become a negative return: many professions, like software engineering to take one close at heart, requires you to be constantly mentally sharp to be at the height of your productivity. Once fatigue and stress starts setting in that mental sharpness is gone with the wind, and people start making simple, stupid little mistakes that they wouldn’t do under normal circumstances.
Under short periods of time, long hours may work surprisingly well (people may be “in the zone” when they put their head down and just work hard), but in the long run fatigue and stress will take its toll. Obviously different people have different levels of productivity, stress tolerance and maximum number of productive hours in them, so giving a blanket number can’t be done - but on average I think the current 40 hour working week is pretty close for the average person in the long term (>2 months).

“Working harder” can only at best be a short term solution to solve short term problems - if it becomes the standard mode of operations, something is seriously wrong with the way your organization works.

I have previously expressed a number of reasons for my skepticism in the sustainability of the current UK house prices in general, and London prices in particular.

It now seems like I was right: several sources, including Forbes report that prices are down for a fourth month in a row, this time 3.2% nationaly, and all of 6.8% in London. The fall in previous months have ranged between 0.3% to 1.1%, but this is something else.

Although property companies and estate agents try to give a bunch of reasons and downplay the fall, a fall of 6.8% in one month is nothing short of crash level slide.
With lending criteria being tightened, the spread between mortgage rates and the Bank of England rate growing (and credit costs increasing as a consequence), subprime and buy-to-let financing all but evaporating and rental yields still being non-existent it does not make for a pretty picture for anyone looking to sell their property. It is likely that what we are currently seeing is just the beginning - once the crap hits the fan we could see a mirror image of the development in the US housing market over recent years.

The Register: “Rubbish UK management crushing creativity” (quoting a scientific study).

Nothing new there. For a country that culturally puts such a premium and emphasis on “management”, the average level of UK managers is really poor compared to my experience of other countries. If it wasn’t for immigrant managers and software developers, the UK IT industry would pretty much grind to a halt from general mediocrity and incompetence (the sad state of british software engineering is a completely different chapter altogether).

When I first moved to the UK, I was taken aback by how politicised the work place was: a general culture of “divert the blame, grab the glory” prevailed over true teamwork. After closer to 4 years in the country, I’ve gotten used to it, but unfortunately it has been confirmed to me that politics often takes the front seat to actual progress in many organizations.

Personally, I think the country’s obsession with stardom and football (soccer for you yankies) are partly to blame: the stature of managers attracts a lot of people into management who really shouldn’t be managers, and many of those in turn are either spineless pushovers that are just secretaries with fancy titles, or go one step too far by modelling their management style after macho authoritarian football managers.
The only problem with the latter is, there is a marked difference to managing a group of overpaid, pampered, uneducated and half-witted ball-kickers, and managing moderately paid intelligent professionals..

Software developers in general, and the Java community in particular have often been accused on being hooked on complexity and over-engineering (EJB <3.0 anyone?).

I believe there is a single, simple reason for this happening (over and over again): ego - people are “going for glory” and trying to be smarter than they really are. It would seem that the hardest thing in software development is keeping things simple.
On pretty much every project I’ve ever been on (since I’ve known better myself) I’ve had to have heated debates on why there is absolutely no need to do things “just in case” or trying to second-guess things to come, when others have wanted to introduce an “oompa-loompa layer” (or something of the sort), “just in case”. YAGNI is a hard concept to grasp.

The sad irony of all this is that if people would instead focus on writing the bare minimum of code (and nothing more) to satisfy a test and simply stated requirement, they would actually be better prepared for the “just in case” scenarios: If you try to guess the future, you are about 95% likely to get it wrong, but if you keep the code down to a bare minimum, what you have will be clean, easily refactored and easily extended when and if the “just in case” scenario actually comes to fruition.

The really “smart”, beautiful architectures stem out of simplicity and elegance - the art of doing exactly the bare minimum of what is required to fulfill a clearly and simply stated requirement.
Chances are that the incomprehensible, spaghetti like architectures you have come across have come out of people trying to be smart and predicting the future. Predicting the future is a fools errand, it is a game you will always loose, so trying to do just that to look smart is bound to leave you looking like a fool.

To-Do lists are a tool everyone has probably used to keep track of what they should do. The less commonly used, but equally effective flipside of the To-Do list is the “To-Don’t list”, because sometimes it is equally if not more important to remember what not to do, rather than what to do.

To give a simple example from my own personal life: I had a persistent throat infection for a couple of months during the fall, which left me unable to exercise, which led me to gain a few unwanted pounds. When it comes to turning this around quickly from a dietary perspective, I find it easier to remember the foods not to eat, than to try to plan a menu for myself for the whole week (besides, I’m to busy to stick to an “eating plan”). Therefore I have a “To-Don’t list” when it comes to foods I should avoid, don’t eat or drink: hamburgers, pizza, crisps, chocolate, sugared soft drinks or food in general that is high in fat content. This list is much easier for me to remember than trying to think up a list of foods to eat for the whole week.

This is a simple example, but it could just as easily be applied to more professional areas, such as management:

• Don’t micro-manage people just to be seen as doing something.
• Don’t try to solve every problem with a new process - there are other solutions you know.
• Don’t critisize or otherwise assert yourself on others, just for the reason of asserting your authority.
• Don’t get hung up on mistakes in the past that have already been made - look forward and correct them.

I’m pretty sure most managers would become much better managers if they could adhere to the above To-Don’t list..