The advent of the Internet and specifically social media applications (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) has brought to the forefront what I am sure is a long tradition of tension between employers and employees when it comes to how much information about your workplace should be shared with the public and who has control over that information.

Before the advent of the Internet, the scope of the average person’s ability to disseminate information about their workplace was rather limited. Friends and family were often privy to information that an employees might want to keep close. But the existing trust network that existed between those people was generally enough to comfort a company. Only rarely would someone venture outside that network to the media or other large distribution mechanism. And while “leaks” certainly occurred, they were usually for higher profile events through traditional media outlets, not mundane everyday looks into corporate life.

The Internet and social media has changed all that. It is now near effortless for anyone to broadcast every detail of their life, including events at their workplace. A tiny sign of that is that only within the recent past has here been a need to create a term such as “oversharing.”

In an unfortunate, but understandable reaction, some companies have reacted badly to this newfound ability of their employees and made attempts to prohibit this behavior. Neal Stephenson in his classic novel, Snow Crash, uses this as a plot premise. Technology is created to try to control the thoughts of their employees at all times to protect the corporate interests. (The results? Not so good for humanity.) While fanciful in it’s implementation, I get the sense that many companies worry that it is getting too easy for employees to share information they consider proprietary and would love to have a form of “intellectual DRM” at their disposal.

In an attempt to control this information, companies often take a reactionary approach and blame the technology. Technology is used to try to impose controls and policies to block the usage of such technology. In the workplace this can take the form of blocking access to social media, monitoring of internet usage, and even taking disciplinary action against their employees. Outside of the workplace, companies have developed tools to monitor the online activities of their employees And provide information back to their supervisors. (I will ignore the fact that it is virtually impossible to block these services given the advent of smart phones and devices which are always connected to the Internet.)

This is completely the wrong approach. Technology is not the problem. Technology is only a tool which allows people to share. What they share is important, not the fact that they share information about their workplace. The type of information people share is a direct reflection of their attitude about their workplace. If an employee is happy about their job and their work, the sharing of that information is a benefit to a company. The social media world can help share that in a way that PR never will. However, if a company has created a negative atmosphere for it’s employees, that will be shared. Imposing draconian policies on employee’s right to share will fail in two ways: it will not prevent the information from getting out and will only make the information they share worse when they do.

Technology is not the problem, nor is it the solution. Creating an environment of trust and respect in the workplace will enable a company to leverage the new technologies benefit. You can see this in the new generation of companies that promote the use of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook to share information and promote the company brand.

If you are one of these companies, resist the urge to take a reactionary approach to technology. Learn to embrace it and use it to your benefit. Your company and your employees will be better for it.

Bruce Schneier: The security mirage

Thanks to Tiffany for sharing this with me. A great talk by a really brilliant guy. The TED talks are always a great collection of really bright people talking (I have linked to them before: Why, how, what). You should look at the full list and find some, you will learn something. Bruce Schneier is definitely a must read and watch for anyone who works in any way with security, information or otherwise.

I try to avoid just reposting things, so I will add a little personal, geek envy story. Several (ok, more than several) years ago, I went on a trip to San Francisco for the company I worked for. I was lucky that there were two events going on at the same time. The first was Macworld San Francisco and it was the year the iPhone was announced. (see this picture from when I was there). But the next was a great opportunity to attend an EFF party at an art gallery in downtown. I was talking with a woman about something relating to her Vintage clothing website, I think. Out of the corner of my eye while we talked I saw someone and I knew that I knew who it was, but I couldn’t place them. I was probably rather rude to the woman I was speaking to as I kept glancing over to try to figure it out. At a certain point it hit me, HOLY SHIT, THAT’S BRUCE SCHNEIER. Now, I was a wimp and didn’t go talk to him, but it was cool none the less. At the same party, I also saw Violet Blue (NSFW link), whom I saw more recently at SXSW. All in all a cool party.

Ok, that’s my story, now go watch the video and learn something.

Link to recently tweeted articles [1. test footnote]

Recently I got asked by the director of the Cohen Career Center at William and Mary to become a member of their Employer Advisory Board. I feel truly honored to be asked by my alma mater to advise the department which has such a huge responsibility to help students take the great lessons they have learned at the College and find a career that they find satisfying. Sadly, I was not able to attend the inaugural meeting a few months back, but I spent the day last Friday at our second meeting and I found it a great experience.

We had breakout sessions with faculty and staff from various departments and my group was focusing on science and technology. To step back for a second, one goal of this board is to help the College as a whole and the Career Center specifically get the message out to employers of the specific benefits of hiring students from William and Mary as opposed to other, well qualified students from other institutions. In my view, the argument is an easy one; a liberal arts education makes a more well rounded individual. Beyond the initial, strict qualifications for a job, I want a new hire who will have the intellectual depth that a narrow education doesn’t give. Someone who is capable of having a great conversation with me, my staff, and customers is extremely valuable to me as a businessman.

I firmly believe that William and Mary provides that level of graduates to the world. But, how do we make sure the world knows this and knows the benefits?

Our conversation came around to the fact that the information is available in mailings and online, but it is just too hard to get to. You can look at the statistics of job placements for graduates or the research interests of the various professors, but right now, it is too hard to find quickly. If I am an employer, I don’t have 30 minutes to research William and Mary, I have 3, maybe. If we can’t show you a compelling set of information that quickly, your next 27 minutes will be spent elsewhere.

So, that is the area I hope that I can help. I want to help the College make it simple for someone who has a resume in front of them from a newly minted William and Mary grad to find out why that individual has a better chance of succeeding for that company. I think this will be a fun project and I will try to remember to share as we make progress.

I will leave you with one project I think is great; Liberal Arts @ Work. This project has profiles of what grads have done with their liberal arts degrees and how they were instrumental in finding their passions.

This tweet from my friend Monique got me thinking about that gut feeling you have when something just “feels right.” The physical metaphor that we instinctually use is an interesting choice. We don’t describe the situation as “looking right” or “sounding right” (which actually implies uncertainty), but specifically bring to mind a physical sensation. When one is working in the mechanical world, this is easy; threading a nut onto a bolt goes smoothly and easily when you have it right, but is hard to do when you have it cross-threaded. You come to learn that if you are having to force it, something is wrong, you should take a step back, and try again.

But what about ideas? Why do we still fall back on this physical metaphor? And, more importantly, how can we plan our intellectual endeavors such that they feel right and hope that our intuition is correct and we are, in fact, doing things right.

I have no magic answers, I wish I did. For me, I think the way that I work is by trying to take the purely abstract thoughts and turning it into something on which my “gut” can operate. When working on software design, I see two ways to do this and both of them involve translating these purely brain based ideas into something physical.

The first and simplest is just to explain your design or idea to someone else. The other person doesn’t have to know anything about the topic (or even be a person, for that matter). The very act of speaking your ideas aloud forces you to translate them into words and then listen to them.

The next method is to go visual. Draw a picture or diagram of your design. If it is simple to draw, it is probably simple to implement. If you end up with tons of overlapping shapes or intersecting lines, you probably are going to have a problem.

Nothing earth-shattering, I’m afraid, but maybe help for you.

BTW, my apologies for being lax in posting last month. Of the 31 days in March, I was away from home for 22 of them. And while this included the excitement of SXSW, it did not lend itself to writing much.

When a discussion, an old school presentation, and a section in a book I had paused reading but just picked back up all point to the same topic, it seems a good idea to write about it.

Sunday morning while I was reading over my news, I came across a story summary that talked about two high school students who were severely disciplined as a result of comments that they made about a teacher on Facebook. This resulted in an exasperated noise from me which spawned a really good discussion with Tiffany. The merits of this particular case aren’t really relevant but we had a lively discussion of where a society (in this case, a public school) should draw the line between having the discretion to use situations such as those kids as a teaching opportunity and having to deal with getting chastised by parents and communities for not having “objective” criteria, which seems to result in idiotic “zero-tolerance” policies which do nothing to actually curtail or change the behavior they punish.

Later in the day, I came across a presentation from my Advanced Software Engineering course in graduate school discussing the importance of good teams in producing quality products. One section that struck me again was the area where I discussed the creation of “methodologies” or “processes.” Specifically the dangers of creating rigid processes that took the power to be flexible out of the hands of the people implementing the process and force everything to be written down. I talked about the importance of the interview to find the right people who have the energy, creativity, and curiosity that is needed. One of my favorite authors, Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man Month describes software development as a craft. It is neither purely an art as it produces practical output but neither is it the mechanical application of a set of rules. To quote Fred Brooks:

…There is delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures…

The final nudge to talk about was when I picked up Justice Stephen Breyer’s Making our Democracy Work, which I have been reading on and off for a little while. I got back into the section where he is talking about the methods by which a judge needs to look at the laws he is being asked to rule on. Justice Breyer espouses what he calls a “purpose-oriented approach” to interpreting statutes. This method holds that the judge must look to the purpose that the legislature intended a law to serve when he is interpreting how it should be applied to a specific case. One of the arguments he uses to support his approach is that if judges were to only rely upon the specific text of a statue, the legislature would be forced to write encyclopedic laws covering every possible situation that might occur in the future.

How do these three topics come together in my head? To me they suggest a truth that I hold dear. In all systems we must trust the people who are implementing them to do the right thing. Processes, rules, and laws must be written in moderation. The old adage that says the tighter you squeeze your fist to hold onto something the more will slip through your fingers is appropriate in all walks of life. The strength of people is there flexibility and if you try to write rules and control every aspect of life or business or software development, you will stifle the very thing that allows for the greatest achievements.

As some of you may have noticed from some of my tweets over the last few weeks, it is performance review season for me at my job. This is one of those things that as a non-manager, one does not pay a huge amount of attention to (except that it may be the same time as salary review which can be fun). Your manager does some things behind the scenes, you have a meeting with them to discuss their thoughts, possibly discuss goals for the coming year, and usually have some discussion on salary. Good managers will be interested in your thoughts and if they are really good, this is just a formality and you don’t really learn anything you haven’t talked about many times before with them over the course of the year.

As a manager, my feelings on annual performance reviews are very mixed, in fact, I really don’t like the process. Before everyone gets up in arms, let me explain. My feeling is that the overly restrictive, cumbersome process that many managers (myself included) have to go through every year to complete them actually lowers there effectiveness and usefullness for the employee but having a method pf providing feedback to your team is paramount.

To be really clear, open and regular communication with one’s employees must be the most important thing a manager does. His or her job is to enable their employees to be more productive than they would be alone and to grow to be better in whatever way they want to be better in. This is how one makes your team and therefore your company succeed.

So why do I think the annual review process hinders this goal?

• It makes it easy to leave the communication to once a year.
• HR depertment systems and procedures usually force the level of communication one can have into little tiny boxes that removes all nuance from them
• The process is usually so cumbersome the manager is in a bad mood by the time he is filling the reviews in thereby biasing the results

Enabling less communication

By formalizing feedback to employees to once a year, it makes it easier for a manager to justify to himself that he should save up his comments over the course of the year because there is a “special” time every year when those should be shared with his team. And by the time annual review time comes along, you have probably forgotten all but the last 3 months anyway. For a manager who is uncomfortable with this type of communication, it makes for an easy excuse. To be fair, I find myself falling into this trap much more often than I would like.

Cookie cutter processes

In an effort to “standardize” and “remove bias” from the review process, many HR departments have castrated what good feedback might be possible to simple numerical raitings and drop down boxes on web forms. To me, the biggest culprit is the movement towards what are referred to as S.M.A.R.T goals. This is a cheesy acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Some of these are obvious, but I have found that in my line of work (and I suspect many things tat don’t involve manufacturing), the most improatnt skills the manager wants to develop and promote are exactly those skills which are almost impossible to measure in this manner. Things like creativity, problem solving, or artistic expression do not lend themselves to numbers. Sure, I can say “you must have 3 new creative ideas in a year,” but that really is not how I want my team thinking. By dumbing down the qualities I seek in a great employee, I imply to them that these numerical goals are all that matters. I have heard even worse stories from other coworkers and friends like systems where an entire year’s performance must be boiled down to a two sentence summary. How can this ever work?

My eyes are bleeding

If you noticed my tweets on the subject they were centered around the absolutely horrid software that my company has purchased to manage the performance evaluation process. What I have found is that just by using this software, I am in such a bad mood that I must resist the reaction to take it out on the reviewee. While my case may be an extreme one, in other companies where I have interacted with the process of doing reviews has always been clumsy and something that is dreaded by all of the managers. This further reduces the likelihood that the input provided by the manager will be useful to the employee.

Having written all this, I am guessing some of you are expecting to see some solution presented here at the end. I’m afraid I don’t have anything magical to say. In my view, the review process that corporate HR departments have created is broken. It is a process driven to try to treat and measure your employees the same way that accountants can quantify profits, losses, and assets - by the numbers. And this is a mistake; people are not quantifiable in that way. The development of great employees is a deeply personal process that must be done through the interaction among many people. Trying to represent it in numbers just cheapens and messes with the ultimate goals.

If you are a manager, all I can say is to hold your nose and get through your corporate HR mandated process as quickly as possible and don’t let it interfere with what really matters which is your people and helping them grow.

Just a quick post of a picture I took this past weekend with Tiffany up at Lewis Ginter again. They had changed out all of the plants in the greenhouse between our last trip and this past weekend. Gorgeous daffodils and tulips. A wonderful way to spend the day for Tiffany and I’s third anniversary.

Full set here.

Facts are everything for engineers, whether they be computer science, mechanical, electrical, or civil. In a utopia of engineers, there would be no disagreements. All decisions would be made by coolly laying out the comparison criteria, assessing the different options, comparing the facts, and picking the obviously logical choice. Sadly, this world does not exist (no matter how hard you wish for it).

Opinions, Perceptions, Personalities, Politics, Emotions. These are the qualities which drive decisions whenever more than a single person is involved. And anyone who has a grasp of these items and can use them skillfully will easily outmaneuver someone who only has the facts on their side but is ignorant of these items.

To be successful, you need to understand when it is appropriate to discuss facts and when the facts are irrelevant and the issue at hand is perception. This came up recently in a meeting I had with a client where they were evaluating our performance. There was a criticism of our company which, if one only looks at the facts of the situation, we were in the right. However, our attitude and reaction to the situation resulted in a negative opinion of us as an organization. In such a situation, continuing to argue the facts of the matter results in a reinforcement of the negative opinion (sadly, one of our people fell into this trap). The proper reaction was to accept the criticism and address the perception problem while simultaneously organizing other forums that are fact based to address the inaccuracies there.

Being a good engineer requires you understand and can apply the facts of your trade. Becoming a great engineer requires that you must understand that people are not neat and pretty and definable through equations and logic.

Enough……..you’re going to run out of colors!

Now, I am an introvert by nature and I am a huge fan of email for communication. It allows one to think about what you want to say, find the best prose to convey your message, and for those of us not always eloquent, we can seem better than we are. But, email is an abused medium; a tool which is used to bash in every nail in sight.

Email evolved from the letter. And a letter is a wonderful point to point communications technology, whether in paper or electrons. It is the best way to convey a complicated set of ideas from one person to another. But once people had email they got the freedom to turn that point to point communications mechanism into a one to many tool. Or, even worse, into a collaborative, many to many communications tool. And email stinks at that.

The quote at the head came from an email chain between 7 people trying to collaboratively discuss a coding strategy while maintaining original author identity through the use of colors. It looked like a color blind person trying to make a rainbow. Email was the wrong tool for the job. They should have considered a wiki page, a Google document, or anything with version control. The person who made the observation in jest was a very brave person (it wasn’t me, I had already tuned out because of the riot of colors).

When to use email:

• When you are communicating a message to one other person

When not to use email:

• When you are having a conversation with a group of people. Have a meeting (online or offline)
• When you are working on a collaborative object. Use version control, or a wiki, or a Google doc
• When you are making an announcement to many people. Use a website (preferably with an RSS feed so people know when it is updated.)
• When you are just sending a document. Use online storage

I am hardly a saint on following these rules, but I think if we all try a little harder, we can help make email a little bit more useful for everyone again.