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.

I am officially done with Winter. Thanks for the pretty snow, but see that door over there? Please use it. Thanks!

I hadn’t realized just how much I needed that smell of fresh air, the colors, the sight of growing things until this past weekend. Tiffany and I went up to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond to take some pictures. Walking the grounds was nice, but entering the greenhouse was amazing! There was one wing of the greenhouse that was filled with spring flowers and the smell was just divine. I contemplated securing a cot and camping out there for the next few weeks. If they had wifi, I would be totally set.

Hopefully it will be just a few weeks and the flowers will start showing their faces outside. Until then, we may need to make a few trips up to the gardens to bolster my spirits.

All Pictures - Lewis Ginter Winter 2011

As a side note, we became members this year and it is a really great deal! It was $60 for an Out of Town Dual membership that gets you unlimited entry into not only the Lewis Ginter gardens but hundreds of others around the country including the Norfolk Botanical Gardens. You should do it!

In the same theme as yesterday’s post, I thought I would expand by adding my suggestions for those people who are in the job market looking for work based on the hundreds of people I have interviewed over the years. I won’t go over the standard type of stuff like researching the company you are interviewing with, being on time, bathing, etc. which you can find many other places.

Know how to shake hands

I always feel a little shallow talking about this topic, but it really is something that makes an impression. The first impression I get from a candidate that has what my father referred to as the “dead fish handshake” is really hard to overcome during an interview. It immediately puts me in the mind of a person who is not self-confident. And when I interview I am looking for personality far more than I am specific “resume” skills.

Look comfortable in your clothes

This is an area where I will amend the traditional wisdom on what to wear to an interview. The overly simplistic rule is “dress up for an interview, preferably a suit (or equivalent).” This is silly as it is based upon a standard 60’s office culture. Modern wisdom has shifted that you should wear one notch higher on the formality for the office you are going into. This is a good general rule, but I will add a corollary to that. If you aren’t comfortable in your clothes, wear something else. Even if the “rules” would state that you should wear a suit to an interview, if you never wear suits, you have a badly fitting one you got for a wedding 5 years ago, and you will spend the entire interview fidgeting with it, don’t wear the damn suit. Find something close that you will look comfortable in.

As an interviewer, I will happily overlook a slightly less formal dressing style if you seem comfortable and relaxed. While if you look like you would like to claw your tie off and are uncomfortable, I will notice and it will make me wonder if you always act like that.

Keep Talking

Don’t give one word answers. If you are asked a question, obviously you need to answer the question. But look for the openings that will allow you to tell a good (appropriate) story that exemplifies why you are the right candidate. Make me want to hear you keep talking. Remember that beyond the work that a company needs you to do, they also have to spend 8 hours a day with you. If you appear boring and uninteresting, you are at a disadvantage.

Know what you want to do

Have an idea what you would like to do in a perfect world. And be willing to talk about it even if the current job you are interviewing for isn’t exactly that thing. Displaying a sense of vision and imagination is what shows you can think for yourself. If, when asked that question, you say that you have always wanted to do is exactly what my job description says, I will not be impressed. I will assume you are either very boring or trying to suck up.

In the end, the interview is the potential start to a long term relationship. You are trying to impress the interviewers with you as a person. Keep that in mind and you should do fine.

My good friend and former super amazing boss at The College of William and Mary, Susan Evans, has been writing a series of blog posts lately that I have really been enjoying. I’ve enjoyed them so much, they have spurred me to write today. Her entry from today, Hiring? Listen and spend an hour, is particularly relevant lately as I have been working to add 7-8 people to my teams in the last few months and I spent yesterday talking with candidates at the William and Mary Career Fair. Susan makes many wonderful points in her article and I highly recommend you read hers first; I’ll wait.

I can’t emphasis the importance of quality hiring enough; while hard when you feel the pressure to get a new employee RIGHT NOW to try to avoid whatever pain you may be feeling in your organization, hiring the wrong person is always far worse. You must remember that the interview process provides your only protection against getting a bad candidate in to an organization; even in the best of situations you only have a few hours to determine if this person is one you will count on for thousands and thousands of hours in the future. The cost of hiring the wrong fit is too high and no matter your company, getting rid of someone you have hired who is the wrong fit is far harder (emotionally and practically) than just not hiring them in the first place.

Trust your team

Never be the only person who contributes to the hiring decision. For any job I have, no matter how junior it is, I always have many people inside and outside my team do their own interviews with the candidate. This can range from 3 people beyond me to 5 or 6. My interview process is long and I get comments from candidates when I wrap up with them that it is more thorough than they have seen at other companies.

The hardest part is that everyone must agree that the candidate should be hired. If anyone has any doubts, the answer is no. It does not matter how much everyone else loves the candidate, everyone has veto power. This is critical to ensuring you only get a new employee that will succeed in your team. (And don’t overlook the ancillary benefit that it shows your current staff that you trust them with the responsibility to shape the team.)

Meet face to face

As hiring managers, everyone makes mistakes from time to time. What I have learned from my mistakes with hiring is that the people with whom I have been later unhappy with are the ones I hired based on the recommendations of others without meeting personally or that I only did a phone interview with. This was the trap of being “too busy” and not seeing hiring as the most critical part of my job. Even in situations where someone was being hired by one of my managers and won’t report to me directly, I now insist that I get time face to face with them. It is the only way to be sure.

The person is what matters

Here I just want to reiterate a point Susan makes in her closing: “the best hiring decisions are based on the type of person you hire and not the skills they have.” I can’t stress this enough. While a resume is important, the courses they have taken in college are important, in the end, none of that matters. I am hiring a person not a list of skills and that is what you must focus upon.

I think it comes as no surprise that I would love some day to start up a small high tech company. When people talk about the required items to start a technology company, there seem to be three main components that are required; money, people, and an idea.

For many years I worried about the first two of these; people and money. But, as I have gotten older (and perhaps wiser) I have been able to meet the right people who in tern have connections to money. But, the tricky part is the elusive idea. The Internet and the advance of rapid implementation has made it so easy to implement an idea and share it with the world that it seems whenever I and my coconspirators have an idea, someone has already done it.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

How great leaders inspire action: Simon Sinek. Listened to this talk on the ride in to work this morning. Simple observation, profound impact.