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Seven tips for leading free and open source software programmers

Posted in Bruce Byfield, careers, employment, Free Software, freesoftware, management, management theory, open source, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 7, 2008| 8 Comments »

(This is an article that originally appeared on the IT Manager’s site. Since the site has shut down, I’m reprinting the article here to give it a more permanent home)

Books about management techniques rarely mention how to lead computer programmers. The few that do sooner or later reach for a cliché and compare the effort to herding cats — J. Hank Rainwater, for instance, uses the phrase as his title. Partly, the comparison reflects how much the topic is outside the corporate mainstream. However, the comparison also reflects the conflicting nature of the job. The typical IT department represents a separate culture within a company, and a successful manager must both understand that culture and stand between it and the rest of the company, trying to explain each to the other.

I’ve seen dozens of managers — including me — approach this conflict, each with varying degrees of success. My observations here summarize what I believe are the basic facts that managers needs to know to manage programmers. They apply to any programmers, but especially those involved in free and open source software (FOSS), many of whom develop typical programmer attitudes to an extreme. Although some of the points seem obvious to those familiar with programmers, let me assure you: To outsiders, if their mistakes are any indication, the points still need to be emphasized.

You’re in a meritocracy. Prove yourself.

Management gurus usually focus on the characteristics of natural leaders and how you can imitate them. They give ambitious managers heroic images of themselves as samurai warriors, Antarctic explorers, or Henry V. However, neither the discussion nor the image is much use when you manage geeks, because developers, regardless of whether they are involved with FOSS or not, are more concerned with results than any real or artificially generated charisma. Before you can even start to lead a group of geeks effectively, you have to prove yourself to them — either by showing your competence in their area of expertise or by demonstrating that you have useful expertise that they lack. To become truly effective, you need to go further and prove that your expertise helps the group and everyone in it towards their goals, and that you have at least a high-level understanding of what everyone else is doing.

Until you prove yourself, you can expect to be tested, even if you’re a former programmer yourself. The probing can be aggravating, but the good news is that, if you prove yourself, you can quickly become accepted. At one company where I worked, the CTO had an impressive programming background, but it was some years in his past. The developers questioned his decisions constantly, right up to the time that he started delivering tough but accurate critiques of their code. The questioning stopped overnight.

Just because you’re in charge doesn’t mean you’re better

Watch how people spend their free time with family and friends, and you’ll soon notice a preference for informal structures. Given anything resembling a choice, people choose not to be in formal hierarchies, especially if they’re near the bottom of it. A hierarchy may be efficient, but, by being its local representative, you automatically become the focus of resentment.

This natural anarchism is stronger in developers than in most people. If you think for a moment, a meritocracy implies a constant shifting of status that depends on who has done what recently. Add this political instability to a widespread feeling of being different and misunderstood, and the resentment of leaders becomes stronger still. Moreover, in FOSS, where status is still one of the main coins with which programmers are paid for their efforts, these attitudes may be taken to a further extreme.

Neither being in a position of authority nor being older — as managers often are — is going to command automatic respect in the IT department. You might assume that your position reflects some superior qualities such as intelligence or ambition, but the development team probably doesn’t. Management consultant Tim Bryce insists that most programmers are no smarter than anyone else in a company, but that’s not what they believe.

Rather than relying on any natural or structural authority, IT managers need to see themselves as coordinators or problem solvers, working within the culture of their department whenever possible rather than against it. Nobody has ever shown the causality, but there’s probably a connection between the fact the era in which the corporate hierarchy has flattened corresponds to the rise of the IT industry. Because of the economic important of the computer industry, its values are spreading through the rest of the business world.

What motivates you doesn’t motivate your staff

A few management books, such as Beverly L. Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans’ Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em
emphasize that one management style doesn’t fit everybody. However, many gurus and the managers who listen to them continue to assume that what motivates them — promotion, money, perks — also motivates programmers. For those unfamiliar with programmers’ culture, the process of realizing they are wrong can be disconcerting.

“Leading programmers is different from leading most employees,” career expert Tag Goulet says. “At one of my previous jobs at a startup, I was the vice-president of production, and led a team of three programmers. One of the guys posted Dilbert cartoons by his desk that poked fun at Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss and were quite possibly references to me. I’d never seen cartoons like that in more corporate workplaces. Instead, everyone was always careful to have political decor that implied that they were all team players.” In fact, such cartoons, like the popular Demotivator posters that satirize inspirational corporate art, are often the first indicators that many programmers are skeptical, even dismissive of the values that many managers take for granted.

The trouble is, managers usually have backgrounds in business or marketing, and are outgoing people who prefer to work with others. By contrast, most programmers are the academics of the business world, inwardly focused and preferring to work with inanimate objects. If they’re FOSS-oriented, they may also have a strong streak of anti-corporate sentiment. While they won’t turn down money, for them job satisfaction is more likely to lie in greater challenges or responsibilities, and, especially for those involved in FOSS, credit for their efforts.

Impromptu bowling in the hall may motivate your sales force and marketers, but, chances are that programmers will only feel like they’re being spirited away into a nightmare of frivolity. A weekly pizza night or an evening at a night club to celebrate the successful completion of a project might be satisfying to a human resources team, but your programmers will either resist being dragged away from their projects or, if they’ve just come off a coding spree, resent losing time they could spend with their families. Instead of being events to anticipate, such efforts are more apt to be seen as annoying obligations.

Instead of trying to make such by-the-book motivators work for programmers, think about you can implement the intrinsic awards that actually mean something to them. Reward those who meet their deadlines with greater autonomy in a project, or by giving them the chance to become project leaders or to telecommute so long as they meet their responsibilities. Let FOSS participants have time to work on free projects once they’ve met their deadlines; even if the projects have no immediate use to the company, they may become useful later, and, meanwhile, your sponsorship gives the company a good reputation among potential future employees.

Credit is the most important motivators, especially for FOSS participants, but don’t forget the cultural differences. Most developers are only going to be embarrassed by being singled out for praise or an employee-of-the-month award at a meeting. Instead, let people know that you’ve noticed their efforts and given them credit elsewhere in the company.

Learn when to keep hands-off

Shortly after I became a product manager, I discovered a major bug in a commercial product that was just at the plant and ready to be assembled. Put in charge of disaster recovery, I asked the team to assemble every hour so I could report to the company officers on the state of their efforts. After the disaster had passed, I found that I had left resentment in my wake. Not only did the programmers dislike meetings, but, by keeping such a close eye on events, I was questioning their competence and taking responsibility away from them. The emergency was real, but I was hampering their efforts to resolve it, not helping.

This kind of situation can’t always be avoided, but experienced managers will give all members of a programming teams as much autonomy as they have proven themselves capable of using responsibly. Partly, that means mediating between programmers and the demands of executives, but it also means only making an appearance among the cubicles when absolutely necessary. Instead of calling everyone together, I would have done better to send email requests or appoint a programmer to provide status checks. Better yet, I could have asked the team for a firm deadline and not interrupted anyone until that deadline while explaining to the company officers that the solution was being worked on — which was all they wanted to know anyway.

Minimize meetings

For managers, meetings are times when work gets done. For programmers, however, attending a meeting usually means time away from their work. Sometimes, especially at the start of a project or at a crisis, a meeting is unavoidable, but managers need to accept that programmers are likely to resent meetings and become more impatient with every minute that passes in the board room. The fewer and shorter the meetings, the more easily the developers will accept them.

Beware of fads in programming languages

Every couple of years, programmers become excited by a new programming language such as Java, .NET and Mono, or Ruby. Inevitably, whenever a project begins, some of your team will argue strenuously that it needs to be done in the latest fashionable language. Sometimes, this argument may be justified, but it is more likely to represent intellectual curiosity than sound design practice.

Almost always, the argument is a recipe for chaos. At one company where I worked, so many different languages were represented in its product suite that individual modules only communicated with difficulty. Several attempts to rewrite the suite in a single language only added to the complexity because they were never completed, and legacy support remained an issue. This trap is easier to avoid if you have a programming background yourself, but any manager should be wary of adding another language to the stack.

Learn when corporate values have to take precedence over geek values

Not being interested in business, many developers tend to ignore necessities like deadlines. Many become skilled at dodging them. The problem isn’t that most developers can’t be trusted to work responsibly by themselves, so much as the fact that they can be almost guaranteed to tinker as much as the schedule allows. In such cases, for all that successful management of geeks means understanding their culture, it also means recognizing when moving to achieve corporate goals are more important. At times, understanding needs to take second place to necessity, even at the cost of resentment. Skilled managers minimize conflicts with their staff, but they also recognize that some conflicts are unavoidable.

Conclusion

Managing programmers — especially FOSS ones — is an extreme version of the balancing act that any manager must do. On the one hand, managers need to understand the culture of their departments and how to work within them. On the other hand, they also need to act as intermediaries between that culture and the rest of the company. Combining these goals means adjusting your concept of management to the department. Sometimes, it means interpreting programmers to non-programmers,or shielding programmers from the misunderstanding of executives in order to achieve corporate goals. At other times, it means awakening programmers to the larger goals of the company. It’s a precarious balance, but knowing what to expect as you go into the position can leave you with more time to handle the challenges that arise without being distracted by cleaning up your mistakes or a lack of cooperation from your team.

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Deciding to go into business for yourself

Posted in Bruce Byfield, consulting, employment, Personal, self-employment, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , on August 6, 2008| Leave a Comment »

There are two ways of going into business for yourself: The way described in books, and the way that it really happens.

On the surface, the standard advice sounds sensible in its caution: Do your research before beginning, build up your business on the side, and don’t quit your regular work until you have at least $100,000 in business lined up. Follow this advice, and you’ll never do anything rash or ruinous.

You will also, very likely, never go into business for yourself at all. The chances are, you will always find the moment not quite right, and decide to wait until you have a little more work in reserve, or finish paying off a particular debt.

While I applaud the standard advice in theory, I don’t think that any of the self-employed people I know – and I know dozens – ever followed it. Instead, most people seem to follow one of two paths.

On the first path, people find themselves unemployed or under-employed, and figure they have nothing to lose by starting their own businesses or setting themselves up as independent consultants. Sometimes, they have wanted to work independently for years, but never had the courage to do so before. Other times, they seize on the idea in their current crisis. But, however they reach the point of decision, they have reached a point at which they are desperate, and, perhaps, tired of working for other people who seem no smarter than them. Having nothing to lose is a wonderful motivator – even better than deadlines – so people on this path set out to do whatever it takes to establish themselves, working hard and borrowing money if they have to.

On the second path, people never make a conscious choice to work for themselves; their career just works out that way. Maybe contracting is the easiest way to break into a line of work. Or maybe they start taking on extra work in the evenings and the weekend to help pay the mortgage or to bring in a little more income. Slowly, their regular work becomes less important to them, and their sideline grows until, suddenly, they realize that it means more to them than whatever they’re doing for their regular pay cheque. They discover that they like the independence, and, at an opportune moment, they consciously choose it.

My own route to becoming a freelance journalist is an example of the second path. I don’t think I ever had a moment when I consciously decided to be a consultant. Nor do I seriously believe, as I sometimes joke, that I avoid full time employment because companies I join have a tendency to have financial crises six months after I come on board. Being a communications consultant was just the easiest way to break into technical writing and marketing when I shifted from academia. Before long, I had the experience and the income that I didn’t need to look for full time work – in fact, a permanent position would have meant a reduction in income. I wavered a bit because of a personal crisis and the excitement of the dot-com era, but I eventually found myself doing more and more journalism, and being more and more bored with office work. Eventually, I had an epiphany about which I enjoyed best, and I never looked back.

But, whichever your path to working for yourself, I think that what matters is that you are most comfortable with independence. Desperation drives many other people to take small consulting contracts or even set up their own businesses, but most flee back to the security of full-time employment as soon as it’s offered. Rather than sensible planning, what unites the self-employed is that, when they stop to think, they really would prefer to do things for themselves.

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11 common mistakes in networking

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, careers, employment, jobs, networking, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2008| 4 Comments »

(This article was originally published on the IT Managers Journal site in January 2008. Now that the site is no longer active, many of the articles are no longer available, so I’m reprinting some of the ones I wrote to give them a more permanent home)

Everyone knows that networking is an essential part of business. Done well, it can build partnerships for you, and tell you about jobs before they’re advertised. If you are a consultant, you can easily find — as I have — that networking is responsible for 75-100% of your income. Done poorly, though, it can handicap or even seriously set back your career.

The dangers of poor networking are especially high for IT workers. Many of those working with computers have poor social skills, and may be tempted either to indifference because of shyness or brashness because of efforts to over-compensate. Also, IT workers tend to be among the major users of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and other social networking sites, where the ease of use and casual atmospheres can encourage the wrong tone for business interaction, especially if you’re a novice at it.

However, over my 12 years as a consultant, I’ve seen problems in every sort of business. To help you avoid them, no matter what field you work in, here are what I’ve observed to be ten of the most common mistakes in networking:

Badmouthing other companies and individuals

Meeting people in the industry whom you don’t see everyday, you can be tempted to express feelings that you normally suppress about bosses, past and present, or about other companies. However, it’s rarely a good idea to make those feelings public — especially in a job interview. If you show too much enthusiasm for criticizing others, those with whom you are networking are going to wonder what you say about them when they’re not around. You can also create the impression of a negative, downbeat person.

If you meet the fellow survivor of a company or boss, you might not have to worry about such things. Yet, even if others start the badmouthing first, you should be cautious about joining in. After all, what are you networking for: To find an outlet for your frustrations, or to make useful contacts?

Name-dropping without permission or with exaggerations

Being able to claim a connection is part of what networking is all about. However, before you claim someone as an acquaintance, much less as a reference, check that you have permission to do so.

For one thing, it’s only polite to give your contacts a chance to think what they’ll say about you if contacted. Possibly, too, they would prefer not to be a reference for you, for reasons like office politics that are only peripherally to do with you.

For another, IT or any other field is a relatively small place, and your claims of friendship or support are easily checked. If they’re false, people will react as though you have lied to them — and, in a sense, you have.

Exaggerating connections

Exaggerating your connection with someone can have the same results as mentioning a connection without permission. True, implying that you are a personal friend of Linus Torvalds or Andrew Morton may get you the job interview you’ve been angling for. But if your interaction is limited to a single email you sent two years ago, you’ll look either duplicitous or foolish when the truth comes out.

Begging for a job

If you are networking to find your next position, one of the unspoken rules is that you never ask directly for work. At first that tradition may seem like hypocrisy, but, if you think for a moment, it makes sense. Networking is an informal, personal way of compensating for the formal, impersonal habits of business. By asking for employment directly, you are mixing categories and creating a confusion that can only make you look crass.

It also makes you look as though you are only interested in networking for what you can get. While this attitude may seem efficient to you, it also signals to people that you are uninterested in them personally. You probably wouldn’t respond well to someone whose interest in you is selfish, so don’t be surprised if others feel the same way.

Spamming requests

Networking is the opposite of the usual marketing techniques; it’s about the quality of contacts, not the quantity. Sending out general broadcasts for help negates that emphasis. Instead of being a one-on-one connection, you make networking an anonymous one when you contact everyone you know with a request — and few people enjoy feeling that you only see them as one of the crowd.

Moreover, any experienced PR flack can tell you that, although targeted requests take longer to put together, they bring better results than spam broadcasts. So, by honoring the intent of networking, you also tend to help yourself.

Participating passively on online sites

As the middle-aged discover social networking, sites like FaceBook are increasingly being used to maintain business contacts. Others, of course, like Ryze.com were designed for business networking for the start.

On all these sites, you’ll find hundreds of registered users who signed up a year ago, and have only a handful of contacts. And, although registration for such sites is hardly time-consuming, these users have essentially wasted their time. One such user regularly complains to me that these sites are useless, but what else can he expect when he doesn’t actually use them?

For any type of networking to be effective, you need to put some effort into it. It’s only when you have developed a large network that you’ll find that others will start coming to you with friend requests. You don’t have to let networking sites take over your life, but, at the same time, if you do the minimum, you’ll only get minimal results.

Networking Indiscriminately online

When you are registered for a social networking site, you may get requests to connect with people you don’t know, or to give recommendations to people you’ve never worked with. The temptation is always there to build your network by accepting these requests, but there’s little point beyond an unconvincing illusion of a broad network.

Whenever someone actually tries to use that network, its inadequacies will quickly become apparent. If you don’t know a person, then how do you know that you can be useful to each other — or that they’re the sort you want to be associated with? Nor can you recommend strangers without making them appear to exaggerate the acquaintance (see above).

Failing to keep up relationships

Contrary to what many people seem to believe, establishing a connection is only the first part of networking. The longer a network connection exists and the more exchanges of help that are made — in short, the more trust that is established — the more useful the connection becomes for both parties. For this reason, stopping at initial contacts is only slightly more useful than sitting back and waiting for contacts to come to you. If you want networking to work, you have to become involved with it.

Being unrespectful of other people’s time

When you network, you can treat as a given that everyone is busy with other things beside the connection. Try to avoid pestering others for favors, especially if you are hoping to use the connection to find work, and avoid asking a favor that is disproportionate to the connection. Asking a new acquaintance to send you details about an upcoming conference is appropriate; asking them to give you a private crash course in Ruby isn’t.

Similarly, just over a year ago, a colleague asked if I could help her fill a position at her company. I found several possible candidates, and introduced one to her company. A few days later, she told me that her company had decided to fill the position through a recruiting agency. The decision meant that I — to say nothing of the candidate — had each spent a couple of hours for nothing. Both the candidate and I agreed that we would think carefully before dealing with my colleague again. We both felt we had been treated with a lack of respect.

Hounding a connection

Last summer, I promised to let an acquaintance know when a position at another company was being filled. After a week, he began sending me daily emails, and phoning me every other day. Since I had no control over the job and was simply relaying information, I could do nothing about the delay and told him so. Once, I made inquiries on his behalf, but eventually I had to ask him to stop contacting me so often. He got angry, and I haven’t heard from him since. From another mutual acquaintance, I understand that he feels that I let him down.

Really, though, he let himself down. By hounding me, he lost his connection to me, although it was obviously useful to him.

Rather than producing the same results yourself, minimize your followups when you’ve requested help. Unless there’s a definite deadline, once a week is often enough to ask. And if the request goes unanswered for more than a couple of weeks, you can probably assume that it’s not happening.

Treating networking as one-sided

Effective networking is about an exchange of help. That means that, if you want people to help you, you have to be willing to help them. If you ignore requests for advice or references, or — like one of my acquaintances — always find excuses for not reciprocating, eventually people will start refusing to help you. The same can be true if you are constantly asking for large favors while only offering an equal number of small ones.

The exchange of favors implicit in networking doesn’t have to be spelled out. In fact, most of the time, it’s not. Instead, networkers simply assume that, if they help you out, at some unspecified point, they’re entitled to request a favor of comparable value from you. Ensuring that you honor that assumption is the main point of networking.

Conclusion

Perhaps the best way to avoid these mistakes is to keep in mind the image you would prefer to project around colleagues. For most people, this image would be professional, polite, and active. Ask yourself how your words and actions might appear to your colleagues, and you’ll not only be likelier to avoid these mistakes, but also to start networking effectively.

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Career choices for English majors

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, career choices, communications, employment, English, English majors, hiring, jobs, marketing, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2008| 9 Comments »

“You’re an English major? You must be planning a career in fast food.” Comments like this haunted me from the moment I declared my major in university. But hearing the sentiment recently, I realized that it was far from accurate. The truth is, people who have a way with words can make a comfortable living in all sorts of ways, so long as they don’t limit their possibilities to the obvious.

The worst mistake that anybody with an English degree – or, in fact, any Arts degree – can make is to hang about on the fringes of academia, hoping for a tenure track position. Ever since my undergraduate days, I’ve been hearing about all the tenured positions that are going to become available as their current incumbents retire, but, between budget cuts and the increasing tendency to hire non-tenured staff or sessionals, the positions are unlikely to materialize. People who were hoping for those positions when I left academia over a decade ago are still waiting for those tenured positions. Meanwhile, they endure semester by semester contracts, last minute hires, and doing the same work as tenured faculty for half the money. That’s fine for a few years, but it’s no way to live in the long-term.

The same is true of editing piece work. Just like academia, the publishing industry depends on having a constant pool of cheap work-for-hire editors. You may be one of the lucky exceptions, but the odds are against you, no matter how talented. Those who run the industry are careful not to employ you so much that they become obliged to offer you benefits.

Instead of lingering in limbo, waiting for the academic or literary job you used to dreamed of, English majors should explore the possibilities in business. Not only is the power of self-expression in demand there, but the competition is far less fierce than in academia – partly because of the greater need, and partly because many English majors seem to consider that taking a job in business is beneath them. Often, too, they make the mistake of thinking that their writing skills are all they need, and are slow to learn the subject matter expertise they need to do the work properly.

But, if you can get beyond the idea that you are dirtying your hands and are willing to learn what you don’t know, then the jobs are there. As a technical writer, you need to write clearly and organize information for conciseness and accuracy; in many ways, the job is writing stripped to the basics. As a communications and marketing manager, writing news releases or blogs, you take on the responsibility of being the voice of the company. As a product manager, you decide how to present a product or line, and you’ll find your skills with textural analysis serve you well when you come to deal with end user license agreements and other legal documents. As an instructor, you are reprising your role as a teaching assistant while you were in grad school, the only difference being is that you are teaching software or policies and procedures, rather literature or criticism.

And these are only the most obvious career paths. Writing and teaching skills aren’t a bad foundation for going on to law school, for example. Best of all, the first thing you’ll notice when taking these positions if you’ve been vying for scraps of work around academia, your yearly income will increase by over fifty percent or more.

Admittedly, some of these positions aren’t on the express way to the top. Technical writers, for instance, may rise to supervise other technical writers at a large company, but they aren’t likely to become CEOs. But they can serve as entry positions, and, if you’re interested in climbing the corporation, you can always expand your skill set later on. Meanwhile, you can reasonably expect a salary that puts you solidly in the upper middle class, to say nothing of responsible and often rewarding work.

Really, the only thing holding you back with an English degree is your own lack of imagination or initiative. Just because those who prefer an education they should be getting at a technical college choose to belittle your liberal education is no reason for you to believe them.

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Two bad interviewees

Posted in Bruce Byfield, careers, corporatelife, employment, hiring, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 25, 2008| Leave a Comment »

As a sometime-consultant and a sometime-manager, I’ve sat on both sides of the interviewing table many times. Which side I prefer is impossible to say: Given a choice between the tension of trying to sell myself to a person who’s largely unknown to me and the discomfort of judging strangers, I will gladly choose none of the above (no doubt that explains why I’m in business for myself). However, being the interviewer does have the advantage of giving me a wider view of human types than being an interviewee. Over my career, two interviews in particular stand out as examples of some of the things you should never do when you go for a job.

Both occurred when I was a manager at a startup specializing in GNU/Linux. I was new to both startups and free software, but I was learning quickly – in fact, I was the only manager, up to and including the CEO and COO, who had any sense of the software life cycle or of free software (and even my knowledge, I admit now, was new and shallow in a lot of places). However, I had hired before, so I ended up on the hiring committee, along with an HR veteran from the startup’s parent company who was there for guidance.

The first interview looked good on paper. He had years of Unix experience, and claimed to know something about GNU/Linux as well. However, one look was enough to show that we’d made a mistake in calling in this interviewee. Looking like he had come straight from makeup to play an English academic, circa 1936, he wore a thick brown suit of tweed with patches on the elbow that looked decades old. His glasses were even thicker, and didn’t match his suit. On his feet were mud-splattered running shoes. His hair was not only uncombed, but looked as though he might have lost combs in its tangles.

His posture – well, a bonobo would have called it shambling and stooped, and died of shame to be seen holding himself that way.

Shaking his hand, I also realized that he was a heavy smoker. A miasma of tobacco swirled around him, nearly visible and making me gag.

This interviewee sat down at the boardroom table, and immediately put his feet up on a chair. Then he leaned back and cradled the back of his head in his hands.

Questioning him, we soon learned that he had applied for the job because “he needed the money.” He had no idea what the company did, and had no questions about it when provided an interval to ask some. Although it was a startup and therefore demanding of everyone’s time, he told us that his idea of an ideal job was one where he could work maybe ten or fifteen hours a week.

I was sinking lower in my chair, embarrassed for him, when the HR veteran interrupted the interviewee.

“No, no, no –” he said. “This isn’t working.” He then gave the interviewee a five minute lecture on the basics of dressing and deportment for a job interview, while I sat watching them, even more embarrassed.

From the way the interviewee slouched away, I don’t think he absorbed much of the lecture – especially since he asked for his resume back, saying it was his only copy.

The second bad example was an applicant for the same company. Its horrors were different, but no less intense.

This second interviewee had worked on a free software project related to the company’s core business. Several programmers knew his work in the community, although they had never met him, so we brought him in.

Once again, first impressions said everything. This applicant was appropriately dressed for a corporate interview, but, from the first, everything about him showed that he considered the interview was only a formality. He was a round man of average height, and everything from his gestures to the slight sneer that was the natural position of his face at rest suggested that he thought himself condescending to apply for the job at all.

This time, we finished the interview. Looking back, though, I really have to wonder how. The interviewee was so patronizing that I had a faint urge the urge to either make deflating comments or to punch him out – and normally I am neither rude nor confrontational.

The problem was not what he said, but the way he said it. Of course we would want to hire him, his tone seemed to imply (although he was no clearer than the first interviewee about exactly what the company did, and no more interested). Of course we would pay him what he asked. Of course the knowledge test we gave all programmers would be the merest formality. And we would let him work on whatever interested him, wouldn’t we?

All these implications came with little sniffs and flicks of the head, as if condescending to be interviewed was almost more than he could bear. I half-expected him to take out a pomander and sniff it, the better to endure the tawdry atmosphere of commerce around him.

Then we introduced him to the lead programmer and team leaders – and the way he shook their hands, you might have mistaken him for visiting royalty.

I don’t remember how we ended the interview process – probably with some version of “Thanks, we’ll call you when we’ve made a decision” – but I do recall that I was exasperated beyond belief.

Needless to say, he was as much out of the running as the first candidate, even though he had survived longer in the interview.

Both these candidates had their own brands of obnoxiousness, but they shared some common faults. Neither gave any thoughts to first impression. Both were so egocentric that they never thought to curb their natural tendencies in the hopes of getting employed, or to find out anything about the company they were applying at. You name a basic mistake in interviewing, and one or both of them made it.

In fact, the behavior of each of them was so extreme that, looking back, I wonder if either had any genuine interest in employment. Perhaps they were only being interviewed so that they could continue to collect unemployment insurance. But I think that their real roles in life were to provide bad examples and good stories. And certainly, they have played both roles many times since.

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7 (Cynical) Steps for Reducing Stress at Work

Posted in corporatelife, employers, employment, humor, office parties, Personal, stress, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 25, 2008| 3 Comments »

Most articles about reducing stress in the workplace start with the assumption that you can do something to affect your circumstances. But unless you’re a company officer or director, you probably can’t do very much. You’re subject to the whims and cluelessness of the upper echelons, and the company’s main concern is usually to squeeze the most work out of you for the least amount of renumeration — and that means too much work to do, unpaid overtime, and most of the other immediate sources of stress.

At times, you may be tempted to beat yourself senseless, or even chew a leg off to escape these conditions. However, I have to warn you that the last one especially can ruin your chances of doing that half marathon you’ve always dreamed about. Besides, you will still need money, and a handicap pension isn’t enough for anyone to live on.

Instead, here are seven less drastic if cynical ways to minimize work stress. These are ways that the average career expert won’t tell you, because to do so is to admit that most of us work because we have to, not because we have a passion:

1. Never take a full time job when you can be a contractor instead:

Employers may dangle benefits before you in the hopes of enticing you to become a full-time employee. And, at first, you might be lured into agreeing for the sake of security. But, as I like to say, the main difference between contract and full-time work is that, as a contractor, you know when your job ends. You may even have a kill clause in your contract. By contrast, full-time employment can end without warning or any more compensation than required by local laws. The ugly truth that nobody likes to mention is that full-time employment is not much more secure than consulting. It also dulls your instincts for survival besides, so that layoffs hit you harder. Consultants know they can survive, because they’ve done so before.

Another big advantage of being a contractor is that you’re usually paid by the hour. That means that managers think twice about asking you to stay late, and that, when you do, you’re being paid — unlike everyone around you. You may still have to put in long hours, but at least you’re receiving hardship pay.

2. Avoid managers and company officers as much as possible:

The most productive and fulfilled people at most companies are those who are actually building the products that the company sells — the computer programmers, graphic designers, and other manufacturers. But somewhere about midway up the management hierarchy, employment stops being about productivity and starts being about ego. That means that, the more remote managers and directors are from what the company sells, the more likely than an encounter with them will be about making them feel good, and not about helping you with any problems.

You may be flattered if such people ask you for details about your work — but, believe me, they won’t remember. They’re not asking because they want to learn more and do their jobs better. Most of the time, they’re looking for a way to kill time. Granted, you might get some wicked stories to tell your co-workers about their ignorance, but that’s a poor return for the time you’ve lost.

3. Keep away from meetings:

Meetings are for those who have reached exalted positions where they are no longer productive. If you haven’t reached that stage, the average meeting will simply cut into your already too-short work time. Should anything important actually happen at a meeting, you can always read about it when the minutes are circulated in an email.

True, by missing meetings, you miss free food. But donuts and other typical meeting fodder only give you a sugar rush to leave you all the more attenuated after you come down. That process is a physical stress in itself.

4. Avoid company functions:

Career experts tell you that company events are a way to network. In fact, they’re a way for human resources managers to look busy (see #2). For others, they are an annoying interruption in a busy day. So, even though you’re dying for an excuse to knock off work, remember that what you’ll be doing is playing ring-toss in the hall or dressing up in a clown suit, and that embarassment is a form of stress in itself. If you’re shy, you’ll suffer agonies, and ditto if you have any empathy at all. Rather than attending a function, book off sick or claim an important task is waiting. Schedule a root canal for the time of the function. If all else fails, duck out early.

5. Go for walks at lunch, or eat out

Eating in a cafeteria — or, even worse, at your desk — only means that people can find you more easily and dump work on you, adding to your stress. Even if someone just want to ask you a question, you’re losing time that belongs to you.

Instead of making yourself a target, go out and remind yourself that there’s a world beyond work. Remembering this fact is one of the most reliable ways to put the pressures of work into perspective. But be sure to vary your walking routes or restaurant, or somebody might still be able to find you.

6. Don’t volunteer for extra work

If you’re feeling stressed because of your workload, the last thing you should do is take on extra work, no matter how good you think volunteering will make you look. This advice especially applies to taking work home on evenings or weekends.

Contrary to what the brainwashed and the ambitious believe, such volunteering rarely helps you get ahead. But it is almost guaranteed to age you prematurely. Even worse, it frequently means you are compensating for the fact that there’s too few staff members, and enabling management to dodge the problem.

Anyway, unless there’s a genuine crisis, you won’t have cleared your To Do list — you’ll simply have removed some items so that they can be replaced by new ones. Unless your company is heavily overstaffed, there’s always more work to do, and, for a surprising amount of it, whether you do it today or tomorrow doesn’t matter very much.

7. Don’t expect that working hard will lead to a promotion

The official myth in our society is that hard work is rewarded with promotion. That’s true in a handful of first-rate companies, but, in most work places, the better you are in your position, the harder time people have of imagining you in another one.

I’m not saying that you should slack off — after all, presumably you need the money, and losing your self-respect will only add to your stress. But if you insist on working hard, make sure that it’s for your own reasons and not for any expectation of reward. The chances are overwhelming that you won’t get one.

You’ll notice that none of these steps actually involve your workflow or work habits. That’s because stress at work is rarely about the work itself, so much as the conditions that surround it. In other words, getting organized, disciplining your email reading habits or any of the usual suggestions you get won’t do much for you.

Instead, recognize that you may be in an impossible position, and that the problem is just as likely to be in what’s around you than in you or your habits. And if that sounds cynical, reflect that, in a bad situation, cynicism is not a negative trait, but a successful survival mechanism. In this case, knowing why a situation is stressful can sometimes help you feel less stressed.

And if the situation continues, or gets worse, remember that sometimes the best way of dealing with stress is to move on. Just looking for work can help you endure your present situation a while longer (so long, of course, as you don’t let your managers know that you’re looking for work by slipping up and leaving your resume by the copier or by taking long phone calls with recruiters at work). Rather than enduring stress because you’re afraid of the unknown, have the courage to actively look for alternatives. If you’re like most full-timers, you’ll probably find that finding new employment is easier than you feared.

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Escape from the office party

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, corporatelife, employers, employment, humor, office parties, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2007| Leave a Comment »

At this time of year, newspapers are full of stories about how to act – or not act – at office parties. As I skim them, I reflect with satisfaction that I have a good chance of never attending another office party, whether for Christmas or anything else. Off-hand, I can’t think of a more unnatural and contrived effort at celebration.

Even though most of my adult life I’ve been a consultant, I’ve seen my share of them. And most office parties are grim affairs. At best, they’re full of quiet desperation. When you are used to relating to people at work, trying to relate to them socially can be an abrupt switch – except, of course, for those who are at least friendly enough to go out to lunch with.

The awkwardness is compounded by the efforts of supervisors and staff to interact, and, in high-tech by the lack of social skills possessed by the average developer. Most people spend their time standing around uncertainly, staying only because, no matter how dreary the party may be, it’s marginally more interesting than doing their jobs.

And that’s at the best of office parties. I’ve seen companies where the human resources staff literally hunted people through the hallways, dragging them out of their offices and the washrooms where they’ve gone to ground.

Sometimes, the blame for the average office party lies in the hands of company officers or owners. Full of their own magnanimity at giving the staff a treat, they overlook how little people are enjoying themselves. I remember at one company, the owner ordered pizza every Tuesday night, only to find that much of his order was going to waste. Finally, he thought to ask his staff. I’ll never forget his stricken look when he realized that the employees thought of pizza night as a duty, rather than an enjoyable experience.

However, most of the blame belongs to human resources. Somewhere in the last few decades, the idea has taken hold that human resources staff don’t just hire and fire and take care of benefits. No – they also have to be Club Med entertainment directors.

They run around organizing birthday parties and fun events like bowling in the hallway, ring-tosses, and singalongs, and pressganging people into activities that are meant to break the ice (but really only unite people in their common embarrassment). All the while, they have a bounce in their steps and a perky smile on their face because they like organizing people and are in their element.

“You just know she was in the pep club in high school,” one fellow sufferer muttered to me as we endured one HR director’s efforts to organize teams for Pictionary. I remember looking at the director running around and thinking: What’s the use of growing older if you still have to hop around like a demented robin?

By far the worst of these human resources efforts was at a small software company that had been working non-stop for several months to finish a project. The overtime was so constant that, if everyone had been paid by the hour, the cost of the project would easily have doubled. To make matters worse, the project was done during the best weather of the year.

Dimly sensing that the staff had been pushed to its limits, the company officers announced they were renting a night club for the evening. Considering that the lead programmer on the project was a devout Moslem (which everyone knew, because he prayed several times a day in his cubicle), the idea was tactless – he not only didn’t drink, but wouldn’t enter a night club. Yet, without him, the project would never have been finished. You could almost hear the silence as people looked around in embarrassment at the meeting to announce the party.

Then, a voice from the back (mine) asked, “Can I have his drink tickets?”

But even with free drink tickets, nobody wanted to go. They’d had enough and wanted to go home at the end of the day for once. I wouldn’t have cared much myself, since as a consultant I got paid by the hour, except that I didn’t think I could bill for the party.

Embarrassed, the company officers changed the event to a Friday afternoon. Still, nobody signed up, despite repeated emails. Come the day, the human resources manager rounded us up like an obsessive-compulsive sheep dog, and herded us over to the night club. We made a concerted rush for the bar, downed our three free drinks – and, at quitting time, three-quarters of us left in such unison that you would have thought we had planned our escape beforehand.

Every now and again, people ask if I feel lonely working from home. But I only have to think of these situations to realize that, if I occasionally am, there are compensations, too. I’ve done my time pit-lamped like a stunned deer under the gaze of an HR manager determined that I’ll have a good time and be grateful, and I have no intention of being in that situation again.

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The CEO who wanted passionate employees

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, corporatelife, employers, employment, jobs, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 18, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“I wish people would come to work with enthusiasm,” the CEO said to me, looking up from his copy of From Good to Great. “I really wish they showed some passion.” His voice was a mixture of puzzlement, longing, and frustration that could only come from a man wondering why the rest of the world wasn’t more like him.

The statement shouldn’t have caught me as unprepared as it did. As a communications consultant, I didn’t even show on the organizational chart, but I’d noted before that executives often feel free to confide in a consultant in a way they’d never consider with an employee. Besides, we were sharing an office until the company could take over more space on the same floor, and it was a hot Friday afternoon, a time when even the most gung-ho company officer takes off his jacket and feels conversational.

All the same, the statement left me dumbfounded for a minute. What I wanted to say was, “You mean you really don’t know?” But I settled for something non-committal and corporate about teams taking time to build. After all, consultants may have more freedom than employees, but wise ones learn to temper that freedom with discretion.

Besides, the fact he could express the wish — and the puzzlement behind it — made all too clear that he didn’t know how much he was responsible for the lack of enthusiasm.

You see, the CEO in question had been recruited by the board of directors to make the company profitable. And he had done everything he could from a business end to achieve that goal, finding new markets and products, and developing business intelligence about the company’s industry and local business. However, what he had forgot was his responsibility for morale.

Frankly, it couldn’t have been worse.

The CEO had come in six months ago, and quickly proceeded to cut a third of the staff. About a month ago, he had done the same again, and anyone who could read a balance sheet and his worried glance could tell that another staff reduction was due in the future.

All these cuts made sense from a bottom line perspective, but they left employees uncertain. The stress was even greater because he had closed a branch office after promising to keep it open, and fired everyone who wasn’t willing to relocate to headquarters.

Moreover, even at headquarters, he had laid off people with no regard to their roles within the company. As a result, the survivors were not only wondering when the axe would fall on them, but having to cope with a sudden loss of a lot of unwritten knowledge because key people were gone. In other words, not only was morale so low that the photocopy machine was starting to jam from the rush of resumes, but the company had become less functional because of the cuts.

Then, just to make matters worse, having just read Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, Lou Gerstner’s biography of his days at IBM, the CEO was inspired to hold retreats for those he designated key personnel. These chosen few were given free copies of various best-selling business books, and invited to spend a day or two at a resort discussing the contents.

But what might have worked in a mega-corporation like IBM, where a few absences across the country would barely be noticed, only served in the CEO’s small company to make make three-quarters of the company feel under-privileged and insulted. Several of the elite didn’t feel especially honored, either, since what they really wanted to do was get on with their work.

And, after all this, what did the CEO do at Christmas? Cancel the company party, and, on Christmas Eve, leave at 11AM without telling the staff they could do the same (most left anyway by 1PM).

Looking back, I’m pleased at my restraint when the CEO wished for a dedicated work force. He wasn’t a stupid man, yet he had no idea that he couldn’t have ground morale into the dirt more effectively if he had been deliberately tried to do so. Busy satisfying the board that he was containing costs, he forgot that, if he wanted dedication and respect, he also needed to show some loyalty and support for his employees. And, really, considering all his long hours trying to turn the company around, I couldn’t tell him what was wrong or the aspects of business that he was neglecting without mortally insulting him.

The company still exists, but it’s only a remnant of what it was in my time. Despite a couple of modestly profitable quarters, it continues to show regular losses, and the same CEO still heads it. I’ve never revisited, but I sometimes wonder if he’s ever figured out what puzzled him, or simply bemoans the difficulty in attracting loyal personnel.

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A firing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, corporatelife, employment, jobs, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , on November 3, 2007| 1 Comment »

I’ve hired – or helped to hire – at least half a dozen people. However, so far, I’ve only been involved in one firing. If I’m lucky, I won’t be involved in any others. The one experience, when I did the company’s dirty work was abrupt and needlessly brutal, and I remain embarrassed by my acquiescence to it eight years later.

The setting was a small startup in Vancouver, the person fired a young programmer on his first job. He was a bit brash, a bit too eager to fit in with the other programmers in the company, and prone to carelessness, but nothing out of the ordinary for a young man on his first job.

Perhaps, too, his coding skills weren’t quite up to professional standards. But he was willing to work for the low wages offered, and tremendously excited to be working with free software – we all were.

Over the few months he was at the company, I noticed that he was gradually developing the necessary working habits, and I was starting to become convinced that he would develop into a useful employee with a little more time.

The trouble was, a startup isn’t the place to learn working skills. At the best of times, a startup is a rough and ready sort of place, and this was the Dot-Com Era, which made the company even more giddy than most in their first few months. People were doing things like sleeping overnight in the boxes the file cabinets arrived in – not because what they were doing was essential, but because they wanted to plunge into the whole Dot-Com experience.

Add to the fact that I was one of only two managers and we were both learning management, and running frequently to the parent company downstairs, and it wasn’t exactly a place for mentoring new workers.

Whatever the case, one day another developer reported that the newbie had been caught trying to hack into the company’s user accounts. In that milieu, the offense seemed a peccadillo, especially since the newbie pleaded that he was only trying to find information that he needed to complete his own work when an account owner wasn’t around.

However, that wasn’t how the HR manager from the parent company viewed the incident. He’d served in the Israeli army as a volunteer, and his military attitude, combined with the sense of his own righteousness, had him springing into action as soon as he heard the story. He hauled the newbie in for interrogation around 10AM, and – presumably after consulting with the owners – fired him not long after.

The first I heard of the story was when the HR manager asked me to clean out the newbie’s desk; he obviously thought the newbie capable of anything up to and including taking his computer and chair with him.
Looking around, I could see that the developer who reported the incident was regretting having done so, and that none of the other developers thought the incident very important, either. But I lacked the confidence to register my own protest, and maybe the HR manager’s grimness as he stood there, bald-headed and scowling and with his arms folded, was a little contagious.

As for the newbie, what he had expected in the way of consequences, being fired wasn’t among his expectations. He looked as though someone had hit him hard on the head and he was still recovering.
Eight months before, I had been laid off myself, so I empathized with the newbie. But then, when I was teaching, I’d always hesitated before giving a D or an F, so no doubt some people would say I was too tender-hearted. But, in this case, genuine doubt seemed to exist, and I was certain it wasn’t being heard. And even if he was as malicious as claimed, he still deserved to be heard in full before

I wanted to call for more discussion. I wanted to take the newbie aside and slip him my card, and whisper that I would help him with a search for a new job. But I was unprepared, and lacking the confidence in my new role to do either of these things. Instead, I went along with the HR manager, removing item from the desk and solemnly asking the newbie whether each one was his before dropping it in the box, while the HR manager stood sentry and another person from the parent company cordoned off the area. Possibly, I was more embarrassed than the newbie, who still didn’t seem to understand what was happening.

Somehow, I made it through that ordeal. But I never felt quite the same about the company afterwards, let alone the HR manager. I was condemning them, of course, instead of condemning myself for not doing things the right way. A few months later, the episode became one of many that made me decide to quit – an easy decision, since I had realized that the company was going nowhere (and, in fact, it failed within the year).

The next time an arbitrary firing was in the works, I’m proud to say, I did take a stand, and helped to prevent it. But I still remember the first experience with shame – and that shame would stand, even had I known that the newbie was as dastardly as claimed. I’ve never liked having power over other people – or them having power over me – and the episode was as obvious a case of abuse of power as any I’ve seen. And although the others involved in it have probably long ago forgot the incident, it remains with me as an example of a time when I didn’t live up to my own image of myself.

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The bookstore grind

Posted in book stores, Books, Bruce Byfield, employment, English, jobs, minimum wage, Personal, retail, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2007| Leave a Comment »

After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I spent several years as a part time clerk in a mall bookstore. I had been reduced to a state where I was fit for little else: Not only had I gone straight through from high school with the exception of one or two summers off, but I had taken a double major and married in the same period. I needed time to coast while I considered the next step, and to earn enough money to pay my share of the expenses in the mean time.

In my naivety, I thought an enthusiasm for books was a natural qualification for such a job. Add a good memory for books and titles glimpsed, and I seemed a natural. Probably the fact that the job was minimum wage should have tipped me off to reality, but I was as green with inexperience as a new branch in spring.

Looking back, I have to say that disillusion took a surprisingly long time to set in. Yet, gradually, and with growing horror, I realized that other employees were far more interested in their shreds of status than books, and that my affinity for books was dismissed at the same time that I fielded all sorts of questions from them. I was unworldly, they decided, and they were right, although not in the way they thought.

All the other employees and managers, I realized, considered books commodities, not as exciting diversions and intellectual stimulation. Their lack of university degrees might have tipped me off, I suppose, but show me the twentysomething man who doesn’t believe he knows how the world works.

But I endured as I recuperated, experiencing the change in my life as Sunday store openings became the norm, and the embarrassment of having the older sister of a school acquaintance arrive as manager. She never said anything, but I grew increasingly afraid that she would mention my lowly status, and whispers would start to circulate that I was a failure.

However, despite this background of discontent, what I mainly recall were the surreal moments of comedy that went with the job. Some of these were corporate, such as the constantly shipping of reduced items back and forth for sales until long after any profit could be recouped from them.

One book I remembered was entitled Les Femmes aux Cigarettes, a reprint of a French photo study from the 1920s by a photographer who found the then-novelty of women smoking irresistible; it started at forty-eight dollars soon after I took the job, and had been reduced to twenty-five cent by the time I left.

I remember, too, the buzz of cleaning and drill that surrounded the visit of the owner – an event that lasted perhaps two minutes as he strode to the back of the store, shook the district manager’s hand, and went out to lunch with him.

Then there was the time I considered applying for a full-time position. The manager took me aside and talked to me solemnly of the duties and responsibilities of working full-time – as though I hadn’t been doing everything the full-timers were doing anyway. Asked point blank if she was implying that I wasn’t responsible, she back-pedaled furiously, but, with such events in my past, no wonder my view of the corporate world is ironic and bemused at best.

But what I remember most vividly are the customers. Many would enter the store in early afternoon, wanting the book they had seen on Oprah that morning, and could not understand that I had been at the store since 9AM, let alone that I’m not an Oprah sort of person. My favorite in this category is the woman who came up to me and said, “I can’t remember the name or the title of the book, and it’s hard to explain what it’s about, but it was on some television show this morning, and had a green cover.” What I wanted to do was direct her to the green book section, but, wisely, I refrained.

Another time, one of the many mothers who used the children’s section as a cheaper version of mall daycare berated us because her son had wandered. We should have kept an eye on him, she kept saying.

Then there was the time I chased a young shoplifter out the door, through the mall, and halfway across the parking lot. I didn’t catch him – which was probably good, since I might have got into trouble with the law – and, to tell the truth, I didn’t much care if I did. For me, the incident was an unexpected moment of excitement in an otherwise monotonous day. But from the terrorized look on the shoplifter’s face as he looked over his shoulder, I doubt he felt the same way – although perhaps he went on to tell his own boasting version of the story.

And who can forget the hordes who arrived in the last few hours of Christmas Eve, overheated in their winter coats, furious about everything that had sold out, and about as full of Christmas cheer as a tax collector? One Christmas, I had just slumped against the door lock when a young male executive came bounding at the door.

“I have to get a gift for my wife,” he kept saying. “I have to!” His tie was askew, and he was more than a little drunk, and all I wanted was to go home and start my own Christmas. Safe on the other side of the glass, I muttered, “Keep this up, and you won’t have to worry about buying for your wife much longer,” and let a staffer take pity on him.

I think that these random encounters helped shaped the basis of my worldview: Things don’t make sense, I decided, and I would only get a headache if I insisted in looking for the logic.

But I had outgrown the job by the end of my first shift. I enjoy people, but not constantly, and I’m not a naturally servile or patient person. After two and a half years, I was looking for a way out. I started applying for any job remotely suitable, then hit on grad school. That fall, I applied for both the Communications and English Department at Simon Fraser University. The Communications Department would only take grad students in September, and I wasn’t waiting another eight months, so I became an English master’s candidate, sinking gratefully into the familiar world where ideas mattered and books were viewed as precious.

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