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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

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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Indoor squirrel hunting

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, squirrels, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 3, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The other day, I was just finishing breakfast when I heard something crash to the floor in the bedroom. I didn’t think much of it at first, supposing that the curtain blowing in the wind had swept something from a counter.

But,when it was repeated again, I found a gray squirrel sitting on top of an armoire. Somehow, it had freed the screen on the window enough to slip through.

I wasn’t very surprised, even though the bedroom window is on the equivalent of the third story. I’d seen squirrels scrambling vertically on the building’s stucco, and heard them at the screen more than once.

However, like most people, I don’t take appreciate disturbances to my morning routine. Nor did I want the little B& E artist getting into the rest of the townhouse, where it would be more difficult to catch and might upset our parrots. All this went through my mind in a second or two, and I quietly stepped into the bedroom and closed the door.

Just then, I remembered hearing that squirrels often carry rabies, and I wondered if I had done a smart thing. Visions of the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail flashed through my head, and I wondered if I’d be found with my throat torn out and the little gray monster chittering a song of triumph on my chest.

If there were any hunters in my immediate line of descent, I decided, they were a long way back. Probably, I was more a gathering type.

Moving slowly and steadily, I drew the curtain and took the screen from the window. I decided I was going to give the intruder every chance to exit on his own. The alternative would be to try and catch him in a bucket.

Again, my imagination sprang into action, imagining me trying to find something to cover the bucket with and racing to get to the door before the squirrel chewed through the bucket.

What happened instead was that the squirrel was panicked by my motions. It leaped down on to the headboard and across to the other armoire.
I decided that the screen would keep me a good ways from the squirrel and waved it in the squirrel’s general direction.

It responded by leaping down on to the bed – closer to me, then to the floor.

I waved the screen, and it leapt back to the bed. I was envisioning spending hours trying to deal with the squirrel, but this time it caught site of the open window and made a leap for it – apparently forgetting that it was high up.

For a moment, I swear, it hung in mid-air, its feet scrambling for purchase as though it was in a cartoon, then plummeted.

Horrified, I rushed to the window, expecting to see a dead or badly wounded squirrel below, but there was nothing to be seen, then or a few minutes later after I had replaced the screen and gone out for my morning run.

In retrospect, considering my imagination and lack of heroism, I think I’ll tackle a few more squirrels before contemplating a career wrestling crocodiles.

Better yet, I think I’ll practice with something smaller, like field mice or lady bugs – but, first I’m going to dig out my old Society for Creative Anachronism armor from the bottom of the closet.

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I thought I’d witnessed a tasering

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, Personal, police brutality, tasers, Uncategorized, Vancouver, tagged , , , , , , on August 1, 2008| 2 Comments »

Having finished my quota of articles for July early, I took yesterday to run errands and browse a couple of book stores downtown. I took most of the afternoon, and had worked out most of the kinks from spending too much time in front of the keyboard when the relaxation was undone in a moment by seeing someone beaten up by three members of the transit police. In fact, until I read the first comment (see below), I thought I had witnessed a tasering. I’m still not sure that I didn’t, considering the source of the comment. But what I did see was bad enough, whether a taser was involved or not.

Understand that I have little use for cops of any kind. The small-c conservatism of the average person in the police fits poorly with my anarchistic tendencies, and I have seen and heard enough that I view the seige mentality of the typical cop with a skeptical eye. While I have known some decent cops, too often they seem a kind of of government-sponsored street gang. And the transit cops are worse than most. One or two in particular seem to take far too much pleasure in picking on Asian teenagers for my liking. But what I saw yesterday was even worse than I had come to expect.

As I got off at my stop, I saw three transit cops taking aside a man for questioning. The cops were typical of the transit forces: each was a few years past his prime, and a little paunchy. The man they were surrounding was much smaller and thinner, and possibly Vietnamese. He had a glazed look about his eyes that suggested that he was stoned on something.

“You poor bastard,” I thought, and continued on my way.

A few minutes later, I was at my bus stop when a scream caused me to look up to the Skytrain platform. Now, the small man was trying to run from the three cops, dodging behind a pillar without much success. As I watched from twenty meters away, two of the cops wrestled him to the ground. I could hear him pleading with the cops as they tried to handcuff him, promising at the top of his lungs that he would cooperate with them if only they left him unrestrained.

They didn’t listen. Clumsily, they continued to wrestle with him. Suddenly, I saw a flash. (naturally, I thought it a taser). The man screamed even louder than before, and went limp. After some effort, they pulled him to his feet. He was crying and cursing, but in a lower voice than before. I heard another scream, which was probably his arms being twisted behind him as a cop put him in handcuffs, but could possibly have been a taser being applied directly to his skin.

I’ve just seen someone tasered, I thought dumbfounded. Even at the time, I supposed that I could have been wrong, but what I saw certainly resembled the videos I’ve seen of tasers being used. The only difference was that watching a video has a distancing effect. This was all too real.

As I watched, I told myself that I should go back on to the platform and see what I should do. I knew that could be unpleasant for me – to say the least – but I hated to think I was the kind of person who would watch such a thing and do nothing. Nor was I the only one; about half a dozen others gathered around the scene on the platform, being held back by a couple of other cops who had suddenly appeared from somewhere. I imagine that most of the other spectators were having as much trouble believing what they saw as I was, but I like to think that, like me, some might be bearing witness to what was happening.

To my own self-criticism, I was still deciding what to do when the police dragged the man away and my bus arrived. But my day of leisure had already been spoiled, partly by my own internal debate about what to do, but mainly because of the unexpected brutality I had seen.

Ever since Robert Dziekanski was tasered to death at the Vancouver airport last fall, I have been against the use of tasers by police. I have been angry, too, that the various investigations into other recent taser deaths were obvious white-washes that exonerated the police involved and never even considered the possibility of banning tasers, calling instead for better training and guidelines. It seems obvious to me that tasers kill, and that they are especially likely to kill precisely the sort of people on whom cops tend to use them.

However, what I hadn’t really absorbed before was that tasers are being used to torture people in public. Can anything be so contrary to the alleged purpose of the piece, or more humiliating for the victim and horrifying for both him and passers-by?

I may have been wrong about what I saw, but the insight is not wrong for all of that. Even if no taser was used, what I saw was brutal and shocking, even from a distance.

And what was the man’s alleged crime? Probably nothing worse than fare evasion and failing to show the proper respect for the cops when questioned, then trying to run. These are hardly acts that deserve such a reaction from people who are supposed to be in authority.

I wish now that I had shouted something, or run to the platform and urged others to act with me – although what we could do, I’m not entirely sure. Chant, “The whole world is watching” in hopes of shaming the cops? Probably, that would have only resulted in us being arrested or assaulted ourselves, assuming that I could have found anyone else who shared my outrage. As things were, all I am left with is – once again – the melancholy conclusion that the civil society on which we pride ourselves is a lie.

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The room mate from hell

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, hospitals, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 30, 2008| 2 Comments »

Hospitals are not my favorite places at the best of times. They are such concentrations of pain, stress and raw emotion that I barely need twenty minutes before I start feeling emotionally overloaded in them. But, after last week, I have reason to like them even less.

Thanks to the overcrowding that has become the norm, Trish had to share a semi-private ward with a man having psychotic episodes. This circumstance is not (I say with understatement) recommended for someone who has just had major surgery.

At first, he seemed normal enough. Possibly, I thought on my visits, he was a little simple, not being able to distinguish his current hospital stay with past ones or give his doctors and nurses much information about himself, but I could hardly blame him for that. Even when he insisted on giving a half-incoherent, half-rambling reply to every comment made in the room, I dismissed his behavior as annoying but harmless.

Then, last Friday night, he went off like a bomb, trying to tear out his IV and catheter and other connections and struggling to get out of bed (which, fortunately, he was unable to manage). At first, he seemed to think he was in a war movie – and, before long, the movie became real. He seemed to believe that the Chinese had landed troops in British Columbia, and that he was on a boat that was shelling their positions. A little later, after nurses and security swarmed around him and tied him to his gurney, he seemed to believe that he was in a town called Dawson, where he had been taken prisoner and was being tortured for information.

Between swearing and shouting abuse, he made his plans out loud. He would pretend compliance, he said, so he could escape. He would even eat the food provided – although it was undoubtedly poisoned – but just enough to stay alive.

And Trish? In her room mate’s delusion, she was pretending to be his mother to trick him. She came in for a share of the swearing and abuse. She managed to get some sleep after the nurses brought her some ear plugs, but trying to sleep less than two meters from such events is not exactly restful.

Nor could she help thinking what might happen if her room mate got loose – he may have been too weak to walk far, but he still might get as far as her.

The next day, the hospital found a nurse to sit with the man, and Trish finally managed to get a few hours’ sleep. She also spent as much time as she could manage outside the room. Her room mate was mostly sedated, but he was still rude and angry when awake.

By the time Trish came home on Monday, she was more than a little tense. We weren’t sure she was healed enough to go home, but she wanted out of that room badly.

I don’t blame the nurses for what happened. They do the best job they can in trying circumstances, and, anyway, surgical nurses aren’t experienced in dealing with psychiatric patients. I’ve often thought that the medical system would be more equitable if doctors’ pay was halved and nurses’ pay was doubled. They do a job that I would flee screaming after half a shift.

But I do blame the organization and budget cuts to the medical system that such a patient was put in with another one who could only be traumatized by his behavior. The next time someone claims that the British Columbia health system is fine, I’m going to reply with this anecdote. It’s one that would be compelling as a Stephen King short story – but even King would have trouble convincing readers that such a real-life incident could happen in fiction.

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The well-bred boredom of celebrity blogging

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, celebrity blogging, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on July 28, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Something has always bothered me about so-called celebrity bloggers, but I’ve never been quite able to identify it. I’ve vaguely thought that a lot of fuss was being made over very little, but never troubled to clarify the impression. The other day, though, I made a mental connection that explained why I was unimpressed.

When I was a university instructor, I did more than my share of first-year composition. When you’re new and being hired by the semester, that’s the price of clinging to the edges of academia. But the point is that, in most semesters, I would encounter students who had passed high school simply by completing every assignments. A few had even got scholarships because they had completed every assignment at exhaustive length. Often, some of these students would do poorly on their first few assignments – and, when they did, they couldn’t understand why. My explanation that, at university, you got marks for what you accomplished rather than what you attempted might have been talking in tongues for all the sense it made to them. How could they not pass? They had done the assignment, hadn’t they?

Too many celebrity bloggers, I concluded, were like these students. To a surprising degree, what they are known for is not for writing about interesting topics, or for insightful comments, or even for pithy turns of phrase, but for blogging and nothing else.

I remember that, at one networking event, the organizer announced that a celebrity blogger would be live-blogging the event. Immediately, everyone applauded, while the blogger looked around modestly. The blogger didn’t participate much in the event, being hunched over the keyboard of a laptop all evening, so naturally I expected some clear and concise reporting, if not the original insights along the lines of Joseph Addison’s or George Orwell’s.

What I found the next morning was an unfiltered stream of consciousness, perhaps of interest to the blogger’s friends, but no more intrinsically interesting than a conversation overheard on the bus. Authentic it might be, but also a well-bred bore, with little except basic literacy to recommend it.

The blogger, I realize now, was famous for blogging – not blogging well, but simply blogging. And, like the high school kids whose world view I used to detonate, to the blogger and their audience, that was supposed to be enough.

This impression was confirmed by a recent local blogathon, in which a number of these celebrity bloggers posted an entry every half hour for twenty-four hours, each trying to raise money for a favorite charity.

As a fund-raising idea, the blogathon seems futile and full of self-importance. Most people simply aren’t that interested in blogs. In every case where I could find figures, the amount of money raised was less than my average charity donation (and I’m far from wealthy).

But what matters here is how the effort was regarded. The organizer referred to participating in the blogathon as a “sacrifice” — mostly of time and sleep — when really it was nothing of the sort. It’s not a sacrifice when you get something in return, and, in my view, the sense of excitement and importance participants obviously received removed any sense of sacrifice from their efforts. And while such efforts are interesting when someone as accomplished as the American fantasist Harlan Ellison does them as a calculated bit of grandstanding (he has, for example, written in the window of a book store), I couldn’t help noticing that, in the case of the blogathon, what mattered in the blogathon was producing the requisite number of entries, not the quality of the entries.

Is anyone surprised that, except for an entry from a blogger who specialized in humor and one or two others, the entries were almost entirely void of interest for anyone except perhaps the bloggers and their immediate friends? Despite the popularity of personal journalism these days, it takes an expert to write a personal essay that interests acquaintances or strangers, and these didn’t. As Attila the Stockbroker used to say, it would take a mentally subnormal yak to care about most of the blogathon entries.

But that didn’t matter. What the blogathon participants care about was that, like my composition students, the fact that they had completed the assignments.

I don’t mean to insult celebrity bloggers by this observation. I’m friendly with one or two local ones, and, away from their obsession, some of them are interesting enough people. If they or their friends get pleasure from such entries, who am I to say that they shouldn’t? But I do mean to say that what they are doing is played by relaxed rules, and that I’m not interested imitating them.

For me, playing by real world rules is the only way worth playing. That doesn’t necessarily mean being paid for your writing (although it’s true that few reactions suggest that you are writing to at least a minimal standard than having someone buy the right to publish you). But unless my concern is catch the interest of others with every trick I can muster and risking failure, then I’m no better than a high school student expecting to be rewarded just for trying.

That’s fine for practice. But high school was a long time ago, and I prefer to operate by real world rules. If the rise of failure is greater (and I’m the first to admit that I’ve failed many times), then so is the chance of a truly satisfying success (and I’ve had a few of those, although far fewer than my ego likes to admit). In the end, what matters to me is not how much I write, but the reception it gets from readers.

Otherwise, in my own estimation, I am no better than those owners of one-person companies who call themselves CEOs – self-aggrandizing, lacking self-perspective, and more than slightly pathetic.

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The pleasures of re-reading

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Personal, re-reading, reading, T. H. White, Tolkien, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2008| 2 Comments »

Ever since I learned to read, I’ve been a chain reader, sometimes literally finishing one book and picking up another one. Books have been my refuge from the bleakness and bad news of the day, a way to while away time while in line at the store, and my companion on constant rides on transit and planes. I even shave while reading to alleviate the boredom of the task (obviously, I use a safety razor). And, inevitably, I re-read.

The first time I read a book, I may have many motivations. Obviously, I need to have an interest in the topic or the writer, but I’m not a very discriminating reader, so that hardly narrows down why I might read something – everything from graphic novels to Middle English poetry might seem interesting to me in different moods. At times, I read because the writer has a reputation, and I want to push back the boundaries of my ignorance a furlong or two. At other times, I read because I’ve been given a book (I count heavily on friends to urge on me books that I might not pick for myself, and, often enough, I find myself pleasantly surprised). Still other times, I read because nothing better is at hand.

However, why I re-read is easier to delineate. I rarely re-read non-fiction from cover to cover, although I might return to particular pages when researching or needing to prod my memory. Mostly, what I re-read is fiction. If I was trying to be a snob, I would claim that I re-read only worthwhile books, but that would be a half-truth. Unless my tastes change, I doubt I’ll re-read standards of the literary canon like Henry James or Anthony Trollope; I recognize that their writing shows some skill, but, like opera, it’s a skill I recognize without appreciating.

It would be more exact to say that I re-read fiction whose skill has impressed me with its craft, regardless of how the canon regards it: Charles Dickens, but also Wilkie Collins; John Fowles and Lawrence Durrell, but also any number of writers who labored their life away in the science fiction ghetto.
What others think of my taste makes little difference to me (although I confess I can’t quite bring myself to read graphic novels on the bus). Instead, what matters is that the work shows some skill. The over-maligned Stephen King, for instance, is a master at pacing and observation of Americana – two skills that are usually missing from the academic’s checklist for greatness, but which average readers reward unconsciously by purchasing his work.
However, the books I re-read the most are those that are not only give aesthetic pleasure, but also reinforce my world view. Three books (or series) in particular come to mind: T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which shaped my sense of right and wrong; J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, from which I learned the core values of endurance and rising to the occasion; and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin novels, which idealize friendship and a detached but amused view of the world while also offering historical adventure in the 19th century British navy.

Probably, you could gauge my character very accurately, not only from the common nature of these books – none, notably, have a modern or mundane setting – but also from the number of times I’ve re-read them. White I’ve re-read at least a dozen times since childhood, and Tolkien – the last time I checked – over 33 times, a number that astonishes me as I write it. By contrast, I have only read the twenty or so novels in O’Brian’s series three times through, but, then, I came to them much later that the other two, and they probably amount to two or three times the words of White’s and Tolkien’s classics. I’m re-reading O’Brian now, savoring favorite lines (“Jack, you have debauched my sloth”) and finding new subtleties.

The chances are, I’ll re-read all three – to say nothing of other favorites – many times in the rest of my life. However, I doubt I’ll re-read any of them as many times again as I already have. As I grow older, I am more jealous of time, and more aware of all that I have still to read. In fact, probably a new book has to impress me more than my classics did before I’ll re-read it in preference to moving on to something new. But a change of heart or a prolonged illness might change that, and, even if they don’t, I still expect many hours of pleasure ahead with my old favorites.

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My personal mythology

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, myth, mythology, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 21, 2008| 1 Comment »

“Let us now compare mythologies”
-Leonard Cohen

One advantage of blogging, I find, is that it reveals my personal mythology. A single entry might not do so, but if I look over a few dozen entries (something I rarely do, because the urge to edit and improve is almost irresistible), a definite pattern starts to emerge.

When I talk about mythology, I’m not talking about lies. Rather, I’m talking about myths in the anthropological sense – stories that explain where you come from and why you do things in certain ways. In this sense, whether a myth is true or a lie is only of secondary importance. What matters is whether the myth sustains you and gives a sense of identity.

For instance, to an American, does it really matter whether America was settled by the best and brightest from older countries? Or, to a feminist, whether a prehistoric universal matriarchy ever existed? You can examine and even debunk such stories – and there can be a certain satisfaction in disproving what everybody knows – but you won’t be thanked, and your proofs will not be welcomed (if anything, you’ll be pilloried). What matters is not the objective reality of myth, but the sense of identity it gives a culture or an individual. If a story helps to sustain identity, that is all that really counts.

So what is my personal myth? Looking through blog entries about my past, I’d say it could be summarized in five words: triumphing after a bad start. Or, in a single word: endurance.

Time and time again, the narrative I tell about myself begins with me doing something badly. Often, I am humiliated by how inept I am. But I am determined, and through perseverance, I make myself competent and even highly skilled where I was once inept.

Considering this story more closely, I find that it has all sorts of implications. For one thing, it’s not a story tied to a particular group or set of circumstances; instead, it’s about attitudes and applicable to a number of situations. Since I’ve always considered myself a generalist with a broad array of interests, I’m fascinated to find that view reflected in my personal myth.

For another, it’s about education – again, not surprising considering that I’ve always believed in education for its own sake, and research is what I currently do for a living.

But what I find most interesting is that my myth that emphasizes persistence. It make no claim to my brilliance or talent. Natural ability isn’t even a consideration. Instead, it’s about learning from mistakes and not giving up. Learning to speak, learning good handwriting, becoming a high school running champion, finding the right profession – time and time again, the story I tell myself is about plodding along until I do or find the right thing.

That’s not surprising, I suppose. The one story I knew about someone with my name when I was growing up was the one about Robert the Bruce learning persistence from a spider. And, as a distance runner, I had concrete knowledge of the importance of endurance, because it wasn’t speed or even strategy that won races so much as the ability to keep going. But, until now, I hadn’t realized how deep-rooted such values were inside me.

In fact, I’m not sure that this is a myth I would have consciously chosen for myself. It has limits, such as a distrust of anything that comes too easily. Perhaps, too, it suggests a lack of confidence, and an expectation of failure the first time. It certainly dropped me into the worst stress that I have ever endured in my life.

Nor, now that I have opened up the myth to examine it, am I completely sure that it is always true. I can think of exceptions to the myth, and, looking back, I think I can see places where I have tugged the raw material of my life to make it fit into the myth better, like the corner of a sheet on a bed. In other places, I suspect I’ve exaggerated or even made up things out of whole cloth.

Still, for better or worse, the myth is mine. And like all myths, what matters in the end is that, on some level, I’ve made it a part of me.

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Learning to enjoy my daily swim

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, swimming, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 20, 2008| 1 Comment »

Today, I suddenly realized that I was enjoying swimming – enjoying it immensely. The reaction comes as a surprise for several reasons.

To start with, I learned to swim under what I remember as the most miserable conditions when I was a child. In my mind, all the swimming lessons I took in the local outdoor pool occurred in the pouring rain and freezing cold, when all I really wanted to do was stay huddled in my towel in the cabana where the class met.

To make matters worse, I was a poor learner. Or so I thought, because I took forever to struggle up the hierarchy of lessons. It was only in my last year of lessons that I had an instructor who was built like me, with an long torso and short calves, and that I realized that much of what I was learning was useless for anyone of our build. The instructor taught me some alternate kicks that actually worked, so I could tread water for the first time in my life.

Yet, even then, I didn’t care much for the crawl, which was the dominant stroke in those days. I found the swift glimpses above the water disorienting, and I didn’t care much for the sensory deprivation of swimming in general. For years, my main technique was a modified breast stroke that kept my head above water.

Then, just to make me even less inclined to enjoyment, I started swimming regularly a few years ago when I realized that I needed a more varied exercise regiment if I hoped to save my much-battered knees more wear. After years of long-distance running, swimming was definitely second best, and something I endured more than I enjoyed.

Several things have made me change my mind, though. For one thing, after swimming daily since the Victoria Day weekend, I’ve reached the point where I fall into a rhythm while doing my laps, and don’t have to think about what I’m doing. It’s only at this point, I’ve learned from other exercises, that working out stops becoming a grim duty. However, I’ve reached that stage every summer for the past few years without more than mildly enjoying my swimming on most days.

But, over the past couple of weeks, the weather has turned hot suddenly, without any gradual build up that would let me get used it. Walking from an air-conditioned building to the outside, I can feel the heat wrinkling away from me as though it’s a skin that I’m shedding, and, after a run or a session on the exercise bike, my singlet is a sweaty mess that disgusts even me. Under these conditions, the coolness of the pool is luxurious. When I duck my head completely under, a delicious ring of coolness seems to encircle my forehead and temples.

Most importantly, this year I’ve been under considerable stress for several months. While most of the time, sensory deprivation seems hellish to me, as I cope with stress, this year it’s relaxing. In fact, it’s so relaxing that I’ve dropped my modified breast-stroke for the proper thing, dipping my head into the water and coming up for air. Propelling myself face down along the pool, I can see reflections from the sun, like a shimmering chain link fence of gold along the bottom, and not much else. Now, it’s a glorious sensation, being cut off from much of my usual sensory input while feeling my legs and arms moving in rhythm.

I’ve got to the point now where I can swim two kilometers, and, although my muscles know they’re had a workout, I feel like I could easily do as much again. I especially like the solitary feeling because the gym where I ride the exercise bike is usually so full of inconsequential chatter and posturing.

What I will do when the pool in my townhouse complex closes in the fall, I don’t know. But I’ll want to make some effort to find another convenient pool for the winter months.

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Life on the fringes of academia

Posted in academia, Bruce Byfield, Personal, sessional instructors, teaching, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »

At the start or end of my morning run, I often meet one of my neighbors running for the bus. He works as an on-call English instructor at various institutions around the city, and often gets the call to teach at the last moment in the morning. He doesn’t seem to mind, except for the irregularity of his pay, but I never meet him on his way to work without being thoroughly thankful that my own days as an itinerant instructor are long-past.

For the last few decades, most people with a graduate degree who hope to have a career in academia spend at least some time as a sessional instructor, scrambling for each semester-long contract, and often scrambling between community colleges during the work week to cobble together something like a regular pay cheque. My own experiences include a semester when I bused out to Fraser Valley College (as it was then) two days a week, and more than one time when I had fourteen hour days in which at least two or three hours were spent travelling. That’s time that I could have dearly used for marking or lesson preparation.

Sessional instructors have the lowest rank in academia, and everything about their working conditions reminds of them of the fact. Often, they don’t get a teaching assignment until a week or less before the semester starts – sometimes the night before. They get paid half what tenured faculty get, and often do twice the work, since they frequently teach lower level classes with more students. Most of the time, they have to share offices – or even study carrels in a crowded room. Officially, they don’t get paid for research, yet, if they don’t publish, they have less chance of being hired. Similarly, they are looked down on because their focus is teaching, but, unlike a tenured professor, they lose their position if their student evaluations are poor. Their rehiring is at the whim of their department, which means that wise sessionals will waste hours at every meeting and function, even though they have no voice. Yet they endure all this in the hopes that one day they’ll rise to the height of being a lecturer – which means they’ll be doing the same work for about the same pay, but not having to scramble for it. Meanwhile, they dream of winning a tenure position and dwelling in the halls of academia forever.

Sessional work is especially hard at the community colleges. For one thing, the classes are larger than at universities, and more assignments are required. For another, community colleges – even now, when they have morphed into degree-granting institutions of a kind – are often the continuation of high school under another name. Faced with the choice of finding a job or going to college, many middle-class kids will immediately register for college, which is cheaper than university and easier to treat lightly. For the sessional instructor, that means that the lesson that works in the more serious atmosphere of university has to be largely remade for use at a college. In fact, when I retreated after a few years into teaching only at university, the first thing I noticed was how much lighter my work load became. And I needed the respite, because, although I was young and healthy, the work was steadily grinding me down, especially since I needed to teach year round in order to keep above the poverty line.

Despite these disadvantages, I loved the work, especially dealing with the students. I was kept going, too, by a vague promise at one university that I would eventually be hired for some kind of full-time position. Dozens of Baby Boomer teachers would be retiring any day now, I was continually told – and when they did, I would be first in line for their jobs, because I had established myself as an effective teacher.

Then, slowly, the die started being weighted against me. My non-dogmatic approach to criticism was out of fashion with the then-dominant Post Colonialists, and, although I muttered jokes about being the token humanist, I was increasingly looked at askance. Then the chair changed, and the new one announced that, instead of reserving sessional positions for those who have proved themselves, the department would use the positions in order to trade favors for its grad students at other universities. Suddenly, my income became precarious. And, right about then, I noticed that, when tenured staff retired, they were either not being replaced or else being replaced by relatively lowly lecturer positions.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I made the jump to technical writing. From there, I was so busy leapfrogging into marketing, consulting, and eventually journalism that I’ve had little time to look back. If my new work was just as unsettled, I appreciated that it paid much better, although ordinarily I have only a minimal interest in money. It also had new challenges, such as taking on responsibility for large projects and developing customer relations.

Still, when I do look back, I sometimes wonder where I would be if I had stayed on the fringes of academia. Then I look at my neighbor and other people who started as sessionals the same time as I did, and I have my answer: In exactly the same place that I was.

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