For everyone that doesn’t know, I’m currently what they alternatively call “on a sabbatical,” “between opportunities,” or “unemployed” depending on whether you are talking to your wealthy family members, your six-figure salary friends who somehow still look fabulous, or the government agency sending you a check every week. It’s not an unfamiliar state to find myself inhabiting, but there are a few differences. I’ve been “asked to leave” several times in my past and honestly it doesn’t bother me one bit. The reasons some one might leave a job unwillingly are really too numerous to worry over and every situation is unique, which is why I’ve never asked that question of anyone during an interview. I feel as though its dirty pool. I mean seriously, if you were out on a date with some one you found attractive who seemed interested in the same things about which you felt passionately and looked like they might feel the same way about you … would you honestly just inject the following question into the conversation, “So tell me why you left your last boyfriend/girlfriend?” I suppose the only worse question would be, “So have you ever been dumped? And if so, please tell me the gory details so I can listen for anything that reminds me of a past bad relationship in order to help me decide if I should just walk away now.” Having spent an inordinate amount of time on the “dating scene” I can say with some assurance a really good person would usually get up and walk out the door at that time, unless they were desperate. Unfortunately this is where the dating metaphor breaks down as most of us out there looking have become so inured to bad dates/interviews we no longer expect anything less. Having our partner on the interview ask us the dating equivalent of asking if we’ve ever posed for a racy magazine spread just seems natural by stint of it being asked so often.
Questions like these are artless dodges used to hedge your bets when deciding whether or not to make a commitment. First of all, the only people who will give glowing answers are either lying or are so professionally meek as to never have worked in a poorly managed company, come into conflict with an egotistical tyrant, or taken a chance on a company that might or might not be able to make payroll in six months. Chances are better you are dealing with a liar if they just breeze through this question and don’t respond with anything that sets off your alarm bells. Unfortunately my personal opinion is it really doesn’t matter to you whether they lie or not. The answer gives you what is termed as plausible deniability and frees you from the more odious task of actually checking into some one’s background. Actually looking into some one’s background to verify their claims is work, work which most of us looking to fill a personnel gap can’t usually afford to perform. Unfortunately its essential to our task. Most people conducting interviews are not given any training or instruction even about the legality of certain questions or topics. It’s difficult to imagine such people being aware of the process for checking references and employment history. In this absence of knowledge about the process coupled with a lack of training about actually effective techniques, most interviewers muddle their way through the process spending as much time covering their own culpability (consciously or unconsciously) as they do actually figuring out useful things like character fit, personality, and professional ethics.
I’ve been there, trust me. It’s difficult to trust your instincts. Its work to actively interview a candidate rather than simply work through a script containing predetermined questions with objective or subjective scoring values. But if you want to actually delve into the character and personality of a possible member of your team, you must break away from standardized interviewing questions and start engaging in conversations. If you steer the conversation correctly, you should be able to chat about past work and team conflict in a more natural (and thereby truthful) manner than an outright question and answer interview. This directed conversation will usually spark points you need to make a note to follow up on later either by directing asking the interviewee or by your own research.
So how do we work at uncovering the information important to our decision making process without outright asking the interviewee this ensuring at least some sort of obfuscation? I’ve found the tips recommended by advocates of active listening to be invaluable. In order to avoid my usual chapter length blog post, I’ll just sum up the primary point of active listening. Actually pay attention to the whole message a person is conveying rather than simply listening for certain words or phrases. You need to engage the person in the interview by asking follow up questions that relate in some reasonable manner to the points they were making. Simply saying, “Hmm … that’s interesting. Now let me toss out a very awkward segue into a marginally related question I have on my checklist to ask” doesn’t cut it. At that point the engaged and passionate candidate with superb qualifications and other options will simply shut down and go through the motions as well. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve actually called an end to the interview after only a quarter of the time because the recruiter to whom I was talking appeared more interested in their instant messages and emails than talking to me. If that recruiter had seemed interested in what I had to say, who knows where the process might have proceeded? I may actually have found a great job with a passionate and innovative team. The team would have gained an experienced and passionate member excited about the opportunities stretching before them.
Of course we’ll never know now.
So how do you use active listening to figure out if the person interviewing to join your company/team/dungeon party is lying out of their eye teeth or is quite possibly insane? It’s simple to say but takes dedication to the process. First off, find out as much as you can about the pre and post screening processes. Identify who will be following up on reference checks or if anyone follows up on them. Who is expected to verify employment history or education background? Finally is there a process in place for handling verbal consent to check statements made during an interview. This last part is crucial. Active listening often reveals persons not listed on an official reference list. A simple curious question about contacting said person will often result in verbal consent. This person and the subject should go on a list you compile immediately following the interview. Your list should map out your impressions of the candidate as well as topics you’d like some one to follow up on later. Any tickling at your instincts should be jotted down and used in either further interviews or as part of a reference check. It’s a pain and takes time you don’t have, but its essential to actually selecting a good candidate rather than simply covering yourself in case the candidate that looks good on paper turns out to have anger management issues.
If it helps, think of the follow up as second or third dates and the reference check as meeting the friends and relatives. Hopefully you wouldn’t rush into a committed romantic relationship without meeting the important people in this person’s past to get a better idea of who they are. Why would you hire some one and spend at least 40 hours a week with them based on less?
So here we are at the second entry in my series offering advice to those seeking employment in a large corporation or conglomerate. If you made it past my earlier entry debunking the myth regarding job security and still want to keep looking at joining, then you’ve probably determined the other benefits you’ll reap will be worth the possibility of your manager telling you they need you in the offices eight or nine time zones away for the next two months (yes, that actually happened to a friend of mine). As I said before, this is not an unreasonable assumption. However you should know what you’re getting into before making this decision, so let’s talk about the most common yet most unfairly in my opinion vilified aspect of working at a large corporation … bureaucracy.
The issue at hand often masquerades under many different terms depending on the specific agenda of the user. ”Corporate politics,” “corporate governance,” “process management,” and “organizational structure” are just a few of the terms I’ve heard over the years to describe the same thing … bureaucracy. The actual unemotional definition of a bureaucracy is “management or administration marked by hierarchical authority among numerous offices and by fixed procedures.” The fixed procedures can be thought of as policies, laws, or directives dictated by leadership. The bureaucracy is then charged with implementing these directives, but (and this is important) they do not make the directives. In practice for the rank and file this can be a difficult distinction to make since the bureaucrat (ie: manager, HR rep, security officer, etc) is interacting with them daily while the policy director is usually someplace much more theoretical called “the home office.” So it seems this separation between the rank and file and the policy makers is then the root of most complaints about bureaucracy.
To explain this better, let’s reexamine the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are simply personnel charged with actually implementing policy as directed by decision makers. In other words they exist in all companies with a hierarchical decision making structure. Some one makes company policy decisions, some one has to follow said decisions, therefore some one has to both ensure the policies are being followed and often interpret these policies in a manner relevant to an individual’s work. In small organizations the separation between the policy makers and the one who will enact said policy is small to functionally nonexistent. In large organizations the separation can be quite vast depending on the level of homogenization practiced by the governing body. The further the separation between policy maker and those directly effected the more layers of bureauracrats usually encountered. More layers of interpretation and communication between the actors in this policy play means the less logical or useful said policies will generally appear to those at the receiving end. To further confound most reasonable people, bureaucracies get really confusing when they are paired with the basic concepts of economies of scale and specialization & consolidation.
I’ve gone into the microeconomic theory of an economy of scale before but to summarize, the basic theory is the average cost per unit of producing something will at some point decrease if the amount produced is steadily increased. The idea is that efficiency can be obtained through repetition and operating costs due to equipment will stay static. In other words the cost per hole is high if we only dig one hole and purchase a new shovel. However the cost per hole is small if one person digs a thousand holes in the same sort of ground and uses the same shovel. In this way the cost of the shovel is spread out over a thousand holes and the operator will get more efficient as they dig more so time spent on each hole will decrease. Eventually you should reach a point of increasing returns on investment, or at least that’s the theory.
The theory of specialization and consolidation is a new one for this blog, but its important and I apologize for the omission. Specialization and consolidation theory relies on the metaphor I used earlier about the person digging a hole and expands on it. Like most theories it sounds correct when stated simply. The simple theory is that a person will get better at something the more times they repeat the process. Thus it logically follows a person will become more efficient quicker if they are assigned a specialized role and asked to do it more often in a shorter time frame. This theory is the heart of the much mocked “that’s not my job” phenomenon. Consolidation naturally flows out of this concept because if you only expect a person to perform one task, it doesn’t make economic sense to have three people performing it. Finally it makes even more sense to gather all the people performing that task or process into a common group so they can share best practices and knowledge.
Sounds all happy and nice, doesn’t it? ”What could possibly go wrong?” you ask. Ah my little butter bean, you’re forgetting the bureaucratic distance we discussed earlier between policy makers and the people actually doing the work effected by said policy. Implementing these two theories in a large corporation means you inevitably end up with distinct departments tasked with managing a portion of the larger corporate policies or business strategy. The layers of disconnect have just been multiplied as the bureaucrats in each distinct department develop their independent interpretations of the policies and how to implement them. The problem is so pervasive it spawned an entire industry tasked with solving it without actually solving it. Six Sigma, for instance, is most often used to help remedy this problem.
So we’ve talked about how a bureaucracy is inevitable at large corporations where directives and policies must be interpreted, distributed, and enforced among widespread groups and divisions, but what about the really juicy part of all this? What about the politics I hear permeate corporate jobs and culture?
Let me just address the supposed ubiquitous nature of politics in corporations by stating in nearly every place I have ever worked I have heard an incessant complain about politics and political favoritism. Let me restate that in case you missed it. The only job at which I did not hear those complaints was while working on my mother’s family’s ranch, and that was probably because all the workers were local kids and family hired on for summer temp work. Any other time the workers were literally hired through nepotism since we were all family working for free or in trade. Every other job I’ve held whether it was at the nightclub where people claimed a girl was made bartender because she was sleeping with the owner or the product line that was discontinued because the new management “had it in for our manager,” political gamesmanship is the easy answer to any question the answer to which might reflect poorly on our own performance. It does exist, but I don’t think its anywhere as common as its assigned blame.
But exist it does and I will now contradict myself by saying actual political gamesmanship is more common in large corporations than anywhere else, except possibly actual politics. How am I confident in that statement? It’s really quite simple. The bureaucratic disconnect we discussed earlier between the policy makers and the people doing the actual work goes both ways. Bureaucrats don’t just interpret policies and decisions for distribution, they collate reports and status information for dissemination upward. Anyone who has ever edited a document or created a report from raw data knows it is impossible to remove subjectivity from the result. Subjectivity is built into the process of selecting what to include and what to exclude. The more instances you have of subjective editing, the less likely a finished artifact will bear any sort of relation to objective fact. The same process is true of actual work product. The more removed your superiors are from your daily work, the more dependent they become on verbal updates, statistical analysis, or general impressions based on random encounters. Promotions, bonuses, raises, cubicles with windows, private offices, and the like all then become subject to seemingly subjective criteria devoid of meaningful work content.
Into this breach steps a class of people I like to call professional deadbeats. I’ve purposely made this class comically extreme enough to hopefully avoid offense. I may suggest a generous bout of self-reflection if you find yourself becoming offended at my statements, however. I call this class of people professional deadbeats since it typifies their attitude toward their working life. The classic deadbeat is some one who makes constant efforts at minimizing the amount of work they must perform to maintain their employment. These are the people who simply punch the clock every day and take longer and longer lunch breaks or review soccer scores or stock prices rather than work. The professional deadbeat is some one who not only constantly seeks to perform the minimum amount of work, they seek to advance their careers while doing so. I’ve never really done an in depth study of this mindset, even though its somewhat fascinating due to the paradoxes they represent. The root causes are more than likely as manifold as the people themselves, but they exist everywhere. These are the “researchers” who expect a mention on papers for performing a few hours lab work or answering a few interview questions. They are the people clamoring for mention on the film credits (and SAG membership) after one day of shooting and a single line. They’re the people with whom you unconsciously find yourself inserting double quotes as they talk about things like “group effort” and “all pulling together” on a project. In short these people spend hours and hours of effort maneuvering, complaining, tattling, and plagiarizing all in an effort to avoid a few hours of actual productive work.
So what do these people have to do with large corporations? Remember what I said about subjective reporting and a reliance on them by upper management to review performance and output? Corporations with several bureaucratic layers embedded in their DNA provide fertile breeding grounds for the professional deadbeat to thrive, provided they don’t over reach their deadbeat abilities. Since actual work and review of the work are naturally being edited and filtered, the professional deadbeat can insert themselves into whichever process they select simply by inserting themselves into the reports. They can also game the system by editing their own reports to show the most positive light possible. But these are secondary mediums for the professional deadbeat; their real medium lies in the completely subjective and random impression of employees and work. True practitioners of the art of being a professional deadbeat will not selectively edit their own work, but will instead insert themselves into the process for reviewing other’s reports. They do this by constant physical presence and offers of assistance to those they deem have either a key position in the hierarchy or some other realm of authority. The true professional deadbeat is the one always sitting in the boss’s office when you drop in with a question. They’re the ones stopping by to make sure the director has taken time out for lunch. They go out of their way to make sure they can insert a strategic opinion or subjective analysis of other’s work in a manner that leaves both a good impression of themselves and no physical record of the conversation that might be later used against them. In a work where disconnect between those performing work and those directing work is embedded, this sort of reliance on personal relationships and influence is usually allowed to fester. In other words, bureaucracy does not cause political gamesmanship as is usually asserted. Rather the stratification of actual communication provides an environment where existing tendencies toward political maneuvering over actual production are allowed to exist longer than in other structures.
So to wrap up, this is the environment into which you will be thrust if you join a large corporation. You will be multiple layers removed from the actual decision makers directing the strategic vision and direction of the company and your products or services. No matter what the propaganda, you will have little say in the direction of your work and will instead be judged on how well you creatively implement directives from others. You will be interact with and probably eventually report to some one who has made a career out of expending heroic political efforts in an attempt to not expend heroic work efforts. All this will lead you to more than once feel like nothing more than a cog in a machine. You will look longingly at your peers working at seemingly exciting small startup companies where they get to work shoulder to shoulder with the CEO and direct entire feature sets. Of course you’ll completely ignore the six months they spend looking for a new company when their exciting startup either fails or is purchased by a company like your’s and their job becomes a victim of consolidation and specialization. You’ll also ignore the fact they spend 80+ hours a week in the office and have no health insurance or vacation time off.
You’ll also ignore one salient fact of life in a bureaucracy most people ignore. Bureaucracies only appear to be homogeneous. The same tendency toward multiple interpretations of directives that can stifle communication and result in an apparent sea of meaningless and useless processes can also spawn creative and unique working environments. Since differing levels of bureaucrats are expected to interpret and implement directives for themselves, they often end up at very different places. This is where doing your homework before applying becomes vitally important. You will never completely divest yourself from political gamesmanship or overweening bureaucracy, but you can find departments and teams in alignment with your personality and work habits. The larger the corporation, the more likely a match can be found within the safe circus tent of your company.
The trick to this is finding it and that’s what my next blog in this series is about.
As a quick summary for those not following my blog religiously (and really, shame on you if you’re not), I’m writing this series of postings as a public service and out of personal benefit. Okay, mostly personal benefit. I’m getting a little tired of “connecting” to people on LinkedIn who only ask me the same sorts of questions about how to find a job. They look at my profile and see an apparent line of unbroken jobs and clients stretching off for more than a decade. ”Curtis,” they ask me in my mind where the magic happens, “I see you’ve worked for some really well known and large companies. I too would like to work for a megalithic multi-national corporation some day. How did you get a job at a place like that?”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s not as hard as it appears either,” I would reply still in my head where I’m dressed in flowing robes that don’t at all make me look tubby. Sagely I would then raise my hand and pronounce, “But first you must ask yourself if this is what you truly want; for in all choices there are consequences as well as opportunities.” End scene.
Actually that is very good advice and its a question you need to ask yourself before embarking on this adventure. Large corporations can offer some of the most rewarding and seemingly stable work environments around. Their sheer size, deep pockets, and branding make them a magnet for intelligent and creative people from around the world. In one or two cases, their branding has been so successful as to become a verb. Now that’s some serious fame right there. Another benefit is large corporations always have multiple product lines going concurrently, and usually in wildly divergent industries. This is a good thing because with very few exceptions, internal candidates ALWAYS get preference over external candidates if a position opens up. So five years from now when you want to make a lateral move into mobile devices from cloud computing, chances are good you can just move departments if you’re employed at a large corporation. The same is true for international companies. If you decide you want to move to Belgium or Dubai or China for a few years, chances are very good your international company’s Belgian division may just happen to need some one with your skills and relations with people at the home office to boot. Finally large corporations can often offer incentive and benefit packages small companies can only dream of offering one day. Free meals, subsidized or free child care, shuttle buses with WiFi to avoid commuting, “Cadillac” health care plans, and phenomenal paid time off are just some of the benefits offered by a large company to attract and retain talented people.
But lets be realistic, the most common reason some one seeks out employment in a massive corporation is a feeling of job security. Microsoft has been a profitable and growing company since the 70′s. Apple’s been around even longer. Google appears to be poised to soon own all of us, or at least all of our personal information. IBM, AT&T, Sogeti, ING, GE, RIM and the rest of the “usual suspects” have all been around for a while, continue to report profits that would have made a Caesar green with envy, and don’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. But don’t be fooled by the apparent solidity of the parent corporation. Corporations and conglomerates are like a deep pocket in a river. The surface appears clam and placid, but underneath the surface there can be anything from swirling eddies of rocky death to brackish pockets of algae where nothing lives.
You see corporations are not a single entity. They are amalgamations of different groups or divisions that by rights would normally be an entirely self-sufficient company all by themselves. Different corporations have differing levels of division between these entities with some companies in emerging markets retaining complete independence amongst their members, but the general practice of a corporation is to follow the Six Sigma practice of establishing best practices in an industry and then distributing these practices amongst the differing divisions or groups. So while the parent company may appear stable and firm, in reality most of them are subject to the same market innovation forces governing smaller endeavors. Jack Welch was famous/infamous for implementing a policy of getting rid of any division or group that wasn’t number one or two in its industry while at GE. This was good for GE since it forced the different divisions to take a good hard look at what they could succeed at doing as GE, but the different people who’ signed up for a job with GE would often suddenly find themselves a new employee of another company … or unemployed. And yet there was GE, still hiring and offering “stable” positions to new candidates.
A division or group being shut down or sold to a competitor is thankfully not a common occurrence for most companies. Far more likely is what’s called “departmental shuffles” or “reorganizations.” These internal bouts of chaos and activity are fairly common even if the justifications for each instance are rarely repeated. Groups are merged to “create synergy” or “increase operational efficiency.” Entire teams are moved from one building to another in order to “open the lines of communication.” Product lines judged unprofitable are terminated or allowed to simply die out. The management team itself may change, brining with it new strategic vision and strategies to which the rest of the division must align. It really doesn’t matter to the rank and file why the changes are occurring as a notice your contract is not being renewed or your job has been classified as redundant generates the same feelings of panic no matter the reason.
So what does this mean to you if you’re looking for stability and security? You won’t find it anywhere, at least not in a practical sense. I have more than a few friends and colleagues who have spent a decade or more at a single large corporation while I’ve apparently bounced from job to job. However when we compare actual work performed over the past decade, we usually match up as far as movement around to different groups, teams, and roles. We also usually have more than a few horror stories to swap about suddenly finding yourself out of work with no clear options. The difference is that while I usually hit the streets the next day, they usually were given a few weeks to contact corporate internal resources and hiring managers. Internal searches within large international corporations are more often than not successful provided you actually do have a good working relationship with your boss and co-workers. Sometimes an offer of a reference is meant to be an offer to ease you out of the company and make you some one else’s problem, but that’s another blog about dealing with being “laid off, “fired,” or “escorted out of the building by security.”
The other primary difference is I’ve been lucky enough to keep a central geographic location over the past decade while some of my colleagues have been forced to relocate if that’s where the work is now. If your group is relocated to Colorado Springs, you can choose to uproot your family and follow it or not. The same goes for that new internal position in Poland that looks like a great fit for everyone involved. The days of companies shipping talented people around in order to reuse them in different locations has not gone away by any means. The only thing that has changed are an employee’s options. In the past, the only IT jobs were with said large corporations that tended to move people around the country and world. These days if you’re lucky to live in an area of known as a hub for IT work, companies realize they could lose talented people if they try and tell them to pack their bags. So the likelihood of these requests has diminished somewhat, but it never went away. There is still the possibility the company wold risk losing your talented contributions if they thought the return was high enough. And we’re also assuming you are one of the top 10% – 20% of talent. If you’re not, then start picking up boxes on the way home from the office tonight.
So in conclusion, working for a large corporation has its definite benefits. However we need to be honest and admit job security and stability is not one of those benefits, at least on the personal level. You won’t necessarily have to worry about running out of money (although departmental and project budgets can run dry, but more on that in the next entry, “Bureaucracy is Your New Friend”) like a startup nor will you usually have to worry about the board of directors deciding to sell you off to a company based out of Topeka because they want to free up capital for a new investment or resurface the deck on their boat. Sorry, that one was a little specific I know. It still hurts a little in my soul.
So if you still think the trade-offs are going to be worth it, let’s keep reading. In my next entry I’ll talk about the 8,000,000 pound gorilla in the room … corporate governance, politics, process management, and bureaucracy.
This is the third and final planned entry in my series on integrating offshore teams into onsite projects. I took a few detours into other topics, because frankly this subject is starting to bore me just a little. Offshore (and it’s kissing cousin “nearshore”) development and testing are a fact of current business practices. There are simply too many perceived advantages to it for companies for it to go away anytime soon. The primary reason with which I happen to agree being that talent, passion, affinity, and creativity are not the sole domain of any one country, economic union, or locality. Any company which does not avail itself of the best people when attempting to solve their problems will soon find itself eclipsed by those that do. And in this increasingly wired, connected, and banded world that means the best people no longer reside exclusively in a single area. I could go on and make a compelling argument for this, but instead I’ll direct you to John Hagel III, and especially his book “The Power of Pull” co-authored with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Needless to say, these esteemed gentlemen make a very compelling case for offshore involvement in order to maximize the flow of ideas and concepts for knowledge workers.
“Well,” you may well ask yourself, “if we agree offshore involvement is a good thing then how can we integrate offshore resources into our teams?”
To which my simple reply would be in two parts. First I would assert you cannot integrate offshore teams completely into inhouse teams for the reasons (opinions, really) I’ve already listed in parts one and two of this series. Second I would ask why you would ever want to if you could not achieve total integration. To put it a different way, would you be satisfied with partial implementation of a product under development before shipping it off to your customers? Why demand less than that from your team?
So how do you both take advantage of talent and (relatively) inexpensive resources on a global scale without sacrificing team cohesion and efficiency? The answer lies in appropriately sizing and assigning the work to be performed. Your tasks and job assignments should reflect your business workflow, and not the other way around. To do this you need to develop and nurture offshore talent as independent teams with uniquely talented individuals. If your work is performed in small batches, develop an offshore team appropriate for small batch work and let them take on some of the load. If your work is performed in a traditional sequential manner (ie: waterfall or spiral models) then recruit and nurture a completely independent development team capable of delivering a product line with little to no supervision. If you find your task work usually falls into discrete “jobs” requiring specific skill sets and actions with some regularity, why not consider developing a specialized team and breaking out your work into something akin to a Kanban task flow model?
So to wrap this whole thing up and get on to discussions I find more interesting because the solutions are not as obvious, the answer to this “dilemma” is rather simple. Stop thinking of offshore resourcing as something external to your company you can onboard to a team and get better results like you would a rack server or a source control manager. Start thinking of offshore resources as intellectual assets capable of (and thereby responsible for) solving the same challenges and tasks you set before your onsites.
Okay, well that’s that and so we’re on to how to land a job at a large (think multinational) software company for the next time.
A person who shall remain nameless currently asked me to recount my experiences applying to a certain giant software company based out of Redmond for an article they’re writing. I’m fairly certain this article is going to be a sort of “what to expect when you’re interviewing” sort of deal since the publication is rather tightly bound to said Redmond based company. It occurs to me this is a good idea, but not very practical. First off its not very original since there are literally hundreds of sites, blogs, and videos already posted on this exact same subject. Do we really need another? Second it doesn’t really provide any useful information, by which I mean information a person could use to actually effect their future. Third it more than likely won’t address the decision making process which is actually more important than the interviews and such. Fourth … well you can probably see where I’m going with this rant so I won’t need to prattle on like a threadbare coated fellow on a milk crate.
So in the interest of posterity, here is a bulleted list of advice I have based on successful experience for successfully breaking into a large software company we’ll call “Yahgooglesoftapplebayzon … bee-emm” or something similar. I haven’t quite worked that one out yet.
I started to write out little summaries, and then realized I can’t. There’s just too much to chat about in the space even my blogs allow. Well either that or I’m just really chatty.
I’ll be following up on these as soon as I get the actual responses updated for the fine fellow from JP Amapalooglesoft.
Yeah, still working on it.
The perceived sudden appearance of the Diversity in Agile workgroup has apparently stirred up a few feelings and no small amount of controversy within the relatively small community of agile thought leaders and bloggers. Lanette Creamer has blogged about why she loves the project. Lisa Crispin has blogged about why she thinks such a group is productive, if not necessary. As a counter, Jon Bach has recently blogged in favor of a form of meritocracy were an ideal of “its the work, stupid” should define us as gender neutral. Finally Maura van der Linden argues while she appreciates the need for diversity, she doesn’t see any gender specific issues in agile and so wonders why a diversity group is necessary.
With all the controversy, I thought I might was well add my own voice to the chorus and give my unasked opinion.
I am a giant fan of diversity. I love it. Diversity is one of the reasons I fell into agile development years ago and have never managed to extract myself fully. You see I’m not a true tech geek. Sure I watched reruns of Star Trek and stood in line to watch Star Wars when it came out, but so did millions of other kids my age at the time. About the geekiest thing I did growing up was play first edition rules Dungeons & Dragons. But even that wasn’t so much geeky as escapist and an outlet for my story telling. You see, I’m a theater/literature/glee club geek. I went to college on a nearly full ride scholarship for my singing and acting talent. I used the scholarship to study modern English Literature. My first real exposure to a computer was when I inherited one from my mother and used it only as a word processor to write novels and short stories. Fast forward *cough* twenty years and I’m making my living in an industry usually requiring at least a four year bachelor of science degree in computer engineering before being considered as an entry level worker bee. It’s a somewhat admittedly homogeneous environment, but it allows me to bring my diverse experience to bear.
Both fortunately and unfortunately my background makes me diverse in the software industry. Its fortunate because most agile development is about identifying and delivering value to the customer defined as stories. I rock at stories. My background in theater and literature mean I can get inside a customer story and poke around like no one else can believe. I can almost hear myself shouting asking out to the director about the motivation for an exploratory test charter I’m building. It’s unfortunate because the simple fact I’m not a computer science major often makes me diverse, even though I’m just like the majority of people on the team in every other way.
The reason a lack of radical diversity is unfortunate has to do with what I believe to be the big “value add” for diversity in the workplace, and it has to do with semiotics. Semiotics is the study of communication through symbols which at first appears to only include spoke or written languages. But widen your perspective. If we look wider, you’ll notice that all communication both internal and external makes use of symbols to varying degrees of complexity. This relation is powerful enough it spawned a now controversial theory of linguistic relativity implying a causation link between language patterns and human reasoning. We don’t need to dig deeper into this subject, just accept thought patterns and experiences will alter perceptions and reasoning to varying degrees.
Diversity harnesses these differences as a source of innovation and radical problem solving. Let me explain. If we agree differences in experience will alter reasoning then we must allow problem solving (which is based on reasoning) will also be altered. My past experiences, culture, and language will subtly effect how I approach any problem I encounter. In business, you want as many different ideas as possible when solving a problem. It is often not enough that a problem is solved, it must be solved as rapidly and cheaply as possible. Staffing a team with similar problem solvers means the problems will be solved in the same manner each time. This team probably sounds familiar to people who’ve had to live through a Six Sigma or CMMI review, and its part of the problem agile methodologies arose to address. Putting everyone together on a single team tasked with solving the same problem simultaneously was an attempt (whether conscious or not) to introduce diversity of thought and experience and increase the effectiveness of all activities.
So a long introduction arriving at a short answer which is, I’m for the group and see no problem with it. I know from personal experience that any team improves with diversity with a seemingly disproportionate increase in effectiveness the greater that diversity. We need to promote diversity in agile because agile relies on diversity to be effective. We need diversity in skills, education, experience, problem solving, conflict resolution, and reasoning. If having a Google group seek out women to honor and hold up as role models for other women or girls just starting out, then more power to them. I’ve won awards before, and it felt great. The fact these women are willing to join the group and accept the award says loud and clear they’re okay with being a mentor, which (oddly enough) is something I hear is hard to find from women friends. I also don’t care if indeed I am not welcome. If its really that important to me, I’ll start my own club and make is exclusive.
But there’s really no need. Every Tuesday night I have “Glee” which only another theater/literature/glee club geek can truly appreciate. Well us and the 14% or so of the US population currently identified as homosexual. See? I even value diversity in that club.
Hello everyone and let me first apologize. I know I promised to finish out my series on the challenges of offshore team integration with a final post suggesting magical methods for actually doing it, but something has come up. It seems there is a lot of current debates “in the community” about the efficiency of templates, frameworks, and entities called best practices. I’ve attempted to make my informed opinions known on these subjects, but realized I may need to elaborate more fully than is possible in the context of a twitter exchange, mail thread, or peer review discussion topic. Since it seems to pertain to the topic of offshore development and integration, I thought I’d take a brief detour to address the issue before launching back into team integration. If you’re eagerly awaiting the third and final part of my trilogy I would beg your indulgence. Please treat this as a passage from the Silmarillion meant to inform and give context to your future reading of The Return of the King.
Yes, I’m that much of a dino-geek as to make a Tolkien reference without in any way shape or form mentioning Peter Jackson. I also started playing D&D using the first set of rules and turned my nose up at the more cavalier second edition. If this pops any bubbles in your head, I would suggest you humbly deal with it.
Moving on, then.
I won’t spend too much time on this discussion as I feel as though this is one of those very emotional subjects you either instinctively understand or you instinctively reject. The subject is the value and appropriateness of reusable artifacts within software testing and software quality analysis. Many times these artifacts are called “templates” or “frameworks” but I’ve also heard them called everything from “processes” to “deliverables.” They can take many forms but they all have one thing in common, they are designed to direct and guide work by the studious application of scientific management principles. To put this as succinctly as I think possible, reusable artifacts are an attempt to take advantage of the same economies of scale supposedly reaped when processes are consolidated and standardized. This is where the emotional responses start to kick in. Either you believe its possible to enjoy cost reductions in design through consolidation and standardization practices (ie: Six Sigma, TQM, etc) or you don’t.
Let me wrap this up by explaining why I arrived there when templates and frameworks were my starting point. In my view, templates and frameworks are guides on how to perform your work. If we were visual artists, templates or frameworks would be a paint by numbers set. An individual handed a detailed template appropriate to the task at hand could theoretically produce predictable results with variations either accepted or corrected in later editions of said template. In other words, some one with little skill should be able to product a reasonable picture of a crying clown on black velvet by following a paint by numbers set. The more detailed and intricate the set, the more “artistic” the final product and the more skill at filling in the shapes is required. Eventually the person using the sets will gain enough skill through repetition and familiarity to create very intricate and colorful crying clowns on black velvet, and they may even gain enough skill to create original artwork of their own. Contrast this with a traditional art background where the student is taught to draw rather than simply fill in some one else’s drawing. They’re taught color theory, light and shading, drapery, and a lifetime of different techniques and tools with which they can approach a new project. The tester/SQA resource taught in this manner will approach each project as possibly unique but will have a common tool set with which they will attempt to solve the unique challenges they feel are present. It will take longer for the tester schooled in this manner to produce their first realistic crying clown on black velvet, but they will more quickly be able to paint anything else you might need with little direction or maintenance.
In other words, if you believe what we do is a repetitive process with identifiable tasks which can be optimized and improved then you will see templates as a integral part of any process improvement efforts. If instead you believe (and this is my personal view as well) what we do is a creative process with assumptions and tools that can be improved, you will view templates as a poor ROI as a medium to long term investment.
But I could be wrong in my views. Please challenge them and change my mind.
