Category Archives: Personal

Tearing It All Down

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In October of 1871, a fire swept over Chicago and killed hundreds and destroyed about 3.3 square miles. To give you an idea of the impact of how much of the city this affected, here is a map of the area affected.

Great_Chicago_Fire_map

It cost an estimated $3billion (in today’s dollars) to rebuild the city. We see disasters, either natural otherwise caused by humans, that can completely tear down systems, leaving people to rebuild them. Just look at cities such as Berlin and Warsaw that were rebuilt after large destructive forces tore them apart. One of the defining characteristics that I’ve noticed that separates a city like Chicago from a city like NYC (I’ve lived in both by the way) is that Chicago is cleaner, generally more efficiently mapped out, and more habitably than NYC. I believe this largely has to do with the fact that Chicago had the opportunity to be completely torn down and rebuilt because of the Great Fire.

I suspect, like all big cities, Chicago had a lot of problems previous to the great fire that lead to non-advancement of the city. Like most cases this is usually due to bureaucracy, politics, and corruption. But, it’s amazing the energy people will put into something when they’ve suffered a great loss.

Why am I talking about the Great Chicago Fire on a tech blog? It represents everything that is happening in today’s tech world. We are seeing a massive trend in creative destruction as being the norm to creating new business models, tearing down old ones, and generally as an advancement of our culture.

In 1998, an informal group called Mozilla set out to rebuild Netscape Navigator’s source code from scratch. Some people would argue that rewriting source code from scratch is the worst decision you can make, but judging by the success of Mozilla and the death Netscape, I think we can all agree that this has bee a good thing for us consumers.

I look back at my former employers and I see instances where destroying the company might actually be a good thing for the advancement of it’s mission, it’s employees, and ultimately it’s customers. But, as cognitively biased as we are, we are incapable of destroying our own selves, or doing nothing at all. Which often is the case in decision making, whereby doing nothing may actually more productive than trying to do too much. Our brains are wired to think that we always must do something, rather than nothing, and that creating a loss can never create a gain.

So looking at today’s system, both human and technical, we see the everlasting cycle with the following behaviors:

  1. New system gets built, people rejoice!
  2. Someone breaks system, so system adapts and get’s updated
  3. System get’s too clunky because it tries to do too much, losing the interest of its members
  4. People leave system and create new one

There are some exceptions to this, such as 37Signals. They deliberately let customers grow out of their system.

We’d rather our customers grow out of our products eventually than never be able to grow into them in the first place.

As I’ve decided recently with my life, I’ve tore all of what I had established down and am rebuilding. But it doesn’t mean I forgot the important lessons I’ve learned in building the professional I sought out to do 7 years ago.

No, Tweets Aren’t Your Own

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It’s fairly common practice to put a disclaimer in your personal profile on Twitter, Facebook, personal blog, etc. explaining that all of your opinions “are your own”. This is basically another way of saying “I wanted to publicly state that these opinons don’t reflect on my employer, and therefore I cannot and should be penalized at work for having these opinions”. I was a victim of falling under this assumption as well. After awhile I began to think about the ramifications of our public opinions on our professional lives.

Let’s set up an example to illustrate my point.

Example – Jim is in the marketing department of a large ad agency. He’s never been accused of badgering other employees for their ignorance in the office, but generally he gets frustrated from time to time because they don’t get work done on time for him. Most of his co-workers don’t know this because Jim is generally pretty good about not showing his frustration. After a bad playoff loss he bad mouths a member of his favorite professional basketball team’s lead player on twitter telling him “You’re the worst shooting guard in the league. I hope you die”.

Let’s take some perspective on this. Let’s say this person had an excellent resume. Would you hire this person? If he was your employee, would you fire this person?

When I’m hiring someone, a big factor in analyzing someone’s character traits is how they handle situations where problems occur. In this case, our friend ‘Jim’ has displayed two sets of characteristics both inside and outside of work. So, the question I would have in the back of my mind for Jim is – if the pressure is on, is Jim going to blow up like he did with the professional basketball player?

Let’s take this a step further to the real root of the problem. Many employees of large (and small) businesses, who disagree with their employers actions, tend to use the public domain as a soapbox for venting their frustrations of their employers decisions, whether deliberately or subtly. This is largely due to the fact that there is no medium or forum for said employees to express their frustrations within their work space.

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Contradictory to my sensationalized headline, tweets are in fact “your own”, but only in the sense that you are the one that created them. Hence why I put large quotations around “your own”. Once you have unleashed an opinion into the public domain, it becomes property of the public domain. This is powerful. Many people (including myself) have used the public domain as a means to bolster your status positively, but conversely it also means there can be equally negative consequence. Putting a disclaimer up doesn’t negate this.

What this is ultimately doing is forcing businesses to be much more transparent with their employees with strategies like the use of open-door policies and internal social networks. In other words, don’t piss of your employers, and don’t piss off your customers, and everyone will be happy.

Marketing Works and I Feel Sad

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I, like most technologists, believe in the ideal that those with the most merit should benefit the most. Also, probably like most meritocratic believers, it means that merit and merit alone will get you ahead. Sadly, I’ve found this largely to be untrue.

I recently wrote an article on my blog here that garnered a lot of attention. It was called “Increasing Productivity is a Load of Bullshit” This article had the following characteristics:

  • Poorly written/edited (there were grammar errors)
  • Very hyperbolic
  • Elicited a variety of emotional responses (“ya I definitely agree!” and “You’re an idiot”)
  • Reached the frontpage of Hacker News
  • Resulted in roughly 6,000 pageviews (which far surpassed any article I’ve written)
  • Had evidence to back up some of the theory (but not enough)
  • It was probably the shortest time I’ve spent writing an article.

I felt very weird after writing it. I don’t regret writing it, nor do I dispel the themes in it. But, I learned something very valuable about today’s information-packed world – marketing is as important, if not more important today than it ever has been. Dually, the most effective marketing techniques are those that exploit our brain’s system 1, or automatic system. The problem is I don’t see the merit in this, but it works, and it makes me sad.

To take this a step further, I believe this largely has to do with heuristics and our mind’s natural biases towards processing information. We do so many things that don’t follow logic and I believe this largely is due to our brain wanting to use it’s system 1 as much as possible. The theory, as stated in Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is:

Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

This theory can be taken even further to say that system 1 uses a lot of less energy and therefore the brain tries to be efficient as possible with it’s energy consumption. Ultimately, I think this whole concept makes me feel sad because it feels like exploitation and therefore triggers a negative response for me. But, hey, it works, right?

If you’re interested in this topic, here a few good resources:

 

Increasing Productivity is a Load of Bullshit

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Today’s technology sale pitches are littered with the ability to “increase productivity”. Ask any employee if the latest tool they’ve implemented is increasing their productivity and they’ll probably roll their eyes. The answer you will most likely get is “My boss just makes me work more hours”. Working more hours is the modern MBA’s answer to increasing productivity. Let’s squeeze as much output from the human as physically possible, and if that’s not enough, let’s make them work more!

Pardon my french, but this is bullshit. You can ask people to work more than 40 hours but at what cost? And this is not increasing productivity (remember – productivity is about efficiency) it’s simply letting the machine to run longer than normal. You now have a bigger problem – who’s gonna pay for the gas?

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that working more than 40 hours a week does more harm than good. So why do organizations continue to be successful by working more than 40 hours? The reality is, we are simply not doing 40 full hours of work in a given week. So, maybe we’re at work for 80 hours, but are we really doing 80 hours of true work?

Instead of increasing productivity, let’s look at the problem from another angle – what can we do to prevent productivity from decreasing. I would argue the following are areas are major areas of decreased productivity: (note, these are just a few examples, I would argue there are even way more)

  • Link Bait – Articles with catchy titles, but no relevance to the purpose of the article, severely detriment our ability
  • Politics – Enough said.
  • User Experience – Is your productivity app on par with the experience with that of Angry Birds or Facebook? In other words, can the person complete their task in a well defined, straight forward and easy way?
  • Internet Connectivity – It’s 2012 and we still have issues with Wireless, 3G, and even wired connection. I wonder how much time is lost simply because you can’t get connected to the internet. When are we (as an individual) going to be “99.9% uptime” connected?
Our attention spans are limited but getting higher in value. As Seth Godin rightfully points out:
Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they’re not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.

So what’s the answer to the productivity problem? Your technology needs to value your end-users attention. Create an experience that is far better than anything else out there and you’ll get their attention…and their productivity. They’ll work less, produce more, and everyone will be happier.

Back in the Saddle

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Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve blogged and I figured I’d write this just to let all my fans (do I have fans?) know that I’m not dead….actually I’ve been training for a Ironman and it’s consuming all of my time. I got a few articles in the chamber ready to go. Hopefully will produce some stuff over the next two weeks.