The franchise operator distrusts the franchisees and asks us, the vendor, to build in restrictions and convoluted rules to protect the data (the precioussss) from the franchisees.
They hate the suppliers because the suppliers are gouging them but attempting to change suppliers is a fool’s errand and besides, the CEO enjoys the wining and dining and general fawning, and is never going to stump up money for a new supplier.
They hate us because we’ve promised to do things that are no longer, or were never, actually achievable and they suspect we knew it when we made the promises. In some cases they are even right, although if they’d all listened to me…
The Franchisee
The franchisees hate the franchiser because who wouldn’t hate people who so clearly distrust and patronise and belittle you, treating you like children. The franchisees make all of the revenue and then have to send chunks of it to this mob of shiny bums in central office who make it their business to make your life hard. They hate us because we enable the shiny bums. They’re most likely indifferent to the supplier, except for those moments when the supplier’s tool is a complete brain dead piece of garbage. Which is to say they loath the supplier at all times.
The Supplier
The supplier hates the franchiser because in coming to us for a third-party piece of kit to work with The Product, the franchiser has stepped out of the eco-system which is the first step to finding another supplier. They hate us because we might become that other supplier, which like all fears is mostly built upon a paranoid fantasy. They barely know the franchisees exist and if they think of them at all, it is with disdain for being unable to afford The Product themselves.
And us, the vendor
We, the vendor, hate the supplier because the supplier deliberately plays a dead-bat against everything, obscures what they can, gouges money where they can’t. We hate the franchisees because we blame them, absurdly, for the Gordian Knot of business rules and requirements that makes the whole project a fragile mess likely to fall over any day now. We hate the franchiser because they took so long to work out what they wanted and then expected it yesterday so we rushed and now we have a system that mostly hangs together but is scarcely monitored and maintained, and any day now we’re going to be exposed – by something going wrong – as the frauds we are.
Fear leads to hate. Ever was it thus in the Kingdom of Agency.
When it comes to blogging, I clearly have a problem with commitment. Part of the problem is I am all heat of the moment reaction; so much better suited to Twitter really. Says the man with fewer than 20,000 tweets even after nearly nine years on the service. My point is though, any time I have something to say, a snarky 140 characters is at my disposal now.
So at least let’s try something else. If nothing else, let’s make this blog the director’s commentary for my twitter and pinboard feeds. To borrow a phrase.
Imagine a beach. Turns out many people are weird in that when you ask them to imagine a beach, they actually have a mental image of a beach. Seeing it in their mind’s eye isn’t a figure of speech, they experience a visual component to their imaginings. Which is some sort of mutant power, because people with aphantasia don’t. I’m still not 100% sure I believe that people without aphantasia actually ‘see’ the beach. D assures me she does. D assures me when she dreams it is like being in a movie, that this is not, in fact, something that just happens in movies.
I thought everything in this movie was Hollywood bullshit. Turns out it was only the bit where people can control your mind? Please, tell me you jerks aren't really getting photo-realistic hallucinations when you sleep.
I don’t ‘see’ the beach. I think. If I close my eyes and imagine the beach, all I see is nothing. I’m mostly convinced that I’m still just not getting the metaphor, that I don’t have aphantasia, because I’m too boring to have something that interesting. I am running out of ideas though on how to make myself the weirdo with the super powers of visual imagination.
David Bowie and Alan Rickman dying mostly passed me by. I appreciated all of their works, but there was nothing personal for me. I was mostly expecting the same from Prince, and yet there I was on the train home that day, watching some videos of assorted performances and shedding tears. D and I saw him on his most recent tour, and it was the closest I’ve ever come to an ecstatic experience.
I won’t go on. Except, while I have a clear memory of George Harrison’s son being part of his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction, but no idea Prince had played. And played that at about 3:25.
How have I not been soaking in that for the past dozen years‽ I don’t care what Tom Petty thought - I can’t quite work out if he was non-plussed during Prince’s leaning back stunt or if he just has resting bitch face - I was totally with Dhani Harrison.
I can’t remember how this came up. I think it might be because I mentioned I had applied for a public service job. One of us probably made some flippant remark that that would require losing the t-shirt and jeans and wearing a suit.
Q: Would that be a deal breaker for you?
No, not exactly. I think, for a professional, t shirts and jeans very easily become taking the piss. I have stepped over that line, regularly, and have had to get a hold of myself. What I find objectionable, however, is the notion that you can measure a person’s professionalness as a direct correlation of the formality of their attire. There are plenty of fools out there wearing suits. I’m quite sure that no one would accuse Steve Jobs of being unserious because of his uniform of high quality jeans and turtleneck.
So suits are not a deal breaker, but an attitude that demands suits, or even just ties, would be. I find it difficult to imagine a culture that has that attitude and does not also have all the other staid, mid-twentieth-century ideas that the Suit is emblematic of.
I was at a meet up last night and a question was asked, who considers themselves a tech leader versus a people leader. It went about 1/3 the former and 2/3 the later. Nobody was asked who thought themselves neither, but a friend copped to thinking she is shit at both. I’m only just good enough at tech leadership to know how much I leave to desire, and not good enough at people leadership to have a good gauge on just how appallingly bad I am at it. Ok, that’s the introvert and the imposter fear speaking. I’m actually pretty good at tech leadership, probably, if I trusted myself a bit more. I have been known to build trust and respect with people and help them get through shadows of valleys of death. I do need to work on my inability to maintain good cheer in the face of fools, and my willingness to be confrontational when the need comes.
My friend also said she thinks she’s leveraged an ability to fake it when it comes to people and tech. In the midst of redundancies where I work, I am quietly confident I am safe. A designated survivor. Partly because circumstances but partly because, I like to tell myself, of faith and trust in me. It’s more than designated survivor though; when things get real, eyes often swivel my way. Far too often if you ask me. It’s sure as hell not because I am shit hot, although in a small pond I’m a good sized fish. It’s almost certainly because I care and I wear that on my sleeve. Well, really on my face and in my body language; it’s rarely a secret when something has got on the wrong side of my caring.
I put it to my friend that it’s not faking it that got her to her amazing job. It’s that she cares enough to fake it, otherwise known as trying to make it. There’s plenty that won’t, that’ll just let it all wash over them. Caring: it’s what drives you to do the best you can at you’re doing. It’s what gets you through the frictions. It’s what lies at the root of passion, it’s why you will allow yourself to suffer. And boy, how you will suffer. Your super-ego will use that care like a scourge if you’ve not yet yoked it the will of your sense of self.
It is a powerful tool though. More generally useful than mere knowledge, in the same way as imagination is 1. It’s what you’re looking for in interviews after separating the obviously unsuited. If let people see it in you, there’s a lot of omissions and sins they’re prepared to forget.
1.Knowledge transfer is technology humans have had since the savannah. There’s a thousand speakers out there promising to imbue their audience with care and motivation, but I’d bet claiming a strike rate of as little as 1% would be an over-sell.
UPDATE: And as if summoned by my words, a giant douche appears. One weekend can change everything…if by everything he means the bank balances of everyone involved.
No, that game you saw, AdVenture Capitalist, that’s not mine. Despite promises of finishing things…not me. I started it, obviously; twice even. But I sure didn’t finish it.
Assuming Jason sees this post, it may amuse him to know that while looking for that tweet, I had to scroll back through all the Ashes matches. le sigh!
Assorted rambling starting with music
Possibly you recall a “study” that came out in April suggesting that if you are 33 and up, you are statistically unlikely to encounter new music. You may even recall that in the game of telephone that is clickbait media, it was presented as something it was not. Which is to say, it was presented as a study. Anyway, I thought of that yesterday after I, a forty year old man, introduced the child to a new artist (Halsey[1]. I started thinking back over all the new music I’ve purchased this year.
There was a push at the beginning of the year to persuade people to only read books authored by women and writers of colour. I…did not do that. Sorry. But, turns out, I have almost done that with music. About 75% women at any rate. It was partly a conscious decision, partly because there hasn’t been much I heard from men that resonated. The Royal Blood album and a few Hudson Hawke tracks. A Saints track - the Saints track actually. It started in 2014, amplified by August 2014, and has carried on into this year. It might actually go all the way back to Steubenville. A switch flipped and I was repulsed by the world. With that, a realisation that I no longer wanted to be part of the problem by way of passivity.
So affirmative action, and all. Preference my money going to women and/or non-white people. Re-broadcast more women. Really think hard - do you really need the opinions of yet another white bro in his twenties.
If I ever get to recruit again I’ll follow some advice I received at a talk recently. Women read job ads and if they find a few points they don’t match, won’t apply; men find a few points they do meet and apply. So interview all the women, don’t even look at their resume. Hell, interview all the women anyway if you’re in tech. We’ll never get 51% women to men if we don’t.
“I’ve been over here a long time and I like watching the football - particularly how England go out in the big tournaments.”
Google and Facebook
The less of both of them in my life, the better. I am now down to a single Google service in my life, Gmail, and even that is mostly just a spam drop. Facebook hangs around solely so I can talk to the captain of the Australian Volley Ball team when I need to score tickets.
Apply at Google? No. Even if I were good enough, double no.
I particularly like Track 9 on Badlands, Control. Al Swearengen’s Vile Task monologue followed by this song is my pre-arrival-at-the-office psyche up soundtrack.
Several years ago, perhaps more years than I care to actually count, I worked at a marketing agency with a man. Several, really, but one in particular. Nice guy, was dating a dancer who was part of the crew of So You Think You Can Dance. He’d had some trouble earlier in his life and was picking up the pieces with what seemed like a job that was kind of beneath him. I could have learned a lot from him if he had cared enough to be a mentor or if I had been a little more engaged. He left after a year, more or less.
I ran into him again about six months ago in North Sydney, because eventually everyone working in North Sydney runs into each other on Miller Street or in the Greenwood. He told me I am a people person.
I had worked with another man - quelle surprise - at the same place. One day, after a couple of years, he vanished. Just never came back to work. The boss asked me if I had heard from him and at that point I hadn’t really even noticed he wasn’t there. Turned out he had been doing ice for the past couple months with another human, also working at that agency. I didn’t find this out until much later after he reconnected. I don’t fully know what actually transpired; maybe his wife found out, maybe he just checked himself. But he never came back to work at that job and so far as I know never officially resigned. I don’t recall if the leadership of the company ever managed to reach him. The man who called me a people person was hired to replace the man who just never came back.1
The human he was taking ice with? He was not an ok guy or a nice guy. He was, in fact, an arsehole. I don’t know what happened to him. Might have quit, might have got the sack.
The man who vanished was working on a product for this agency we both worked for. It was a big dream of the company’s leadership, this product. Or rather it was the big dream of some men that the company’s leadership met one day, agreed to do business with, fell out with, and unashamedly stole the big idea from. There were lawsuits. The company I work for now would be all over this product, and to some extent are, but in 2004-ish2 it was right on the ragged edge of doable with the kind of technology and resources at the fingertips of a small digital agency in North Sydney constantly on the precipice of no longer being a digital agency of any size anywhere. Which is why they were all for it. It was software as a service back that was merely a thing rather than a Thing. If they could have got it going it would have fueled the true big dream of all agencies, revenue-to-expenditure growth mapped by an exponential function.
They didn’t have the revenue to fund the development. It wasn’t really going anywhere because of the lack of investment but they had to have something to justify their rank theft. They had to beat the idea’s originators to market. So they applied pressure on my friend to perform a feat that was beyond a single person at that time. Cracks began to appear: he loathed the people directing the work; he was frustrated with his peers; ice. Then he bailed. I was a little hurt at the disappearance. With hindsight I completely understand, and if I dwell on it too long and am filled with empathy and a little shame3.
It was vastly unfair what happened to him. But that’s what employers do. Because they don’t care about you. What are you gonna do?
Escaping is a logical outcome of the pressure and one that you should choose. I have chosen it before and am awfully tempted to do so again. Not disappearing though; disappearing is an extreme expression and one that while I find emotionally soothing to ponder in the abstract, would find emotionally searing to ponder after the implementation.4 Leaving that kind of situation behind by gracefully exiting with notice is the act of a rational human. You have to ask yourself, just what are you getting out of the relationship. Yes, you’re getting paid. Just getting paid is fine when you’re a kid. When you grow up, you need more.
Your employer will never willing give up more. You have to take it. You have to treat them like you might a demon you have summoned up from hell. You have to bind it and then extract a bargain for which you must offer something in return for what you want. So make sure what you get is worth what you’re offering. Don’t over-commit in return for a pittance. Because your employers don’t care about you. No, not even in your hip little company where there’s only two layers, the boss and everyone else, and you’re going round to his place for dinner on Saturday night and even if she’s your mum. When the ROI from you dwindles and ceases you will be put onto the ice floe. Your boss is a servant of a legal construct designed to limit the liability of its directorial body while feeding from society. Banks are not the only vampire squid5 and your manager is Renfield.
Me, I’ve got some of those symptoms I mentioned earlier, except for the ice, mum. To a lesser degree. I’ll never win awards where I work because I suffer fools poorly. I’m not brimming over with respect for the management team. I can be very snippy with peers if I don’t make an effort to chill.
I’m where I am still because of the possibilities it offers: working at scale; riding the leading edge of new mediums; thought leadership on something big. Those possibility ebbs and flows in my perception day to day as I observe the flailing attempts of the inept cowards executing the company6. I think the best you can hope for is being proud that the thing being exchanged is valued by the victims, and even then, you really should value it as well.
I help provide companies send SMS notifications to you when your commercial exchange is about to get to the point of personal interactivity. Your taxi is almost there, you’ve got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. On the other hand, I also help attention leeches send you SMSs you didn’t want.7
Anyway, the guy who I ran into several months ago, he told me “You’re a people person.”
My neighbour across the street, who I’ve never actually met but was the recipient of a gen-u-wine knitted cap from D for her 2-months-premature daughter, she smiled and waved at me over the weekend while backing her car out of the driveway. I had to ask D what our neighbour’s name is, and you know what…..I have forgotten again. People Person of the Year right here.
And seriously, fuck that human who gave my friend the ice. Hope he’s miserable.
1.Turned out okay. Runs his own company now. Great guy.↩
I stopped at that point when I realised I probably could have gone on for days with ever diminishing returns. Like Modern Day Harry Potter except @girlziplocked found a seam of great, and I’m just being a snark.
I start projects semi-regularly. About ten percent of the way through things I have started, I start questioning their worth. And shortly after, I’ll stop working on them.
I started GEB and got about a quarter of the way through but then I had a week and a half of insomnia. My commute is when I read and instead I was too tired to take in what was on the page. By the time I got my sleep patterns back on track I had just let the book slip aside.
I lost sight of what I was trying to achieve with Adventure Capital and stopped to re-plan. The plan never really got done and then weeks had gone sliding past and I never picked up the work again.
Maat is my current project that is beginning to slip its ropes and drift off into the mists.
If I include 2012-3 I started and failed to finish
Reading House of Leaves.
Writing a messaging platform.
Writing a blogging tool.
Writing this blog, kind of.
Writing a novel.
I was really only working on the messaging platform in reaction to frustrations at work. Once I realised that I killed that endeavour in short order. The blogging tool I was writing because of the one or two frustrations I have with octopress but knew if I started I’d reach a good enough point and be left with dozens of frustrations. The novel I managed to write about 12,000 words using pomodoro, but lost momentum after a pause of a couple of days after re-reading them and never got it back.
There are some common threads in those recollections that, while obvious, are worth restating. Sometimes I re-evaluate my motives, realise they are bad, and stop. But generally I lose momentum because of a pause and never get it back.
Why?
It isn’t just that these activities are hard or time-consuming. They are all one or both of these things. Writing a novel is near the hardest thing I have ever attempted. It’s difficult to even just write a profoundly terrible novel let alone a good one. I almost wrote one fourteen years ago, in public no less for eighteen months. I bailed right before the ending, an ending I had had in mind from the beginning, because of a childish temper tantrum1. My tertiary degree was hard because I had no idea what I was doing or wanted; I completed that, took me seven years, the last three and half years part-time. I can be distracted, but each of those efforts suffered many distractions and periods of inattention, but I always recovered enough to keep momentum going, to keep picking up and carrying pebbles to the pile.
I started doing the exams for the Microsoft Certified Developer merit badge a few years ago. The books you are supposed to study are bricklike, and there was only a single copy to go between five of us doing the work. So I cheated2 I found copies of the questions and answers, and memorised them. I did two exams (of four) that way, both times only really starting a couple of days before the exam but spending every waking moment reading over those questions and answers. After passing two exams, it no longer mattered because the Microsoft Certification we were after had been won. I stopped caring as much, stopped working on it for a month and never went back.
If I have learned nothing of myself in the last five years, it is that I am ultra-competitive. Sometimes. I can drift in a comfortable malaise for days and weeks. Bored but unfocused. For whatever reason though, one moment something will hit a spark, my game face will go on, and I’ll smash down walls to get it done before you, better than you. I was trying to get the MSCD because it was an opportunity to compete with others. Then we got the MSDN licenses, everyone else stopped doing the exams as no need any longer to get an MSCD, and I lost that focus. There was no one left to compete against.
I don’t understand people who can just do things. Is it that they can just do the thing for the thing itself? For the doing? Are they competing against someone that’s just not visible to me, someone in their corona? Maybe they’re like Bruce Banner at the end of The Avengers movie – they’re always competitive. I can’t do that. I can use tools like Pomodoro to assist, or I work with or against someone. I can make gains that way, running ahead of the wind. I had someone working with me on that novel I almost completed, reading first drafts and making suggestions on changes. I had someone I was working with on another story effort that ended sooner than I wanted, but at least got finished. In my professional life, my best gains were made when I was competing with a team member, but the last person I felt competitive with has since moved on from the company and interstate.
But I don’t relaly want to talk about work
I attended a training course for leadership through my employer this year. Learned a lot, and if I internalise it well and regularly re-examine what I am doing, I should become a much better leader. One of the things I did learn is that I shouldn’t complete with other members of my team. My peers, absoultely; but not my team. So compete is the wrong term. It’s really about being proud of what you do and what the team does and wanting to show off and show it off. I haven’t built that culture in my team. Building that culture is how I intend to spend my social capital on using this training.
But I don’t really want to talk about the company I work for, at least not in the context of this blog. It’s boring and some people I work with, but not all, read this blog, I wouldn’t want a scenario where only some people know what’s going on in my head because they know where to look.
Know thyself
I could find people to work with. There was a woman who wanted to become writing partners back in 1999. I’ve not really stayed in communication although I follow on Twitter. I could write some pieces, then throw them away and write some better pieces and ask if she could help. I could do the same on Reddit. Probably on more than one subreddit. I could do the more traditional route that Pomodoro is just one flavour of, and stop being such a pissant when I fall off the wagon.
Planning out what I want to do is also important. The projects in which I am creating something - as opposed to consuming something - founder when I lose sight of what I am doing. I get lost in the weeds of small problems and spend too much time on them rather than taking incremental steps along a path to a goal. All of the doubts I experience, whether in the project or in myself, are instigated by this.
The Meta-Project
Life is no good unless you’re leaving something behind. Something other than a carbon footprint and a pile of trash. That’s all I ask, that I leave a dent in the universe. Doesn’t have to be big, just so that this time next year I can look back and point at something and say “I did that.”
I won’t set public goals. I don’t do New Years Resolutions anyway, because I am too much of a unromantic to believe in artificial renewals like that. I don’t even know if they offer and sort of psychological aid. I’ve read that that doing so can help and I have read that it can harm. By setting the goal I will feel that I have taken a first step, rather than a zeroth step, and then relax. However, I do have the meta-plan worked ot for 2015, the goals and projects that require their own planning.
You’ll know if it works when I say “Look at this.”
Updates
03 February, 2015
I continue to want to be Anil Dash, amongst others, when I grow up
1.I’ve gone back once or twice over the years and tried to write that ending, once working with the stupid cod-ending I let drift onto the shore back then, and once ignoring the rotting jelly fish corpse I’d left behind.
↩
2.I have no shame here because the MSCD program is worthless in the face of a) Stack Overflow and b) the wider community of open source libraries. However it would have scored us free MSDN licenses.↩
