More Than Porn

I was watching an interview of Justin Timberlake the other night. Rove McManus was doing his usual "20 bucks in 20 seconds" routine, and JT was being flippant (manic might be closer, given his tour schedule) immediately after complaining about his flippancy having already gotten him into trouble over saying that he had to cancel a gig because he had a hangover. The question that started me thinking was probably something like "What do you use the internet for?" and the answer was "Porn."

If you're not in the industry, you go "OK". If you're in the industry, you go "There's more to it than porn - there has been for years!" and you could get either of these responses out before he looked into the camera and said "I'm kidding!"
But did he mean it?
I've been working with online development for a long time, and I've been to interviews where a company will describe its history as having survived on the back of porn, or having a porn-related aspect, and I've just taken this in my stride, accepting that the internet is just like that - porn is a big money driver.
How can I accept that? I don't use the internet for porn. I've never developed software that was porn related (and there isn't much, as it relies on general stuff like streaming video and online shopping). I don't know anyone who's done any porn. I've been involved in online gambling, dating, and advertising, and known people in lingerie, adult products, and religion, all with their own taint of moral dodginess (all justifiable, mind), but not porn.
It is, however, still the case that online porn is a big money spinner, and the cynical section of the population who know little about the web think that porn is a driver (and why they let their kiddies loose on the web thereafter, I don't know).
If you know any history of the internet, or have been around long enough, you will know that it was always an academic tool - a way to share scholarly work (thus ftp, wais, gopher, ...) and keep in contact (email, talk). All of this had to get commercialised to 'offer better services to the greater populace' - that is, a buck had to be made. This meant that the less desirables were allowed free reign on the pure sanctuary that the web was. Thus you had marketers, advertisers, online shopping, site membership with a fee, etc. That spells porn.
Initially, porn was being really clever about arranging characters on the screen artistically to make it look like a picture. There was a beautiful art associated with that, but it was the shape of porn.

In a way, I'm rather glad that my grandmother died before she realised what industry I was working in. She'd probably never seen a computer (or at least not noticed what one was) let alone used one. The 'public knowledge' of the web, from her perspective would be that it's a nasty, evil place where kiddie-diddlers swap filth or stalk the unwary (she used to watch 'The Bill'). These undesirables well be the same people who would happily use the post or else personal interaction to do likewise, and they may live next door, but bringing it to the internet means not only can they do it over greater distances, but they can do it in your home. Scary stuff.
It's the same with gambling - 'lose your house without leaving it' was the catch-cry of some fool who put an end to online gaming in this country. It's no different to walking down to your local club and putting your weekly wage through the machine - except that the web-based casino has limits, and you can be barred from it at the tap of a key. Evil, I tell you.
What about those nasty advertisers who flash credit card and mortgage deals across your eyes while you're trying to read the latest news about which celebrity has had a nip and tuck (and last week they told you she was pregnant)? I just re-read that after being distracted, and I couldn't work out whether I meant online, in a print magazine, or on TV. All three can have mixed messages in one sensory-input-full of content. Only radio escapes this one - they have to segment time into ads and non-ads (they just don't have to tell you which is which).
I think my point is that your access to questionably-useful content is being supported by questionably-useful advertising. If that story about the surgery scars wasn't there, you wouldn't be any the poorer for not knowing. You might have fewer trashy things to talk about after tennis or in the office tearoom, but you certainly wouldn't be a lesser person. I'm not sure if you benefit very often from hearing about the cheapest mortgage available - unless you intentionally seek to change your loans often, in which case you can be better informed by directly dealing with the various mortgage providers.
Suffice to say that the internet for the majority is something that does nothing - a perpetual self-gratification activity that may make you feel better in the short term, but does nothing useful.
It's ... kind of ... like ... porn.

All Blogged Up

I started another blog today. It feels somewhat strange to be thinking in abstracts, lessons learned, principles gained, here, and then thinking in concretes, things done, people involved, there. If the two worlds should collide, then will my personalities become integrated, or will I become more schizoid?
It's been a slow time, but so much has happened. The company is shrinking around me, with the loss of such luminaries as Polo, Bubble and MadDog; Gabriel is about to go; Bull, Veg, Nix, and Tutu gone. There are empty offices and desks all over the place, and FO hasn't finished yet. I am, of course, questioning my own purpose, my desire to continue with the charade that something might happen to save us all, regardless of religious overtones. I'm not sure that I have faith in FO any more. At one point, I thought of him as the great white hope who could save us from Bubble's inactivity and stupidity. He was dynamic, only a year ago. Now he's caught up in the morrass of politics that the board has become, mired deep in the administration of a cash-strapped organisation looking for its next meal whilst simultaneously eating soup from a sieve.
Doodles is runing rampant in the way that MadDog used to. Gabriel couldn't fill Polo's shoes, and now Tank looks absolutely tiny in them, even when Axis, Stripe, and Scruff are squeezing in there with him. This, of course, makes four chiefs and two indians (one being a squaw) - a ratio that is destined for failure in the not-too-distant.

And yet, there's so much going on in product-land. I'm churning out new ideas, putting them into practice, keeping up with Doodles' sales efforts, and making some people excited with what's possible. The reality hits when I hand something over to engineering and they take away the features and deliver something late and ugly. If no-one owns the problem, then no-one's looking for the solution, fundamentally.
Ownership is becoming critical for me, because I'm happy to own anything. Call me greedy. I own the kitchen roster. I own the photocopier. Lucky me. I believe I own the HR problem, because I'm the only one who can see it. I've got that martyr complex going strong again, and this is just another big lost cause. If I wasn't a saint, it would be too much for me.

Now, where's that abstract blog?

Tank Busted

As sporadic as my writing has become, after so diligently beginning this journal, I didn't think I'd return to the page so soon after my expose on the use of arrogance as a management tool, but here I am. Call it precognitive, or merely coincidental, but FO showed his mastery of the worst kind of arrogance within 24 hours of my last entry. I hope he's not reading this, because that could embarrassingly end a reasonably good working relationship.
To get back to the story - I'd missed the last bit of a meeting (yet again - why can't they plan ahead and tell me when these things will occur so that I can fix my diary before-hand?), and it still hadn't gone through all of the issues, so there was another meeting tentatively created for the morning, and I was free. Before this, however, FO dragged me into a little room to write all over the white board his thoughts, which coincided with mine, continually asking for back-up.
"Am I an idiot, or is this what we want engineering to do?"
If I have to choose only one of the two options ...
I demured my support.
The problem with using arrogance as a tool if it's based on self-belief is that occasionally you become befuddled with doubts, and need the support of those who believe in you. Failing that, there's telling me your troubles.

The meeting came. It didn't start well. I took my customary seat, with Arkel sitting to my left, instead of my right, with the hope that we'd have better luck finishing if he changed position. Tank started setting things up, discovered that he couldn't access the document he needed, and scurried out again to fix things up. Eventually, FO strolled in.
"Where's Gabriel?"
"He's in another meeting."
"F* that! I want him here."
Out he went to grab Gabriel. Sure, there was an undercurrent of engineering scheduling and status involved in the meeting, but unless he didn't trust Tank to convey the minutes to Gabriel, he wasn't an essential element. It even turned out that the other meeting had been canned for the same reasons that FO was going to pull its plug, and Gabriel had taken the opportunity to indulge in his dirty habit.
"I've got someone hunting him down when he comes back," FO said with glee.

Preamble. Catch-up. Gabriel arrives. We start discussing the list of tasks in Tank's document.
Every sentence had FO jumping up with "Why? Why do we have to do this to achieve what we want?"
"Well, because of ... "
"How come we have to deal with that?"
"That's just the state of the system as it is."
"Why is it going to take so long?"
"That's how long it will take to do the work - you need these people working on it, and they've got to control several other tasks as well ..."
"It shouldn't take that long!"

Some time ago, I gave up second-guessing engineering estimates. I can question their processes for coming up with the numbers, but they're supposed to be the experts in delivering, so they know what the numbers should look like. When I used to estimate, I used to be pretty accurate, but always conservative. Having done that myself, I won't question when someone gives me likewise conservative answers to a simple question. If it's a complex question, like "What's your best and worst estimate?", then I expect detail. I ahve a few simple rules. Nothing takes less than a day. Anything useful takes more than a week. Anything new and major takes months. It doesn't matter how 'big' it is, things just take time.

"It's only going to cost us that much time and resource because you f*ed up!" he ranted.
Silence.
I should have stepped in there, on principle; but at the time, I almost believed FO. There was something fishy in what was, or how it was, being expressed that I couldn't fathom. FO and Tank may have been talking at cross-purposes over what needed to be done, and it ended up that they were essentially in agreement, but personal attacks are not the way to solve differences.
This was getting us nowhere.

FO eventually calmed down, we found the trigger phrases that cause mutual comprehension - Tank had been calling a spade a shovel so that they didn't get confused, because we still needed spades, and FO and I were concerned that all we had to do was dig a hole, so we didn't need an excavator.
All went relatively swimmingly into agreement.

I went off to visit FO later. I walked into his office and closed the door behind me, which is something I just don't do.
"Uhoh," he said, turning from his computer.
"Are you intentionally trying to make anyone in particular quit?"
"What do you mean?"
"That personal attack on Tank."
"Oh! I've already talked to him and apologised for that."
"Did you talk to anyone else?"
"Huh?"
"What about what other people there were thinking?"
"Good point. I'll have a chat to them. Thanks for that. I appreciate the feedback."

He might appreciate it, but will he act on it? Only time will tell. Sure, he's under a lot of pressure, etc, taking on more responsibility, but he's over-doing it and missing the point of having that responsibility - he has to be responsible to the employees as well as the board.
Meanwhile, I'm interviewing potential receptionist/admin staff. That's a story for another day.

The Perfect Tool

I look at FO in meetings these days, and I start to shake my head. It has been the case for a while that he and I can have little altercations in meetings and smooth them over immediately afterwards, but a lot of those have come from built up frustration on my part when he goes off on a tangent, or a rave about something he knows very little about, and no-one else in the room says a word. They sit there and stare at them as if they don't dare. Now, I realise that Bubble is about to burst, and FO is a likely contender - at least in his eyes - but it's getting to the point of not needing meetings if all that's going to happen is that he spouts forth and people nod politely, but then go and do things their own way regardless.
That's a problem. Because he isn't the sharpest tool in the box, he doesn't realise how much information he lacks - he doesn't have the background and experience to ask questions, and assumes that everyone is waiting for his pearls of wisdom to drop, when in reality they're just waiting for him to shut up so that they can go away and get on with what they'd intended to do in the first place.
Then there's the other problem - more often than not, when he's ranting away, I agree with him, in principle, if not in implementation. That means that the voice of argument has turned into just the voice of agreement. Although I can help to clarify what the business needs from engineering, my being on FO's side means that I can be ignored, too.

All of this reminds me of that ever-useful management tool - arrogance. FO has gotten away with what he has - position, clout, etc - by being arrogant. Before he was arrogant, he was just another mindless executive creating little reports and presentations that proved that he was doing something. Now, he's pro-active. For someone to be pro-active, they either need to know what they're doing, or else believe strongly that they know what they're doing. I like to believe that I'm the former. I can be argued around. People in the latter class, like FO, can't be convinced that they're wrong, because they have an almost religious belief in themselves and that they're doing right for the company, and no-one else can hear the voice of God (the Chairman).
Don't get me wrong - a forceful personality, which borders on arrogance, is a great management tool. It is sometimes even essential in engineering, where the manager is not the smartest person in the room. In fact, it's often easier to play dumb under the circumstances and let everyone explain very carefully what they're doing. It gives them a little burst of self-confidence, and it gives you the full picture. If you're too arrogant, then you already know what everyone is doing, so you don't need to ask questions! Only a fool remains ignorant.

But that's where we are now: FO rampaging through the company, calling the faithful to follow, and me wondering why he's headed for the desert.
The disciples seem to be: Polo, whose recent accident has meant that he can't work a full day, so he's relying on others anyway; Gabriel, who, without Polo, folds under the smallest amount of pressure; and Tank, who I believe will be a Judas because each revelation startles him. The only one in my camp (apart from my loyal followers) is Axel, who has been dealing directly with FO for so long now that he takes anything said with a grain of salt. He's always been a reasonable chap.

But I was getting off track - from arrogance into religion, two areas never related ...

In thinking of my future, and what role or company I would like to move to next, I was thinking that I could use the arrogance tool myself a little better. It's one of many I like to wield. I'm not too bad at using it, when necessary - in fact, I've been called a master.
I think that's what was meant when someone once called me a bit of a tool.

Dryza with a Bone

Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I think about the people who've been proposed and trialled to fill that missing functionality hole that I identified a long time ago when MadDog just wasn't doing it for me. Now that Dryza is back on board, I thought that all of my desires had been fulfilled, but now FO is claiming that she's a temporary measure to act as an internal consultant and gather enough material to be able to present the company in a better light. This, of course, means that we'll lose that link to reality when her period of consultancy ends, and we're back to square one.
Anyway, FO's grand scheme was to have Dryza do a round of interviews with the folk within the organisation, expand to the Board, and then on to key customers and overseas representatives, and perhaps beyond that to potentials, gathering information about how we work, and then presenting that to each successive group, and finding how that relates ot what they're looking for in a development partner, or whatever relationship is most appropriate.
Dryza hadn't been desk-placed, because I've got Roddy sitting at that desk I used to reserve for the likes of Dryza, so she was stopping by irregularly, chatting to FO, Arkel, or myself, and then flitting away again, while she sorted out her marketing commitments elsewhere. Then, one day, FO suddenly looked excited about the prospect of her getting underway - she'd given him a proposal, and he was unhappy with it, but she could start work anyway. He asked if I'd like to be interviewed, and listed key personnel who would be - the exec, most of the VPs, and Axis, because of the work he does. No problem.
Early next morning, I got a meeting request, and I responded without much thought. No clash, no thought. I noted that Dryza had been in on the previous afternoon - the lipstick-marked coffee cup in the sink. I thought no more about it until FO came around and asked for a few minutes of my time.
"You know that interview this morning?"
"This morning? Bugger - I thought it was tomorrow!"
"Well, it's in - 10 minutes. I just want to give you some background, but I'm not allowed to show you this," and he waved the questionnaire about like a flag of truce. "I'm not exactly happy about what she's come up with, and I want your feedback on whether you think it will be worthwhile continuing with her services, or just cut our losses."
"... and lose the only one we've got with these skills."
"Yeah, well, better than waste money."
FO and I have some very different ideas. He thinks it's a waste of money to hire people, but it's nothing to offer rewards to those we have for working excessively, in the extreme, or hiring consultants and contractors short-term. As long as it doesn't affect the long-term costs. I believe that the right people make the business viable. Having too few people will kill us. Keeping the wrong people will kill us.

So, there is twa, I was about to be interviewed for my take on product and company direction and how it should be presented to the big wide world. I got a new glass of water.
The interview was a slow process, as it should be - you should never rush these things. And it did need some refining. Other people were supposed to be put on the rack for an hour. I got three. I'm not complaining, because I had to sort out a lot of misundersatdnings.
When FO gets talking, he goes off on his own little tangent. If you weren't with him at the start point, you've lost him. Dryza, coming in from the outside, had been overloaded with FO-concepts that were misrepresented, misinterpreted, and generally missed.
A good example is "I want you to draw a bubble-map of each product, breaking it down into components, so that we can see if there's value in what we have."
This is so overladen with assumptions, that I spent nearly half and hour deconstructing the question.
If the company is service-oriented, then product is next to irrelevant. What the hell is a bubble-map? Is it something that non-technical people draw when they have no formal training of how to represent a concept? How do you draw it? What are you allowed to put in it? Who is its target audience? What is its purpose? Componentise in what dimension? Who said it could be done at all? What is value? To whom?
I ended up not drawing anything myself, but allowed Dryza to draw two diagrams - one showing the service that we provide, and how that can be componentised into marketing advantages, and another breaking down the product, showing how that related to potential new services. I guess from a marketing point of view, a service is product.
To me, if you can see it, it's product, if you can't, it's service. Call me an engineer at heart.

The interviews went on. I saw Axis and Polo have their turn, and then I had to laugh - she'd hit Bubble. I've got to find out what she makes of him. I don't think she's spoken to him before. I could tell that she was concentrating really hard on what he was saying, which is different to me, when she was either trying to clarify a point, or else was busy writing things down.
When I first heard about this interview, I jokingly asked FO if he wanted me to be honest. It didn't really come up, because we spent three hours on product, so I had no opportunity to talk about management issues and company go-forward. Maybe I'll leave that for a chat over coffee.

Mustn't Grumble

So much for my holidays. It was a silent struggle to achieve them, and, once achieved, their taste was not as sweet as anticipated.
For the first time since I began working in this place, I decided to take off those precious days between Christmas and New Year's - those special three days that are the most peaceful known to man. Sure, the trains weren't working, and it would have been impossible to get into the office without facing the empty streets, but I usually work from home and get as much done in less time (with fewer distractions). I had decided this year (being now last year) to bite the bullet and stay at home and not work. I told my ladies to stay away and not talk to me until the new year, or words to that effect.
Beach rang me just before Christmas.
"Are you working through the break?"
"Maybe."
"Will you be in the office?"
"Most likely not."
"Will you be working from home?"
"Not if I can help it."
"So you'll be on holidays?"
"Unless someone wants something really desperately."
"So, I'll put you down as on leave."
"But if I come into the office, then I won't have been on leave, and I won't be able to get that time back."
"Can't I sort it out if that happens?"

Beach was going on holidays, and trying to organise the end-of-year pay before she went. I could sympathise. Just. I took holidays. I kept them.

However, some didn't. Doodles had brought us a Spanish market, which meant that I now had to find a way to ensure that our product actually worked. I put the call in to engineering to do some investigation, and Gabrial assured me that, even with WildMan and Bull away for that week, they would put in every effort to make my new lady's job a breeze when she started in the new year.

First thing Tuesday morning, having forgotten that WildMan hadn't been in, I went up and asked him how things were going, and got a blank stare. Bull, nearby, also shook his head sadly. Gabriel then admitted that no-one had really had any interest in doing the work, so ... it wasn't done. Fine. I got Roddy, my new Spanish Market Expert, working on something else to satisfy my curiousity, and fumed in silence.
Wednesday, and I collected the milk on my way into the office (being first in). It hadn't occurred to me that the kitchen had been a bit of a mess without Tutu around last week, but I don't notice things like milk unless there isn't any. On this occasion, there was no space left in the fridge for the fresh milk because of what could generally be described as very unfresh milk.
I removed 14litres, went off to put my coat on its hanger, and forgot about it until Stripe came in an hour later. When I thought about it, it was a good little demonstration of the state of things that no-one had noticed 14litres of curdling milk filling up the fridge. We had the stench of the sewer invading our offices for weeks with constant complaining, but no-one notices chunky green milk.
Several hours later, I returned to the kitchen with the express purpose of removing said curds. It was at this point that I discovered some kind soul had ordered the contents by date, and by solidity therein.
Ten minutes of nose-holding, hot-water-running, and sheer terror later, the collected works of several bovine gas-producers was wending its way through the system to add to the general post-new-year's detritus such a city produces.
I wonder if that counts as green waste?