Inter-sections.net :

Announcing Woobius and Scribbles

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:00 +0000

I’m working on the part 6 of the hyperbrain series, but it’s not finished yet. It takes time, of course, and in the meantime I’m working on many things, including my business, and the future blog that will replace inter-sections.

Perhaps it’s worth finally mentioning that business here! Fancy that, I hadn’t actually done it before. Incredible.

So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce: Woobius, and its associated blog, on which I write regularly: Woobius Scribbles.

What is Woobius?

Woobius is a collaboration tool tailored for the needs of the construction industry. In the process of designing and building any sort of building, architects, consultants, engineers, and a whole lot more people have to exchange large numbers of files that need to be kept track of. If you would like more detail on this, do have a look at this article which I wrote on Woobius Scribbles: Document Control - how hard can it be?

This can become a huge problem, because there are a lot of those files and they have to be shared between dozens of companies. Most common file sharing solutions (like usendit, box.net, or even Dropbox) are not well suited to this, because they completely fail on the “collaboration between companies” part.

There are some industry-specific solutions, but without exception they’re slow, bloated monsters that try to control every aspect of the project, and end up pretty much requiring full-time staff just to deal with them. They’re very hard and slow to use, so people end up bypassing them at every corner. And they’re extremely expensive, too.

This is where Woobius comes in. It’s designed to be intuitive and easy to use, automates most common tasks to save time, and is more than an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition.

So, this is what I’ve spent most of the last year working on. The good news, since I did follow most of my own tips, and since I work with a fantastic team (I know it’s cheesy to say it, but it’s true), is that it’s going quite well. We have a good many users within the construction industry who are using it every day for live construction projects. Growth has been steady and viral, despite the economic conditions in the construction industry, from 50 or so users 10 months ago, when we launched the first kernel of functionality, to over 2000 today, almost all of it through invitations by our users themselves.

That’s all very, very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to the next year, as we grow to profitability and help many more architects with their projects.

The only other thing I’d add about Woobius is that, like every start-up, it could use more publicity. If you know some people who work in the construction industry, let them know — not because I ask you to, but because it is genuinely useful (our users tell us that!).

And if Woobius sounds useful to you and you don’t work in the construction industry, don’t let that stop you from giving it a try. It’s a really handy tool, and although it was designed with specific users in mind, I would be the first one to be surprised if it wasn’t useful to many others too.

What is Woobius Scribbles?

Scribbles is simple the company blog for Woobius. I write there regularly, about business and technology related topics, so if you like what I’ve written here in the past, I encourage you to check it out and, maybe, subscribe. It’s got a strong architecture slant, so not everything will be of interest to non-architects, but since I myself am not an architect, and I like to write things that I find interesting, there will be many posts there which will not be related to architecture.

That’s it for this meta-announcement. There will be another one like it after the hyperbrain series is complete, about the future of this blog. Thanks for reading!

Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 5. The butterfly approach

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:51:00 +0000

This is part 5 of my series on the hyperbrain. If you’re just joining us, please have a look at parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 before continuing. If you’re wondering why there was such a gap between parts 1-4 and part 5, try this.

When it comes to immediate distraction, you should do your best to block it by shutting down unnecessary browsers and chat, letting people know that you’re busy, and making an effort to keep focused on the current task. This standard advice applies to everyone, hyperbrain or not. At the same time, you should keep tasks closed so that when you inevitably do get distracted, it won’t cause too much damage.

However, there is a different kind of distraction that works on a much slower cycle. Sometimes it can be mistaken for a general low of energy (and sometimes that’s what it is), but very often, if you’re a hyperbrain, you’ll get progressively bored of a previously enthusing piece of work and basically not feel like working on it anymore for a while.

Confusingly, immediate distractibility will hit hardest at that time too - you’re bored of your main task, so almost anything (even perhaps examining some strange defect on the wall to your right), seems more interesting than what you’re supposed to be doing. Not only that, but because you’re supposed to do that big task and you don’t find the energy to do it, you end up not doing any other useful tasks either (after all, those other tasks are lower priority).

I have a technique to deal with that too, though it’s not so easy to apply consistently. Yet even when applied only part of the time, it is still useful, in my experience.

#4 The butterfly approach

Remember, back in the first technique I said that you should accept and embrace your limitations, while figuring out how to work with them in the best way.

So, you feel like you don’t want to work on your most important task. The natural response, what society tells us is right, is: tough luck. Just take it like a man and soldier on. And if you can’t, you’re a weak-willed loser. That’s the advice that we get throughout our childhood, and somehow it perseveres through adulthood (“when the going gets tough, the tough get going”).

Unfortunately, this approach stinks for hyperbrains. When you’re excited and “into” a task, everything is easy and you can chop through a forest in a few hours. But when you’re not into the work, when you don’t care for it, it will take a disproportionate amount of effort to get even the smallest thing done. What’s more, because you don’t care for it, you won’t do it well - and it will show, to others, but, more importantly, to you. This creates a negative feedback cycle where you feel even less like doing that thing (because you don’t like to do things badly). Feeling less enthusiastic leads to further strenuous efforts to get the smallest thing done, which leads to more fudged work, which leads you to feel even more dispirited, etc.

You have to break that cycle.

Here’s my advice: when you don’t feel like doing something, don’t do it. Do something else. Like a butterfly, when a task has lost its nectar, flit over to another. Keep that up, happily flying away from (closed!) boring tasks onto other ones that you find exciting.

It’s a very rational choice. Option 1 is to spend 10 units of effort to get 1 unit of result in task A (that you’re supposed to do). Option 2 is to switch to task B (the one that’s looking so much more appealing right now), spend 1 unit of effort and get 10 units of result in task B. If you want to maximise results, you have to take option 2.

Of course, if task A is what you committed to do for someone else, this will have negative consequences. And the solution to that is: avoid making hard commitments that will hurt you in that way. We’ll get back to that a little later.

The important practices are that you should be working on several loose “clouds” of tasks (some related, some not) rather than focusing on a single direction, and that you should allow yourself to switch between those things without guilt.

Loose clouds

Notice I said loose clouds, not loose cloud. I used the plural because this won’t work if all your tasks are still sitting under the same umbrella (e.g. “stuff I’m doing to get the next release out”). There need to be vastly different sets of tasks in your available “task-space” - things ranging from writing a blog post to coding some new functionality, from doing a bit of business administration to planning your holidays. If you find yourself dispirited by coding, switching to a different coding task is unlikely to improve your mode.

Those tasks should all be “productive”, in the sense that you should feel like you’ve accomplished something when you get them done. This is important, because this is what will break the negative feedback cycle. If you don’t feel like coding something and instead you spend a few hours playing World of Warcraft, you won’t feel any better about yourself afterwards - you’ll feel worse. This will vary for you, but for me, “worthless” tasks include things like shopping (unless I’m buying something very specific), cooking lunch… interestingly, cleaning my office or the flat doesn’t feel like a worthless task - but rearranging it would be. You’ll have to figure out for yourself which task are productive. Generally, if it falls under the category of “time-fillers” or “busy-work”, it’s not a productive task.

You may not get back to task A for some time. Don’t feel bad about it. So long as you’re doing worthwhile things, that are accumulating value for you and make you feel productive, you will be working to negate the cycle of low energy. At some point, maybe the same day, or maybe a few days later, you’ll feel like working on task A again. Then, you’ll be able to chop through it at your best efficiency, and you’ll probably catch up with where you would have been if you had stuck with task A. But you’ll have the added bonus of having also done tasks B, C, D, E and F in the meantime, instead of agonising over a single task for days.

This, if you play it right, will make you appear fearsomely productive, as if you were working 20 hours a day - because every hour that you do work will be at full efficiency.

Uncommit

To make this work, it’s important to not be too committed to doing tasks by a certain date. You need to influence your environment so that people don’t care when exactly you got something done, just that it was done.

Of course, not all tasks have this flexibility, so you’ll have to make allowances for things which have to happen at a certain time, but those tend to be a minority in careers that are good value accumulators.

For tasks which don’t require you to commit to a deadline, don’t. Be vague if you need to be. If you tend to deliver great stuff, most people will accept some element of vagueness.

Some of your coworkers will really dislike the vagueness and you’ll have to manage them appropriately. The ideal way to do this, in my experience, is to under-promise and over-deliver. If people won’t take “I think I’ll get it done in the next couple of weeks or so” as an answer, give them a clearly defined answer that leaves you plenty of leeway. “I can work on this next week on Thursday, for sure.” But then, try to deliver it this week on Friday instead. If you do this often enough, in my experience, people will stop pressing you for deadlines, because they’ll be happy enough that you seem to get everything done quickly enough for them to be able to rely on you.

Important caveat: put bread on the table

There is a subtle but necessary addendum to this technique: you must keep in mind which of those activities put bread on your table. It’s great to follow your interests and be super-productive every day, but it’s not so good if you end up starving. So when choosing tasks you should always bias yourself towards tasks which are fun and productive and also earn your salary.

This is actually the hardest part of this technique… because it’s easy to turn a bias into an overriding order - and then you fall back into the mode where you feel compelled to slog through the task that you “must” do at the expense of all the others. And yet, at the same time, you have to pay attention to your bread-winner, because otherwise you won’t earn money. I don’t have any specific tips for how to do this - this is something you have to play by ear, I’m afraid.

In conclusion

Beating the cyclical highs and lows is not easy, but you can really help yourself by following this advice:

Have many unrelated “clouds” of tasks that you can switch to at a moment’s notice
When you feel like your energy for a specific “cloud” is gone, switch to a different one
Don’t feel guilty about doing this
Avoid committing to hard deadlines where possible so that you have maximum flexibility to switch

I hope you find this useful. As always, your comments are welcome.

Destroying the World (of Warcraft)

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:20:00 +0000

I’ve always had a tendency to get addicted to computer games. Not all kinds of games (I never really got into driving games, for example), but mostly games where you accumulate points - strategy games, role playing games, etc. My first “big” addiction was MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons… a kind of text-based equivalent of the recent crop of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft). I broke it off the first time, with a super-human effort, when I visited Oxford University and decided that I wanted to go there - and that I would clearly not get there while I was playing MUDs 6 hours a day (outside of school time!). It took all my will-power, back then, to quit cold-turkey.

Later on, my next big addiction was Diablo 2. I spent insane amounts of time playing that game, levelling up a variety of characters to level 80 or thereabouts, playing through the game countless times to accumulate precious items, experience, skill points, etc. One summer, after finishing my degree, I went through a phase where I burned myself out of Diablo 2 - by playing it so much, from dusk till dawn, that even I grew tired of it. That was another way of breaking off the addiction… it was easier, but costlier in wasted time.

So, when World of Warcraft came out, I knew that it was very important that I avoid playing it, because it clearly was a game that I would get instantly addicted to. Blizzard have a bad habit of making excellent games that got better with each version, and clearly WoW was the pinnacle of that progression.

I failed

To be fair, I lasted a good long time. It took until September 2008 before I finally gave in (on the excuse that I would only be playing with a friend, so that we would moderate each other’s gaming). The truth is, like an alcoholic having just one sip of beer, I was instantly addicted, even if I was more in control of that addiction than with any other game before.

I am not 16, or even 20, anymore. I am almost 29. Since the Diablo days, I have worked as a consultant in a large investment bank (not so trendy anymore these days, I know), managed teams, started two start-ups… I’ve achieved a few things that I’m proud of. One of the side-effects of those experiences has been a greatly improved degree of self-control. Ten years ago, WoW would have destroyed me, much like Diablo 2 did. I would have turned into one of those zombies with level 80 characters who spend every spare minute playing.

In comparison to how bad it would have been 10 years ago, I came out of this bout of addiction almost unscathed. The highest level I reached was a paltry 49. I flitted in and out of WoW, occasionally spending a few solid days on it (such as around the New Year). but mostly managing to keep it down to a few hours here or there. After all, I have responsibilities now - to my start-up, first and foremost, but more importantly to myself. I have no intention of devolving back to who I was 10 years ago. So, in all appearances, it was relatively harmless.

And yet…

And yet, although the addiction was not as visible as before, it was still there, eating away at less obvious things. Of course, I wasn’t going to take time away from my start-up to play WoW, but that time had to come from somewhere. So I played in those spare hours where I didn’t feel like writing code. Sometimes, those spilled over into other activities. Often, they sneakily turned “I don’t feel like writing code but I could be doing something productive, like writing a blog post” into “I don’t feel like writing code, so it’s time to play WoW”.

“Extra-curricular activities”, like running a blog, learning chinese, or reading some fiction, help make us more rounded, more interesting - not just to others, but also to ourselves. For six months now, WoW has been eating away at those activities. I feel more hollow than before I started playing it. The progression towards being a better me was reversed for those six months, in all sorts of subtle ways. I was aware of this all the way through, but did nothing to stop it.

It was terribly easy to convince myself that I was overreacting in this analysis, that WoW could not be so harmful, that it was just a game, that I was in control, that I had taken breaks from it through that period and so therefore that I could just do that again. Yet each break came to an end, and was topped off by another day-long session, another set of “let’s play a little bit every day” compromises. So I did avoid the issue. Once, I raised it to my cofounder… “do you think it’s affecting my work?” He didn’t think so (and he was right, it wasn’t my main work that was being affected). Phew. I could play some more without feeling bad about it.

But though it was not affecting my work, it was affecting all those other things that make me who I am.

Bang! you’re dead!

Yesterday, as I lay in bed, tossing and turning for the umpteenth time, pondering this problem, I asked myself, once again “Can you just stop playing?” And I felt that I could not. I could not live with the idea that I would not be able to continue the progression of all those characters that I’d grown to think of as extensions to myself. That I would not be able to find out the end of this story that was unfolding on the computer but also in my imagination. That I would never explore that world, find out all about it, get to the top of it.

To me, not playing anymore was an impossible proposition. I lay wide awake, struggling with this as I would if I was about to make the biggest decision in my life - and yet fully aware that World of Warcraft is just a game!

It may sound trivial to those who have not been addicted to computer games before, but believe me, it is not. I struggled with this decision harder than I ever did about any business decision. It took more willpower to do this than anything else in my life (except, perhaps, the last time I did this, over 10 years ago).

And so yesterday, like I did when I broke off my MUD addiction, I did the impossible. I got out of bed, logged in to World of Warcraft, deleted every character, and then cancelled my account. I went to bed with feeling of immense relief. I won’t have to think about this topic again (well, apart from writing this blog post). And yet the relief was mixed with another feeling - something akin to mourning. I will never continue those stories. I murdered a handful of virtual characters who were a part of me. They are gone forever.

This is a good thing. I knew there would be negative after-effects to that decision, but here I am writing my first blog post in six months when instead I might have spent half the day pretending I was a paladin. This is a good thing.

Let’s put the house in order

I am not writing this post to point the blame at anyone, least of all Blizzard, who have created a fantastic game (though I could argue whether it is really ethical to create games that edge closer and closer to Red Dwarf’s BTL game). I am writing this post to put my thoughts and this blog in order.

Hyperbrain, continued

First of all, I owe my readers a sincere apology for leaving the Hyperbrain series unfinished. It was not the right thing to do, and I will remedy this in the next week.

Secondly, I have, in those times when I wasn’t playing World of Warcraft, been thinking about the future of this blog, and decided that it was time to transition to a different format. Over the next few months, I will progressively start posting my new writings to some new sub-blogs (some of which are already semi-active), move the best posts from this blog to the new one, and eventually close down this blog. Inter-sections will stay up for some time, until I finish moving its more interesting posts to a new home.

Finally, I’d like to conclude by thanking all those who have emailed me and commented on this blog throughout this period to ask when the rest of the hyperbrain series was coming - you helped make it more obvious to me what impact my gaming addiction was having.

Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 4. The value accumulator

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:46:00 +0000

This is part 4 of my series on the hyperbrain. If you’re just joining us, please have a look at parts 1, 2, and 3, before continuing.

Some jobs are “process jobs”. They consist mostly of taking some sort of input (phone calls, support tickets, orders, sales leads), performing some work on them, and providing some form of output (a satisfied customer, a filled order, a new sale). These jobs exist at all levels and in all kinds of businesses - from a small business support technician to a large business sales director). A lot of people (in fact, most people) have jobs that fit this description, are happy with that work, and do it brilliantly.

If you’re a hyperbrain, however, this kind of job is your worst nightmare. Why? Because it is a job you will always screw up.

Imagine you’re a manager in charge of a process. What do you care most about when hiring people to put in the roles you’ve identified? Predictability. You don’t care if the person handling the support tickets is capable of churning through 200 tickets on a really good day. You want to be sure that, on any given day, they’ll handle the 20 or so tickets that come in on average. Unfortunately, the hyperbrain does not work like that. It can produce exceptional results, but it is lousy at being consistent.

This is a weakness that, once again, can be worked around. Read on for this technique.

#3 The value accumulator

As long as your worth depends on your consistency, you can never win in the long term. You might fool yourself and others into thinking that “this time, it will be different,” but it won’t. In order to win, you need to change those rules. The question is, what do you change them to and how?

First, the “what”. The best way I can come up with to describe what you should be aiming for is a “value accumulator”. You need to engineer your own job so that people focus on what you’ve accomplished rather than what you’re going to accomplish. You need to create a system that accumulates value and then rewards you based on accumulated value.

This can be done both in choosing a career or profession, and in deciding how to perform and evolve your work.

It’s worth noting that there’s another technique hiding in this discussion - how to smooth your output, within any environment - but I won’t be covering it in this article.

Careers that accumulate value

I believe that most smart and capable people benefit from doing work that accumulates value. For the hyperbrain, however, it’s essential, if you want a fulfilling, successful career.

Most human activities “accumulate value” in some respect, since experience is a form of value. Some careers, however, are better at it than others. Let’s look at some examples.

Let’s consider writing as a first example. You can be a writer in many ways: working directly for a newspaper, being a freelance writer, writing a blog, writing books… How do these compare?

While the first two (newspaper and commercial freelance) accumulate value in the shape of experience and contacts, they do little to turn the output of your previous work (your backlist, as Seth Godin calls it) into something you can keep deriving benefit from. Freelancing is sometimes anonymous, and writing a great article today will not keep returning you benefits for the months to come, unless you’re also the publisher. You’ll have to keep writing great articles over and over again.

On the other hand, writing a blog is a pretty good value accumulator. It takes time for the value of a blog to be realised, but, for example, I published my most popular post so far in November last year, and yet it keeps bringing several hundred visitors a day each day, and keeps my PageRank up.

A book is an even better value accumulator. Once written, it can be marketed and sold over and over again for many years, and you keep the credit for “having written a book about X” for your whole life. Of course, book writing is a difficult way to make money, but if you write just one brilliant book that captures people’s imagination, you can keep deriving value out of that even if you did little of value for years after writing that book.

As I touched on in this earlier article, a product business is a great value accumulator. The market doesn’t care how you built your product, through great spurts of inspiration or a long, consistent effort. It only cares about how great your product is. And a product is a natural value accumulator, since work that you’ve done on it remains there pretty much forever.

On the other hand, a services business might not be ideal for a hyperbrain, since clients naturally care about the work you’re doing for them now, rather than the work you did for other clients in the past. So if you’re running a service business, you might want to consider turning it into a product business instead.

Corporate jobs

In most corporate jobs, the high-level equation is not in your favour, since employers usually care more about your future output than your past achievements. However, even there, some jobs at least provide past achievements, whereas others are entirely process-focused.

Consider an IT support job, for instance. By default, it has no past achievements that you can point at. Your performance is mostly measured by the consistency with which you answer tickets. If you stop answering tickets for a week, you’ll take a very serious hit.

A development job, on the other hand, has natural “past achievements” in the form of features built, for example. A one-week lull in productivity won’t make anyone happy about you, but it won’t destroy you either, and if you can keep people focused on what you’ve done rather than what you were supposed to do, you can survive those lulls unscathed.

You should seek a job that naturally lends itself to accumulating past achievements that people care about, but even in the case where it doesn’t, you can still tweak the work in your favour, and slowly transform a process job into a project one. Read on to find out some ways to do that.

Accumulating value within a process job

Within a job, to make up for your inconsistency, you want to create value accumulators and then keep people’s attention firmly on those.

The best device for that is a “project”.

A project is a set of tasks that achieve a definite goal within a definite time. A project can be finished. This is important, because it means that once you’ve finished a project, it remains in your “achievement history” no matter what else you do (or don’t do) afterwards. If you wrote the competitor analysis report, you’ve done it, and no one can take the credit away from you. However, if you processed all the orders reliably for a couple of months and then go through a couple of weeks when you don’t process any, the credit for “processing orders well” will vanish immediately.

For a hyperbrain, it’s useful to structure every bit of work as a project. Even if you’re in a process-oriented environment, find projects to get involved in. If there aren’t any, create them.

You can create projects by looking for improvements that you could make to the process, and implement those improvements as projects. You can also create projects by packaging processes into chunks. If you can ensure that your work on a process has an end-point, it can be completed and put aside.

Find the projects, finish them, and then keep people’s eyes on the projects.

After you finish a project, keep other people aware of it. Blow your own trumpet, so to speak. Every once in a while, perform small additions to projects that you already completed, to give you an excuse to re-release them and keep them fresh in everyone’s mind. Those additions shouldn’t be planned, they should be things you do spontaneously.

As you accumulate more past projects and keep people aware of them, your credit will go up, since everyone will then be aware that you’ve done a lot of things, rather than seeing only the bits where you failed to do what you said.

Conclusion

In any work environment, look for ways that you can create value accumulators. Steer yourself away from work that’s purely process based. Ideally, find a career that allows you to accumulate value for yourself rather than for others.

I’ve been pretty busy this week, so haven’t had the time to write part 5 yet, but there’ll be another hyperbrain article coming next week. Keep your eyes peeled!

Good scams, bad scams, and terrible scams

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:00:00 +0000

If you define a “scam” as a system designed to trick people into purchasing something they didn’t really want to purchase, the internet - and the real world - are rife with scams. Almost every business, no matter its size, uses every trick it can think of to convince people to purchase its products.

Scams are not created equal, though.

Terrible scams

I define a terrible scam as one which most of the target audience can see through right away, and which makes them distrustful the minute they spot it (which is pretty much instant). That’s pretty terrible, because it creates huge amounts of bad will. Even if you’re a professional scammer (as opposed to a legitimate business trying to sell a product by all means available), you want to avoid those - although somehow, a great many professional scammers (e.g. 419ers and other viagra spammers) seem to specialise in it.

Spam is a great example, but so are all those “get paid to work from home” websites out there. They’re scams, preying on desperate people, and the vast majority of people out there can see right through them and immediately distrust the originators of such schemes.

Being so transparent, they’re not all that effective, really. Perhaps the reason why professional scammers specialise in this lower grade of scam is because they can’t do any better. Those who can at least create a bad scam will work for real companies.

Bad scams

Bad scams are those which still breed resentment when seen through, but which most of the target audience doesn’t see through. A great example of this would be bank charges. Most people won’t even begin to think that the banks are scamming them by applying over-hefty charges for non-existent “administration tasks” linked to overdrafts. They’ll resent it a little when they pay, but they won’t see it as an outright swindle and challenge it as such.

Another good example would be high-interest credit cards. In the past, these were called usurers. Today, they run credit card departments in large stores worldwide.

Yet another example: some real estate companies often spam free property search sites with attractive listings that aren’t actually available when you call them up (try going through findaproperty and calling up the agencies, you’ll see). Most people seem not to figure this scam out, but when they do realise it, they generally don’t feel very happy about it at all.

Bad scams are not terrible, because at least most people don’t figure them out. We all wish they didn’t exist, but the companies that use them at least get some returns out of them from a majority of their target market, so, unlike viagra spam, they’re at least not completely boneheaded.

Good scams

And then, finally, there’s also good scams. Those are the ones which few people figure out, and which those who see through them don’t mind so much. What could that be? How could anyone fall for a scam and still feel good about it? I’m not quite sure, but I suspect it’s all about creating the right emotional blanket around the scam.

Let’s have an example, then. Mobile telcos (at least in the UK), have become masters of the good scam. They scam consumers from at least two perspectives.

The first one is free minutes. Almost any monthly contract in the UK will include some number of free minutes, which are basically prepaid minutes that expire at the end of the month. It’s a blatant scam - you’re paying for something so intangible that it doesn’t even exist until you use it up. And of course a large number of “free” minutes go unused by the time the end of the month and expire silently into the pocket of the telcos. Yet, and this may be hard to understand for people in countries where this is not the norm, most people would feel at least a little distressed about being offered a contract that doesn’t include any free minutes.

I’m not sure why exactly that is. I guess it’s a combination of using the word “free” and of emotional associations generated through clever marketing, but somehow, most people in the UK, even when they realise that free minutes are a scam, don’t mind so much, and actually want to be scammed. If you have any better theories, please do share them in the comments.

The next one is the monthly contracts that sponsor the price of the phone. In absolute terms, it’s a scam. People are paying more than they would if the “buy a new phone every 12-18 months” virus was not injected into the contract. And it also strongly encourages consumers to actually buy a new phone (and lock themselves into a new contract) every 12-18 months. Yet, once again, it’s nice to get a new phone “for free” or at a large discount, and the result is actually that a lot of people have cool phones even though in a more rational world they would choose to spend their money on something else.

So once again, most people who fall prey to that scam don’t mind, and would even feel bad about the scam being taken away, even when they do realise it’s a scam. That’s brilliant.

What do you think? Is a good scam more ethical than a bad or terrible one? Would you prefer if most scams were good rather than bad or terrible? Would there be a benefit to the world at large if scammers learnt to create better scams that actually make us want to be scammed?

Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 3. Keep tasks closed

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000

This is the third article in my series on the hyperbrain. If you haven’t read them yet, you might want to look at parts 1 and 2 first.

Subjectively, I think the greatest challenge about having a hyperbrain is distractibility. If not handled effectively, it can make you feel really useless. I’ve often sat in front of my computer, knowing that I’m supposed to be getting on with some piece of work that’s half done, and not been able to focus on it (whilst remaining quite capable of focusing on dozens of blogs and other wastes of time). Learning to work with your distractibility can make an order of magnitude of difference in your productivity.

Like a game

Have you ever played a computer game where your character could die at any point? First person shooters (Doom, Quake…) make for an excellent analogy to distractibility. What do you do when you have to complete difficult, complex, sometimes tedious tasks and your progress can be lost at any point?

A long, long time ago, there was nothing you could do. You just played the game until you died. A few palliatives were invented to try and deal with that, and eventually, they culminated into the ideal solution: saved games. Nowadays, if you’re playing a game like Quake, you can save whenever you’ve done something that was hard or lengthy. Then, if you happen to die in the next minute, you can reload from the saved game. If you save every minute, you can minimise the effects of dying to, at most, translating into one minute of lost time.

If you accept the fact that you are easily distracted (and, after years of fighting it, it’s something I’ve come to accept rather than fight), you could consider distraction to be similar to dying in a computer game. Accepting your own distractibility means that whenever you’re doing any work, you have to accept that you might be distracted and start doing something else for two hours, two days, or even two weeks.

So what can you do to mitigate this sword of Damocles? You need some sort of real-world equivalent of saved games.

#2 Keep tasks closed

A task is closed when you can ignore it for an indeterminate amount of time and there will be no direct negative consequences from doing so (other than the fact that this specific task won’t get done), and when it isn’t left in such a state that you will struggle to pick it up again.

A programming task (e.g. a refactoring) is closed when you can commit and push all your changes into the main codebase and not (knowingly) break the application.

A writing task (e.g. writing a book) is closed when you’ve finished a self-contained section or sub-section and can leave it without having to spend 20 minutes to re-immerse yourself in the subject to continue writing.

A managerial task (e.g. setting up a weekly meeting) is closed when no one is expecting anything else from you on that task.

A closed task is in a state of rest. It can be safely ignored while you do something more important. It’s like saving the game after killing all the monsters in the room, but before walking into the next room. An open task is either when you haven’t saved the game recently, or you’ve saved it in the middle of a fight.

Open tasks are risky

There are many risks with abandoning open tasks:

They can prevent other people from getting on with their own tasks (which breeds resentment against you even though you’re working hard and enthusiastically);
You might have been able to work on the task today on an inspired high, but you might be on the low for the next week. If you leave open a big, complex task, and go do something else, you may be incapable of picking it up productively again for some time;
As long as the task is open, it will clutter your mind and your ability to do other things will be diminished. Keeping tasks open uses up your mental capacity and impacts every other task that you’re involved in;
By the time you are finally able to complete the task, someone else might have rendered it irrelevant (if you’re working in a fast-moving environment);
Say you finally complete the task and have taken five or ten times longer than expected; in hindsight, others may think it wasn’t worth spending that long on it - this will rob you of the praise that you need and expect when you complete something difficult.

And so on.

The key approach to surviving distractibility is to keep almost all tasks closed all the time. Only one task should ever be open at any one time, and it should only ever be open for a short amount of time. How long depends on your work. For programming, I like to make that time fifteen minutes. At least every fifteen minutes, I should be able to save all my changes and commit them to the central repository without any ill effects.

Some people present this advice as “you should not multi-task”, but that phrasing is not so useful to the hyperbrain. The reason is that the definition of a “task” is stretchy. A major restructuring of a codebase could be considered a single task, even though it is really composed of dozens or even hundreds of small tasks.

For the hyperbrain, the definition of single-tasking has to be time-based. You need to set yourself a limit for how long you will work on something before closing it.

If you don’t think you can close the task within that time, don’t do it.

Rethink the task until you can figure out a way to close it within a short time. If you can’t think of a way to do that, don’t start the task. You wouldn’t jump out of a plane before finding the parachute - don’t jump on a task without figuring out how to chip off a small chunk.

“Don’t multi-task” is correct advice, but not useful to the hyperbrain. Instead, think of it as: “Don’t do anything that you can’t close within fifteen minutes”.

This doesn’t mean that you need to break down the whole task into fifteen-minute chunks before starting. Don’t even try doing that, you’ll never finish. Instead, break off one chunk at a time. Ask yourself “what’s the next thing I can do that will help me get this task done, but that can finish in less than fifteen minutes?” Make sure that the next thing you work on can be finished in a short sprint. Each time you finish a sprint, break off another small chunk of the remaining work and do that bit.

Also, don’t feel that it’s a bad thing if it takes much less than fifteen minutes to complete a task. Some of my most productive stretches of work were long collections of 1-minute chunks.

What if you can’t seem to finish it?

What if you start a task that you thought could be finished within fifteen minutes, and you find yourself half an hour into it without any clear endpoint yet? This can easily happen with complex work, such as programming - after all, you don’t really know exactly what you’re going to do until you start doing it.

If that happens, you need to roll back to the previous closed state (discard your changes and reload the latest good version). Take the game metaphor: if you were playing your game and suddenly you find yourself dead? You simply reload. The unfortunate difference between a game like Doom and real work is that work doesn’t make it so clear when you’re dead. You can keep going like a zombie for a long time before you realise that you died three hours ago. And because, as a hyperbrain, you’re fairly optimistic about your own abilities, you keep soldiering on, thinking it will get better soon. Another way to phrase this advice would be: “When you’re in a hole, stop digging!” It won’t get better. You’ll just end up even deeper.

With work, it’s often hard to figure out whether you’ve lost your way and should back out, or whether it’s just a hard problem that you’re on the verge of cracking. Fortunately, there is an absolute, objective measure you can use to determine whether you should back out: time.

This is not a huge effort of discipline. It does take a little mental effort to “give up” on fifteen or thirty minutes of work that you’ve just done, and I’ll grant you that’s sometimes hard to accept. But if you can apply this simple discipline, you will see a several-fold improvement in your productivity (and that will make you happy and drown out any sorrow that you may have experienced when abandoning a small dead chunk of work).

Conclusion

You don’t need to be a super-hero to adapt to distraction, just to follow a handful of simple rules:

Reduce the distractions in your environment as much as possible, but accept the fact that you will probably get distracted anyway, and be prepared for it
Never leave a task open for more than X minutes (fifteen in my case, for programming tasks)
Never open more than one task at a time
If you are working on a task and it’s taking longer than your cut-off point, roll it back and try again from a different angle

I hope you’ve found this article helpful. Feedback is, as always most welcome.

Technology recruitment in an early start-up

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:00:00 +0000

So, you have an idea for a startup, but need a tech guy to build it… how should you find him?

Last week I ripped into a job advert with, I hope, some good comical results. Some people asked, more specifically, what I would do in Redline’s place (Redline was the company that produced the advert). How do you make that first technical hire?

Of course, you want the company to sound personable and friendly, and that was probably the noble impulse that drove the poor anonymous job ad writer to write that awful ad. A formal, stiff job ad is indeed not going to attract good early employees - let alone a start-up CTO, which I believe is what they were trying to hire in this case.

First of all, let’s define our terms a little. Everyone has different terms for these things, but there’s two general stages to recruitment of technical guys in a really early start-up (one with fewer than 10 techs). Please note that when a company grows beyond that size, things shift and evolve. This applies to very small technology start-ups only and, as ever in the start-up world, there are and will always be exceptions.

The CTO

The first person that needs to be recruited is what I call variously the start-up CTO, the technology director, or the technical co-founder. For a technology start-up whose bread and butter will be developing a technical product that people will want to pay money for, this “hire” is the most important that the founder can make in the entire history of the company. Here, I’m assuming that the first founder is non-technical or not technically strong enough.

Strong enough to do what? Well, to develop the whole product by himself! Wait a second… can anyone develop a whole product by themselves? It depends on the product. I’ve done it. My best friend is doing it now on his own start-up. My current start-up employs only two people to build our product. So yes, it is possible, if you’re using the right technologies and if you’re building the kind of product that is amenable to being built by a very small team.

You might decide to hire more than just this guy, even though he can build the whole product by himself, in order to speed things up a little. After all, if your cofounder can write the whole product by himself, but it will take him 3 years to get to version 1, that’s probably not good enough. But you won’t be struggling to hire his team - he’s more than capable of doing that himself. Ah yes, that’s another thing a start-up CTO needs to be capable of: finding and attracting other technically talented team members to joint the start-up.

What else? Well, he also needs to have a good head for business, to understand where the start-up is going and be able to pick the technologies to meet those goals. He needs to be capable of working with maniacal productivity despite the chaotic, highly constrained environment of an early start-up. He needs to have enough managerial skills to manage the early start-up team once it comes into existence. What you (as a business-minded founder) might be doing for the business, i.e. pulling the entire thing from a mere idea into existence out of your sweat and determination, he needs to do for the product.

It’s worth emphasizing here: I’m not saying this guy will build the whole product by himself, only that he needs to be able to do so if need be.

He’s a One-Man IT Department. He’s the person on top of which you’ll build your company. He’s not a rock star. He’s a rock, and on this rock you can build your company.

The early employees

Early (technical) employees also need to be very competent, flexible and driven, but less so than the technical co-founder. They can specialise a bit more, and can focus on getting things done without quite so many business distractions. It will be the CTO’s job to figure out what technical skills are needed to continue to grow the start-up, once there’s budget for other people, and to find and hire the right people to fill those holes.

Early employees do need to be willing to have a go at whatever needs to be done at the moment. If it’s network administration that you need to do today, so be it. But they don’t need to bring all those skills to the job - it’s something they can learn from their colleagues, from howto’s downloaded from the web, books, etc.

As a start-up CTO looking for early employees, you should look not for someone who can do your job, but for someone who is reasonably well rounded and flexible, but more importantly is better than you in one of the key areas that really matter to the start-up.

Where to find them

So, where do you find these rare and wond’rous creatures? Let’s start with the CTO. Most important hire in the company. Defines the product that you will build. Is a job site a good place to look for one of those?

Of course not. You find technical co-founders the same way you find any co-founder: through personal relationships. If you want to start a technology start-up and you’re not technical, you need to locate your technical co-founder amongst your network of friends, and if there isn’t one there, you need to expand that network until there is. Until you have found your technical cofounder, your company cannot be started (at least not with any reasonable chance of success). Maybe there are even better ways of finding co-founders, but I don’t know them. Paul Graham’s experience seems to agree: “Usually the founders have been friends for at least a year before starting the company.”

I’m sorry if you were expecting a simple, easy answer, like “Go on find-a-CTO.com”. In my experience, the kind of people you want as technical cofounders are either doing it already, or productively employed. Finding your technical co-founder is hard work, but the pay-back from this work is huge.

What about early employees? Well, those are a little easier. At least, you can let your CTO do most of that job. He or she should have the network to find the people that he wants to hire. There, as well, I’d recommend networking as the primary means of finding great people to work with. However, for early employees, in some rare cases, you might use a carefully constructed job ad to fish for possible hires. Bear in mind, though, that at this stage, it’s usually better not to hire anyone than to hire the wrong person.

Taking on a cofounder: final note

One last note on cofounders: you can’t treat them as employees. They’re not employees, they’re cofounders. You want them to feel that it’s their company, and to do that, you have to give them equity - not options, not promises of options, but actual founder’s equity. Don’t feel like you’re giving stuff away here. If you’ve got the right person for the job, ensuring that they feel ownership of the company will ensure that your share is worth something. It’s better to own 70 or 80 or even 51% of something than 100% of nothing.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful! Comments are, as always, welcome.

Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 2. Accept and reject your limitations

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:28:00 +0000

This article follows a previous article. It’s part of a series of yet undefined length. If you haven’t read the first instalment yet, it might be worth going back and reading it.

This is addressed mainly to people who recognise themselves in the description of the hyperbrain, although it may be of interest to others. When you count up all the different ways in which your hyperbrain differs from the average, you might be tempted to think you’re not normal. Well, it’s true, you’re not. You’re different from the norm, but that can be a good thing. After all, you can’t be normal and expect abnormal results. The focus of these articles is to make you more aware of how you can deal with those differences, counteract your limitations, and build on your strengths, to achieve what you’re capable of.

So what are you capable of? Well, you can do anything you want (that’s the good news). But in order to do those things, you need to learn to work with your hyperbrain, otherwise you will constantly fail in public and humiliating ways at the worst moments (usually, on the cusp of victory, at least in my experience). And that will hurt you more than the average person, because you are far more sensitive to negative feedback than you’d care to admit. Let’s look at the first practical step to take to improve your chances of success.

The first step to success with a hyperbrain is to both accept your limitations and reject them.

Accept your limitations

You are not built for consistency. Putting yourself in situations which require you to provide a constant output, and which hurt you the moment you fail to do so, is a recipe for disaster for you. Yet you might be tempted to set up just such a system in order to generate motivation. To succeed, however, you need to engineer your environment to focus on what you’ve achieved rather than what you’ve planned to achieve.

Your focus can shift radically in an instant. This means you cannot rely on continued focus in a period of time, so, to succeed, you need to structure your (focused) work in a way that allows you to abandon it at short notice without downside.

You crave validation from yourself. If you can’t feel that you’re doing something really worthwhile, your productivity will shoot down to a hundredth of what it might otherwise be. You need to ensure your work is always presented in a way that makes you feel it’s worthwhile.

You crave validation from from other people, too. Most people like a pat on the back, but without that pat, you can’t go on. Putting yourself in situations where no one really cares about what you’re doing will demoralise you fairly quickly, unless you can come up with elaborate rationalisations for why they don’t care yet (e.g. secret projects). So, paradoxically, to succeed, you actually need to be on the front lines, where it’s most visible and most dangerous to fail, because that’s where you’ll feel most energetic and driven.

When you’re on a high, you feel you can take on the world. And you could - if only you could maintain that high. But you can’t. So, on a high, you actually do take on the world, and then the world chews you up and spits you by the side of the road. To succeed, you need to moderate that eagerness to ensure you don’t set yourself up for failure.

You get involved in too many things. All successful people do that to an extent, but you’re really pushing the boundaries. At any given time, you’re reading 5 books, pursuing 10 pet projects, and working on 15 things - and you constantly shift between them. To succeed, you need to structure your environment to allow you to shift between those things without negative side-effects.

You are extremely sensitive to negative criticism. Most people dislike being told they’re wrong, but the wrong bit of criticism from the wrong person can shut down something that you genuinely cared about permanently. To succeed, you need to develop a healthy scepticism for people’s negative criticisms (if only because success is always, inevitably, accompanied by harsh negative criticism from people who are mean, jealous, in a bad mood, or just simply disagree in overly harsh terms).

You have a strong tendency to martyrdom and self-victimisation. How better can you gain other people’s positive feedback than by sacrificing yourself? If only I had the support I needed, I could do so well! To succeed, continue reading.

#1: Reject your limitations

One of the hyperbrain’s tendencies is self-victimisation. Well, that’s not unique to the hyperbrain. Many people feel misunderstood, although the craving for external validation makes it particularly acute in this type of mind, because the only way to fulfil that craving is to succeed, and you cannot succeed while you feel the odds are stacked against you. This self-victimisation is crippling, though. It’s oh so easy to slip into thinking that you are doomed to fail at everything you try, because you’re just that way, and there’s always some bit of the “support system” that’s missing (tip: it’s a catch-22 - you will only be able to build a full support system when you’ve already succeeded).

If you take only one thing from these articles, take this:

Your limitations are not an excuse for failure.

You should never throw up your hands and accept that you will fail because of your limitations. Analyse past failures in terms of your limitations to see how you can make up for them, but never accept defeat as a given. This advice goes for anyone, really, but it is especially important for hyperbrains because of these self-victimisation tendencies.

Your environment is not an excuse for failure.

You may try to dodge the above advice by saying something along the lines of: “Well, I can deal with my limitations, but my environment just doesn’t work with my personality.” Bullshit. You can succeed in any environment. The match (or mismatch) between your limitations and your environment is just a puzzle to be solved. In later articles, I’m going to drill down into specific techniques for how to counteract those limitations without taking away from your strengths, and you’ll see that almost no environment is incompatible with the hyperbrain, so long as you know how to handle yourself. You are the sole factor in whether you succeed or fail.

You don’t need to sacrifice yourself in order for others to succeed.

People don’t need you as much as you feel they do. How many times have you been in a situation where you thought the project couldn’t run without you, and you got moved somewhere else anyway, and the project still went on? Because of your ability to pick up many different skills, you’re involved in everything, so it’s easy to end up feeling you’re indispensable. Then, you feel that you can’t possibly go and do what you want because everyone is depending on you. It’s easy to turn this into another excuse for not achieving your potential. Don’t let it be so. People don’t need you as much as you think they do, and they will not appreciate your sacrifice at all - so don’t do it.

Unless you accept this key point, that the key to success lies within you, that there is no valid excuse for not realising your potential, then the rest of my advice will be worthless. I’ve started with this high-level “tip”, even though it really applies to everyone (not just hyperbrains) because it is so very important.

In part 3, coming later this week, I’ll present my most important approach for how to deal with distractibility and arrange your work to survive the hyperbrain’s attention deficit without losing out on its ability for extraordinary focus (no, it doesn’t involve some fancy variation on GTD).

How not to write a job advert

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Recently, I found a Craigslist job advert that made me chuckle. It seems to manage to do almost everything wrong, from the point of view of recruiting the kind of person it appears to be targeting.

So, in the spirit of improving the web, here’s my blow-by-blow description of all (or most of) what’s wrong with this job ad.

Here’s the advert, first, in case it’s taken down:

Senior Rails Developer (Toronto)

Reply to: jobs@redwirenation.com [?]
Date: 2008-08-26, 9:12PM EDT


Working Role Title: Senior Rails Developer 

Why People Want To Work for Us: RedWire Employees Are Rockstars 


Enabling Entrepreneurs To Connect on a Global Scale 
As far as missions go, ours is pretty cool. How many people get to say their job is to help others be successful? 

Innovating at Warp 9 
We are a small company, but we are driven to change the world. Our reason for being is to help entrepreneurs realize their ambitions. We are innovative, relevant and user-friendly, and we use these qualities to equip business owners with the tools they need for success. 

Fun-zilla 
Working for RedWire means being passionate and creative. We want awesome people to work with who will be contributing members of our team of rockstars. 

The top three reasons why working at RedWire rocks: 

1) You get to do good. People helping people—it’s a beautiful thing. 
2) Brainastics, whiteboards, candy and lots of coffee. Sometimes we have to remind our employees to go home. 
3) Flexible work hours. We don’t do “9 to 5”. 
Nuff said. 

We realize that a start-up environment doesn’t appeal to everybody, but if it works for you, then, please, read on. 


Current Needs: 

¼ Network Engineer 
+ ¼ Electrical Engineer 
+ 3⁄8 Senior Open Source Software Developer 
+ 1⁄8Mathematician 
= 1 RedWire Senior Developer 

We are looking for an in-house doer-thinker-fixer-betterer whose superpower is to fulfill all the functions of an IT Department. We need an autonomous and resourceful guru to join us in our quest and manage all things IT. You must be ridiculously passionate about the web, love the idea of working in a start-up, enjoy variety in your day-to-day and be able to handle the stress of being the go-to resource. 

Role Overview: 

This is a pivotal role for an ambitious, highly enthusiastic developer who’s excited at the thought of working in a fast-paced, high-growth web start-up. 

In this position, you will demonstrate your mental prowess as you coordinate a diverse flow of projects and initiatives. 

You will be responsible for: 

- Web application development 
- Network administration 
- Information storage 
- Network functionality 

In addition, you will also be responsible for helping set up email distribution, as well as any other relevant technically related projects as they arise. 

We are looking for a goal-oriented, naturally eager person who can work effectively and efficiently under tight deadlines and who is able to manage multiple projects at once. 

Qualifications:
• Provable guru status and devoteeism of Ruby on Rails with experience actually deploying applications 
• Strong experience with MySQL, version 5+ and beyond 
• Background in developing and optimizing GNU/Linux, *nix, and *BSD platforms for mission critical production environments 
• Familiar with network infrastructure and design concepts for small networks (<25 machines). 
• Proven experience in designing security-hardened web applications, using open cryptographic standards 
• Familiarity with hardware prognostics and normal accident theory 
• Expertise in open-source programs and development 
• Familiarity with content versioning systems (e.g., Hg, SVN, CVS) 
• Experience breaking stuff 
• Experience fixing what you’ve broken 

If you are the personification of our long-winded wish list, then we’d celebrate your email’s alerting us to your existence. Interested potential rockstars should send their résumé to jobs@redwirenation.com.

Right. *cracks knuckles* Let’s get started, shall we?

Rockstars helping people for brainastical whiteboard candies

The first problem: Why people want to work for us: Redwire employees are rockstars.

Really? Ok, I’ll sign up, but I want to get some free tickets to their concerts. Many employers still feel like calling future employees rock stars or ninjas is going to attract better developers. Here’s some news for you: most of the great developers you’re interested in can’t stand the term “rockstar programmer” (or ninja, or whatever alternative you may care to come up with).

Next: How many people get to say their job is to help others be successful?

Well, let’s see… off the top of my head, every single employee in the world? By definition, employees help others be successful. That’s what “having a job” means. Most people who join start-ups do it because they’d also like to help themselves be successful somewhere along the way, or because the work is more interesting. In any case, if you want to excite start-up developers, you’re gonna need a better “mission statement” than that (ideally, just scrap the mission statement altogether).

Fun-zilla

Well, nothing says fun like Fun-zilla, right? Who are you trying to hire? 10 year olds?

“We want awesome people to work with who will be contributing members of our team of rockstars.”

*puke*

Top three reasons:

1) You get to do good. People helping people—it’s a beautiful thing.

Oh puh-lease, I’m getting all teary-eyed already. Of course. How could I not see it? Tell you what, it’s such a beautiful thing, I’ll work for free too. Every start-up believes their goal is the best, the most worthwhile of them all, but your job in a recruitment ad is to convince other people who haven’t drunk the kool-aid that that’s so. This kind of vague nonsense isn’t going to help.

2) Brainastics, whiteboards, candy and lots of coffee. Sometimes we have to remind our employees to go home.

Translation: long hours, no concept of work/life balance. That’s acceptable for a start-up (though perhaps it shouldn’t be), it’s understood that you may work long hours on a start-up. But you shouldn’t brandish that about as a key selling point for your company, much in the same way that someone who’s changing jobs might be doing so because their current job sucks, but they probably shouldn’t say it outright in the interview. And since when are whiteboards a perk?? What’s next? “Our state-of-the-art office premises include a quality toilet seat”?

3) Flexible work hours. We don’t do “9 to 5
Nuff said.”

Normally, that would be fine, but in conjunction with the previous statement, it’s highly suspicious. “We don’t do 9 to 5” could just as easily mean “We do 10 to 10”, in this context. Nope, not “enough said” - more detail would have been preferable.

One cup of flour, two cups of milk, two eggs

1/4 Network Engineer
+ 1/4 Electrical Engineer
+ 3/8 Senior Open Source Software Developer
+ 1/8 Mathematician
= 1 RedWire Senior Developer

Oh boy. Maybe add another 1/32 janitor while they’re at it? What the heck is up with the /8 fractions anyway?

We are looking for an in-house doer-thinker-fixer-betterer whose superpower is to fulfill all the functions of an IT Department. We need an autonomous and resourceful guru to join us in our quest and manage all things IT.

Ok… so, what emerges here, is they’re looking for a CTO. That’s what a CTO is - a one-man IT department. But either they can’t afford one, or they haven’t figured out that’s what they’re looking for, or they don’t know that hiring a CTO in a company like that is the most important hiring decision in the whole history of their company (and should be achieved through intense networking, not through free job ads). Or perhaps, more likely, they just don’t really have a clue what they want, beyond the fact that it’s someone who knows stuff about IT.

In this position, you will demonstrate your mental prowess as you coordinate a diverse flow of projects and initiatives.

You will be everyone’s IT bitch.

…ambitious, highly enthusiastic…

And you will enjoy it!

Responsibilabilities and Qualifimications

You will be responsible for:
- Web application development
- Network administration
- Information storage
- Network functionality

Wow is that it. Oh wait, you’re not finished. Please continue.

In addition, you will also be responsible for helping set up email distribution, as well as any other relevant technically related projects as they arise.

Didn’t we cover this already? If you want someone with that breadth of skills, you’re hiring your CTO cofounder. And you better give them equity - lots of it. And you will never find them via a craigslist job ad. Also, what the heck is “Information storage”? Does this “Senior Rails Developer” also have to manage the shared drive, perhaps?

Provable guru status and devoteeism of Ruby on Rails with experience actually deploying applications

Devoteeism? Guru status? Come on, I need some lines that I can make fun of. This is so self-contained, I can’t possibly make it any more ridiculous than it already is.

Proven experience in designing security-hardened web applications, using open cryptographic standards

What does that even mean? My guess is, it translates to “is capable of setting up an SSL certificate on apache”.

Familiarity with content versioning systems (e.g., Hg, SVN, CVS)

Is it even possible to be a “Ruby guru” and not be “familiar” with source control? Another hint that the person who wrote this job ad doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Experience breaking stuff
Experience fixing what you’ve broken

It’s always a good thing to let your company’s personality show through your ad. Well, not always, I guess. Not in this case, for example. After this litany of unintentionally awful propositions, this “joke” doesn’t really go down well.

In conclusion

Now, it’s possible that actually, Red Wire is a perfectly fine company, and they just happened to get someone’s friends sister to write and post up the job ad because they were too busy and, heck, craigslist is free anyway. But this is a terrible impression to make to prospective start-up employees and, if they indeed lack a CTO, it’s no way to hire one.

If you’re in a position to hire technical people for a start-up, try not to make quite so many mistakes.

Blizzard should be ashamed

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Recent news has pointed out that gold farming in China has become a $500m industry.

Blizzard should be ashamed.

We have many challenges in the world today. Entertaining people (as Blizzard does with their main products) is a worthwhile activity for a business. Hard-working people do need it, and even though there are some extreme cases of “entertainment abuse” (similar, in many ways, to drugs abuse), the abuses of the few should not limit the many from enjoying a perfectly healthy, if somewhat fruitless, activity.

However, gold farming is not entertainment. Gold farming is an entirely sterile activity. It produces nothing other than a transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining. Each piece of gold farmed represents a small amount of wasted productivity for the human race. In aggregate, the $500m gold farming industry represents $500m of wasted human productivity.

Moreover, Blizzard could very easily stop this trade, by creating an official gold market where people can exchange dollars for gold. There would still remain some market for rare items, but those are necessarily less fungible than gold coins, and so would at least greatly decrease the $500m black hole.

If anything, Blizzard should see its own self-interest here: if it can get even a 10% slice of this $500m market (and there’s little reason to think that it couldn’t get 100%), that would represent $50m - not an amount to be sneered at. From a business sense, Blizzard should be ashamed not to have opened up a gold market yet.