Sign of the Times

Traditionally, as a manager with a group that currently consists of 12 direct reports, one of my yearly performance goals has been employee retention.

I was measured as a manager by how few people left my organization for other opportunities.

Even through the last economic downturn it was recognized that keeping key people was important to the ongoing operation of the business.

Then we were acquired last year by a very large corporation, of which software development in general, and my part of the development in particular, were such tiny parts of the overall revenue stream as to be invisible on the balance sheet.

For this year, retention disappeared from my goals.

I was just given my goals for next year. I now have an attrition goal.

I will now be measured as a manager by how well I can drive a specific number of people to pursue opportunities elsewhere.

I suppose that takes the pressure off of my worries about morale in the software development group.

Indifferent Promotion

I have worked for my current... well... what should I call it?

I hesitate to say company, since it has been several companies over my time here.

Product group maybe? That is as good as anything I guess.

I've worked with the same product group for well over a decade now, through various ups and downs, acquisitions and mergers.

I came on as an individual contributor, but in two and a half years I ended up as a manager with my own group.

And there I have stayed.

At points, staying in the same spot has seemed like a good thing. I seemed to survive layoff after layoff during the bursting of the first tech bubble. I got through reorganizations and the inevitable trimming of surplus people after acquisitions. I've made it through bad times.

On the other hand, when times have been... better... I have stayed put. Meanwhile, anybody brought in or promoted to management seemed to go straight to Senior Manager. Often these were people with considerably less experience, direct reports, or responsibilities.

I began to ask my boss about how I could get promoted to senior manager. Time and time again he agreed that people who were being given Senior Manager titles did not deserve them as much as I did. But nothing happened.

Some years we were at a company where promotion beyond manager required the approval of a committee, some of the members of which no longer worked for the company, making it hard to get a quorum.

At other times HR said I was not being paid enough to be promoted to Senior Manager, and since those were generally times when we were giving out 2% raises, getting there seemed a long way off.

And at some times it was just better to keep my head down, since everything looked like it was going to change the next day, and not necessarily in a good way.

Eventually we were bought up by what I would call a "real" company, a big company with where rules were not quite so ad hoc. I thought this would be a good thing.

In many ways it was not. Rules went from ad hoc to Byzantine. My connection with the company felt a lot more tenuous; I went from being in a meeting with the CEO once a week to being so many jumps from the CEO on the org chart that I have never seen him in person, I have seen one of his direct reports once, and I don't see or talk to anybody on a regular basis who actually works at corporate HQ. And I found out that big companies have crap benefits for the rank and file because, as I was told, "They can."

Still, one thing worked out my way.

In my position, with my responsibilities, I was required to have access to a specific internal email distribution list.

However, the rules for that list required that an employee must be at least level M1. I was only level L3.

My boss (an N2) tried for some time to get this fixed. Not having access to this list was impacting my work. However, IT was adamant that the rules for this distribution list were set in stone and they would not allow exceptions.

He went to his boss (an O3), who also tried to get the issue resolved. Eventually he came back to my boss and told him that he just made me an M1, since that was easier than working with IT.

M1 is, of course, the level of a Senior Manager.

So my boss called me into his office and gave me the news. I had been promoted to M1 so I could access an email distribution list.

I had to laugh.

My wife seemed less amused when I told her.

I explained to her that I had cracked the system! I explained that there was nowhere to go but up from here! I explained that my next promotion was assured!

All I have to do is find the right email distribution list and make the case that I need access to it. The rest is just details.

New Record!

By declaring the last picture the record, I spurred some sort of competition.

Juice consumption appears to be up at the office because of this.

Some Days You Cannot Win

Our vending machine at work. The punts on the bottom of the bottles, those little indents, catch on the dividers, wedging the bottles firmly in place. No amount of shaking the machine will get them free.

Four bottles is the current office record.

Executive Initiative

I run a moderately sized organization in our company. I would not exactly call it an empire, but the corporate organizational chart shows that I have over 30 people reporting into me. My team is spread across the world, with people in the US, India, and the Czech Republic.

Maybe not an empire, but the sun never sets on it.

My wife sometimes makes the mistake of asking me what I did at the office on a given day. Sometimes I follow up that mistake by telling her the truth.

Last week she asked and I told her that in addition to the usual meetings to attend and fires to put out, I spent a good part of my day busily burning CDs, updating and printing labels, editing release notes, and double checking dozens of little details that come along with a product release.

My wife wanted to know why *I* had to do all of that. Didn't I have somebody to do all of that stuff for me? She has seen the org chart. She knows how many people I have working for me.

I explained that the people who work for me are all highly skilled, well paid professionals.

She pointed out that I was also a highly skilled, well paid professional.

I told her yes, but I am a manager. My primary responsibility to ensure that my team is productive, that the company is getting their money's worth out of their investment in these people. Often that means keeping them somewhat isolated from the trivia and focused on the goals for the team.

I then told her a story of my youth, which is what I do a lot these days now that I am over 40 and something of an old fart.

When I was around eight years old, I was at my grandfather's company. He started his own business after the WWII, which turned into a reasonable success. My father, my uncles, my aunt, and a few cousins ended up working for him at one time or another. I did my own stretch working for him, on the loading dock, when I was in my teens.

But back when I was eight, I was in his office, which was large and well appointed. I said to him that I would like an office like his some day. He smiled and asked if I really wanted to be an executive. I said "Yes!" quite enthusiastically. He got up and said, "Follow me."

He lead me off to the men's room where he picked up a toilet brush and handed it to me.

He said, "If you want to be an executive, start by cleaning the toilet."

He laughed while I looked at him like he was crazy. Cleaning toilets wasn't going to get me a big office.

Then he said, "When you're ready to do what needs to be done, no matter what, you can be an executive."

So now when my wife asks about my day, she makes a point to enquire about the toilets. I assure her that we pay somebody to take care of that.

Meanwhile, I do what needs to be done... though I do not have a nice office.

Not yet, anyway.

Maybe I should go order some pop-up Post-It® dispensers.

Pop Symbolism

I think it is somehow symbolic that, in our office supply cabinet, we have only Post-It® note pads designed for pop-up dispensers, but nobody in our office actually has such a dispenser.

I was also unaware at how big of a brand Post-It® has become for 3M.

All I have is little yellow square pads... for pop-up dispensers.

Baked Dorritos

The vending machine at the office stocks the usual array of junk food. Generally, the only item in the machine I want is a bag of Dorritos, usually as a tide-me-over snack because I cannot get out to lunch at a reasonable hour.

Yesterday, I was in a time crunch around lunch, so went to the machine to grab a snack.

No Dorritos. The usual red bag was nowhere to be seen.

However, there was a yellow bag of "Baked Dorritos" in the machine.

The bag even has a green sticker on it that says "Smart Choices Made Easy" as an indicator that this is somehow more healthy for me than my standard choice.

Fine. Whatever. I am hungry. I have no time. I bought the bag.

Back at my desk, I opened the bag and took one of the Baked Dorritos in my hand. They seem flatter than the regular ones.

Then I put it in my mouth.

Can you say, "Yuck?"

Not horrible, I've eated something spoiled or putrid yuck.

More of a "this sort of tastes like what it is supposed to be, but it has a whole array of other, odd flavors along for the ride" yuck.

I tried to get past the flavor. I tossed the bag after three chips.

Avoid those Baked Dorritos.

I suppose, in the end, that not eating any Dorritos is the healthiest choice of all.

IQ: A Bad Resume Idea

Being a front line manager in a tech company, I spend a lot of time in the hiring process. There were times during the first web boom that I spent half of my time reviewing resumes, phone screening or interviewing, and providing feedback on candidates.

Of course, given the number of resumes that have crossed my desk, I have seen my fair share of bad ideas. I just reviewed a resume last week that had one of the more rare mistakes.

The person in question put their IQ on their resume.

This is always a mistake. There is no winning in this situation.

First, there is no way that a hiring manager can verify this tidbit of information. Your resume should stick to things that can be reasonably verified or demonstrated. So it is a useless piece of data.

But it gets worse. If you claim to have a high IQ, you may look like you are bragging or come off as an elitist. Is that the impression you want people to take from your resume? The best case scenario is that you will set unreasonably high expectations for yourself. Imagine every slip in your interview being greeting in the mind of the interviewer with, "You didn't do so well there, did you Einstein?"

And if you do not have a high IQ (and I had a resume that listed an IQ of 105) who cares? What message are you trying to send? That you do not have enough experience to fill a letter sized page of paper? That you do not understand the IQ scale?

So keep your IQ to yourself.

Cannot Bear the Worms

I bought a small package of Gummi Bears from the vending machine at the office today.

In this bag there was something of a bonus... or at least something different.

There was a big Gummi Worm in the bag, the kind that are two flavors mixed together in alternating segments. This particular one was red and... is it white or clear... the flavor without color.

This lead to some speculation about the relationship between Gummi Bears and Worms.

We eventually decided that worms represent some sort of immature state of bears, and that when the worm reached maturity, the segments would break apart and develop into individual bears.

For no particular reason, I could not bring myself to eat the worm at that point, a problem I have had with Mezcal as well.

Cultural Time Zones

The company for which I work has its headquarters, and the majority of its employees, in a city in the south. It resides in the Central Time Zone of the United States.

The office from which I work is on the west coast of the US, in the time zone known as Pacific.

So there is a two hour time difference between us an HQ. This always makes for a bit of comedy/annoyance when it comes to scheduling conference calls that require attendees from both locations.

Still, a two hour time difference is not so bad, is it?

It would not be, except that we are also separated by a two hour "cultural" time zone.

The people at HQ seem to be early risers. They like to get into the office at 7am and head out the door around 4pm. Finding somebody that will answer the phone there after 4pm can be a trial.

Out here on the laid back left coast, at least in my department, 9am is a more likely starting time, and if you are still around at 7pm, you are probably not alone. We work late.

This means that there is really only a very narrow window of time when one can schedule a meeting and expect full attendance from both sides, and there is much grousing when meetings fall outside of that window.

There is one other cultural chasm exists between the two offices. One group is always on time for meetings and one of them is always, chronically late.

Ironically, it is the early risers at HQ that are always late, while the left coast crew is always on time.

I'm not sure what this means.

End of Fiscal Year

The end of the quarter is almost here. It just so happens that this is also the end of our fiscal year.

This means that everybody in the company is getting email about making sure our project time tracking entries are up to date, our vacation time has all been submitted, and that things like expense reports are all signed, approved, and turned in.

Being a large and modern company, all of this is done through software that is maintained by the IT department. SAP is the software of choice at our company. Feel free to speculate on what the acronym SAP really stands for, but I will guarantee it isn't "Solves All Problems."

Still, we know the drill. We have received the bare minimal training to use the horrible interface on must navigate to accomplish all of these tasks before the end of the quarter.

Only there is a problem. Among the email flying about was one from IT. With a week to go in the quarter, they decided they needed to upgrade SAP.

This upgrade... you know where I am going, don't you... yes, this upgrade managed to kill all of the data entry applications we use to update our project time sheets, vacation time, expense reports, and what not. The system is up, end users can log in, but the applications are not there.

Ooops.

In real companies, these sorts of systems are locked down around end of quarter, usually two weeks before and a week after such an event, and longer at fiscal year end, to prevent just such fiascoes.

To be fair, I do not know why the upgrade was required. It might have been something that had to be done to close out the fiscal year. But to wait until the week before the end of fiscal year to do it....

We get what we deserve.

A Different Type of Web Security

Or an inadvertent security measure.

We have a mission critical system that every project has to access before it can ship. No project is complete until this system has been updated.

It is a web based system. You can do all the work you need to do in a browser.

But only if you have the right browser.

IE is not the right browser. Firefox won't work either. Opera? Forget about it. And don't even bring up Safari.

No, you need Netscape to use the system. A specific version of Netscape. A nine year old version of Netscape.

Unless you have that version, the application will not display correctly, your inputs will not be accepted, and you will get errors every time you try to go through the prescribed process required for each project.

It is a rite of passage at our company that every new manager finishing up his first project must learn this the hard way. The browser requirement is not documented anywhere. That information is part of what I call "the great oral tradition" of our company where the way things really work is only transmitted by the elders around the campfire, and only when they deem you ready.

So a new manager will be pointed at this application, told to follow the instructions in the ISO compliant document, and sent on his merry way.

A merry way to frustration and despair.

The application will appear to work in IE or any other browser, but key elements will be missing from the page. The new manager will be sure that he just isn't reading the document right. He will try to enter the data in the fields that have the right name, some of which seem to be missing. He will try to submit that data only to get an unhelpful error stating that data from a field he does not see is incorrect.

Eventually the new manager will break down and cry out for help. Impatient weenies like myself do it right away. But other more stoic types will labor on trying to make the instructions work with the application they see. The pain can last for days in that situation.

Eventually the manager will end up on the phone with somebody who has been indoctrinated into the secrets of the application. That person will send the manager to the special location on the network where this special version of Netscape is kept.

Eventually the manager's eyes will be opened. The application will work. All will be right with the world.

Thus the process to ship a project at our company is completely secure. No outsider could possibly do it.

At least that is what I tell myself. It is a much better answer than the one a new manager will get from IT should he call them to complain about the application.

It seems that the guy who wrote it years ago was an ardent Netscape supporter. Only he does not work here any more. He hasn't for years. But the application works and IT, in a seeming reversal of their standard policy, is not inclined to fix something that works.

Prerequ-uh-what?

Our operations department sets up servers with our software before they get sent out to a customer. With the latest release of one of our modules, operations completely messed up the install and a developer ended having to go on site to fix the issue.

One of the root causes of the problem was the word "prerequisites." The module comes on two CDs, one with the module name, and one with the prerequisites for the module. The operations team did not know what to do with the prerequisites CD, so put it aside and attempted to install and configure the module independent of the software required to support the module.

And, of course, we ended up in the situation with the developer at the customer site installing everything from scratch.

At a postmortem meeting about this fiasco, the director of operations tried to explain how "prerequisites" is not the correct nomenclature for our SAP process. However, since his team runs that part of the SAP process and actually entered the name of the CD and never once objected, his explanation did not get the response he was hoping for.