thedwick

So we had our ’selection event’ today for our new graduate recruiting program. The morning started with all of them in a conference room on the 33rd floor of our Financial District office, with an impressive view of the SF Bay and especially the ferry building. I think it was the same conference room I’d been recruited in many moons ago and I know whatever room I’d been in impressed me then.

They spent the morning doing group activities that were designed to bring out their leadership, negotiation and problem solving skills. When I’d first read the descriptions of the activities, I have to admit I was skeptical; they looked marginally useful at best and downright lame at worst. But I took the time to drop in and hover during them and I was surprised at how much I felt like I was getting out of watching them. There’s something about seeing someone work on an actual problem and interact with other peers, instead of just answering theoretical questions about solving problems, or describing a time in the past when they’ve solved a problem. Really what we had was a mini-Apprentice–without all the drama.

I was glad I’d made the time to drop in, because the written feedback the official evaluators recorded wasn’t nearly as useful as watching them actually interact with each other. I wonder if 10-year industry verterans would put up with the same thing because it might be useful for normal interviews, too.

They’ve finished putting up the rafters for the roof. So I think they’re done framing (less than 3 weeks!) and now start to close stuff off with roofing and siding and whatnot. I can walk around in the framed-out rooms and really get a feel for them and now I’m even more eager for them to finish.

We’re starting a new college grad recruiting program at work. We’re hiring four people to four different groups where they will be paid out of the ‘recruiting program’ budget for 18 months and then we have to find a home for them. I’m going to be in charge of one of the graduates. There are a few ways this is interesting to me…

I was hired many moons ago into a failed college recruiting program here. “Program” was too strong a word for it, really they just hired about six people and didn’t do anything special with them (us) after we were hired. There had been talk of rotations and mentorship, etc, but as soon as the program’s champion left the company, it all evaporated. I had the sense there wasn’t much support for it in the first place. Sortly after the program started, most of the graduates in it quit for other jobs.

Now I’m on the other side of the table. If this program ends up the same way, then it will be partially my fault. I’ve hired a couple dozen people over the course of my career so far, but this one is different and in some ways more exciting. I get to shape an eager, fresh person and somewhat influence the initial trajectory of their whole career. I’m hoping their optimism wears off on me and I’m hoping I have some kind of wisdom to impart to them.

I recently read a post by Joel Spolsky about why so many resumes you get when you post a job opening suck (and they do). He theorizes that really good people get a really good job out of college and pretty much stay there for their career (link). Personally I don’t think they stay there, but I do think they stay within the interpersonal network they form from that job on. They rarely search Craigslist for jobs. What does that say about me, as someone who has used Craigslist to look for jobs? Hmmm.

PS–I’m also looking to hire real pro database developer, skilled especially in Sybase. Usually when I hire I’m not as concerned about an exact set of technical skills and instead hire on raw talent, but for this spot I really do need a Sybase pro, if anyone in Internet land knows of one.

So we actually pay our nanny legally, filing all the right forms, paying all the right taxes, etc. I have an employer identification number and everything.

The experience has been fairly stressful. The various state and federal agencies involved don’t really distinguish between someone like me and someone who runs a real business and has several employees and a dedicated payroll person. It’s no wonder that many (most?) people don’t do this legally and I think the government would be doing itself a favor if it radically restructured the way people with housekeepers, nannies, etc had to interact with it.

I’m paying twenty bucks a month just to have a service (www.paycycle.com) keep track of what form I need to file when, fill the information in for me, and email me when it’s time for me to do something. And that’s all they do; they don’t handle my payroll for me, don’t send checks, don’t actually file these forms for me with the IRS, etc. Really, I’m completely relying on them to keep me out of jail because I’m not sure I could keep track of it myself.

I left this morning and there was only a floor. Now they’ve already framed out the walls of 1.5 rooms and tore the siding off the existing wall. I will never stop being amazed by their speed.

Apparently our existing roof sags by 1 inch on one side, so they’ve been trying to jack up that side of the roof in-place with mixed success. Apparently in home construction, as with software, integrating with the legacy infrastructure is where some of the hardest and most time consuming problems arise.

Now that the siding has been torn off and I can see the inside of the existing outer wall, it’s fascinating to see its history. In two different spots (and at two different times, judging by the construction) there used to be windows where there is now wall. And the one window that is there used to be taller and at one point was swapped for a smaller window (why would you do that?). And, our back bedroom, which I had been assuming was original 1920 stuff, was actually an addition (a very old one). You can see where they grafted new rafters onto the old ones. Now I have some idea what it’s like to be an archaeologist.

I’d always had the opinion that software development is very similar to construction and I’ve seen nothing to contradict that so far. Our outer wall with all its historical remodels looks just like a system that’s been around a while and has lots of patches worked into its original architecture. The way Levitch has been approaching the building process is similar to agile development, where they came up with a ’story’, then just enough plans to get a permit from the city, but we’ve been modifying bits of the design on the fly as the building takes shape. We’re adding windows here and there, we’re choosing the location of the outlets only when the electrician comes. Of course, there are no unit tests for a house, though.

So the Levitch guys started the day with just the concrete foundation and a sill (?) bolted to the top of it, and by the end of the day today the three of them had put up an ad-hoc tent over the site (it was pouring today), framed out the entire floor of the two rooms and cleaned everything up in neatly boxed piles.

I continue to be amazed by their speed. That and it’s still lots of fun every day to watch the addition take shape.

A really small, fairly cheap dictation gadget that translated my voice to text and stored it that way. This would save lots of space, and make it easy to upload to a computer later.

Back in the beanbag chair waiting for Citrix. Yesterday I went to a session about the internals of the Java Virtual Machine, which was pretty interesting. Really, it was about the JVM from the perspective of someone who want to tweak the performance of their application; I would have preferred just a description of the nuts and bolts of a JVM.

Marc and I are trying to write an article about how most of the nifty performance tweaks and wiggles you see at these kinds of things are red herrings. In my career so far, I’ve dealt with a lot of severe performance problems in systems and none of them have to do with using ‘ints’ or Integers, squeezing a microsecond out of efficient byte code, or whatever. Most of them have been much more fundamental: table scanning a million row table every 5 minutes, making several hundred calls to a database when it could have been one, having too finely grained remote interfaces on a distributed object so you end up making 50,000 network operations when it should be 1,000. That’s the kind of stuff I’d like to see pointed out at a conference.

The biggest “I’ve never thought of that” idea I’ve seen so far was from Michael Rosen in his Service Oriented Architectures session. He was advocating the concept of having several layers of servicess:
Integration bus–just deals with connecting the application to the rest of the environment and converting it’s data schema to a more enterprise standard one
Business bus–starts to add division-level functionality. Built largely on top of the integration bus
Enterprise bus–Really adds together business functionality to achieve lots of useful enterprise wide workflows.
The obvious drawback is performance. But that’s probably solvable if you think about it long enough. Or maybe just make them logically seperate and not necessarily physically seperate.

So I carry around a little green notebook that serves (on again, off again) as my idea book and journal. I’m coming back to it after a long hiatus partially because I need something to take notes in at SD West when the speaker doesn’t give out a slide deck, and partially because I’ve been having more ideas lately after a bit of a break.

It’s got the usual range of writing from embarassing self-conciousness:
“People’s complexity tells the clearest tale” (what does that even mean?)

to embarassing crudeness:
“If split pea soup looks like vomit, what does vomitted split pea soup look like?”

to genuine gems that I’m glad I preserved:
“The fog was graveyard thick”

Of course I’ve got much longer ones, but I don’t feel like typing them.

Much of it is from my college years and contains random ideas for research projects. I’d have thought many of them would sound lame after 8 years of real-world experience, but I’m surprised by how many of them still sound like good ideas today. It’s kind of validating.

Here’s a good one that has real application in building design:
“2 doors, one farther away but open, one nearer but closed and unlocked. Which one will people go into? How far apart do they have to be to make a difference?”

There’s an annoying example of this at Yank Sing Express. There’s a set of double doors to the place, the left door is typically the line of people waiting to order and is propped open by that line of people. The right door is typically closed and is the one that makes the most sense to use to exit. But for some reason when people exit they insist on using the left door, which has a line of people in it and requires people to move out of the way. Almost without fail, exiting customers would rather ask people to move out of the way than just open the stupid right door even though the right door is right in their path. It simply blows me away. Imagine this effect maginfied in a fire or some other panic situation when large volumes of people are trying to exit a building.

Much of my green book has to do with a very pivotal time in my life, when I abandoned wanting to be a firefighter and applied to real colleges, eventually going to UC Davis. It’s been good for me to read myself transforming from someone who hid his talents and intelligence to someone who (I like to think) doesn’t. One thing that isn’t in that journal is a point a year or so later when I realized some of the upper bounds on those talents and that intelligence by meeting truly brilliant people at Harvard (though Lindsey). Paradoxically enough, that was just as liberating.

I wish I’d been updating the green book around the next pivotal time in my life, when Miles was born. But I guess that “point” isn’t over yet anyway.

So I just got out of a session that basically sucked (not the norm for other sessions so far). But I’d made the mistake of 1) talking to the presenter beforehand and 2) sitting right in front. So I couldn’t ditch it without feeling guilty. On the other hand, I thought I was going to tear my fingernails out.

So I pretended to get a cell phone call and left, making sure to open the phone and put it to my ear and move my lips as I walked out. Does that make me a bad person?