Archive for July, 2007

How social pressures make groups weak

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Truth: Organizations of more than three people want roles, not independent thought, because roles can be replaced and manipulated, which is more important in a big organization than getting a job done right.

Big companies want cogs. You hire interchangeable people who do very simple well defined tasks. If one leaves you hire someone else give them the ISO9000 job description and have the replacement up and working in a week. (after the 6 month hiring process)

A “master of all trades” is a threat to any large organization as you can not replace them easily. I had this issue at past jobs luckily I had a boss who knew how to balance the process vs my skills and I was essentially made into a one man prototype lab.

If you have one guy set up firewalls, wire the network, configure the server, write the application, and leave you have no one else who knows all the steps and at best you have to hire several people to replace the person who left.

It may seem silly but large companies/organizations want consistency over brilliance.

If you are hired as a contractor by a big company/agency they expect you to follow procedure. That means not building your own machine, not moving it from shelf 1 to shelf 2, etc. UNLESS that was what you were contracted to do.

Following process adds a lot of time, but some people working these governmental jobs are only comfortable with a single well defined task. If you comes in and do it all you are threatening the roles of other groups and probably skipping steps of documentation, communication, etc.

The larger a organization the more communication is necessary.

I can set up a new application server (including writing a basic application from scratch) in 3-6 months, but to communicate it and document it through a large organization will take several more months. The larger the organization the more communication and documentation that is required.

This is very frustrating, but if it is not documented and communicated then it may be duplicated elsewhere and then there are two applications to support instead of one. ^

Truth: creativity comes from a certain amount of external freedom, but a
larger amount of internal drive, and while it does not reward
day-to-day existence, it is where we get almost all of our real
lifestyle improvements.

In industry, it is common to see creative engineers working in their spare time, or working during evenings and weekends, on their “secret” project. If they asked their manager for authorization, the manager would likely say “No!”, so the creative people keep their project secret until it is completed or it becomes clear that their concept will not work. ^

Truth: when you want something to be done right, the only qualifier is the
intelligence and experience of the worker.

The key issue at play is that a great developer is streets ahead of a good developer in much the same way that a chess Grand Master is streets ahead of a Master.

It’s not just Mr Spolsky who says this, it’s a point backed up with solid research and a point that Steve McConnell makes in Code Complete. While others point to productivity gains, Joel also points out that great developers have other kinds of smarts too, and that this can pay off in ways unrelated to pure code quality.

Given the need to recruit the very few great developers out there, what is the best way of going about it? If these developers are that great, how is it that you can make them interested in the first place? How can you even get to them (placing ads online only nets thousands of CVs from not-great developers)? ^

Truth: Because of fear of its instability and replacement cost, companies prefer to hire tools or import tools, because they can easily manipulate them or replace them; they are afraid of hiring smart people because of the risk, and the risk of them leaving.

Countering claims that the United States is facing a critical shortage of skilled technologists, former IT professionals like Lovelace and Adler point to depressed wages and their inability to score even preliminary interviews as evidence that the market is already flooded. Yet at the same time, technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, asserting that their ability to function at full capacity is being hampered by the lack of qualified technologists, are furiously pressing Congress to allow more temporary high-tech workers into the country by raising the cap on how many H-1B temporary foreign worker visas are issued. Indeed, on the first day in April 2007 that H-1B petitions could be filed, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was overwhelmed with more than 150,000 petitions from employers hoping to snag some of the 65,000 general visas available for fiscal 2008. ^

Truth: Thinking in terms of cogs furthers central control. You say, and yes-people down the line repeat, but they fail to warn you when things aren’t quite working. This is why most dictators and CEOs fail. This phenomenon is bad enough in small business, but at the corporate level becomes insane because we don’t have just one layer of yes-people, but 100 layers.

Companies need to stop thinking about their developers as cogs in the machine. They are more akin to artists, authors, designers, architects, scientists, or CEOs. Would your HR department rush to find the first person who would willing to take on the role of Chief Scientist, Art Director, or CEO in your company? Of course not, theywould spend the time to do a through talent search for just the right candidate, court them, and then compensate them appropriately. They realize that having the wrong person in that seat is much worse thanhaving the seat empty. It is absolutely the same with programming. ^

Truth: Any group of people that has gone from youth to maturity to a moribund state will tend toward this construction, where it prefers manipulable people to independent thinkers and therefore, fails. Sometimes, this happens in dot-coms when they are startups, and sometimes only when they achieve near-monopoly status while maintaining a cult-like, religious atmosphere.

The five major measures of U.S. debt—from national to household—keep setting records, he observes in his section on “Borrowed Prosperity,” and the real estate boom spurred by the Federal Reserve, he argues, cannot continue. Phillips identifies the escalating clout of the financial services industry and suggests that Americans should emulate policies in Asia that encourage savings and in Europe that encourage manufacturing. The lesson of the past, he warns, is that intractable national issues “generate weak and compromising politicians or zealous bumblers.” A critic of the Bush family, Phillips sees little hope in Hillary Clinton. ^

I didn’t start this topic to be depressing. I wanted to show how the pressures of getting along as a group force mediocrity. A large corporation would rather hire cogs than experts. A government wants simple, predictable answers and not solutions. We’ve gotten too good as a species at playing the game and not good enough at looking outside of the box (thinking outside of the box is a misnomer, as once you get outside of the box normal thinking will work just fine).

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Google a form of interactive fiction

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

William Gibson: Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page. There have been threads on my Web site –readers Googling and finding my footprints. I still get people asking me about “the possibilities of interactive fiction,” and they seem to have no clue how we’re already so there. ^

Why bother making novels hypertext anymore? Google is the footnote finder for footnotes that weren’t footnoted. I don’t think this constitutes “true” hyperfiction, in that it is one-way links from text to linear footnotes, but maybe if Gibson got together with the people with the highest page rank on each term, he could set up his own link maze to keep people happy.

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In praise of editors

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself.

In an odd way, the exchange between writer and editor encapsulates the process of growing up. The act of writing is godlike, omnipotent, infantile. Your piece is a statement delivered from on high, a pronouncement ex cathedra, as egotistical and unchecked as the wail of a baby. Then it goes out into the world, to an editor, and the reality principle rears its ugly head. You are forced as a writer to come to terms with the gap between your idea and your execution — and still more deflating, between your idea and what your idea should have been.

…

Still, editors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It’s also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent — and perhaps more training — will be required.

We already use other readers to sort things out for us: My bookmarks are mostly referrals from writers I’ve learned to trust. Some utopians may dream that an anarcho-Wikipedia model will prevail, that a vast self-correcting democracy of amateurs will end up pointing readers to
the most worthwhile pieces. But that is only “editing” in its crudest, most general form — it’s really sorting. In the chaotic new online universe, the old-fashioned, elitist, non-democratic system of sorting information will become increasingly important, if only because it enforces a salutary reduction of the sheer mind-swamping number of options available. The real problem is glut, and it’s only going to get worse.

In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day — and it’s this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It’s edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don’t want to
get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can’t breathe or think. ^

This article is worth its weight in gold. An old-school newspaper or book editor had three roles: first, pick the stuff that has the potential to go somewhere. Next, re-arrange it so it makes sense. Finally, the physical role of editing, or making the sentences as clean and efficient as possible and eliminating errors. It’s similar to how writing is first picking a concept, next expressing it well, and finally the mechanical process of writing, whether with pen or keyboard.

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Why computer-related fiction is terrible

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

As someone who writes computer security related fiction, I have a vested interest in seeing what others do in my quest, which is somewhere between “desired profession”, hobby and religious fanaticism. What I’ve found divides nicely between the technically accurate but boring, the technical abstract but exciting, and the complete fantasy that makes no sense.

Dan Brown’s “Digital Fortress” was the first book that really shocked me. It fits into the latter category, for combining research gleaned from Scientific American and Slashdot with a whopping dose of unrealistic fantasy. It left me with the same feeling I had after watching the movie “Hackers.” Wow, this one has a PCI bus, and my eyes wandered after that.

I’m accustomed to some of the better writing from the second category, like the William Gibson and John Brunner cyberspace fantasies, and have only encountered the first type on the net as unpublished work of interest to a small community. I think the divide comes about because of a need for stories to romanticize reality, and technical accuracy pulls in a different direction.

For example, if I want to write a post-modern style story, I need to find a meta-metaphor to give people that sense of profound, life-changing theory about the story. This means I’m going to have to contort my writing around the idea of an XOR, or character escapes, or the idea of layers in packeted networking. It’s not a terrible gig, but it’s by nature very cerebral.

It’s too much easier to create The Matrix instead, where we get the hacking out of the way early on so the kung fu and cryptic concept salad dialogue can take over. But not all of us have given up, and there are some out here who believe that good science “equals” good fiction, in the way the older science fiction authors like Heinlein, Wells, Dick and Bradbury did.

Christopher Blanc writes computer security related fiction and “post-postmodern” fiction by night, and works in the IT industry by day. Blog originally posted at Slashdot.

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How to user-proof a new computer

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Although people know me as a writer of fiction in my personal life, my day job is fixing computers, so when someone I know needs work done, I often get the call. Recently someone I used to work with as a computer consultant called me up to help install a home PC for a sibling in town. Because I’m nice and/or stupid, I did it.

The experience was not bad at all, since the user was kind and understanding. What stuck in my head however is how not ready for use the average Windows installation is. They try to get the user going with some kind of video-based training, but that isn’t going to work for most people who find it horribly tedious and would rather play. My approach is different: I clear out the unnecessary, organize the computer appropriately, and then let ‘em rip so they can learn by playing.

Here’s a list of important steps:

1. Disable all crapware, even if it seems useful. Rip the installed programs list down to the bare minimum.
2. Update all drivers. I’ve rarely had to roll back.
3. Set the system swap file to be twice the size of the memory installed in the machine.
4. Add a firewall, install FireFox or Safari or Opera to replace Internet Explorer, and remove virus scanners.
5. Add Pegasus Mail, Thunderbird or Opera mail to replace outlook, and disable HTML mail and .exe, .vbs and .js attachments.
6. Clear all extra icons off the desktop. They need My Computer, My Documents and the Trash and that’s it.
7. Uncheck all protocols except TCP/IP in the network configuration.
8. Set up a user account with Administrator rights, but keep the Administrator account in case they need bailing out.
9. Set up a guest account for drunken friends, idiots and clueless family members to use. You can set the password to TOIDI or NOROM to really fool ‘em.
10. Run HijackThis and remove all unnecessary start up actions.
11. Go through your task manager, using this guide or one like it, and remove unnecessary programs.

This will take you the better part of three hours, but if you do this and then backup the system, you will have set your friends on the path toward sanity instead of confusion. They’ll thank you someday.

Originally written on Slashdot

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