Marcin Floryan

On Tuesday I have had a very interesting evening. It was time for the ALE Bathtub IV conference – Christmas Edition, the informal, webinar-style event organised by the ALE network as yet another way to share ideas and grow the network. Catia, who lead the organisational effort this time, invited me to contribute and, with some trepidation, I agreed.

I’m glad I did.

Despite some technical problems with citrix I’ve managed to share my ideas with others and they seem to have been very well received. Thank you very much for listening.

If you missed some of the slides, or would like a reminder, here is the prezi about “Where Bad Code Comes From”

I’ll try to take the ideas presented here further and let you see the presentation live at the next event near you

I keep thinking of @mfloryan‘s difficult conversation thing. Sometimes I just can’t face the long, involved discussion w/ our PO. But must.

07/12/2011 5:20 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@lisacrispin

lisacrispin

@mfloryan Great talk. Got me thinking #alebathtub

06/12/2011 9:34 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SannyGR

Sandra Warmolts

A great talk on #alebathtub by @mfloryan

06/12/2011 9:34 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@madsth

Mads Troels Hansen

Bravo @mfloryan ! That was probably one of the #alebathtub alltime highs!

06/12/2011 9:32 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@michael_leber

Michael Leber

@mfloryan great talk at #ALEBathtub!!! You made my day!!!

06/12/2011 9:32 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@vinylbaustein

Thorsten O. Kalnin

lol @mfloryan presentations is awesome #ALEBathtub

06/12/2011 9:26 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@CatOliv

Catia Oliveira

The idea of maintaining a healthy life-work balance looks like a good idea in our ever faster, ever busier world, a top aspiration for many, mostly those who feel they work too much.

Perhaps it helps some but I don’t buy into this model.

To suggest that life and work must remain balanced is to suggest they are two opposites. It immediately brings to my mind an image of a weighing balance scale. To add to one pan automatically upsets the other. In order to improve your work, you have to sacrifice personal life, if order for your life to benefit, work must suffer. That’s the consequence of a balancing act and achieving the fragile state of equilibrium requires constant expense of energy. To maintain balance is a never ending struggle, no wonder we so often fail.

I prefer to use a different model.

To me life and work are more like two sides of the same coin. Adding to one side enhances the whole. Things that I learn at home turn out useful at work, new ideas from work can be helpful for the family. My wife says: “I can be a better mother when I find fulfilment at work” – I concur. We can exercise different parts of our brains if different settings, we satisfy different desires through varied activities. I don’t stop thinking about my kids when I’m in the office, I’m happy to continue considering a new design back at home.

Which model to adapt is entirely up to you and it can have great impact on your happiness and satisfaction. Choose wisely and consciously.

P.S. If you feel I have brushed-off the issue of time, I did so because there is already a great answer about it: Time isn’t the problem.

I think the recruitment model for professionals working in the field of software development is broken. That’s the overwhelming impression I get observing different job specifications and approach of several recruitment agencies. There are more things broken than can sensibly be put in a single post. For now I want to focus on just one, the common, and in my opinion incorrect (or at least simplistic), use of the word skill.

Dear recruiters I think you are confusing skills and technologies. They are not the same thing.

01/11/2011 11:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mfloryan

Marcin Floryan

Yes, so many CVs (actually, mine included, to be rectified shortly) give a list of technologies under the section grandly entitled “skills” and the “skills” employers require are often: “5 years of ASP.NET” or “C# .NET 3.5″. Yet the first English dictionary I could find (and a few others I followed up on) give the definition of skill along the lines of:

skill (noun) – The ability to do something well.

So how do you “do C# well” or how do you “do SQL Server well” – these are not actions that you can execute, at best these are technologies that you can use. Even then, we don’t say “I can use my car well” but rather “I drive well”. We focus on the outcome of our actions and not the particulars of how we execute them. I would  much rather see the expectations and abilities expressed indeed as skills:

• writing readable code
• creating usable web applications
• designing decoupled components
• selecting appropriate data access layer
• using data access technology with understanding of performance

I hope it changes and yet I have an impression it won’t be soon, after all it would require people who deal with recruitment to understand what software development is really about.

Nature has its surprising ways of keeping balance. While some celebrate their birthdays, others pass away.

My grandfather, Zygmunt Glazer, has always been fascinated by nature. He loved to explore the world around him trying to understand how it all works. By the time I was born, he has already become a well know professor of geology and an author of popular and highly praised textbooks on soil mechanics. I’m not sure he would have necessarily chosen a path into academia had it not been for the particular political circumstances in Poland after the WWII. I’m glad he did, as generations of students benefited (although, I am told, he was a rather demanding teacher).

I know he wanted to be remembered not only as a keen scientist and a teacher but also as an engineer and a practitioner who helped rebuild Warsaw. He contributed to major civil engineering projects throughout his career be it in mines, power plants, dams or, more recently, motorways. Although he came from Łódź, he lived most of his life in Warsaw and took active part in the Warsaw Uprising. The one lesson he would always repeat, this experience has taught him, was never to shoot at people.

He never stopped learning and decided to move his writing to a computer when well into his 80s. I might have had a hand in that.

While many engineers where still focused on solving linear differential equations he would tell me the real world was in fact better described by nonlinear systems, though they pose orders of magnitude more difficult problems to solve. He introduced me to the chaos theory and gave me the great “Chaos: Making a New Science” book by James Gleick.

He left me with the important thought that we should always question what we know and always strive for a better, deeper, fresh understanding of the phenomena around us.

Dear grandpa, I’m keeping your valuable advice.

No, it’s not going to be about the next version of the Android operating system.

I missed the Energized Work book club yesterday but managed to see the video by Benjamin that was being discussed. Together with this presentation I bumped into on twitter it prompted me to consider how we give feedback.

The traditional management approach to giving feedback was to get it all out, straight and with no adornments. Perhaps you might have experienced something like this:

You are really poor at wiring these specifications. No one can understand them. Developers are complaining, customers can’t read them. It really isn’t working. I know you can do better, you just have to try harder.

When I was doing my line manager’s training I was told we need to be more considerate and should use the “sandwich” approach when giving feedback; our information should come in threes: positive – negative – positive. Wrapping damning remarks in a cosy blanket of positive appreciation is supposed to make them more acceptable and easier to act upon. To improve even further we can go a step further and replace the negative critique with constructive criticism: positive – constructive – positive. Let’s try:

Hi. I have spoken to our customer recently. They really liked how you kept them engaged when you were writing the specification. Great job, it really worked. There was just this bit where you described the calculation rules. Nobody seem to have understood it, not even the developers. You should improve how you communicate the technical details and keep you positive attitude. I really like how you approach your tasks with enthusiasm and dedication.

I don’t know. Is it better? I followed good advice, will it really help the person improve?

Coming back to this dialogue later I was trying to remember and write what I might have been thinking during that meeting:

I have all these new ideas about being a good manager. I must try them out.

I’m off to a good start, nice piece of personal positive feedback. They feel good so I can get on with the real stuff.

Thy didn’t have a clue about the technical side of it. I should have written it myself! I’m not sure if they will ever learn.

Anyway, time to close off with a positive spin.

Am I not the best manager ever?!

Even if it’s a bit exagerrated it’s not very far off. How often do we think like that? How often do we even check what we think?

Well, at least I’m glad they didn’t hear that, right? Wait… No! It’s me who didn’t hear that. They, on the other hand, surely have picked up hints from my tone, gestures and posture.

Not that good after all.

So how about this:

- Tell me a little bit about your last piece of work. How did it go?

- […]

- Sounds like it went well then. I’m glad to hear that. I was speaking with out customer earlier today and they really enjoyed it too. Thanks. So did you find anything difficult with this task?

- […]

- Yes, those calculation rules looked very complex indeed. It would have been a challenge for anyone to document them well. What do you think?

- […]

- I think we could try to find ways to present such information in a cleaner way. Would you like to try that? Is there anything I could help you with…

Now this looks like it may actually lead to some meaningful improvements.

Less advocacy, more inquiry.