There is nothing I’d rather do than give up this day job with $BIG_COMPANY and survive on my writing while I whiled away the days trying to learn to code to maybe build an app that I want. Apparently (according to a thread on Twitter) startup businesses require passion and if you’re not willing to code for pizza then you’re not showing passion. And not showing any balls.

That’s shite.

I can’t do this because I have responsibilities. I have a mortgage, kids to feed, a house to run. It’s just not an option. And the answer I get? Rent! WTF? Have you seen the prices of rental properties these days? You might as well pay a mortgage because at least then you have a long term gain in equity.

Five years ago this month I was in the unenviable position of finding out that the directors of the company I was working for were in cahoots and were embezzling. I’d been hired to run the technical department which, in the end, turned out to be the only pat of the business that actually made any money - everything else just made loss after loss which is how you burn through half a million pounds worth of debt in six months. They got off scot free (typically) and disappeared to their other business in England (where, for a annual fee you can get substandard techno-luddite telephone support for your Mac). I had a couple of weeks to act and there were livelihoods to take into account. I had a young child and one on the way so I had responsibilities but the choice was to go find another job or stick my neck out. I convinced Apple’s UK MD to take a chance with us, took my savings and started Mac-Sys. During the next year I would realise that business and friendship are not compatible - and as a result I lost some friends who wouldn’t work. I would discover that the only people who truly believe in you are your children - and god bless them for that (and they’ll grow out of it soon enough). And I would find that I’m not as hard nosed in business as I should be but I’m enough of a cvnt to make something work. These were not lessons that came easily.

For the last two years I’ve been trying to start a software company. Iteration 1 was when Aidan took on SyncBridge. He worked his ass off and produced some real miracles but a shaky API and Apple undercutting us with Calendar Server put paid to our dreams. As it would happen we were a year ahead of the competition, a market for syncing that is now over-run with competitors. For Iteration 2, we hired Steve into Mac-Sys and he wrote the first rendition of ‘macserv’, a web application designed to make the running of an AASP easier. To Steve’s credit, he had a job herding cats to get the processes defined but he managed it. And this only stopped because I recruited him into $BIG_COMPANY (which had been my way of escape). For Iteration 3, we tried again with Aidan, Steve, Philip and Jordan on board but everyone is pulled in different directions. It was always our ‘other job’ and frequently lost out to family, the fact that the day job killed my enthusiasm for things and everyone had priorities. I’m left wondering what to do next.

You see. The first and third Iterations were all done ‘for pizza’. There was a promise of rewards but there were a lot of steps to bypass between now and then. Both ended up falling over because, end of the day, if it’s not putting the bread on the table, it’s not a priority. The second Iteration worked because we had someone working on it and yeah, perhaps we need to look at that again.

I don’t want to ask anyone to code for pizza again.

As the months pass in $BIG_COMPANY, it becomes clearer to me what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.

1. Not this. It’s not even that I dislike corporate wage slave culture. I actually have no issues with it. I loved my time in Nortel and only moved on because timing, opportunity and encouragement were right. This is just mind-numbing. And typical, of course, of worst-class pandering to executives while stripping the workers of their pay rises. Not good enough for me.
2. I’m also not sure about whether I want to get back into IT work. It’s something (I think) I’m good at, having done it for over a decade now and there are new areas of business I’d like to move into, certainly, but the allure of crawling around chasing cables in a dusty footwell under a desk just doesn’t have the same appeal.
3. There are some things I’m totally enamoured with. Ubiquitous wireless. Co-Working. Bedouin working. The ‘Presence’ aspect of social software. The tricky thing is how to get all of that to pay a mortgage and feed a dog. Yes, I have a plan. I just need the timing to be right (after all I’ve got a full dance card until around September).

At the moment, with someone leaving $BIG_COMPANY every week, it doesn’t surprise me that I feel this way (and that I’m obviously not alone). I do wonder what sort of job you have to be in to get the freedom to attend talks and trips like Paddy’s Valley. I asked to attend a 1 day Open Source event in Belfast and was told it would be annual leave - some companies have such vision!

The answer is therefore to figure out what I really want to do, get paid for doing it, and wander off into the sunset.

It’s the question that drives us.

I’ve already pledged a desk (that I’ll be unlikely to use but will pay for anyway) and Mac-Sys is pledging a couple of iMacs. A lot of this depends on other people who are interested in finding an inexpensive workplace where they will meet other ‘working’ people.

Watch David and Andy’s blogs for more.

“One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.

Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.”

I’ve been very harsh about $BIG_COMPANY in the past but this is one thing they get right. Emergencies are all about response time and everything else happens when there’s time to do it. This means that if the business starts to lose production/manufacturing time then it’s all hands on deck. Conversely if it’s not going to have a direct effect on production/manufacturing (like getting a password reset) then it’ll happen at some point that’s otherwise hard to predict.

So while I agree that urgency is a demotivator - mostly because it’s always someone else’s urgency and they’re in your face about it - I don’t think I can agree either way.

Emergencies aside, the concept that urgency is poisonous only covers one half of the exchange. What you perceive as non-urgent might be an urgency for another person, a source of frustration and pain for their day, the start of a bad day which eventually will lead to a dinner eaten in silence. Been there, done that.

Try and make a positive difference to other people’s days. I take this theory seriously even when just driving to work: there’s no harm in slowing and letting people out in front of you or being a caring and courteous driver so you’re not causing other people stress first thing in the morning. I don’t speed, I overtake only when I need to and I’m pretty good at letting people out. As the day wears on, however, you can see the effect of a few hours of frustration. I can’t wait to get onto the main road and on the way home. I frown at people who drive carelessly and there’s a greatly reduced chance that I’ll wave you on. I just want to get home. And for the most part it’s because my priorities for the day have already been relegated to ‘non-urgent’ by someone else.

I used to get endlessly frustrated when commissioning a new building and finding that the builders were late, the sparks and plumbers late, the plasterers were slow and the painters delayed…which delayed the furniture and meant that the Technology installation would also be delayed. It caused issues with other projects but mostly the frustration was that the deadline for finishing hadn’t moved. All of these other people treated their work as non-urgent and it always seemed to be my technology team that had to recoup this difference. And every time we delivered, nomatter the personal costs.

I see this in software development as well. The software engineers are delayed because they don’t have the hardware or compilers. This delays the testing and QA. But the release date never slips. You just end up having inadequate QA and testing. And you thought there was a mystery about why most software sucks?

In my own company I understand the urgencies of the customer. Which is why we bought extra equipment for customers who needed a loaner machine due to a pending deadline. But getting access to it required staying calm, dispelling of hyperbole and as little self-entitlement and whining as possible.

Take ownership of urgency. Especially the urgency of others.

“…four guys, a car full of props and gear, and a boatload of post-production time, can recreate the Normandy Invasion of WWII. All it takes is a lot of creativity, patience, and running. Lots of running, climbing, and, well, falling down.

Mike Cane on modern film-making:

“I bring up Danger Man for an important reason.
Why isn’t something like this being done on the Net?
Why are people taking all that wonderful, affordable digital production technology and producing absolute shit with it?
There were some sets in Danger Man that couldn’t have been more than ten feet deep and comprised of only two walls.”

“Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And it’s creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-’90s way, when it’s a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.”

This is the #1 demotivator for me when it comes to software development. It’s an unreasonable fear and like all unreasonable fears it has to be overcome. Being afraid to do something because someone else will do it is simply stupid as is giving up when a big competitor comes on the scene. If they see it as a viable market then it’s actually an exceedingly viable market for the small business. You’ll have to fight against their ability to leverage market pressure and the two biggest issues there are going to be:

• They can offer for free what you’re selling
• The end user likely already has a login to their authentication system

Yes, it’s hard to fight against that kind of pressure but who told you that being an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) was going to be easy?

There are a lot of big company projects out there that start as skunkworks where someone has an idea and a project manager gives them enough rope to run for a while as long as they don’t step out of the yard. Google somewhat circumvents this with the 80:20 work week - 20% of the time you’re permitted to work on projects that interest you. It’s a sneaky way to use/abuse geeks who have a persistent work ethic (the things they love working on, that others would see as ‘work’, they see as enjoyment!). This kind of behaviour is why Google, though massive, still retains some agility and is able to throw out new and exciting stuff on a relatively regular interval. Compare this to Yahoo or Microsoft who haven’t given us anything interesting in years.

Just because Google has completely ripped off the look and feel of your app doesn’t mean you should stop. And that also goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, Yahoo or any of the other 900lb gorillas in the market. You’ve got a good product I hope, you have some first mover advantage (in that people have already been paying you money) and you’ve already been thinking of what to do next with your application (which means when some copycat clones you, you can wait, see the effect on sales and then release your planned upgrade).

That said: if you think you could lose 80% of your customer base to this new free service run by one of the big nasty companies out there and this would cause you to lose a significant percentage of income and endanger your company, then you need to start diversifying.

Nothing is harder on your laurels than sitting on them.

Really it’s a couple of pages describing how to meaninfully interact with a nerd who is painted for the most part as being a borderline Autistic with directional (and somewhat immutable) focus.

…control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Think travel. Think job changes. These types of system-redefining events force your nerd to recognize that the world is not always or entirely a knowable place, and until he reconstructs this illusion, he’s going to be frustrated and he’s going to act erratically.

The stresses of “the real world”, where people are erratic and inconsistent, lie, cheat, grandstand, self-promote and generally act in socially acceptable ways is just not where my comfort zone is. I like to be with people I know and trust. While PeeJ may consider me to be present the air of being obnoxious (and he’s probably right), there’s a much more complex interplay here as despite the fact I don’t communicate well (his word was ‘atrociously’) I’m not doing too badly. I think.

The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerd’s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. It’s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where he’s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.

Yup. Which is why I can have the SlingPlayer open, while surfing the web with Godlike open at page 285 and email and IM conversations going. It may not be efficient but it gives me happy. It’s hard for other people to understand this and it often seems untidy because, by extension, we really ‘need’ 30″ high resolution screens attached to our laptops to keep everything visible and a large desk with our papers, books and pet projects. Our attention may wander to any one of these things (and I believe it’s part of the good procrastination thing that I’ve talked about before).

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates.

I had a rather negative experience of this recently where it was assumed that when I met her friends I’d automatically embarrass her because I’m not interested in football or cars. I am, however, interested in computers, technology, gadgets, business and suchlike and a lot of other guys are too. This was highlighted a couple of weeks later when we went out for dinner with one of my friends and his wife. We geeks successfully stayed away from our geek topics while the conversation steered itself around shoes, hair, weddings, holidays and other essential stuff and the only references to our nerdish tendencies was when the womenfolk brought them up. These geek things were, after all, the reason we were in a nice restaurant, eating nice food and having good conversation.

If you’ve got a seriously shy nerd on your hands, try this: ask him how many folks are in his buddy list? How many friends does he have in Facebook? How many folks are following him on Twitter? LiveJournal? My guess is that, collectively, your nerd interacts with ten times more people than you think he does.

I would agree absolutely that I interact daily with more people during my downtime at home than I do during my work day and also any other time. My buddy lists are huge and used every day. I twitter. I blog. I receive and respond to emails. I run more than one forum. Social skills? Yeah I got them. It’s again back to the small talk.

Looking back earlier this week to a wedding I attended, I don’t think it was immediately apparent that I was a geek though I was and so were my friends there. Geeks aren’t bad at all - they have incredible attention to detail and, unlike a lot of other sorts of people, they do have passion for things. Passion is something sadly missing in most people’s lives (or if they have it, it’s for the beer or the football which I consider to be unconstructive).

I’m not going to sweat it. The people I love, love me for who I am now. Though I admit that I dress (and smell) a lot better since her indoors came on the scene. I even like aftershave now…

“self-funded small business that encourages people to stay away from the VCs, says you don’t need to live in San Francisco to be successful, suggests that charging for your products is a good thing, espouses the advantages of small teams, applauds shorter work weeks with more reasonable hours, rejects the notion of traditional ‘seriousness business stuff,’ and believes keeping it simple is the way to success.”

Yup

Jason Calacanis was hounded a little last week with his comments about workaholics but it’s worth looking at what he said rather than the rants about how people interpreted them.

when you don’t love what you do it sucks.

I can totally empathise with this as I keep working on trying to do the switch again? Explain? Okay. I will, but not here.

Jason also says
Very much paraphrased here…and removing some points which I don’t feel can apply universally.

• Buy Macs. They’ll save you money in the long run
• Buy an extra monitor for everyone. Makes people happy and productive
• Buy lunch. Often.
• Find a good accountant to handle tax and wages

This, the Jason Calacanis/37Signals model is the model I already run with for the most part, but there are limits, e.g.

• I think most customers would prefer that Mac-Sys was open 6 days a week rather than 5 (but that limitation comes from the Enterprise Park and not from us). We have campaigned repeatedly to get this changed…
• The hosting company needs to be available 7 days a week. That’s just a reality. Nothing can be done about that and it’s up there with my own expectations.
• Infurious could get away with a 4 day week, probably less considering everyone is working at it part time at the moment anyway.

but the issue with all of this is in terms of equality. Rolling out something to one group and not another isn’t egalitarian and therefore I’m not willing to consider it. It’s not an issue at the moment because the hosting company and Infurious are both still in startup mode. Working conditions are not bad at all - it’s not a stressed environment, they get to work with interesting people every day, they do stuff they enjoy and the only aggro was who gets to play their music on the Airport Express. But it’s not perfect, we’re starting to get tight on space and I’m feeling more and more that a city centre location (or one walkable to from the major bus and train stops) would be better for everyone.

I think 2008 will be a time for me to work on improving the working conditions for everyone.

Apple engineer: …and the layout needs to take into account ligatures and contextual forms, where adjacent letters change glyphs depending on neighboring characters, or even merge into a single glyph.

Sun engineer: C’mon, is this important? How many people need advanced typographic features like that, anyway?

Apple engineer: [after a pause] Well, there are over 900 million of them in India alone, and another 200 million or so in the Arabic world.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been bashing my head off a brick wall for, well, years. Motivating people to not do ‘half-a-job’ is actually hard.

Yesterday I almost had a stand up argument with a guy in my team in $BIG_COMPANY on the definition of ‘complete documentation’. I want documentation that can be read and understood by novices and managers. He wants it to be opaque enough so that you require understanding in order to work with it. In the end we sat down and he demonstrated it to me and I tried it. Within about 5 minutes we hit the first stumbling block in his documentation. He asked if I had the database interfaces set up. I replied “The what, the who and the where?”. So we need to add a piece about database interfaces. Then we needed to add another piece about how to log into the server. Then how to run an update. Then how to publish the updates. Then how to check the updates have been completed. In all, the additional bits were more than twice the original document and spawned two more wiki pages. In the end he agreed with me, the documentation was half done but the journey was a lot harder than it should have been.

Writing technical documentation is not an art. Writing it for non-technical users in order to help them learn is not an art. It just requires removing assumptions.

When building my second office in Mac-Sys, we had a square room to modify and the original assumption was to put a single wall, parallel to one of the other walls, in. By questioning the assumptions (that a single wall, parallel to another wall was the only way to go) we put in a ’shaped’ wall which provided us with nearly 50% more wall space in a room where wall space was a premium (for shelving, storage, desks, etc).

If you’re in a job you don’t like and your choices are (or seem to be)
a. leave
b. suffer
Then you really should be looking for c.. I can’t tell you what c. is for you but when I was in Nortel it was as a simple as bringing in a laptop to work with me and increasing my productivity (and reducing my frustration with Windows NT). There may be ways you can change your work day in order to improve your work life. Would working part time from home make a difference? Would time-shifting your work day by an hour help? (I much prefer working from 07:30-16:00 as it removes a LOT of traffic from my commute).

Remove your assumptions and consider new ways.

There is always a c.