Looking Forward to the Next Decade

Back for another year in review.

Being a blogger opens you up to scrutiny and criticism.  I use this forum as a way to share knowledge about the agile reformation.  I attempt to argue in good faith and provide others with a voice.  I am a passionate advocate, and that passion clouded my reason leading to some big mistakes.  Fortunately, my discourse avoids bitterness so when I eat my words; I do it gladly.  The most treacherous blog of the year is my annual predictions.  Sometimes, I am an oracle with an accurate vision of the future.  Other times, I blunder like a drunken person in a dark room; time will tell if any of my predictions are correct.

The “Breakup,” of Big Tech-

Continuing issues with Facebook, Alphabet, and Microsoft will prompt regulators in the United States to pursue anti-trust suits and legislation to regulate the technology industry.  The efforts by congress will create tremendous pushback from the technology industry.  I expect to see billions of dollars spent on lobbying efforts.  Additionally, political candidates will fundraise and stump for votes by publicly bashing large tech companies.  The technology business does need oversight but I am afraid 2020 is going to have little meaningful reform.

Fighting Corrupt Agile-

As agile becomes more prevalent in organizations, bad actors and corrupt practices will flourish.  The article, “Agile is Whatever Management Says It Is,” was one of the most insightful articles in 2019 business press.  The article discusses how management professionals will demand behavior and process changes from others while clinging to their self-destructive practices.  It is up to us in the agile community to fight this corruption.

“Radical Candor” in the New Decade-

Kim Scott wrote an excellent book on the topic of business communication.  I feel that is will be used by business leaders to improve their performance and the performance of the people they serve.  The difference between “radical candor,” and “manipulative insincerity,” are going to be crucial for leading a successful global business.

I look forward to spreading the word.

The Awful Election of 2020- 

I steer away from politics on this blog.  The internet contains better takes on political rhetoric.  If you are a conservative or liberal, there are plenty of authors on-line to provide insight and perspective.

The presidential election is going to be awful.  The pugilistic style of President Trump and the cultish behavior of the GOP is going to make the election an exercise in pain tolerance.  Democrats will be accused of socialism, infanticide, and having over-due library books.  The very nature of what and who Americans are will come into question.  It will be ugly.  In victory or defeat, the president will be petulant, and regardless of the outcome, our nation will seem smaller as a result.  I hate feeling this pessimistic.

I hope these words are not too bitter.  I am sure I will have to eat them someday.  Thanks for spending the year reading the blog, and I look forward to more writing in the next decade.

Until next time.

Be on the Look Out for Workism

Even Elves need some rest.

The Christian holidays are close and it is easy to become caught up in the bustle of parties, shopping, and family gatherings.  The biggest challenge is weighing the exclusive demands of family and career.  Derek Thompson wrote an excellent article about the subject earlier this month.  As a member of the agile reformation, I want to remind my fellow professionals of the danger of workism.

Speaking for myself, I become a software developer for two reasons. The first reason was I was chasing the hype and wealth of the first internet boom.  It was a giddy and stupid time where Bill Clinton was president, and anyone with a “.com” at the end of their company name wasted millions of dollars.  I wanted to be one of those twentysomething or thirtysomething millionaires writing code instead of being told to smile more while casino patrons blew cigarette smoke into my face.  The other reason was I was good at it.  I became a wizard with Microsoft Office and was soon glancing at Visual Basic code like I was reading the morning news.  My dream of working afternoon drive at a classic rock radio station evolved into becoming a web developer.  The pay was better and it gave me a career that I did not enjoy in my twenties.

Looking back, I realized I joined the technology during a dramatic period of expansion.  I was one of the numerous anonymous workers who helped construct the contemporary internet we enjoy today.  I was an early consumer of social media with a MySpace page.  I was using a smartphone before the birth of Android.  I witnessed the evolution of Microsoft from an evil empire to an innovator in Cloud computing.

It was not an easy road to travel.  I failed numerous times, working for every type of business imaginable.  I became an entrepreneur and failed, and each setback and disappointment set the stage for more significant success.  These experiences helped me coach other professionals so that they avoid the mistakes I made in my career.

It is also a profession where less than one percent of the world population can do it successfully.  It often means cramming various amounts of work into a single workweek.  Developers and network engineers work long hours keeping the global economy working.  It is intellectually demanding and detail-oriented.  Imagine a world where checks do not manifest, or shopping on-line comes to a stop. It is a nightmare world I would not like to live in.

The lucrative work and the shortage of people who can do it successfully translate into long hours.  Thompson in his essay in the Atlantic talks about workism.  It is a career focus that puts family, friends, and community at arm’s length.  High skill workers benefit from long hours in ways that low skill workers do not.  If you work in technology, you are expected to work long hours because it is cost-prohibitive to find people who can do the work.  It is also the only way for a professional to advance in their career.  As Thompson says in his essay,

“At many firms, insanely long hours are the skeleton key to the C-suite and partner track.  Thus, overwork becomes a kind of arms race among similarly talented workers, exacerbated by the ability to never stop working, even at home.  It’s mutually assured exhaustion.”

Executives enjoy exploiting this arms race to get more out of their employees.  In the agile world, we need to push back against this exploitation.  Countless studies point out overwork is counter-productive.  Workism has severe consequences for employee health.  It hurts morale.  It also undermines the quality of the work.  Agile is about “Healthy Ownership,” a sustainable pace and delivering value to customers at a more reasonable pace.  Anything else is waste and exploitation. As an agile coach or scrum master, please be on the watch for workism.  It is a path that leads to poor quality and burnout.  The better way is Agile which is a more sustainable, satisfying and safe way to work.

I want to finish this blog by wishing all of my readers a Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and a joyous Kwanzaa.  I am sure I am missing some other holiday but I hope each of you enjoys time with your families and take some time for reflection.  I will back next week with my end of year predictions.

Until next time.

Ignore Product Delivery at Your Own Risk.

When we talk about agile and scrum, we often talk about the process.  It is a curious paradox because the agile manifesto clearly states, “Individuals and interactions over process and tools.”  I want to take some time to discuss the reason we do this crazy agile thing.

When agile began in a ski lodge in Utah, it was the product of seventeen leaders in software development.  It is not a perfect document and others have made numerous suggestions for revision.  The agile movement has balkanized because people have different interpretations of the values and principles outlined in the manifest.  Finally, the challenge of scaling agile to accommodate large software projects has further split the community into competing camps.  I have attempted to stay above the bitter disputes but I have taken sides on a few issues like no-estimates. The conflicts among agile professionals hide something which all of us agree.  The purpose of agile is to get work done.

Agile does not promise to get work done faster; it promises to get customers involved with work so that businesses can deliver value to those customers.  Agile professionals ship software, develop marketing campaigns and provide services that offer value.  Anything else is differences in style.  These styles range from prescriptive approaches for organizations beginning the process of agile to experimental methods which allow teams to self-organize and come up with unique ways of doing things.

Many of the disputes in the agile community are about how well people are following the steps of agile or scrum.  It is an unhealthy disagreement about the process. Instead, everyone in the agile community should focus on delivery.  The shipping of products is what pays the bills and continues to build the agile movement.

To review, agile is about delivery.  Individuals are more important than development processes, and both are subservient to providing value to customers.  Anything else is waste.

Until next time.

Requiem for a Software Developer

I use this blog to discuss two principle topics; software development and software developers.  It is an exciting topic, and the people who build software represent some of the best traits in the human species.  Today, I want to talk about one of them. 

Carla Robinson was an anomaly in the technology business.  She dedicated most of her career to one company.  Carla spent the bulk of her career at R.R. Donnelly, and when the company split, joined one of the spin-offs, LSC Communications.  She worked with AS/400 systems and wrote RPG code.  It was hours of staring into green screens and sorting through reams of sequential code.  She kept a legacy system alive, and as the technology business changed, she rolled with these changes. 

I knew Carla as her scrum master.  She was learning how to write C# code and unit tests.  What made her invaluable to her team was her manual testing skills and her business knowledge.  Often, she was able to answer questions about the product and how it helped the business.  She was a person of good spirits when times were tough.  Finally, she would not accept grief from anyone and demanded respect. 

She loved Bessie Smith, vintage Prince, and anything to do with dusty radio.  She was a colleague and to many a friend.  The world is a little less fascinating without her.  I imagine her enjoying some step dancing in the afterlife and feeling a sense of pride about a life and career well lived. 

Fair forward and not farewell, Carla.

It Takes Labor and Intelligence to Make Magic

It looks like magic but it is something else.

The software business is a strange beast.  Developers wrestle with ones and zeros to create things that only existed in someone’s imagination.  We exchange terabytes each second to help us shop, get driving directions, or book a vacation.  The raw computing power we hold in our hands dwarfs the computing power which puts people on the moon.  Science fiction author Arthur C. Clark said any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. We live in these magical times, where we can get anything on our phones.  It hides an ugly reality that it takes a tremendous amount of labor and intelligence to construct these systems.  It takes more energy to maintain those systems and keep the global economy spinning.  I need to pull back the curtain and reveal the hard work behind the magic.

Software is written to solve problems or to automate a process.  The first electronic computers were created to break the Nazi Enigma codes and to calculate the trajectories of artillery shells during the Second World War.  These machines were ugly and ungainly.  The early computers did not have formal systems of logic or operations.  Smart people would have to come up with those systems.  Fortunately, the allies had people like Alan Turing and Grace Hopper to pioneer those advances.

The vacuum tubes of the early days of computers would give way to the transistors and then semi-conductors.  The transition from glass tubes to silicon wafers leads to an explosion of innovation including programming languages like Pascal and COBOL.  IBM used a startup company from Seattle called Microsoft to create the first operating system for personal computers.  The world wide web was born, and soon businesses sprang up to generate billions of dollars of wealth.  In hindsight, all of this “progress” appears inevitable.  In reality, it is the work of tens of thousands of engineers and software developers who will forever remain anonymous.

These were people who sacrificed time with family and friends to stare at green computer screens attempting to squeeze additional seconds of processing time out of applications.  These were people who came up with algorithms that allowed efficient organ donations.  They were UI/UX designers who discovered horizontal scrolling hurt sales and created designs that improved closing rates.  It was late nights, cold coffee, and exhaustion, which constructed the technology we take for granted.  I am one of those anonymous foot soldiers in this march of progress.

As I became more experienced as a software engineer, I realized the way we lead those projects was not improving with the technology. We were doing the same crazy things and expecting the same results.  It is why I become a member of the agile reformation.  I wanted to make a change.

Today, many of the people making decisions about technology have not constructed that technology.  These people have ideas but no practical knowledge of how to make those ideas work.  Confronted with this reality, they have engineers, developers, and designers to make the idea a reality.  Unfortunately, because they think technology behaves magically, they believe its creation is a magical process.  It is not magic but the product of hard work and intelligence.  No amount of wishful thinking will change the realities of Moore’s Law.

It is why we have the agile manifesto and principles.  We want our work to be more sane, satisfying, and sustainable.  It is only four values and 12 principles, but they make all the difference in an organization. We do live in a magical world.  It is a world created by the sweat and toil of smart people.  By understanding the labor which goes into technology, we can make the world a little more magical.

Until next time.