The Default State Is Broken

In 17 days, I and my partner will be sailing out of Fort Lauderdale on a 7-day Caribbean cruise and I will be entirely unreachable for the better part of 10 days including travel days. When I was an individual contributor, this was fine; I made sure my work was handed off to someone, I made sure my tickets were up to date, and I told my boss I was going, and then I walked away. But now, I  am the boss. There are things, including interfacing with the clients, that no one else on my team is even authorized  to do by dint of corporate policy. Now, this isn't insurmountable; my boss knows I'm going to be unavailable, I'm getting everything lined up and squared away before I leave, and I'll be doing a handoff briefing before I leave. But honestly, I now totally understand why sometimes managers have a tough time stepping away. There's a lot hanging over my head, and I definitely don't want it hanging over my team's head because they already have enough hangi...

We talk, and I mean A LOT, about what technical roles are and what is required to succeed as an individual contributor. Core Competencies: those things you must, MUST have in order to be good at whatever it is you're doing. As an IC, anyway. Managers... seem like a different matter. We know, in theory, what a good manager looks like, if only by pointing at our experiences with previous or current managers and saying "well, not that; whatever the opposite of that is." But negative space with regards to core competency isn't actually all that helpful. And a big piece of whether we think a manager is "good" or not boils down to "did I like this person, and did they appear to like me?" in the end. And while that's an important part of being a manager (and arguably an important part of being a good manager), it's probably not actually how we should be measuring. I'm not as curious about what executives think makes a good manager, becau...

The single biggest speedbump on my transition from Individual Contributor to Manager is the realization that I need to hire people that have skills that I don't have, but I'm not sure how to test for those skills to make sure I'm hiring correctly. Listen, hiring is HARD. It's hard, y'all. Interviews are difficult and as far as I can tell don't actually give a good measure of how a person is going to react or what a person knows. Technical interviews can only do so much, especially when you're hiring for niche positions. Eventually, you just have to make a call and trust you do it right. Sometimes, you get to take a chance on someone who maybe doesn't exactly fit the background, but you like their spirit and you want to give them an opportunity and so you get a great self-learner who is eager for each task and really knows her shit and is working actively to learn more. And that's great! And then sometimes you give into time pressure and you go wi...

A while ago some friends of mine pointed out to me online that they were involved in a kickstarter that was live, so I went to check it out. And it was a kickstarter for a gaming convention in the Bay Area in October, and a whole bunch of people that I cared a bunch about were going to be involved and wanted it to succeed. And I was a bit flush that month, so I said 'fuck it' and I backed the kickstarter and that got me a ticket to BigBadCon 2018. And so I had a ticket, and I made reservations, and bought a plane ticket, and everything was looking up. And then I broke my foot. And now I was mobility-limited. And then my mom died. And I had to go out of town and deal with all of that basically the week before the con, which included taking a bunch of unpaid time off from work. And I thought really seriously about not going, but then I was like: no, there are cool people there that you haven't seen in literal-years. And you've already spent the money. So I said 'fuc...

You'd think, if I was in between projects, I'd take time to update my blog and maybe do some pontificating. But, of course, no; I'm bad at that sort of thing. So here I am more than six months since my last post, in the middle of a new contract and two weeks into my second term of college and I'm suddenly thinking "maybe I should post something". Part of the reason for this is that the network is down at work, so I'm at a bit of loose ends. Plus, a lot of my little thoughts go onto Twitter (and I really need to migrate to something that isn't actively terrible) and mostly I'm just listening rather than posting long-form thoughts these days. As a white dude, I think this is probably a good thing to do: let others speak, and listen as much as possible. But I submitted a couple of talk ideas for DevOpsDays PDX 2018, so I was thinking that I should update this page since it's possible someone might be looking here. So hi there! Anyway, this b...

The last time I was unemployed, I used to really dread Wednesdays. Wednesdays were, at least as far as I could tell, the day that the HR / Recruiter Person decided to let everyone who didn't get the gig that they didn't get the gig, and it wasn't unusual for me to get four or even five rejection letters on a Wednesday. The good news is that this time, Wednesdays aren't like that any longer. The bad news is that the rejections still come, just more spread out. And sometimes they pile up a little. Today wasn't a good day: I got rejection letters (and a nice phone call from a recruiter) all letting me know that the positions I had applied for were no longer interested in me. A couple had already been filled, but at least two were continuing their search for other candidates and that I was not being considered for the next round. This was especially hard this week, as I had worked really hard  to nail the in-person interview I went to last week, and I was relati...

OK, today the "being unemployed" thing feels real for the first time since Thursday. That said, I went and did my in-person meet, I'm signed up and filing for UI, and I'm actively searching for a new gig. Plus, as I've said to several people over the last several days, I no longer wake up with a pit of dread in my stomach. I no longer feel like I have to take my anti-anxiety meds on a twice-daily basis. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders -- I no longer have to go back to a job that I really didn't like -- and while being unemployed isn't a great thing, my partner and I have been here before, and this time we're in a better place than the last time. Being laid off isn't the worst thing that can happen, and we can deal with it. We have a plan and a budget and each other, and that's a lot more than some people in my position have. I'm ready to see what happens next. FYI, if you know someone who's h...

So here's a thing that happened this week: I got promoted at work. My current organization has had significant growth over the last 12 months, including a pretty significant ramp-up in the team I'm on -- basically doubling the number of people in the team over my tenure at the job -- which has led to some serious conversation about what the layout of the organization should be. And this week, the management team rolled that plan out, including a promotional ladder for both managerial and non-managerial advancement, roles and responsibilities for each level, expectations for time-in-grade, and basically a bunch of stuff that bigger organizations have to worry about and smaller organizations ignore to their peril once they become bigger organizations. So now I'm technically at least a part-time manager. Finding ways to shoehorn the much-needed time for managing people is going to be exciting given the current workload, but at least there's the intention of giving some...

Tomorrow afternoon I start my vacation from work. We're heading to BlizzCon 2015 and then Disneyland , and I'm really looking forward to seeing in person a bunch of people I haven't seen in ages. And I'm very much looking forward to not thinking about work. Work is one of those things that I have trouble putting away, because often the most difficult part of work for me is not the actual work, but the acknowledgement that others (usually my bosses) make decisions with given factors that result in outcomes that are not always my preferred outcome. It's Not My Raid has become a significant mantra; not because things are necessarily "wrong", but often because there are pressures or forces of which I am either not aware or feel should be prioritized differently. But I'm not the boss; I'm a team member, not a team lead. And that means that getting worked up about stuff is likely at best counterproductive and at worst is harming both my own reputatio...

I believe I got the quote from Cory Doctorow, and he credited a designer who's name I've never been able to find or credit, so feel to let me know if you know the source. EDIT: Cory was kind enough to let me know that this is from Dr. Don Norman , experiential designer and founder of the Nielsen Norman Group. But the quote as I remember it is this: "The default state of technology, any technology from stone axes to modern computers, the default state of technology is 'broken'." It's true, too; technology as a definition is something that is created  and thus must be maintained . The axe is possibly the earliest and easiest example: axes that aren't sharp are spectacularly bad axes. For really, really long time we survived on technology and tools that were only moderately more complicated than our own fingers and teeth, and thus technology was relatively easy to maintain and manage, but still: a dull knife is a failure mode. A snapped bowstring...

Think of your business as a bedroom -- let's say you're a homeowner and you're looking to rent out your spare bedroom on AirBnB or something like that (we'll leave the troublesome methodology of companies like AirBnB or Uber for some other day when I have the ability to produce TWO multi-thousand-word rants about business decisions). Your bedroom is a business, and your production environment is the bed -- mattress (front-end), box-spring (back-end), bedframe (infrastructure). Your Operations team is the woman who changes the sheets (product release), and this is where things get tricky. If you're running a shady, quasi-illegal operation out of your spare bedroom, the woman who changes the sheets is probably you, and you're probably not a professional housekeeper. You just want clean sheets that keep the mattress from getting horked up by the weirdo from Brooklyn with the Macbook Pro who leaves beard trimmings in the sink. In this case, you do what any reasona...

In any organization, IT or not, that is larger than zero people, there needs to be a way for the organization to identify, track, and resolve work. The tricky part is how you define "work", because that actually means a bunch of things: Work means "hours spent by workers on tasks", but it also means "the product of the hours spent by workers on tasks" and "future hours to be spent" and "future products as a result of spent".  For the purposes of this rant/manifesto, we're going to define "you" not as a generalized vagary, but a very specific person. You, in this case, are "Tanya". Because this is fiction, I'm going to really go out on a limb and be wildly divergent from reality, so you, Tanya, are a young woman in tech (you can already tell this is fiction). You've spent your college years suffering through the horrible sexism and racism to finally graduate with your Computer Science degree, and you and f...

(This post inspired by Michelle Lyons-McFarland; check her out at http://scmusing.blogspot.com/ among other places) There are a lot of white dudes in IT talking about "inclusivity" in their culture and how it's important, as if "inclusivity" is an end-stage boss they can beat, or a card they can move from the "actionable" to the "done" part of their burn board. It's often used in concert with "diversity" (which is another tricky concept that I might go into later), and is touted as a good thing in and of itself. I can claim a lot of things as a cis white guy in IT, but here's one thing that you should probably trust me on: Inclusivity Is A Bad Thing. It's bad for the individual, it's bad for communities, it's bad for teams and organizations, and it's bad for society as a whole. It's bad because at best it means nothing, and at worst it means a deliberate and willful choice to avoid making decisions....

So a non-trivial number of people whom I respect and enjoy have made the very same mistake about a bunch of inter-related application usage patterns specifically about social media tools and the infrastructures therein. That's a complicated starting sentence, so let me give a specific example (which is just the latest in a long line of argumentation all of a theme): the excellent CGP Grey  made an argument about Youtube and why it can't be better at serving up videos and be more like Netflix when presenting content. It's an excellent point, to be fair: Youtube is fantastically bad at serving up content that I want in the way that I want it when I'm trying to watch stuff, and I'm not even a publisher; CGP Grey's problems are at least twice the difficulty level from mine. The problem is, of course, that the problem reverts to a very old axiom that I've used since I heard it the first time: nearly every question that starts with "why" can be answ...

Aside from a couple of aborted attempts back when I was a teenager, and therefore incapable of making good decisions or long-term thinking, I haven't had any formal college-level education. I found myself incapable of following instruction sets, which was odd because I rapidly got involved in the IT industry which is effectively all about following instruction sets. And so I skipped the college degree in order to accrue a significant amount of experience in the IT industry in general and in Operations in specific, spending most of my time hammering away at various architectures and ticketing systems and in the meantime teaching myself how to do things like ssh and grep and write SQL queries.  I had a string of good colleagues and mentors that turned me into a valuable and capable Operations person, but it's also managed to leave big holes in my experience and my brainmap, so while I know where to go to get the information, I often don't have it in my brain on recall at a...

Today I spent most of my day in a windowless room cut off from the internet and the greater world, with no access to electricity, writing in my notebook, while a couple hundred other people did mostly the same thing. It was called Puppet Camp , and sadly it was not a day-camp where they taught me to make puppets (though, given that this is Portland, I'm sure that's actually something I could do). Today was when a handful of people talked at me about Puppet Enterprise application, which is a configuration and automation management tool from Puppet Labs. I like Puppet; it's pretty nifty and if I were starting up my own company *shudder*  I would probably mandate using Puppet from the get-go to reduce technical debt. One of the speakers today said "There is no future where IT is smaller or less important" and I agree, but I often feel like there are companies out there that don't understand how important dedicated Operations tools and Operations personnel are. ...

Some people like to dress up in special clothes, get together with like-minded individuals, and then spend 90+ minutes running back and forth over a hundred-meter rectangle of grass. Others like to wear scarves and yell at the first people. I confess to not being fit enough to do the first thing nor dedicated enough to do the second, but as I said before, Some People Juggle Geese. What I do for fun, a couple of times a week, is to sit at my computer and coordinate with between 15 and 20 other people for three hours trying to make certain pixels last longer than other pixels on the screen. This is called "World of Warcraft Raiding" and it is not terribly common as a pastime, but it's something that my partner and I enjoy doing together with a number of our friends across the world. My partner actually has her own raid group that she leads, and I'm lucky enough to have a spot on that team, but that group is currently on hiatus for various reasons, so we have been par...

There's a really tough part to the grind of being unemployed: the waiting. The UI department doesn't care that it's Thanksgiving. It doesn't care that I've had a couple of phone interviews with a place, or that I'm waiting on a callback. It doesn't care that my stomach is tied up in knots and I'm having trouble sleeping. It only cares that I've looked for work, and that I haven't yet been hired. In a way, it's been really good training for working on issues and getting myself used to the idea of managing my time better, and good practice at applying Kanban in places other than the workplace, and how organizing myself makes things easier (significantly easier, as I get older). I have had trouble in the past with writing things down , on the belief that I could just "remember" things, despite never, ever being able to remember anything at all. I once forgot my own name. So practicing the process is good. The set goals and dete...

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and they were selling me on applying for a position in their company, which I was totally up for and interested in and in fact had already done for a couple of other positions. And the point we kept coming back to was the idea that I was "overqualified" or that somehow putting in for this job would be "beneath" me. Now, this is a customer-facing position in a software company where the users are generally going to be relatively bright engineers or sysadmins, so it's not exactly a Comcast Helpdesk job, but there was still this stigma, this idea both in their head and in the culture in general that a customer-facing role, any  customer-facing role, is somehow less  than a job as, say, a developer, or a devops job, or something like that. I worked in a technical support role for six years, the last three or so in a supervisory role (mostly because if I'd've taken the "manager" title, my salary woul...

* - a very specific human, i.e., me. This past weekend was BlizzCon, the gaming convention for all of those people out there (like my partner) who like to play videogames made by Blizzard with friends. I'm not as hardcore as some other players (like my partner), but as a "filthy casual" I did enjoy both the spectacle of going to BlizzCon and the chance to meet up in meatspace with folk who I've been friends with for a while. We had a fantastic time doing random stuff both at and not-at the convention, and it was, for the most part, quite enjoyable. The trick is, I'm anxious in crowds. This didn't used to be a thing, but somewhere over the last ten years or so I've developed a pretty serious anxiety problem in groups of people; where there are crowds of any sort, I tend to not do terribly well, and when the crowds get loud and random, I get even less functional than normal. Thinking about it, when I was younger being up on stage in front of people would...