Closer To The Ideal

Darfuria has some kind words about our new site, WP Questions.

Just as a quick testimonial/user experience – I started work at 8:30am on a website I’ve been working on for a little while. At 8:50 I decided that working on the particular element of the website I was struggling with for any longer would be a waste of my time, as I wasn’t making any progress – so I decided to submit a question here, in hope that another developer could help me out. Due to the modular way WordPress works, I began working on another element of the website. By 9:50am a developer had responded to my question, and had actually provided the working code I needed. I paid $15 for the answer to that question, which, considering the amount of time, and therefore money I could have wasted if I’d continued to fix it myself, is well worth it, I think.

Ken Rau argues that innovation comes from government funded research and from big business. He seems to be talking only about technological innovation, not process innovation. Peter Drucker, in his 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship lists a number of different types of innovation. Process innovation is likely to come from a veteran of an industry who realizes something can be done a better way, and then strikes out on his or her own to build a company around that business. It seems to me that process innovation may or may not fit the model that Rau is describing here.

In my experience (and everything that follows here should be prefaced with that caveat), the source of most meaningful innovation that gets translated into jobs comes from either University research (through funding by government or sometimes private sector grants) or R&D efforts by large corporations. It’s just that, in most cases, neither of these sources, because of policies or politics, is able or interested in pursuing the most promising of the innovations they try so hard to identify. Instead, it is up to an entrepreneur working in that environment to recognize the true potential of an innovation, leave the environment where it was created, and strike out on his or her own to pursue the innovation. The entrepreneur recognizes the worth of the innovation and, because of frustration with the bureaucracy, politics or getting cross-wise with management of the organization, decides to take the plunge and pursue the innovation on his/her own. Credit cards are maxed out, second mortgages taken, and sometimes, in the case of the experienced entrepreneur (more on this later), venture capital obtained. The innovation is adapted, applied, engineered and pursued. In so doing, jobs are created, revenue is generated, and, sometimes, even profits are made.

Note however, this scenario describes the application of an innovation, not its creation. A technicality? I don’t think so. Innovation is the product of universities and large corporations, not small businesses. Small businesses generate jobs based most often on the innovations they liberate from other sources.

And what of the jobs they create? Are they real, permanent and enduring or just transitional? First of all, the job of the entrepreneur and the cronies he takes with him from the source of the innovation are a job loss to the source and a job gain to small business. This on its own does not represent a net gain in jobs for the economy. Second, those people hired by the small business from the ranks of the unemployed can be tabulated as job gains to the economy, but for how long? The fate, or maybe even the purpose of most small business startups, is to prove an innovation’s merit and then, if successful, be acquired so the entrepreneur(s) become wealthy and can say, “I told you so.” (If the venture is unsuccessful, all jobs are lost.) Once the value of the innovation is proven, a feeding frenzy among large corporations ensues in an attempt to acquire the small business. The entrepreneur and most of the employees of the small business are amply rewarded for the risk they have taken, but at whose expense? Entrepreneur and employees are absorbed by the acquiring corporation who then most often proceed to squander the value of the innovation that has been acquired. Costs are cut, layoffs ensue, and often the quality of the acquired product diminished under the guise of improving efficiency. Discouraged and unable to fit into the inherited corporate culture, most of the remaining acquired employees who have not been laid off as part of the acquisition leave and appear as a net loss of jobs by the corporation.

Mark Suster writes about the difficulty of staying in shape when you are an entrepreneur:

I was now 38 and in worse shape than my previous experience. The time zones, the travel, 2 kids, pressure, managing the sales process, speaking at conferences Somehow I had yo-yo’d back to where I was previously.

In early 2007 I focused exclusively on the sale to Salesforce.com. I stopped doing conferences, traveling or pitching to VCs.

As a result I freed up the time to get back into shape. I swam every morning and ran every afternoon. I started “pulling doubles” often doing the swim then run one after the other. I began bike riding and dreamed of become a triathlete again. I lost 22 pounds between January 1st and March 27th through a combination of serious exercise and watching my calorie intake. I was on top of the world again.

Except that after the acquisition, my job at Salesforce.com required that I commute more than an hour each way from Palo Alto to San Francisco. So 2 hours of potential exercise vanished. The work pressure mounted, the food piled in, the sleep disappeared and the exercise was non existent.

I would like to finish this post on a happy note but I can’t. After I left Salesforce.com I moved to LA and became a venture capitalist (no, that’s not the sad part and had a new challenge to prove myself in a new field. My hours picked up, I worked hard to establish myself in a new city and a new industry. My wife said to me, “I thought you weren’t supposed to work entrepreneur hours when you’re a VC?” I still felt like an entrepreneur. I had something to prove.

I lost perspective and my life hasn’t been in balance since then. Exercise hasn’t been enough of a priority in 2008-09. But now I’m nearly 42. This time it’s for real. After a recent international trip with limited sleep I went to the doctor with chest pains again. It’s still acid reflux. But this time it’s combined with high blood pressure. I’m still in the manageable zone of hypertension but the doctor said I’ve got to change my ways. He also ordered me to take medicine to control my blood pressure.

So the yo-yo continues. But with 2 beautiful kids and a lovely wife I have much more to be serious about. It’s easy in your 20’s to imagine you’d never be in my shoes. I thought that, too. But I’ve spoken with many entrepreneurs in their 30’s who are going through some of the yo-yo health issues that I have brought on by work, travel, food choices and stress. And one doesn’t have to look beyond the most prominent technology bloggers, early-stage Silicon Valley angels or even some of the biggest names in tech (Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff) to find people suffering like I have been.

It’s far more productive to make sure that exercise and healthy eating creeps into your routine. Find something else to cut out – not this. You know what I’m talking about – it’s far easier to stay in shape than it is to get into shape.

Over on LinkedIn, someone asked how long it should take to write a 30 page business plan.

My response:

I’ve seen 3 major efforts at writing a business plan. All plans were being used to pitch to venture capitalists. One entrepreneur was asking for $100,000, another was asking for $500,000, and another was asking for $50,000.

The first effort I saw took 6 months. This was for a web startup. The process was drawn out because the entrepreneur was facing a fluid situation. New information was coming in on an almost daily basis. The competitive landscape was changing quickly. And also, the entrepreneur was learning a lot about how to run a startup, how to pitch to VCs, and how much money would be needed.

Really, for web startups, or any startup facing a fluid situation, I think it is normal to always be working on the business plan. You re-write it every week. You re-write it after every pitch, based on the feedback you got from the last VCs, and then you re-write it again when you are about to do a new pitch, as you want to spin it in a way that you know the next VCs are going to like. If you know the next VC you are going to meet with is more interested in iPhone/smart-phone apps than in web apps, then you emphasize all the ways that your idea has smart-phone potential. You de-emphasize the web app potential.

I did see one business plan put together by a very experienced consultant, a veteran of the tech industry. He was writing it for his client, who was a younger and less experienced entrepreneur. The industry veteran took 3 weeks to write it and included multiple scenarios, detailed in various Excel spreadsheets. It was an impressive effort. It almost sounded believable, despite the large number of guesses that needed to be made about how web usage would evolve.

The last startup I worked on, the “project manager” worked on the business plan almost full time. Raising money was his main job. He faced a profound, fundamental problem, in that he did not really believe in the project. He fell into a bi-polar cycle of sometimes being optimistic and other times being pessimistic. During each pessimistic trough, he would re-write the plan considerably, or at least come up with entirely new slogans to pitch it with. This went on for over 6 months.

Andrew Wakefield is the guy who started the hoax that autism was caused by vaccines. His panic he started lead to many parents making poor choices for the health of their children. The full extent of the harm that he has done will never be know. Happily, his career is now coming to an end, and he is facing the dishonor that he deserves.

Twelve years after his now discredited claim in The Lancet that injections of the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella might cause autism and bowel disorders in children, Andrew Wakefield is closer than ever to being banned from practising as a doctor.

Publication of his claims panicked parents into abandoning the shots, which had peaked in uptake at 92 per cent of UK children in 1995, falling to a trough of just 81 per cent in 2004.

A panel appointed by the UK General Medical Council – which regulates and monitors British doctors – concluded today that there’s now no factual impediment to Wakefield and two of the co-authors on his paper facing charges of professional misconduct.

…The GMC panel also affirmed irregularities in the way Wakefield recruited and managed the 12 children involved in the study.

At least four of the 12 lacked the history of gastrointestinal symptoms and so did not constitute the “routine referrals to the gastroenterology department” that had been stated in the paper. “The panel concluded that your description of the referral process as ‘routine’, when it was not, was irresponsible and misleading and contrary to your duty as a senior author,” it says. “The panel is satisfied that your conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible.”

On another occasion, at his own son’s birthday party in 1999, he took blood from children who were there as guests and paid them each £5 for agreeing to this. He was accused by the panel of showing “callous disregard for the distress and pain that you knew, or ought to have known, the children would suffer.”

I stumbled upon this essay, apparently regarded by some as a classic. I have not read it all, though it looks like it answers a lot of my questions about the bizarre handling of floating point numbers that I’ve noticed in some situations. What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.

Here is every blog post ever written:

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful and ridiculous example of such people the author could find. This sentence is a three-word refutation of the post linked in the previous sentence, the first of which three words is “Um.” This sentence implies that the linked post is in fact typical of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This sentence contains a link to an Internet video featuring a cat playing a piano.

This sentence implies that everyone reading has certainly seen the folly of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence reminds the reader that there are a few others who agree. This sentence contains one-word links to other blogs with whom the author seeks to curry favor, offered as examples of those others.

I added these comments to the comment thread of that post:

This comment was only partially written when the poster accidentally submitted it by hitting the

and:

This comment is an attack phrased as a series of questions, allowing the poster to put forward an aura of faux objectivity, though careful readers can clearly see through the pose.

and:

This comment starts off by strongly agreeing with the above blog post, but then goes on to summarize the blog thesis in such a way that it becomes clear the commenter thought the blog author was making exactly the opposite point of that which was actually written.

and:

This comment is written by a well known writer who has a regular column at the New Republic but who feels deeply threatened by the thesis of the above blog post and who is, therefore, posting here anonymously to suggest that the blog author here is utterly wrong and immoral, whereas decent, well meaning people tend to agree with the writers at the New Republic. When it becomes publicly known that this New Republic writer is posting comments using false identities, their career as a writer will suffer a terrible setback, from which they will never recover.

and:

This comment points out that anyone who wants to do anything about the issue described in the above blog post is, paradoxically, a hypocrite, because, for this issue, the laws of unintended consequences work in such strangely ironic ways that, in fact, the best thing we can possibly do about this issue is to do nothing at all.

and:

This comment is posted by a troll who is well known, and utterly hated, by those readers who frequent this blog. The troll comments on every post on this blog.

and:

This comment is made by a regular reader of the blog who hates the troll who just posted the previous comment. The regular reader now begs the owner of this blog to permanently ban the troll forever. The regular reader appeals to the others who post comments on this blog to agree that the troll never contributes anything useful to any conversation on this blog.

and:

This comment expresses outrage that the author of the blog post should be writing about this particular issue, when, in fact, the author of the blog post has never written about the suffering of the people of East Timor, which is clearly a much larger and more important issue, effecting many more people. The poster of this comment suggests that no one will ever take the author seriously, until the author has written about all of those other issues, of which East Timor is only an example, which are clearly more important than the issue raised here.

and:

This comment parses the words of the original post, and parses them again and again and again, using clever rhetorical tricks to falsely “prove” that the words mean something very different than what they first appear to mean. This comment then urges reader not to fall for the innocent, naive impression they may have been left with after first reading the blog post, but rather, to see deeper, and thus understand the hideous, monstrous, secret aims of the author of the blog post.

and:

This comment is written by a hardened veteran of blog comment flame wars but who, hoping to gain the credibility of an objective innocent, claims “This is my very first time posting a comment to a blog.” They then disagree with the blog post and point out that they know of absolutely no one, anywhere, who would agree with the blog post.

and:

This comment is written by someone who clearly arrived on this site after having searched on Google for a term that just happens to appear in the title of the blog post. They then ask “Where can I buy incendiaries?”

Daniel Chu posts this bit about being an entrepreneur:

Entrepreneurship is about challenging the status quo. So, you have to expect people to disapprove you.

Hence, Tina wrote, “I didn’t ask for anyone’s permission. I just did it!”

Tina has a PhD in neuroscience, but founded a seemingly unrelated multimedia company, BookBrowser. And when she named herself the President and CEO of the company, her father, a corporate veteran, freaked out because in his mind, you can only get promoted or be proven by others to get that title. The reality is: no, you don’t.

I wrote recently about the New York tech scene.. Now Caterina Fake offers her thoughts on what New York is missing:

But what NYC is actually missing is not engineers. In NYC you can find lots of great engineers, visual designers, and great publishers and contributors to social media. But in CA I seem to find far more people with multiple skills – engineers who blog and dabble in design, designers who can do great UI but also great UX, etc. These multidisciplinary people are the ones who hack together brilliant new stuff, can innovate across the board, see various avenues of attack, and are indispensable at startups. It is these hybrid people that we are always looking for at Hunch and for whatever reason find them much more often in CA than NYC.

A very odd 1st Amendment case. The creepiest thing about this case is that the district attorney invented a “five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like ‘what it means to be a girl in today’s society‘”. I do not want to live in a society where district attorney’s have the discretion to invent their own re-education programs. Such programs need to be invented by the legislature, not the executive or judicial branch.

On January 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit heard arguments in Miller, et al. v. Skumanick, a child pornography case that, oddly, involves no child pornography. The case goes back to 2006, when two girls aged 12 were photographed by another friend on her digital camera. The two girls were depicted from the waist up, wearing bras. In a separate situation, our third client was photographed as she emerged from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her waist and the upper body exposed. Neither of the photos depicted genitalia or any sexual activity or context. In 2008 the girls’ school district learned that these and other photos were circulating, confiscated several students’ cell phones, and turned the photos in question over to the Wyoming County district attorney, George Skumanick, Jr.

Skumanick sent a letter to the girls and their parents, offering an ultimatum. They could attend a five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and “non-traditional societal and job roles.” They would also be placed on probation, subjected to random drug testing, and required to write essays explaining how their actions were wrong. If the girls refused the program, the letter explained, the girls would be charged with felony child pornography, a charge that carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.

A single, individual district attorney may have standards that diverge from that of the majority. The legislature is more likely to take into account the full balance of concerns that need to be addressed, from majority norms to the civil rights of those in minority. While miscarriages of justice can arise from any branch of government, they are more likely when a single individual government agent assumes they have the power to make up new programs unilaterally. In this case, it is clear the district attorney has views that violate both due process and also the norms that are probably held by reasonable people:

Interestingly, none of the classmates who distributed the photos received letters from Skumanick. Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges. If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, “high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves.”

Ultimately, that’s what this case comes down to: one man’s view on how a young woman should conduct herself. The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education. Instead the girls are threatened with felony charges and life-long registration as sex offenders. To apply such a penalty, designed to protect minors against exploitation, is a grotesque misapplication — and that’s once again assuming that the photographs in question could possibly be construed as pornographic. In reality, there was no way such charges would ever stick, and the DA’s office had to know this. The child porn charges were merely a threat, to force the parents to subject their children to Skumanick’s moral view of the world, where any and all child nudity is illegal and bras and bikinis are pornographic.

Obviously I’m biased, since I’m trying to do a start-up in New York, but everything about this rings true:

Tumblr and Posterous are the two most prominent “tumblogging” sites, i.e. sites that make blogging more straightforward by making it easier to post media. Both were launched within six months. (Actually, Posterous was started later than Tumblr.)

But now Tumblr has been an Alexa Top 100 site for a while and is still growing strong. Meanwhile Posterous has about 4 times less uniques. Yet Posterous has everything to win: it’s a Y Combinator company with top-tier investors like Chris Sacca and Mitch Kapor. Its founders are experienced software engineers with computer science degrees from Stanford. How come it’s eating dust from a small startup started by a high school dropout?

The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.

Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.

Posterous is extremely well engineered. There’s nothing wrong with it. Every single thing about it is well thought out. But it’s not just that it’s less pretty (though it is). It’s just not designed as well as Tumblr is.

…In fact, everything about Posterous is nice. It’s very nice. I’m not here to bash Posterous, I think it’s a tremendous product and I wish them the best of luck.

But everything about Tumblr is better designed. I used the landing page as one example, but there are tons of features where Tumblr shines by its gorgeous design.

Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user.

…The first is that New York has truly come of age as a startup hub, with its own “style”, its own way of doing things, its own mindset, which can sometimes — not always, but sometimes — kick Silicon Valley’s ass.

I admire Jeff Bezos more than any other business leader today. Most business leaders talk about innovation, but Bezos really does it, over and over again. Amazon is releasing a developer kit, so 3rd party developers can develop for the Kindle.

A lament about the decline of the Wall Street Journal:

The politicalization of the WSJ has moved to a new and more risky phase. The paper is now in danger of being a money loser — not for its investors (tho that has already happened), but for those traders who read its content.

It used to be that articles on the Market or specific companies or various finance stories were objective and reliable and free from bias. Sure, you could always count on money losing, bat-shit crazy nonsense in the editorial pages, but that was a special area of sequestered partisans, who due to their insanity cared not a whit about how much capital their lunatic ravings lost their readers. (The list is long and varied, but the Boskin “Obama Crash” on March 6th is a good place to start; then read anything Don Luskin writes — he is a reliable contrary indicator).

I assumed the drunks on the OpEd page did not care about what they did to your portfolio if you drank their Kool-Aid. But they were easy to avoid –you simply avoided that page, or read it and laughed. Smart investors could easily say “Go sell crazy somewhere else –we ain’t buying.” That was possible because you knew that the business pages were sacrosanct, always run with a steel-eyed objectivity that professionals could rely upon.

That is no longer the case. The lunatics now run the asylum, and henceforth, I am moving the WSJ into the column of “Stuff to read, but not take very seriously.”

It is puzzling that there are so few good outlets for financial news. You would think that with so much money at stake, a lot of media outlets would cater to the demand, but the opposite seems to happen: with so much money at stake, the investing industry (mutual funds, day traders, the stock-issuing companies themselves) can not allow the truth to go un-managed. So most media outlets focused on investing get co-opted by the investing industry. The Wall Street Journal stood apart for a long while, notable for its objectivity. Now it is sunk, though for an unusual reason – its become co-opted by the most radical elements of the Conservative movement. Very sad to see.

A simple spelling error leads to a dramatic increase in sales:

I successfully used this technique for a while. When I sent the follow up, I had a reply rate of about 40%. Then I discovered a simple trick that drastically improved my reply rate and increased my income to about $1500 a month.

Previously I had

—-

Subject: About your pricelist request for Klein SDK

Body: Dear John Doe, I saw that you…

—-

I changed it to

—–

Subject: Re: Klein SDK pricelist request

Body: Hey John Doe, I saw taht you…

—–

The idea behind it was to let the people know that I actually wrote the email to them, and this was not a form email or a machine sending it to them. Adding only the “Re:” gave me about a 60% conversion rate. Adding the “Re:” and the “taht” increased my reply rate to close to 75%. And made me $600 more a month every month after that.

This reminds of a story from GE. By the late 80s email had replaced paper memos, but the upper level executives were spending a lot of time crafting perfect emails. Just as they had once put great effort into writing the perfect memo, they were now putting great effort into well-researched, well written emails. By the 90s, Jack Welch (the CEO) felt a potential breakthrough was being wasted – the advantage that email offered was that it was quick and spontaneous. He insisted that his executives should start writing in a more informal manner. The goal was more creativity and brain storming and fast communication. Welch wanted to see spelling errors, damn it!

In response, the upper level executives at GE continued writing well-researched, well written emails, but then, before they hit the Send button, they would go through and strategically place some spelling errors, to give their email the look of something written in haste and casually tossed off.

I used to laugh at that behavior and think it was stupid. Now I realize that, in terms of marketing, it might be brilliant.

I love it when people quote what I’ve written on this blog, and link back to my blog, but I find it irksome when they quote me without giving me any credit. I notice Moonviper is using a part of my essay as part of their marketing:

The text is from my essay “How much do websites cost“. I wouldn’t mind being quoted if they gave credit, but I hit the “View Source” command and searched for “teamlalala.com” and got nothing. They should link to the original essay and make clear that they are quoting my essay.

Penelope Trunk questions the economics of a college education:

The idea of paying for a liberal arts education is over. It is elitist and a rip off and the Internet has democratized access to information and communication skills to the point that paying $30K a year to get them is insane.

Ben Casnocha has one of the most thorough, self-examined discussions about the value of college on his blog. He went to college, probably, because so many people told him to. (Here are some good links on Ben’s blog.)

Ben left college. Early. And he’s fascinating, and he’s educating himself through experience, which is what the Internet does not provide. The Internet provides books and discussion, so why would you need to go to school for those things?

It’s the time of year when college students start looking for the return on investment for their education: They start worrying about what they’re going to do this summer.

I agree with Penelope Trunk, I’d rather have an interesting life, rather than a happy life:

I think I’m over the happiness thing. I think I am thinking that the pursuit of happiness is, well, vacuous. I don’t think people are happy or unhappy. Because I think knowing if we are happy would require knowing the meaning of life, or the ultimate goal, or the key to the world, or something that, which really, we are not going to find outside of blind religious fanaticism.

The first thing I have to grapple with, besides having spent the last three years of my life completely enthralled and ensconced in the happiness research from positive psychologists, is if I don’t want a happy life, what sort of life do I want?

I think I want an interesting life. Not that I want to be interesting, but I want to be interested. I’m talking about what I think is interesting to me. I want to choose things that are interesting to me over things that would make me happy. For example, this post. I am not sure if I’m right on this, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of telling me I’m an idiot in the comments. But it’s going to be interesting.

I think choosing a life that is interesting to us and choosing a life that makes us feel happy are probably very different choices.

Not sure what to make of supposed graduate students (in economics) supposedly bad-mouthing one of the winners of the Nobel Prize. Especially hard to understand are the attacks based mostly on gender. In 2010? The attacks suggesting that economics are better than political science are also worrisome – the events of the last 18 months have taught us that some in the economics profession are already frighteningly out of touch with reality. To have young economists closing their minds to what various disciplines can teach them would amount to a worrisome trend, if it turns out to be anything more than ranting on a website.

It got worse and a bit embarrassing when Steven Levitt noted that he too did not know who she was but thought that “the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than the Republicans hated the Peace Prize going to Obama”.

Unfortunately, as I found out Levitt was right. Nowhere was this more evident than when I went to the Economics Job Rumors website. The site is frequented by economics graduate students who are on the academic job market, and as such is a reasonable barometer of the ways in which such students in the field are thinking. What I found was really disturbing. There were over 200 responses to a thread called“NOBEL BULLSHIT” in which the undisguised ignorance, tribalism and vicious misogyny of the graduate student pool were starkly evident. Here are a choice few comments which are, I hate to say, not unrepresentative of most of the discussion there.

“This is the problem with Affirmative Action: last time a woman tried to go to the moon, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after the launch. Now this is the end of Economics.”

“Economics is superior. Don’t let political science conteminate (sic) us”

“she’s not top 5% on ideas on any ranking!!”

“susan athey or nancy stokey if you want a woman. This girl seems to be a political scientist. I don’t think she has published original research in any major economics journal”

This is the average opinion among the pool of people in their late twenties and early thirties who are going to be the teachers of economics and the leaders of thinking about economics and society in the future. It is enough to make you want to quit the discipline in disgust. All right, yes, anonymous posts bring out the worst in people, but the absolute nastiness of these responses suggest a visceral set of reactions which lays bare some of the culture of economics as a discipline. These include a thoroughgoing disregard for other disciplines (even those we take our ideas from), an inherent inability to respect ideas which do not conform to the strictures of what is acceptable knowledge (top-tier peer reviewed journal articles) and a deep-seated sexism which allows a young brash student to call the 76 year old past president of the American Political Science Association ‘this girl’.

Clay Shirky wrote a stupid post suggesting women did not know how to promote themselves. Some of the reactions in the comments are very good:

Annalee says:

Obviously women need to speak up more. And men need to shut up more, especially when women are talking.

I’ve definitely taken the “act like a braggart” approach to my career, and honestly it’s not just a matter of speaking up. It’s a matter of speaking up over and over again, even when somebody is interrupting you or telling you that you have no right to speak in the first place.

I wish the problem were just training women to raise their hands more often, but of course it isn’t. It’s training men to notice when the women are raising their hands. And training the men NOT to raise their hands when they clearly do not have the answers.

This is also good:

Patty Zevallos says:

I get real tired of hearing other people telling me what is going on inside my head because I am female. I have no problem promoting myself. I have no problem jumping into something a bit tricky to get ahead. I have been highly successful at doing the work I want to do in media production (see http://www.pbzproductions.com/resume/) for 31 solid years, and don’t have any problem explaining how good I am in my field. I currently am getting calls and emails about high-end web design jobs because you, Clay Shirky, have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

The problem is that you are so completely out of touch with what is going on. You have no idea that the Green Living movement (www.pbzproductions.com/green/) is up and running and initiated mostly by women, that women are getting organized and helping each other, that women-owned businesses are growing and thriving.

Perhaps you should actually talk to people instead of ranting.

This is also good:

kim sbarcea says:

Frankly, I’m amazed that this “rant” even occurs in 2010. Having said this, I think you are barking up the wrong tree. The fact that organisations or senior management might actually allow men to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks (to use your words) is the problem. Not whether women can or cannot (or even should) act in the same manner.

Maybe it’s just Australia, but I have worked with many women who can be described as self-aggrandizing, prone to extreme exaggeration, arrogant, nasty, back-stabbing, overly self-confident and so on.

This is also good:

T.T. says:

You know that calling a badly argued essay a “rant” doesn’t make it less badly argued, right?

“…not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.”

This statement is a special case of “women are Z”. Women are Z. They just are. You know that. You can make categorical claims because your experience is universal. If only we could all be so special.

This last one hits the angle that I find most surprising, that Shirky would sink to the level of making categorical, universal claims about women. In 2010? Is this some kind joke? Surely it suggests mental laziness if anyone who starts a sentence with “All black people are…” or “All women are…”

I wrote my own thoughts about the essay in the post called The most disappointing essay Clay Shirky has ever written.

Aren’t you a damn fraud, and shouldn’t you feel guilty? Why should anyone give a damn about your art, your poetry, the novel you are writing, the software you’ve created, the politics you advocate, the consulting advice you offer? For that matter, you are a terrible friend, lover, spouse, parent, politician, manager, employee, sibling and child. You should feel ashamed.

Thankfully, this is one problem I don’t have (I have been blessed and cursed with too much confidence) but I’ve got a dozen friends who suffer in this particular way. They are all smarter than I am, and much more talented, but they feel that everything they do is nearly worthless. They have brutal internal critics.

I like what Jason Cohen writes here about his own experience starting his own software company:

I felt like a fraud every day. Here I was, selling a wobbly, buggy tool and pawning myself off as an expert in a field that didn’t exist. (My software was the first commercial tool for code review.) Every second I felt like I was putting one over on the world.

…Objectively, and with hindsight, my feelings were misplaced. The tool really did save time and headache; customers said so. As much as I doubted the title “Code Review Expert,” I had developed more experience with more teams in more situations than any one person could (because everyone else was busy doing their actual jobs). And sales isn’t as mystical and unknowable as I feared.

Still, emotions don’t respond to logic. Jason was telling me that these feelings don’t go away, even when they ought.

The other thing he was saying is: You’re not alone. As it turns out, it’s not even just business founders. Mike Meyers said “I still believe that at any time the No-Talent Police will come and arrest me.” Jodie Foster said “I thought it [winning the Oscar] was a fluke. The same way as when I walked on the campus at Yale. I thought everybody would find out, and they’d take the Oscar back.”

It turns out there’s a psycho-babble name for this: Impostor Syndrome. As Inc Magazine points out, studies show that “40% of successful people consider themselves frauds.” Ask any small business coach; they’ll confirm how prevalent these feelings are. It’s even common with PhD candidates.

Although not an official psychological disorder, and generally not crippling, if you have these feelings it’s useful to know that it’s common and there’s something you can do about it.

See if these sound familiar:

You dismiss complements, awards, and positive reinforcement as “no big deal.”

You are crushed by mild, constructive criticism.

You believe you’re not as smart/talented/capable as other people think you are.

You worry others will discover you’re not as smart/talented/capable as they think you are.

You think other people with similar jobs are more “adult” than you are, and they “have their shit together” while you flounder around.

You feel your successes are due more to luck than ability; with your failures it’s the other way around.

You find it difficult to take credit for your accomplishments.

You feel that you’re the living embodiment of “fake it until you make it.”

When I see friends of mine fall into this, I think it is tragic. Sometimes it spurs them forward – as Cohen says, there are healthy ways to channel that internal perfectionism and self-doubt. But often perfectionism acts as a perfect censor – people far smarter than I are shut silent by their own high standards, or by the guilt they feel wasting other people’s time with the ideas they have (ideas which I often think are brilliant, but which they think are worthless).

Scott Berkun writes about feeling lost after graduating from college:

For years I’d been following the plan given to me: go to high school, go to college, get a job. From day one of kindergarten onward there was always a next step waiting. The choices were easy and safe: which classes, which activities, which universities. But an hour after my college graduation, sitting alone in an empty apartment on Beeler street in Pittsburgh, there were no more choices laid out for me. There was nothing. I confronted my future as a kind of void for the first time and was terrified. I’d never understood that emptiness, despite seeing its effect on older friends and my older brother. Until I was sitting alone surrounded by it, without the defense of a plan or a friend, I had no idea how frightening it was.

I was always the opposite. I tended to be unrealistically optimistic about the stuff I wanted to do. I never had a single moment when I was unsure of what I should be doing, for me, the problem has always been finding money so I could go do those things. What to do has always been an easy question for me, how to do it has been much tougher.

Just had another call from a head hunter. They’ve lined up a gig they say will last “3 to 6 months”. For some reason this makes me recall being in college in the late 1980s, and some of the professors trying to give us students some career advice:

Whatever you do, never a quit a job unless you’ve been there at least 2 years. 5 years is better but 2 is the minimum. Even if you hate your boss, try to stick it out. If you quit before 2 years, then you’ll get a reputation as a job hopper. No one will ever hire you again. No one wants to hire a job hopper.

Hilarious, compared to nowadays. Things have changed 180 degrees.

For the most part I like the change, though I realize some important things have been lost. Back in the 40s and 50s and 60s (the New Deal era) the ideal was big, safe corporations that gave you life time employment. America had a secure middle class. People worked less, and people in the poorest 40% were better paid then than they are now. But, god, how boring to stay with one corporation for your whole life. That’s the stifling conformism that Kerouac and Ginsberg were rebelling against. It is tragic that we have lost the security offered by those years, but I can not regret the loss of the enforced homogeneity of life goals. The end of the office, and the future of work sums up the changes:

The middle of the 20th century was the age of the great employer: Mainstream success was a stable job at a single company, steadily ascending from middle to upper management. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, for reasons that were social as well as economic: American conglomerates began to face stiff foreign competition, and the country accustomed itself to – and even began to celebrate – a more mercurial, less cosseted brand of capitalism. The Organization Man was replaced by the worker as free agent, one who might with little regret leave a job when a competitor gave a better offer, or who might be left jobless when his company merged with another. The arc of the average career trajectory grew more fractured.

What we’re seeing today, says Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of the 2004 book “The Future of Work,” is a further shift. The growing freelance workforce, he argues, is made up of people who see themselves not as having a single job so much as having several at once. To describe the current change, Malone borrows an image that the sociologist Alvin Toffler used to describe the earlier one.

“One of the things [Toffler] said was that we should move from the idea of a career as a linear progression up the ranks in a single organization to that of a career as a portfolio of jobs that you hold over time in a series of different organizations,” says Malone. “What I’m just now realizing is that many people today see their career portfolio including a combination of jobs at the same time.”

Malone believes that new forms of freelancing will help drive this change. Companies like iStockphoto (a stock photograph and image site containing the work of over 70,000 artists), Threadless (a T-shirt design company where anyone can submit designs and evaluate others), and Elance (an online source of skilled freelance labor) are models of companies where not just secondary jobs but the core function of the business is outsourced to a diffuse online workforce. All are helping connect client companies and freelance laborers to each other easily, without a traditional intermediary and with stricter standards than online marketplaces like Craigslist.

These sites allow freelancers to field and respond to far more offers than they would previously have been able to, and to create a far larger and more diverse slate of jobs at any one time. Successful Elance workers often have nine or ten projects going at any one time.

I grew up close to this future. My dad was a freelance stock photographer from 1950 to 2007. He made a fantastic living at it, at least till the Internet hit the industry in the late 90s. For all of my childhood, he loved his work and enjoyed a very flexible lifestyle. From a very young age, I knew I wanted to grow up and enjoy a lifestyle similar to his.

To some extent, the change strikes me as a continuation of the movement from status to contract. When everyone is their own freelance agent, then the last vestige of status will fade from this world.

I usually like Clay Shirky a lot, though his most recent piece seems poorly reasoned. Shirky suggests that women are not aggressive enough in negotiations, but then he mentions how this hurts them in 2-sided markets, and he lists colleges as one such market. Did he miss the fact that the majority of all college graduates are now women? Nearly half of medical school students nationwide are now female. Young women are out-earning men in some areas and professions:

Women’s pay relative to men’s rose rapidly from 1980 to 1990 (from 60.2% to 71.6%), and less rapidly from 1990 to 2004 (from 71.6% to 76.5%), though young women have started to outearn young men in some large urban centers with young women earning up to 20% more than their male counterparts.

But women with children have less negotiating power:

However, other trends are decidedly negative: a study at Cornell University concluded in 2005 found that women with children were less likely to be hired and if hired would be paid a lower salary than male applicants

These 2 facts suggest that raising kids limits women’s negotiating power. Women don’t have an innate lack of negotiating skills, but the circumstances of raising children imposes some hard constraints, that fall disproportionately on women. Shirky is ranting about the wrong issue.

This is what Shirky says:

This worry isn’t about psychology; I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

Remember David Hampton, the con artist immortalized in “Six Degrees of Separation”, who pretended he was Sydney Poitier’s son? He lied his way into restaurants and clubs, managed to borrow money, and crashed in celebrity guest rooms. He didn’t miss the fact that he was taking a risk, or that he might suffer. He just didn’t care.

It’s not that women will be better off being con artists; a lot of con artists aren’t better off being con artists either. It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.

…And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Again, it is tough to reconcile the career success that young women are having with Shirky’s narrative of “They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists”.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read in any of Shirky’s essays:

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more.

Maybe “we ask people to cross gender lines all the time” but usually the goal is to make the world a better place. For instance, “encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners” probably makes the world a better place, whereas encouraging women to be “anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards” does not. It is really disappointing to be reading stuff like this in an essay by Shirky.

However, even in an ideal future, self-promotion will be a skill that produces disproportionate rewards, and if skill at self-promotion remains disproportionately male, those rewards will as well. This isn’t because of oppression, it’s because of freedom.

If professional women in their 20s continue to pass by professional men in their 20s, then clearly women know how to promote themselves. If women with children continue to be handicapped in their careers, then we are dealing with oppression, not freedom. At the very least, we are dealing with work practices and family practices that are in need of innovation.

In these circumstances, people who don’t raise their hands don’t get called on, and people who raise their hands timidly get called on less.

…It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions.

Surely someone hacked into Shirky’s blog and is trying to discredit him by publishing an idiotic essay? Where is the nuance and subtlety of thought that gave us such classics as Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality? I feel like I’m reading a fundamentalist version of Shirky, a stripped down version of Shirky, lacking any of the careful qualifiers that grace his previous work.

My main problem with his essay is the broad-brush nature of his description of the problem. It is pointless to talk as if women are doing poorly in every profession, when nearly 50% of new doctors are female.

Since Shirky works in and around the tech industry, I suspect that a lot of his remarks were aimed at the tech industry. Had he explicitly said “What I’m saying here only applies to the tech industry” then he would have been on slightly safer ground. There are certainly some odd gender imbalances in the tech industry, which I just wrote about in my last post.

I feel like I know where Shirky is coming from. I’ve come close to writing a similar essay. I have seen talented women sabotage their own careers. For some reason, this happens more in the tech industry than anywhere else. I have felt a frustration similar to the one that I think Shirky was trying to express.

The title of this blog post is “The most disappointing essay Clay Shirky has ever written”. Why am I disappointed? Mostly because I have come to expect a great deal of emotional honesty from Shirky. In posts such as “The Failure of #amazonfail” he does a rare thing: he admits that he made mistakes of judgement due to being caught up in the emotion of the moment, and he also talks himself back to sanity, all the while being candid about the emotions he is experiencing. That kind of emotional transparency is missing from “A rant about women.” I understand the frustration of seeing talented women sabotage their own careers. On the one hand, I know it is damn tempting to rant about that frustration. On the other hand, I think it is important that I, and Shirky, keep ourselves from expressing that frustration in untruthful ways.

Shirky has been a supporter of many politically progressive causes. So have I. Most progressive activists occassionally suffer some moment of burn out, during which time, they may say some damn reactionary things. They lean on their reputation at such times. I’ve done it. Shirky is doing it here. His essay amounts to “I will say some unqualified, harsh things here, to vent my frustration, and surely people will cut me some slack, because my previous progressive efforts have surely earned me some good will.” There is some truth in that – no one will change their opinion of Shirky simply because he wrote one bad essay. But we will all feel disappointed.

Clay Shirky just wrote a stupid post that suggested that women are not aggressive enough in negotiations. The comment thread following that post are full of good reasons why the post should be ignored. I wrote my own post and pointed out that 20 something women are doing as well, economically, as men. For most industries, Shirky’s remarks should be dismissed as factually wrong.

Still, there is something odd going on in the tech industry, regarding gender. As I I wrote in The strange anomaly of gender issues in tech

Over the last 30 years women have made dramatic gains in field such as law, medicine, management and science. Almost 50% of new doctors are women, so that is a field that has achieved near perfect equality. But there is something wrong with the tech industry, and with computer programming in particular. The percent of computer scientists who are female and who are earning advanced degrees peaked in 1989 and has since retreated. What explains this retreat, when women are still advancing in almost all other professions?

And in Women and math:.

I’d been assuming that women’s retreat from computer science had to be mirrored by weakness in math, but if women are making huge strides in math, then the anomaly of their retreat from computer science is even more puzzling than before.

As near as I can tell, the trend is mostly confined to the US. I searched Google but was unable to find hard data on the trends in other countries. Still, in online tech forums, I see women take part in conversations about programming and where they have a public profile, I notice they are often from countries such as Israel and India.

I do not doubt that this issue is multi-faceted. I’ll comment on one small part of it.

In the US, one of the big trends of the last 20 years has been the relative decline of the Fortune 500. The largest companies now employ less people than they used to, both in absolute terms and in terms relative to the working population. Especially in the software industry, I’ve the sense that the small 10 person company is more common now than what prevailed in the 1980s. My guess is that this fact somehow relates to the gender issues effecting the tech industry. Why this should be so is hard to say, though I can make various guesses. Certainly, the small shops tend to make long hours seem normal, and long hours might interfere with the kind of family life some women may prefer. At web startups, working 60 hours a week seems normal.

Deborah Tannen, in her book, “You Just Don’t Understand” writes about a type of mis-communication among the genders that I think might have more impact at small firms than at large firms. Tannen says that women will often try to create emotional closeness, a friendship, by admitting vulnerability, and men generally do not do this, at least not at work. A single anecdote will have to stand in for my experiences here.

At one point I was working for a small startup and I was put in charge of hiring the next programmer. I interviewed several people and eventually decided on one who I thought would work out. She was 31 years old and had 8 years experience working on projects similar to what we wanted to do. She had, in fact, worked on projects far more complex than what we were considering. On her first day of working for us, we had a meeting: her, my boss, and myself. I recall this conversation:

Boss: We are excited to have you here.

New programmer: I am excited to be here.

Boss: Lawrence was very impressed with some of your previous work.

New programmer: Yeah?

Boss: Yes. The auto-sorting MP3 database, for instance.

New programmer: Oh, yeah, I guess. I really feel like I could do better than that.

Boss: Uh, you mean you’ve learned a lot since then?

New programmer: Yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing back then. And it was really buggy.

Boss: Oh? Lawrence seemed to think highly of it.

Me (now I have to defend my decision to hire her): I typed some adjectives describing music I liked, and the software was able to guess other kinds of music that I liked. It worked smoothly.

Boss: That does sound impressive.

New programmer: Really?

Boss: Uh, yes?

Me: We need someone with experience writing those kinds of sorting algorithms.

New programmer: well, I am really looking forward to working with you. I think it is really great that you are trying to do such interesting stuff.

Boss: Good. So, you think you could write something similar for videos, but this time match against both keywords and buying patterns?

New programmer: um, well, I sure look forward to trying. This is really ambitious, what you are trying to do.

Boss: but, uh, are you up for it?

New programmer: well, what kind of time frame are you thinking about?

Me: We can roll this out incrementally over the course of months. No one is expecting you to do all this in a week or two.

New programmer: Oh good! Yes, I think a few months would be perfect for this project! I was so scared when you first described it. It sounded overwhelming.

Boss: Oh?

Me: This project is actually less complicated than the system you built at your previous job. I imagine the database of multimedia that you did for them was enormous. I see their advertisements on television all the time. They are doing, what, $50 million a year in business? How long did you work on that system?

New programmer: from 1996 to 2002.

Me: So you’ve seen how simple projects evolve into complex ones, and how a software project needs to managed and maintained over several years?

New programmer: yes.

Me: Well, what you’ll be doing here is a lot simpler than that.

New programmer: I’m really excited to get going with it.

Me: Me too.

Boss: Me too.

Possibly someone like Shirky might read this as the woman lacking self-confidence, but, having read Tannen, I thought the new programmer was trying to create friendship by admitting vulnerability. Regardless, of what Shirky might think, I can say with great certainty that my boss was reading the woman as lacking self-confidence. My boss was one of the most arrogant and ego-driven people I’d ever met, he communicated with other people mostly by boasting, and he generally expected the same in return. He was clearly surprised that the woman would reveal even a trace of doubt on her first day on the job. The new programmer did not know him well and apparently missed the degree of surprise that he expressed. I had the sense that our meeting could have gone badly. I felt certain she would be good for the job, so I defended her. She turned out to be a very talented programmer, and I worked with her till I left the company, 18 months later.

Work is very personal at small firms – that is the joy and the pain of small firms. At larger firms, there are layers of bureaucracy. We often think of bureaucracy as a bad thing, but it does allow for some checks and balances to be put on people’s impulses and judgments. At small firms, a single bad encounter with an arrogant and ego-driven entrepreneur might be enough to curtail your involvement at the firm. At a larger firm, you’d get some 2nd chances. I could be wrong, and surely this is only one aspect of the issue, but I suspect the larger firms offered a more effective environment for women in tech.

Daniel Chu on what it takes to be entrepreneur:

Without commitment, you will not start your own business. Many “experts” advise people to start something small on the side while keeping their day job. I personally think this is not going to fly because why would you spend the time to think about other people’s business during the day when you can actually use the time to think about your own? If you can, then you are probably not that serious about your business.

…Or let’s say if you only have one hour to spend with your own kid versus somebody else’s kid, whose kid are you going to spend the time with?

If you cannot find that personal, emotional connection with your own business, just forget it since you will be able to use those few extra hours to work for a job and get a promotion sooner.

Hence, first step — commitment, and that is — quit your job immediately.

This is my own attitude as well. I strongly disagree with the approach taken by 37 Signals in such posts as “How many hours should I work per week?“:

Investment bankers may work 18 hour days…but look at the state of the investment banking business. It’s not the quantity of hours you work, it’s how you spend the hours you do work and what you’re working on that matter.

Too many people think they have to work 80-100 hour weeks. They think, “No amount of work is too much work.” They pull all-nighters or sleep at the office.

But you don’t have to work superhuman hours. A normal workweek should be plenty. Even less is ok. In fact, being short on time is a good thing. It forces you to focus on the essentials. There’s no time for things that don’t matter. There’s only time for the basics. And if you want to build something great, you have to nail the basics first.

Basecamp, our flagship product, was created on the side while we were still doing client work. With just 10 hours a week of programming time and 10 hours a week of design time, we made a product that took off.

They repeated the point in “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing with a startup“:

Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutrient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk life without insurance.

Hogwash!

We’ve repeated this story so many times that it’s starting to wear a little thin, but here it goes again: Basecamp was created with 10 hours/week of programming time and as a 3rd or 4th project alongside paying customers for the designers over the course of about 6 months. In other words, we didn’t drop everything we had to create Basecamp, and you don’t have to either.

There are plenty of startup ideas that can be done without millions in funding, thousands of man hours, and dramatic risk. But I can excuse people from failing to see them when blinded by press and popular opinion. Everywhere you turn it’s stories about how ever-younger entrepreneurs with nothing to lose are defying all odds and making mortal sacrifices to reach their impossibly unlikely goals and succeeding.

Did I say hogwash already?

Possibly this works for 37 Signals, though I am suspicious. There is a wealth of research suggesting that time on task increases learning and productivity. However, it is true that “time on task” is not meaningful in itself, but rather, “time on completed tasks” is crucial:

But meaningful time on task is a misnomer because it is not exactly about time; learning in schools is about completing tasks that directly relate to the goals of instruction. These lesson tasks tend to be either open-ended, such as developing critical thinking skills or improving composition skills or alternatively are tightly focused, such as covering content on a high stakes state-wide test. For example, a recent evaluation conducted in seven schools in the Pemberton School District, reported a relationship between the number of CompassLearning lesson activities completed and performance on the New Jersey state-wide test. On average, students gained 1 scaled-score point for every 13.0 CompassLearning reading lessons and 1 scaled-score point for every 12.4 CompassLearning mathematics lessons completed. Whether the goal is broad in intent or tightly focused, stating the goal for online instruction and then completing lessons that address that goal are crucial.

For my part, I need a few hours to get into work mode. I’m often inefficient in my use of time, especially in the mornings. I make up for it by working more time – 10 or 12 hour days are normal for me. I suspect that someone at 37 Signals might suggest that I’m “not really working” for the whole of those 12 hours. I’m not, that is the whole point – I’m not working the whole of that 12 hours, but I am attempting to get into a work frame of mind for those 12 hours. Sometimes it takes me 12 hours to get 8 good hours of productive work. The folks at 37 Signals are missing an important psychological element – the danger of distraction, which becomes greater when one works less.

Their example of Basecamp, where they worked 10 hours a week, is especially pointless. What matters is how many hours a week people are focused on work, not how many hours a week they are focused on any particular project. How much of your time do you spend in work mode, thinking about work problems? Studies have shown that big breakthroughs tend to come after long, intense contemplation of a problem. Innovation requires time:

During the past few years I’ve noticed a curious paradox heading its ugly rear among business leaders tooting the horn for innovation.

On one hand they want the rank and file to step up to the plate and own the effort to innovate.

On the other hand, they are unwilling to grant the people they are exhorting any more TIME to innovate.

Somehow, magically, they expect aspiring innovators to not only generate game-changing ideas in their spare time, but do all the research, data collection, business case building, piloting, project management, idea development, testing, report generation, and troubleshooting in between their other assignments.

Tooth fairy alert!

This is not the way it happens, folks! Not only is this approach unreasonable, it’s unfair, unbalanced, and unworkable…

You cannot shoehorn game-changing innovation projects into the already overcommitted schedules of your overworked workforce.

If you do, it won’t be innovation you’ll get, only half-finished projects and a whole lot of cranky people complaining to you in between meetings.

Aspiring innovators don’t need pep talks. They need TIME. Time to think. And time to dream. Time to collaborate. And time to plan. Time to pilot. And time to test. Time to tinker. And time to tinker again.

That’s why Google and 3M give its workforce 20% of their time to work on projects not immediately connected to its core business. That’s why W.L. Gore gives its workforce a half day a week to follow their fascinations. That’s why Corel instituted it’s virtual garage program.

…The fear? If you give people “freedom” they’ll end up playing video games and taking 3-hour lunches. Alas, when fear takes over, folks, (the same fear Peter Drucker asked us all many years ago to remove from the workplace), vision is supplanted by supervision and all his micromanaging cousins.

Time to innovate is not time wasted. It is time invested.

The great business guru, Peter Drucker, says innovation arises from focused, disciplined work:

Most successful innovations, according to Drucker, come from a conscious, purposeful search for innovation opportunities. He saw four areas of opportunity inside organizations: unexpected occurrences, incongruities, process needs, and industry and market changes. Opportunities also exist outside organizations in its social and intellectual environments: demographic changes, changes in perception, and new knowledge. Together these seven account for almost all opportunities for innovation.

Effective innovation is simple and focused. If it tries to do too many things, people will get confused and implementation will be compromised. He also states that innovation is hard, focused, purposeful work. It requires knowledge and focus, and often, requires ingenuity. The foundation of entrepreneurship is the practice of systematic innovation.

Time on task explains why it is productive to work 90 hours a week, while taking lots of work breaks:

Working 90 hours a work week requires frequent, and highly effective, work breaks. In the center of Macintosh work area in Bandley 3 we had a ping pong table, a nice stereo system, and a Defender video game machine. We found that competitive play gave us a jolt of adrenaline, and a refreshed mind-set when we resumed work. We also learned a lot about our coworkers and how they excel during competition. While playing Defender one day I got some great insight into how Burrell accelerates his own learning process.

There is a huge difference between playing video games at work, versus playing them at home. At work, you know that you are going back to work, so your mind stays in work-mode. When you are done playing videos, your brain is both focused on the problems at hand, and also refreshed and ready to look at things anew. At home, when you play video games, your brain drifts to other forms of recreation, as you know you won’t be working for the rest of the day.

I’ve had friends who have sometimes suggested to me “Maybe you’ll be more productive if you work less.” I’ve tried it, it does not work for me. The less I work, the more distracted I am.

37 Signals seems relatively isolated on this issue. Most of the people who’ve written on this issue have suggested that time on task has a positive relationship with productivity.

Colin Steele writes about hiring programmers and asking them to show a code sample:

Since I’ve long viewed the practice of programming as a craft, I’ve tried to apply the notion of a portfolio, a gimmick I learned from my boss back at AOL. A good programmer should have a body of work, which can be shown, and in it you will find strong clues as to the type of programmer they are. So unless I’ve worked with someone before, directly, along with references and resumes, I ask them to provide:

A significant code sample which you feel is representative of your best recent work.

You might be surprised how that surprises folks. I’m not sure if they think I’m going to poach their code, or rat them out to the employers whom they were working for when they wrote it, or what. In any case, of those that get over it and send me something, a disheartening number send me what amount to toys – 100 line incomplete snippets of something-or-other. Or, just as bad, a swath of user interface callback code, or a class definition that’s 90% setters and getters. Sigh.

Once I’ve settled on the notion that a particular person might be a good hire, I try them out. That amounts to a six-month “no fault divorce” period, where the candidate is brought on board as a 1099 contractor, but in all other ways as a full fledged member of the team. Most folks need six months to settle in, get embedded in team dynamics, and learn enough of the problem domain to be useful. During that time, if anything doesn’t feel right – and I do this purely based on gut instincts – I gently end the relationship.

I can imagine for some kinds of coding this is especially important. If you’re writing an application whose main goal is data mining, then to see a code sample that shows an unusual cleverness in sorting or averaging or summing or grouping or parsing might be very important. However, that would not apply to a lot of the work I have done over the last 10 years. I might make a distinction between the engineers who design cars versus the car mechanics who fix cars. The engineers have to know a lot more than the mechanics. But for about 95% of the web sites I’ve built over the last 10 years, the work has been more like that of a car mechanic, rather than that of a car designer.

Much of the work I’ve done, and for which I’ve hired people, has been straightforward CMS work, which, in a sense, is the simplest kind of programming – designing the database is one of the few high-level, strategic decisions one has to make for that kind of work. The rest is just writing some code to either put data into the database, or take data out of the database. These projects do not necessarily demand great technical cleverness, but they do demand clear thinking. The worst thing about CMS projects is the way the code tends to sprawl over time. After 3 or 4 years working on a CMS, you find you have 50 modules, and you find the amount of redundant code building up in your system is allowing the same bugs to show up, again and again and again. The need to keep things organized eventually becomes the #1 priority. I’d be unable to figure out how well-organized someone is from a short code snippet. For me, the important test is the one Steele mentions at the end – giving someone a test of a few months.

But of course, one needs to screen out the folks who are really bad. Since 2006, I’ve had to hire programmers for 3 different projects. As I wrote in How Much Should You Lie On Your Resume:

The interviews were amazing. People would claim all kinds of things on their resume that they couldn’t defend when we met for an interview.

One woman said she knew Javascript. During the interview, I asked how well she knew Javascript. She said she’d taken a class in it during 1999 (that’s 8 years previous!). Could she write a single line of Javascript now? Um, no. But, uh, if she started working with it, she was sure it would come back quickly.

One fellow said he knew PHP and MySql. Turns out his experience consisted of a single small project he’d done for fun, at work. He was working as a tech support person at a local community college, and one of his main tasks was to help people when they forgot their passwords. So he wrote a tiny database program into which he could record usernames and passwords and email addresses. This consisted of about 6 screens. The PHP code was unbelievably primitive: he didn’t know what functions were, so when he wanted to break up his code into pieces, he put each routine into its own file, and then he would include that file when he wanted to trigger the code. And all the HTML was hard coded into the PHP. Awful. And the poor guy had no idea how much he still had to learn.

We spoke to a woman who said she knew Java, but had no Java projects that she could point us to, not even little demos on her laptop.

Many of the people we spoke to were just moving past the point of unconscious incompetence. They simply had no idea how they appeared to us.

We spoke to a lot of people who were clearly beginners, yet they claimed to know more technologies than I do. A typical list: Javascript, CSS, HTML, XHTML, RSS, Atom, Flash, ActionScript, Java, .Net, C, C++, Python, Perl, PHP, Linux, MySql, Oracle, Microsoft Server, Windows, Apache, IIS, Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, iMovies, Mac OS, and SOAP.

…What a lot of beginners seem to do is they include on their resume stuff they were briefly exposed to during some class in college. So if, for one day, they got to write some SQL queries against a dummy database set up in Oracle, they then claimed that they knew Oracle. I think what this approach communicates, more than anything, is insecurity. I realize that it is tough to get one’s career started, but still, you might want to leave off the stuff that you’ve only had a day or two exposure to.

The more extreme cases can be weeded out with an interview. For the rest, sometimes you can get a sense of who they are if they have a blog. But a lot of the times, it comes down to giving people a try, and see how they do.

There are a lot of decisions where an argument can be made for 2 radically different approaches. I had a conversation this summer, with a programmer who did very good work, about how many databases should be in use on our website. I felt that the right answer was “one”, they felt the right answer was “two”. Part of the site was being built in Symfony, and part of the site was simply a WordPress blog. He argued that putting each application in its own database was “loose coupling”. In this case, I thought it would be a huge headache. We wanted to integrate data from both applications on our home page, and the idea of drawing data from 2 different databases to create our homepage struck me as way too much work. He was aggressive in defending his opinion and he regarded my final decision with a certain amount of contempt. All the same, the programming he did was excellent, and he was very fast, so I’d hire him again for future projects (though I wouldn’t take his advice on architectural decisions).

When I think about the next time I might hire, I think about how I might give someone a try without wasting too much money. I’d like to think that its possible to figure out who is good, and who is bad, after just a week or two of working together. The big challenge is the 6 month wait that Steele describes:

Most folks need six months to settle in, get embedded in team dynamics, and learn enough of the problem domain to be useful.

I try to find tasks that only take a week and which reveal a lot about what kind of programmer I’m dealing with. This is a large-scale version of asking for a code snippet. This worked out well for us when I was at Bluewall and we were looking for a Flash programmer. After I interviewed her, I decided to give a very short, small project to Starrie Williamson. I liked how she handled her first, small assignment, so we ended up working with her for the next year.

I post this only because I am impressed with the extent to which the JVM world is now able to fight back against Microsoft. Record macros in OpenOffice with Groovy

Windows/Mac/Linux (OpenOffice): Free OpenOffice extension Groovy makes it possible to record and run Macros in OpenOffice. Don’t confuse Groovy for a cheap Visual Basic knockoff. Groovy has its own syntax similar to bash mixed with Java. If you were sticking to Microsoft Office solely for its macro capabilities, you may be able to break away with Groovy. Unfortunately, Groovy is not nearly as beginner friendly as VB/VBA. However, beginners will have no problem getting started with simple macros. Groovy is a free extension for all platforms with OpenOffice. Here is an ODT with several sample macros to help you get your feet wet (remember, you need to install Groovy before you can run the macros).

I first got interested in Java in 2003. I played around with it for year, doing minor toy projects. I finally decided that I hated it — too verbose, too redundant, too much aimed at the Enterprise, not dynamic or agile. Java is inappropriate for fast moving startups. I turned my back on Java and therefore missed the explosion of dynamic languages that run on the JVM: Jython, JRuby, JavaFX, Groovy, etc. In other words, I turned my back on the Java ecosystem just at the moment that it finally started to get interesting.

About a year ago I began to focus again on the world of the JVM. At first I was over-enthusiastic about JavaFX. Then I was frustrated by its lack of progress. Some at Sun have talked as if JavaFX was Swing 2.0, the future of Java GUI programming. But with JavaFX one has to jump through some hoops to integrate with Java code, whereas other JVM languages, such as Groovy, allow seamless integration.

Given that background, I am fascinated to read that Griffon is making it easier to do polyglot programming with the JVM languages:

If you’ve followed the Griffon news in the last 12 months you may be aware that Griffon is a fun and rapid desktop/rich application development framework inspired by Grails; that there are more than 40 released plugins and that polyglot programming is a pretty much a done deal (Groovy, Java, JavaFX, Scala & Clojure). Griffon was born as a means to get Swing applications off the ground quickly; a few months ago it gained the capability of mixing Swing and JavaFX components in the same application.

Just recently it went a bit further than that.

Swing is not the only toolkit that can be used with Java in order to create a desktop applications, JavaFX is clearly one alternative (though at the time of writing this entry it still lacks a full set of controls and a healthy ecosystem of 3rd part components, but that’s another story). There is also SWT, which provides better fidelity as it talks to native widgets directly as opposed to Swing. However that also imposes some restrictions (like skinning) but that has not kept the proponents of the toolkit (and Eclipse) from using it at every turn. There is also another newcomer: Pivot. Fresh from VMWare labs it quickly found a place at the Apache Incubator where it’s been nurtured and awaits the moment of graduation.

What do these toolkits have to do with Griffon? Well as it turns out there is experimental (i.e, not finished yet) support for both SWT and Pivot.

This is the rare article where every paragraph held a shock for me. There is a type of slug that absorbs organelles from algae and then uses the organelles to produce food:

It’s easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Microbes swap genes readily, but Zardus said he couldn’t think of another natural example of genes flowing between multicellular kingdoms.

Pierce emphasized that this green slug goes far beyond animals such as corals that host live-in microbes that share the bounties of their photosynthesis. Most of those hosts tuck in the partner cells whole in crevices or pockets among host cells. Pierce’s slug, however, takes just parts of cells, the little green photosynthetic organelles called chloroplasts, from the algae it eats. The slug’s highly branched gut network engulfs these stolen bits and holds them inside slug cells.

Some related slugs also engulf chloroplasts but E. chlorotica alone preserves the organelles in working order for a whole slug lifetime of nearly a year. The slug readily sucks the innards out of algal filaments whenever they’re available, but in good light, multiple meals aren’t essential. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from one of its few favored species of Vaucheria algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to do is sunbathe.

The article mentions that the slugs also steal the genetic material needed to keep the algae organelles going. For me this is proof that for almost every rule in biology, there is an exception.

Such a story allows for a completely new understanding of evolution:

Mixing the genomes of algae and animals could certainly complicate tracing out evolutionary history. In the tree of life, he said, the green sea slug “raises the possibility of branch tips touching.”

Branch tips touching would require a re-write of almost everything we think we know about the history of life on Earth.

Meaning is the hard work of the mind:

“The Internet,” writes Mayer, “can facilitate an incredible persistence and availability of information, but given the Internet’s adolescence, all of the information simply isn’t there yet. I find that in some ways my mind has evolved to this new way of thinking, relying on the information’s existence and availability, so much so that it’s almost impossible to conclude that the information isn’t findable because it just isn’t online.” When Mayer says her “mind has evolved” to the point that it can only recognize and process information that has been digitized and uploaded, she is confessing to undergoing an intellectual dehumanization. She is confessing to being computerized.

Poirier:

[Frost] insists on our acknowledging in each and every poem, however slight, that poetry is a “made” thing. So, too, is truth. Thus, the quality which allows the poetry to seem familiar and recognizable as such, that makes it “beautiful,” is derivative of a larger conviction he shares with the William James of Pragmatism. “Truth,” James insisted, “is not a stagnant property … Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.”

It’s not what you can find out, Frost and James and Poirier told us; it’s what you know. Truth is self-created through labor, through the hard, inefficient, unscripted work of the mind, through the indirection of dream and reverie. What matters is what cannot be rendered as code. Google can give you everything but meaning.