Closer To The Ideal

 Zed Shaw has posted a rant about everything he hates in the Ruby community. The rant is so over-the-top that is impossible not to find it entertaining. It is rare to see anyone with 21 years experience post anything like this in public. Most people in his position would be worried about their careers. He, apparently, is beyond the point of caring.

At times, the rant is almost incoherent:

Alright people, time to get a huge grip on reality’s collar and hold on tight.

Ruby on Rails is not a mother fucking industry!

Jesus fucking christ on a goddamned pike you absolute mother fucking donkey dick sucking morons get a fucking grip!

You are not in an industry. You are a bunch of people barely scraping by in a tiny little sector of a moderate sized piece of the economy. Gaming alone makes you all looks like the pathetic little crumbs I brush out of my toaster when it smells bad.

He makes a few good points though:

Where I work the company is willing to blow huge amounts of money on a consulting firm or hardware, but ends up firing people when times get tight. It’s a universal mass hysteria that paying $100 – $200 per hour for a group of consultants is preferable to simply hiring good employees. At the rates companies pay these consultants they could hire 4 full time employees.

Consultancies used to provide a service by managing the entire project so you didn’t have to do much. Now with Agile and Pair Programming the consulting firms can dupe clients into helping them make the sausage, provide little to no services, yet still charge insane rates. What’s impressive is these consulting firms somehow charge rates that are 5 or 6 times what they pay their employees.

…

Let’s take ThoughtWorks as a classic example of the hysteria. They decided to get into the Ruby on Rails game and went full bore. I was telling people right when Rails came out that doing it for internal projects at big companies would be a huge money maker. Nobody believed me, and now rather than all my smart friends working on cool applications for big money I have ThoughtWorks fucking up my party.

Before you continue this part of the rant ask yourself a question:

How did ThoughtWorks go from 0% Rails business to 60% Rails in just a few short months, but somehow didn’t hire that many top notch Ruby guys? Remember, if 60% of your business is Rails then 60% of your people need Rails training or else you have to hire more people. If they didn’t hire any more people than that means…the people they had were retrained. With two week training courses. Huh? How does that make them experts?

What happens if you do that is you have a group of former C# and Java guys running around writing shitty Ruby code and training on the client’s dime for huge fees.

Some of the post seems to border on libel:

In the two projects I’ve taken from ThoughtWorks I found mountains of horrible, horrible code. They of course try to pull the classic “there’s many ways to do everything in programming” but this time they kind of get caught because Ruby on Rails means stay on the Rails. There is an established best practice way to build web applications with Rails and that’s the entire point of the system. When ThoughtWorks fucked up these projects they did it in such a completely deviated way that it was impossible to defend.

Additionally, the people they placed on these projects were not well trained at all, had no idea about simple Ruby idioms let alone good design, and spent more of their time drinking and having fun than actually getting shit done. At the last project they actually had bottles of Pedialyte in the fridge to help with their hangovers after wild nights partying.

Chip Ransler (of Second Road) gave me the book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War to read. I have not yet had time to read it all the way through, but I’ve enjoyed opening it at random and reading various parts of it. Since the American military is one of the largest hierarchical organizations in the world, studying it can remind us of the strengths and weaknesses of hierarchy. This following anecdote, from page 188, brings across one of the worst aspects of hierarchical organizations:

A story is told in the Pentagon of a colonel waiting in the outer office of a four-star general. The colonel’s face is twisted in anguish. He looks at his watch and he looks down the hall and he looks over his shoulder at the general’s door. Everything about the colonel shows a man twisted and torn by powerful emotions.

Moments earlier a subordinate had rushed to inform the colonel that his wife called to say their house was on fire. Her call was suddenly cut off, presumably by the fire. The colonel did not know if his wife was safe, if his children were safe, or if his house was burning to the ground. Every ounce of his being as a husband, every iota of his soul as a father, dictated that he drop everything to rush to his family. Yet he stayed. The chance to have a one-on-one meeting with a four-star general, the chance to advance his career, is more important.

Such is the way of life for many in the Pentagon.

This is an extreme case, of course, but it serves as a reminder about the sometimes twisted incentives that hierarchy puts in place. When an organization is hierarchical and big enough to be isolated from outside forces (even when that isolation later turns out to have been a bit of an illusion) then the internal politics of the organization become the main source of reward, validation, threat and competition. The effect can be deadly in for-profit companies. Instead of focusing on competing with outside threats, the managers of such firms focus on competing with their fellow managers. When I think of some of the American giants who’ve struggled through hard times (IBM in the early 90s, General Motors now) I sometimes wonder how it was that the organizations didn’t see the crisis coming which eventually hit them. In all such situations, one of the first things I suspect is too much hierarchy.

Actually, the title should be “Kaizen is an attitude, not a skill level?”. The question mark is needed because these are issues I’m still thinking about.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming had a method of increasing the quality of any business process, but he was unable to get a hearing in America till towards the end of his life. After their defeat in World War II, the Japanese were desperate to rebuild their country and they were open to new ideas. And so Deming found an audience in Japan, and he taught the Japanese how to make high quality products. It wasn’t till the 1970s, when Japanese competition was hurting American companies, that American companies finally took an interest in Deming’s ideas.

The production of software and web sites can beneift from Deming’s method, which is neatly summarized as the Deming Cycle. Robert Hoekman has a nice, short page summarizing the Cycle:

The Deming Cycle is a proposal for handling changes. It includes four steps that repeat in a cyclical pattern:

1. Plan a change
2. Do the change
3. Check the results
4. Act on the results

Hoekman also has a page on the Japanese practice of Kaizen, which has made companies like Toyota the best in their industry. The software industry has a lot to learn from the practice of Kaizen.

Kaizen (pronounced “kigh-zen”) is the time-honored practice of continuous, incremental improvement. In the software industry, it’s the practice of actively improving designs, code, processes, and everything else, continuously, now and forever, to create a complete customer experience. The principles of the Kaizen Software Manifesto are:

1. Make continuous improvements in every aspect of the business.
2. Actively pursue a superior, complete customer experience.
3. Continually improve designs, code, and processes.
4. Strive to increase agility (binshou) while reducing costs.
5. Use the Deming Cycle to minimize disruption from change.
6. Prevent errors (poka-yoke), in software and in business.
7. Respect people, leverage expertise, and trust staff.
8. Reward suggestions, improvements, and progress.
9. Always move forward.

This last year, I’ve been working with Bluewall, and they’ve been trying to hire additional programmers and designers. I started off thinking that we could hire relatively inexperienced people and train them on the job. Perhaps this strategy will pay off in the end. However, the last two hires have both been extremely talented people, and it is a relief to work with them. They require very little of my management time, for the most part they manage themselves. This recommendation by Hoekman combines with my own recent experience to change my thinking about who we hire:

Build a kaizen team

Create a team of “change agents” to manage change and make it less interruptive.

One team, in fact, can be dedicated to improving the whole customer experience. Staff from different parts of the organization – marketing, development, management, etc – can all be part of this team. The team should have a clear goal of keeping an eye on the big picture of how customers experience the company and improving it in every way possible.

Of course, a kaizen team is not necessarily made up of highly experienced people. Kaizen is an attitude, not a skill level. So long as people have the right attitude then, given time, they will achieve improvement, which over time will amount to dramatic breakthroughs.

But these are things I’m still thinking about. I sometimes think that a kaizen team must have some experienced members, who can informally act as leaders. Otherwise the team makes improvements, but at a slow pace. Without experienced members, one would have (at least initially) a team of highly motivated individuals who are unsure what to do.

I should add, I have hired one person in the last year who was inexperienced but who has worked out wonderfully. The person is ambitious and dedicated to learning fast. So attitude is more important than skills. All the same, when one can find those rare individuals who have both the right attitude and advanced skills, then, I think, one should always hire such people, to the maximum extent that one’s budget can possibly allow.

Susie Bright was invited to come speak at Blogher. The invitation pleased her, but the subject did not:

This time, however, I was surprised which panel I was asked to join; it was pitched to me as “how to make safer spaces online.”

My first reaction was like a child being asked to put on my seat belt for the 100th time: Ugh. “But I don’t want to be safe online, Mom!”

When I think of all my ambitions for my blog or my writing, I think of being influential, incendiary, funny, poignant— never “safe.”

Susie Bright recounts her own history as a women’s rights activist, and recalls the crippling effect that concerns over creating a safe space could have:

Pretty soon, certain organizations of the feminist left were ground to a halt, because at any moment, someone could pipe up in a meeting: “I feel unsafe when you say that, Mary!”

There was nowhere to turn. Debate had no recourse in the “safe zone,” and the “victim” won, smugly, by suppressive default.

It’s rather amazing that everyone put up with it, and never rejected its childishness. Can you imagine interrupting a legitimate argument to complain that it had to end because it gave you a stomachache?

As the left pissed its faltering assets down a PC drain, the right-wing embraced some of the same coddled language. Is America safe for children? Are video games safe for teenagers? Shouldn’t women stay inside and be safe instead of being subjected to god knows what in the brazen streets?

Of course, this wasn’t anything new — it’s centuries-old protectionism - but the pseudo-feminist sheen gave it new legs.

That centuries old protectionism has never been a friend of women’s rights. It arises from the kind of paternalism that argues that women are weak and need to be protected, and the “protection” tends to involve a loss of freedom. But a confluence of factors allowed arguments about safety to make headway in the courts:

The next group to pile onto the Safe-T Garbage Detail were the corporate litigators. This was a huge leap. You had institutions that were truly guilty - are truly guilty - of staggering sexism and discrimination. They would freeze out and exploit their female workers without a second thought. Get some more coffee while you’re up, dear!

When a few women tried to mount a legal campaign against the worst offenders, it turned out that one of the few things they could nail these fuckers to the wall for, was for cultivating an “unsafe” atmosphere.

To a large extent, Bright sees the issue of safety as a distraction from the underlying class issues:

Here’s a tip: Wanna stop the cycle of “safety panics” at your workplace? Give each person who works some privacy and dignity.

Then look at the pay scales of everyone in the company, and give all the secretaries, assistants, and janitorial staff a gigantic raise. Watch how suddenly, all the “unsafe” feelings disappear as if by magic!

I think she sums up the situation fairly well. I don’t think more pay equals more safety, but I do think both reflect a crucial underlying set of values. The organization that respects its workers and pays them well is going to have less harrassement than the organization that disrespects its workers and pays them low wages.

Not all harrassement comes from the leadership. In fact, studies show that the majority of sexual harrassement happens between workers who are nominally peers. However, how much harrassement will be tolerated is certainly indicated from the attitudes of those at the top. The leadership of any organization signals, through its policies and its pay scales, how much respect it has for the people working in that organization. Lower ranking staff are at all times aware of how much real respect the leadership has for the workers. And those who wish to harrass will be concious that they can get away with more when they are in an organization that has no respect for its workers.

Heather, at her blog The Needle’s Bewitching Eye, writes of her own experience with sexual harrassement:

However, by the time I left the job, not only had I realized I wasn’t even helping the company, but I had also become a victim of gender harassment myself many times over. I worked in one of the two organizations which was supposed to SET THE EXAMPLE for the rest of the company (the other being the Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action, or EEO/AA group); I had a B.A. and an M.S. in criminal justice; and I dealt with severe violations all day, every day; but I couldn’t even manage to protect myself from victimization because I worked in a dramatically male-dominated field.

In fact, I had reported my own situation to the EEO/AA group no less than five times — and WON the investigation every time. The problem, though, remained because, as the only female employee in my group, I was the only one complaining about gender harassment, and so it was rather a simple solution to just ignore me. I actually was told often, “Nobody else has a problem,” and after I heard it enough times, it did start to sound an awful lot like, “You are crazy.” Even the EEO/AA investigator (who was a male, by the way, and a very decent one, too) couldn’t help much with that, since he couldn’t be in my shoes all the time. I had to deal with reality, and I had to deal with it alone. It was as natural to my male bosses and coworkers to treat me as a second class citizen as it was for them to urinate while standing. It would never have occurred to them to analyze their own actions, and even when someone pointed out to them exactly how they were treating me differently from everyone else, they still had difficulty seeing it for themselves. More importantly, they refused to change their behavior. Or maybe more accurately, they didn’t think they SHOULD change their behavior because I was ONLY a woman and therefore not worth showing that much respect.

Heather’s experience points to how difficult it is to stop harrassement in an organization that has ingrained contempt for women. The law is a blunt instrument, it will often fail to reform an organization that does not want to reform.

What Susie Bright reminds of us is how a company can use old fashioned paternalism to create an illusion of safety - for instance, put a filter on web browsers so no one can look at porn. Such a policy doesn’t protect employees from sexual harrassement at work, but it does give the company something to point to if they are ever brought to court. They can say “See how much we care about our workers? We won’t let anyone look at dirty pictures.” Such paternalism as this takes for granted that women are weak and need to be protected. It’s questionable whether this form of protection is ever necessary in a firm with a genuine respect for all of its workers. To put this the other way round, I’ve never worked at a firm that filtered out porn, and there was never a need for such a filter because at the places I’ve worked the whole culture of the business has communicated that professional, respectful behavior is expected from everyone at all times.

What does it mean when you find yourself writing emails like this?

Dear vvvvvvvvv,

I have not talked to you in two years, since I lived in Richmond. I think you were friends with Laura Denyes? Or you were a friend of one of her friends? I m curious if you are still doing web design and Flash work? We (bluewallllc.com) are looking for people. Please let me know if you are looking for work.

take care,

lawrence krubner