unloading

Take a seat kids, this one’s going to be long and ranty, but it’s just something I have to get out of my system. Apologies in advance.

When my employment was ended, I had the opportunity to have an exit interview. Or so it was called. It turned out that it was simply an equipment return and paperwork session rather than an “interview”. I have no idea if that was the norm or if it was just the way it was done by my interviewer. I turned it into an exit interview anyway.

Even though I was part of a “resource action” (downsizing), there were still things I liked and didn’t like which I thought I could contribute to the betterment of those that remained. Of course, from an employer point of view, they probably couldn’t care less what I had to say since technically they weren’t losing someone of interest to them, they were getting rid of dead weight. One of my previous managers ended up conducting the session. I think I learned more about the attitudes and directions management had on my career from that one interview than I had in any previous discussion with my managers (we had annual one-on-one progress discussions).

It did not sit well with me. Hence here I am.

reality check

I’ve come to terms about being ”chosen” as part of the resource action. I think the combination of a completely uninteresting final project and my inability to find another project I could contribute to led to my ultimate demise. I just couldn’t get to another project/group fast enough before the axe fell. The sad part was that had I managed to survive the cut, I was being recruited to work on another far more interesting project. C’est la vie.

But of course, decisions are not based on one thing alone. My project before my final ill fated one was an ambitious attempt that just couldn’t find the right footing in the right places. Although it managed to do what I wanted it to do, I just couldn’t find the right adoption rate, and that, for any project, is a make or break deal. No matter how promising or interesting (my view) the project may be, if people don’t want to use it, then it’s not worth it (management view).

I labored on that project for around 15 months before it was put to rest. But those 15 months were a key determining factor for my production value. A canceled 15 month project plus the last project also lingering in an adoption and implementation fight for 12 months, in retrospect, probably didn’t bode well for me.

blind progression

During those 15 months, I was too blinded to know just how stalled management considered the project. The worse part, my manager at the time (the one also conducting the exit interview) didn’t feel like he was able to get me productively pointed towards any goals and that I was unmanageable and ended up just doing what I wanted. I can see myself doing that. I had still believed in the project long after management stopped believing; and trying to continue a project that is a dead end in management’s eyes is certainly not a career wise decision.

At the exit interview, he mentioned that he probably should have canned the project 3 months in if it didn’t have the possible footing for adoption. Admittedly, I agree that would have been an appropriate action, but I had enjoyed the project concept and the potential too much so I was blinded. He was not a able to assert himself enough to outright can the project, instead he let me languish with little value seen in what I was doing.

A complete failure on my part to see the bigger reality around me, a complete failure to see that I was indeed forsaken by management. The project also was not a good fit for my manager’s interests, so I feel that he was more inclined to leave me alone far more than I should have been while he tended his other more valuable projects. It was perhaps a little abandonment, but at the same time, it was a bit of freedom for me to try to take it to the next level to show value. Alas, I was not able to do that outright.

swept under the rug

In retrospect, the problem is if you have a disinterested manager, you have someone who would have normally be a proponent for your project be an idle bystander. This disinterest led to a lack of focus towards the project, a lack of want to participate in it (he barely touched it) and just a lack of understanding about the bigger picture. I was doomed.

There were only vague references to “anything done this week?” and “what’s the progress made?”. There wasn’t any deep involvement with influencing ideas, thoughts, directions, methods, usefulness. No conversations or debates or suggestions. It was just in cruise control mode until he finally managed to find a way out for me… or rather for him to have to no longer deal with me: I was shuffled during a department reorganization.

At least he managed to learn his lesson that if a project isn’t succeeding, kill it fast and quick before it ends up being mired in months of directionless development. As the department reorganization took place and I was shuffled, that conveniently ended that project cold. But even with this opportunity, he had no real idea what to do with me. That was perhaps the most disappointing part. I was simply shuffled to get me somewhere else, to someone else, in hopes that I would find a better fit elsewhere. Anywhere out of his hair.

Unfortunately, there was no discussion or postmortem as to what went wrong, what I could do differently, where I may like to be, what projects interest me. There was none of that. Instead I was simply off loaded onto a new team whose focus, if anyone had asked, was one of the last things I would have ever wanted to do as a programmer (hence the uninteresting-to-me project that ultimately led to the end).

Swept under the rug… or rather, under someone else’s rug.

faulty cog

There was no real concern for me or any offer of options, I was just a cog in a wheel, a faulty one at that. When I brought that up during the exit interview, I was retorted with a reply that people in a company like this are rarely given a choice about where they want to go. An example was given about the rotating executives and VPs. They are assigned and moved, why should it be any different for me, especially when I’m no where near being an executive?

Good managers will find ways to move people around properly to fit their skills, and thus their productivity. Understandably, at times, it may simply mean a dismissal is in order. That’s fine too. As a manager, you have to do what you have to do. But some managers, they’ll just ignore you or sweep you under the rug, shuffle you to somewhere else out of their hands, or when opportunity presents, they’ll just make you disappear. The subtle difference is in the amount of effort they may put into people managing, as opposed to just project managing.

It was certainly a wake up call about the attitudes prevalent in the company that some (certainly not all) of the managers were mired in.

specialists and generalists

A homogeneous treatment of employees at all levels can only lead to disaster.

Executives and VPs are career oriented to gain a broad knowledge of the company. It’s important for them to see the various areas, gain strengths, and provide that global picture for eventual grooming that may lead all the way up to the job of CEO.

Programmers are a completely different beast. Maybe it’s wishful thinking and my own naiveté, but as the cogs and engines of the company, you really want to assign a programmer to where they can specialize and excel. You want them working with a passion on something that interests them and excites them. That’s where you’ll get the best productivity. You don’t need to necessarily have them get good at all areas or versed in every aspect of the company. Programmers are hired by the dozen and are meant to specialize and work together, not do broad level work. You need that type of specialty and passion to be able to create things the world has yet to see.

Not to degrade executives, but sometimes they are truly there just for the time they are assigned to that position. They do the job, gain the perspective and experience, and are then ready to move on within a few years (as part of the rotation plan). Programmers I think see a much longer term evolution of their job rather than it being transitional. The mindset differs, so therefore should the treatment.

The term “job satisfaction” can indeed be a strange concept for some people. Too often, people choose to trudge through things they don’t want to do to get to where they want to go. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do things. Not everything you do at a job should be a sacrifice in order to simply ascend rank and ladder climb. I have a feeling that for those solely focused on climbing the ladder, the goal, not the journey, is of utmost importance. But for others, like myself, the “here and now” are what’s important. Ascension is not a goal, it can be a by product, but never the primary target. To be able to enjoy with a passion what you do now is what can bring the greatest satisfaction, not to mention the best productivity.

That concept was evidently lost in this conversation, and apparently lost in the management of myself.

communication

I know this may sound more like sour grapes, and perhaps my glorified viewpoint of programming is far removed from the realities it takes to run a company, but I still believe that personal interaction, transparency, skill matching, and job satisfaction are key elements when getting the best out of people. I feel like those were lacking, either because of my motivation or by management attitude. If that was indeed the case, perhaps it was time for me to leave (or get booted).

All I had wanted was to be consulted, or at least notified, when my skills and efforts were being transferred to another location because of my lack of success or a difficulty in being managed. Instead, I got the corporate shuffle where we were treated like cogs instead of people. The last bit I asked him to do as I left was to actually talk to the people he manages, discuss with them issues, consult with upcoming plans for shuffles, even if it’s off the books. To have this talk we were having right now at the exit interview instead at the annual reviews so that people have a chance to evaluate and adapt.

I realize perhaps management is taught never to discuss department shuffles with people being shuffled because you don’t want to have to deal with the complaints or drama that may occur. But that sentiment already seems like something completely counterintuitive to me. You’re already fearing the reactions and therefore not giving any due respect that we can indeed be adults and handle the situation as needed.

To know in advance is at least better off than simply being moved around like pawns. Even if we know that we may not have genuine ability to change our future in the company, it’s that little effort of actually asking and having that sliver of a chance that you can have some say in your own destiny is an empowering and important thing to have.

I hate to see that this type of respect is not present (and maybe never was) in a big corporation that in general, I still respect.

ask!

So what can you do if you’re heading in my direction?

It may seem rather mundane and stupid, but ask questions. Open a dialog. If you’re being shuffled, ask why. Ask how you were to manage and what you could do better to improve yourself. In reality, you should be asking this each time you have an annual review. Often times we only concentrate on what we accomplished when we do retrospective reviews, but if your manager is worth a grain of salt, they will know what you’ve done. If they don’t, that’s a whole other set of problems on your hand.

So ask questions, know what they think of you, and don’t be afraid to let them know what you think of them. Too often we pretend that everything is a one way communication from the top down, when in reality, there’s plenty of bandwidth for a genuine bilateral discussion. Now whether they are in the mood for listening is something you’ll have to ascertain for yourself.

We may be programmers, but there is a certain level of humanity left in us. If you manage coders, and want to tease out the best in them, be sure to actually treat them like people and take the time to genuinely figure them out. Cause if you’re already thinking how time consuming that’s going to be, then you’re definitely not really a good fit for being a people manager. Remember, there’s a difference between managing people and managing projects.

We can program, but we don’t just churn out code. Some people do it out of necessity, but I’m sure if given a choice, we would love to do it out of love and excitement. Trust me, you’re going to get a lot more productivity out of programmers when you treat them like people instead of just cogs.

* this post just kept growing in length. I was even considering splitting it in two, but I think I’ll just instead expound on some of the points here with later posts. So for this time, you get a super verbose post. Hopefully at least one person will read it to the end.

living by dying

It’s not often in one’s life that you’re confronted with the realities of being alive, namely by virtue of a death. It always sneaks up on you, no matter how much you think you expect it.

Our cat, Anakin, finally gave in to his heart disease and passed away a few weeks ago. I’ve had to let this post and others sit on the sideline a while due to the event. For those that have never taken care of an animal beyond the obligatory duties of just feeding and walking, this post wont make any sense to you. You may leave now.

it was an expected event

He was diagnosed with heart disease (and inflammatory bowel disease) over an year ago so the fact that he was pretty happy dandy till the end was a good thing. But looking over all the pictures, I can certainly see a change in him over the course of a year. It’s hard to notice when living with him day to day, but somewhat striking to see just how much physical change he went through. As grim as it sounds, in the end, he died of a cardiac event. But we were able to be there when it happened, paying attention to him, trying to comfort him. So as tragic and sudden as that event was, there was some solace in knowing that we were there, and hopefully some comfort for him knowing that he was with us till the end.

Living with someone for almost 12 years, whether an animal or a human, can make an impact. There’s a certain sense of loss and that gut wrenching feeling of never being able to see or be with them again. I’ve lost grandparents and relatives, but the sense of loss is different with someone that you’ve continuously been with, day in and day out. I know perhaps people will complain if I compare this to the loss of a child, but it is markedly a different experience than losing a relative.

emotion and logic

As a programmer, I tend to reduce things to logic and calculations. I knew the event was coming. I knew that even if he lived till a ripe cat age of 20, I would still have to endure this same sense of loss. It’s a sad thing to know that by caring for an animal, the chances are that you will witness their death first. Perhaps there is comfort in thinking that at least you get to endure this for them instead of the other way around. To have him lose one of us may be as equally heartbreaking and perhaps confusing to even comprehend why we may not be around anymore. I hope our other cat, who has elevated her level of “follow the human around”, is not feeling as badly (she’s a much more independent cat).

But it’s hard to completely rationalize away any emotions one should have during a time like this (note: and perhaps one should not). Almost out of a defense mechanism, we try to assign some reason, some justification, some grander plan, a fate. I only ascribe that this is what happened, when it happened, and am simply thankful that it happened when we were around instead of a time when we may have been out or away from the house. It was an important closure to be able to be there with him.

ephemeral permanence

This sudden event, along with my change in employment status, is a jarring reminder of the lack of permanence. Things will change whether you plan them to or not, whether you want them to or not. It’s a grim reminder that the permanence we so complacently accept and cherish is not, in fact, permanent at all. You need to invest your time and energy into actually doing something, being someone, that can overcome and strive past these events. To know that you’ve taken the time and energy to do what you can to leave an imprint.

He was just a pet, a cat, an animal; but if you’ve ever taken care of one, you will know how much impact their mere presence can have and how much more impact their presence can be felt once they are gone. He left that incalculable impact simply by being who he was… just by being with us. That’s an accomplishment few can ever have.

Will I be remembered as fondly once I am gone? Have I done anything deserving of that merit to be remembered beyond my time?

Have you?

I think it’s time to start something.

Gallery on Google+

* sometimes it’s the hardest to just get going. stop worrying about things that could go wrong or how difficult it may be and just try it out…

a wiki is where data goes to die

I know, a phrase usually reserved for email

It seems strange to read that doesn’t it. But read on for my take.

A wiki is great. People can add information, contribute their know how, edit it, create a knowledge base, share the information with the rest of the world… full of people. But for computers, it’s a fairly complicated dead end. Most wikis (I’m sure there may be semantic ones out there, but I want write this first and then see if I’m in alignment or not) are designed, rightfully so, for people in mind. People can look at a page and understand what’s there, scan it, get the information they want, and be on their merry way.

But for a machine, it’s not quite so easy. And by machine, I usually mean a programmer trying to figure out a clean and nice way to leverage all that information stuck in a wiki in a meaningful manner for their own application (and therefore their own users). It may be for a mobile app that wants to show the information and pictures about musical instruments, a web app that shows the government types of various countries , or even a simple inline reference link on a blog to help users get a quick grasp of a topic without leaving the page or having to expound on it right in the post itself. Most wikis (let me pick on Wikipedia) ignore the potential value of having a great semantic markup embedded in their articles so that machines can access and read that information and consume the data and help spread knowledge.

Right now, all that can be done is to link to the relevant article in Wikipedia. If we wanted to just extract a short primer text about the TV show Futurama, we can’t. We need to start to parse the whole article and then try to guess where that information is located. Usually something a bit too much for a developer who just wants to leverage the system, not architect a whole search and parsing system for natural language.

semantically dataverting a wiki

dataverting… I just made that up

Perhaps a useful definition of dataverting would be: To convert unstructured data into semantically accessible data.

So what can be done to datavert something like Wikipedia? How about adding some structure in the form of template? I know, people will start to scream that it’s destroying the whole concept of a wiki and free form edits and so on. But really, it’s not that bad, and it’s optional, and in the end it’ll be completely transparent to the end user (if you wish).

Each topic may have a basic template. Perhaps for a TV show, it’ll be something like title, broadcast dates, episode lists and so on. I’m sure there’s much more. Just like any other extensible markup language, you should always be able to add more fields if that show needs something unique and specific (rerun count, remakes, same universe shows, etc). The basic template should be common for the subject, the extensions from a well established vocabulary. The editor just needs to fill in the sections as needed. If there’s misc stuff to add, just put it into a misc tagged area of the template. In the end, it should look no worse than the current system, which is the equivalent of a huge “misc” container.

but computers and humans read data differently

(for now :P)

So for people, it helps to have a nicely formatted, image pretty list of TV episodes. Computers simply want the raw data. One way is to transform, like we do HTML with CSS, from the raw data to something human readable. But this means that the people entering the data need to enter it in raw form… which again destroys the ease of use of a wiki. But this is where the whole crowdsourcing business can get interesting.

If for some reason, people can’t be forced to use a specific generic template, we can just have a human readable section and a machine readable section maintained and synchronized manually by editors. Of course, not all articles may be popular enough to warrant an editor to translate human to computer, but the larger articles undoubtedly will have someone (probably a techie) who wants to dedicate some time to keeping the data in sync. Or even visa versa.

so what do you get out of all this?

better access to data for even more people

While the concept is to allow machines to read data, often times those machines are leveraging that data in order to display it to an end user. Being able to properly recognize sections of the article and being able to transmit that data to the end user instead of redirecting them is probably a good thing. It can deliver the needed information to the user, allow the user to stay in context, and be able to consume and move along without loss of time and effort. It helps to spread the knowledge in a place like Wikipedia even wider and faster.

If one wanted the 2 sentence summary, you can look in that marked section: #summary. Or if you needed something of paragraph length, there may be a tag for that (#detailed). Perhaps there’s a related field listing similar concepts (#related). The point is now developers can smartly leverage all this information and deliver it to more people. In theory, you can even allow content editing and updating remotely, which now can make more sense since the system will be able to give you discrete chunks of information rather than the all or nothing format of having to visit the wiki itself.

will this happen?

long term answer: yes, short term answer: no

As many know, if it ain’t broke, why bother fixing it, especially if it requires more effort upfront + more effort thereafter in maintenance. It may not happen with this current iteration of Wikipedia, and maybe it wont have to happen if there’s smarter AI/linguistic ways of understanding the text. But until that happens, I would think it’s easier to do a semantic markup of the wiki and start there. It need not happen immediately, and what may be interesting is that it probably only needs to happen on an as needed basis.

Think in terms of a “static” blog post like this. If I were to write about woodwind instruments, being a static post, I just need that particular page to be cleaned up. As a blog author, for my readers, perhaps I can address the time needed to template the page to make it semantically accessible. Thus ensuring that any inline references I may want to leverage in my post will have a clean backend source to work with.

One step at a time. It’s always daunting to have to think about the millions of articles that could use dataverting, but if we just do it in terms of what’s needed, it may not be as bad.

Anyway, some thoughts. Feel free to disagree or discuss :). I know it’s pretty raw so there may be something that already does this, or it may have been something that’s been proven as not viable/realistic. But it was fun to think about either way. This one’s been on my radar of thought for a while now, but pointers to @davewiner for piquing my interest again with his post on ”Wikipedia and Explainers”.

* This time I’m combining some structure with an image. Maybe I should do an image for each section? I think it at least helps the readability since I’m a bit wordy, I need ways to break apart a wall of text.

entrenchment

Been there, done that, for perhaps too long.

I’ve had a fairly established presence at my previous place of employment, or so I thought. My time line there extended to almost 15 years, and over that course I could see a change in how things worked. Or perhaps, I should say, I let myself get idly swept through the changes an organization faces as it grows up. That idyllic complacency became institutionalized in my own behavior and before I knew it, it defined where my comfort zone lay. That became a problem.

When I first joined the Corporate Intranet team at almost its inception, we ran the single server under the desk. Now people figuratively often say that to indicate an ad-hoc solution, but at the time, we literally ran it under the desk of a coworker. Kick a plug, and the intranet site would go down. Thankfully I don’t quite remember that happening… but it could have.

We were bound only by what we could produce, how well we could make it work, and being able to make it functional and presentable to the users. We were the jack of all trades, perhaps the master of none, but it worked to make things happen and get things done. Everything from server maintenance, to coding, scripting, front end design, low bandwidth [modem] layout and sometimes even graphics work. We got to be our own self contained team.

But as with everything that succeeds, it grows. As time passed, we moved the server to a proper home. Designers were brought in. We specialized in doing what we did best and left the other aspects to other people. Overall, the system ran pretty smoothly. It was different, it had its pluses and minuses, but it still worked and we were able to still do some cutting edge things at the time. We built a new “portlet” environment, created a user profiling system, experimented with dynamic content via javascript, dhtml, and even an infamous Java applet.

Some more time passed and we split the team even more into distinct functional units. Those taking care of the server, those handling the day to day of the website, design folks, backend service jobs, applications to add to the stack (I ended up here). It felt like a natural progression. We solidified under a larger umbrella group. Our (my) mission became to create new and interesting applications for the users.

we shuffled

A lot.

I’ve had 4 managers in the last 6 years or so. 3 in the last 3 years. Each shuffle meant I had to reintroduce myself, my skills, my goals, my quirks, join a new team, pick up a new project. This is when I went from being someone who I thought had value in a structure, to a cog that was shuffled from one necessary place to another. It was the beginning of the end, but I hadn’t realized it.

Each shuffle was unconsulted. There was no feedback as to the direction I wanted to go in or what I may have enjoyed doing. I mentioned in the previous post how passion can drive one to be productive even if the job may entail uninteresting bits. When you’re shuffled and constantly placed under different objectives, passion tends to take a hike. What used to be an interesting opportunity now just becomes something to have to reset and recalibrate yet again.

One last shuffle last year, one last assignment to a team whose mission I had no compatibility with, one last project I didn’t believe in and then the end.

I went for the ride when I should have been a little more cognizant of what was going on around me. Complacency was there once again to keep me company and give me that false sense of security that things were still happening simply because I was being moved around to new places. I tended to think at least something was happening.

With each new move, group, project, I should have been a little more aware of my surroundings and made sure that each move was indeed in my best interest. Honestly, some certainly were. Others I was ambivalent about. But the last two moves definitely were not what I wanted. As certain as a statistician could make a nice plot leading to an end game I would not like, that was, in retrospect, the trajectory I was headed on.

I can’t tell, and I probably never will, if I was being shuffled because those making the decisions were simply pulling staffing numbers out of a hat, or they just had no clue what to do with me to get what they wanted out of me; so they had to keep putting me in new places to see if I could produce something they liked. Planned or unplanned, the results ended up the same.

then the ride ended

But I guess not unexpectedly.

The take away from this is that sometimes my complacency leaves too much decision power in the hands of those around me who may or may not necessarily have the best interests for me in their mind. After all, they themselves need to have the best interest for themselves in their mind so I shouldn’t really have too much expectation that they would actually have my best interests in mind as well.

As with anything project related, or life for that matter, if you want to get something done, you’re going to have to get off your ass (I can say ass now right, since I’m not blogging in corporate land anymore) and get your hands dirty. Each move should have been a flag for me to question where I was going, why, and plan my own escape route if the trajectories didn’t align. But complacency was deeply embedded in me by that point. Too strong to allow me to think about what these shuffles meant and instead prompted me to just wait and see where the chips fell.

you always have a choice

Even if it doesn’t look like it.

I could have started to look at any number of new opportunities in different organizations or different areas of the company. I could have tried a little harder to pitch a pet project and see if that was something that I could align myself with (I tried to do that periodically, but not always successfully. That’s a story for another post :P). I could have even considered trying to find opportunities outside of the company. The point is I didn’t have to wait till they decided they had no clue what to do with me but to let me go. There were plenty of signs and enough opportunity for me to take the reigns and do something about it.

It’s easy to just shift the blame to the managers and say that they didn’t understand me (some did, others didn’t), but in the end, whether they understood me or not, it’s still up to me to initiate change that will benefit myself. I am my own keeper, it’s not quite fair to rely on someone else for your own basic wellbeing.

So, make sure you’re cognizant of your surrounding and always keep an eye out on who’s holding the reigns. Ideally, you should always be the one in control, no matter what others are telling you, but understandably, it is easier to just let things happen and not have to deal with it. As a person who’s mindset is more about programming than career ladder climbing, it was easy to just rely on other people to handle all that sort of stuff. Remember, you’re the only one who can truly have your own interest in mind though.

passing it along

Wisdom from others.

Oh, and (paraphrased) advice from a blog post another RA’d colleague wrote over 3 years ago: Even if you don’t need to, go out there and look and interview for a new job. It’ll be an experience (in humility) at how much you know, and especially how sellable you are. Something to tuck away in the back of your mind for not just when the day comes that you will need to look in earnest, but also as an experience to take back to your current job to realize how out of touch you may be with the rest of the industry. Hopefully at least that much can light that flame just to get things simmering.

* No pictures this time, just section breaks. Which of course means the next post should have both section breaks and pictures. Though let me know what makes it feel readable to you. I know I should have images to make it compelling, but sometimes it’s just distracting.

I’ve been wondering and pondering for just about the last two months on how to write my closure blog posts from my previous job, and it’s just not coming to me. Initially I was going to write something pretty specific about my situation, but I feared it would just end up as a long winded rant. So instead, I’m going to take a step back and write about the high level events that happened as a lessons learned. Once those are out of the way, perhaps I’ll see if it’s a bit more appropriate to go into my own specifics. We’ll see :).

Regardless, I need to write these posts to just get it out of me so that I can start to move onto the next thing. So here we go.

It’s always hard to leave a company, especially even harder to leave via a downsizing event, otherwise called a “resource action” in company lingo. But it happens. The confluence of the wrong time with the wrong project with all the stars aligned can target anyone. I’ve seen enough highly qualified people before me get “RA’d”, so at some point in time, you begin to feel like it’s only a matter of time. Apparently my card was drawn and my time came.

I’m not particularly bitter about the reason for the dismissal, though I may have some issue with how it all came about (but I’ll save that for a subsequent post). I wont get the grandness of saying it was mutual, but to some extent, the last project I was working on, I just didn’t believe in it. Now, being freshly unemployed and looking for a new job, that’s probably not the most strategic thing to say, but at the same time, if you’re someone who is going to employ me, are reading this, and don’t understand the concept of personal value and belief in a project being a crucial item for success, we may be reading from different books of productivity.

I understand that everyone, at some point, needs to work on things they may not be that enthused about. It’s a fact of life: taxes, medical paperwork, maintaining that blog site… oh wait. Well, you get the drift. A salary earning job can certainly qualify as something you need to do out of obligation over interest, but it really shouldn’t be. If you are just trudging through, you’re wasting your own talent and time as well as the efficiency of productivity that could otherwise be attained by someone else that may be genuinely enthusiastic about the opportunity. In other words, you’re getting in your own way, you’re getting in your employer’s way, you’re getting in the way of that guy or gal that really wants to do what you heartlessly slog through. You’re probably becoming one of those people that on any other day you would look down upon for dispassionately doing their job.

Cutting to the chase: You really need to know when to play your cards and decide to move on so that you can find something that motivates, interests and makes you feel energized to tackle all the problems associated with it. You want to become truly vested in your project and its success, not just a hapless bystander.

Complacency is a deadly disease and one that is hard to spot or get out of if you’re mired in it.

Take a look around. Are you doing something you like? Are you doing something of value? Do you believe in your work or your project? If any of those are “no”, start looking for the exit. Because even if you don’t realize it, it may start to show. Once it does, you may also become susceptible to just being “cut”. It’s actually a good thing if you recognize it, because it will mean that you’re taking that crucial step out of complacently doing a heartless job and moving to better pastures. But be sure to recognize it and learn how to manage and leverage your situation to get into something you want to be passionately doing.

Passion for life, we all know about; but passion for work is equally valid. Find what you love to do in life and in work. That’s what my search is about now. Ping me if you think you have a fun fit for me, I’m all ears :). In the meantime, I’m going to do a little soul searching and exploring. Stick along for the ride.

* Kitty images courtesy of placekitten Cause really, what would be appropriate images for a resource action… may as well give you happy little kitties…

So this is interesting. +Dave Winer (@davewiner) decided to remove [most] commenting from his blog: http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/19/noComment.html

Due to spam and people just not quite being on topic with responses (or even understanding what they’re responding to). It used to be that we would consider something an article if you simply read it, but more of a blog if you could interact with the poster.

Now that the concept of interactive pages has gotten a lot more prevalent (is an understatement), and if you’re high profile, you’re bound to run into quite a lot of spam commenting. Even if it’s all “quality”, once comments hit a certain number, rarely do I even bother beginning to read any of them seriously (maybe just to troll).

So the commenting system as we know it is broken. Even if we do moderation like what gizmodo and related sites to do pick up the best, that’s nice, but someone still has to sit and moderate. We try to alleviate that by having disqus or other commenting specialty systems take out the genuine spam, but you’re still left with those that lack the grasp of what’s being sought in the comments (the dedicated trollers too cant be stopped).

So what to do? At the moment, it could be that you disable comments, and just move the discussion to other places via crossposting: like to twitter, facebook, google+. That way at least your website remains clean, your points are there and are brought to higher attention without the distraction of loads of comments, related or not. It’s a bit of a change of pace, but in essence, not different than what we do nowadays anyway, you’re just removing one option of a place to comment, but all the other ones remain.

From a site owner POV, you’ve off loaded the moderation needs, the commenting hassle, registration, notification and all that to another system. And before we jump in with “but where’s the control?”, in this case, it was being run off of disqus anyway so the control was already being given over to another system.

I think in the end, it’s just an inevitability if your posts get to a certain point in popularity. I see that as a problem anywhere. Google+ with a 500 comment chain is equally just not worth the effort to comment, and certainly if you own that type of post, hard to justify going through them all and replying.

Oddly, twitter’s model of not really having a good threaded view of a conversation gives you the ability to pretend like you’re the only one there without regard to all the other replies. An odd realization…

Anyway, comments as we know it are a little broken. Perhaps time to think of a way to come up with something that hasn’t been exported from the days of newsnet and BBSes.

[This post was originally posted to my posted to Google+ account]

Addendum: From the perspective of this blog, I also use the Disqus commenting system to outsource my comments. And in fact, since this post is technically a transplant from my google+ account, I’m really also using google+ as a commenting mechanism. So perhaps this concept of comment maintenance and ownership is merely just a facade over what we do anyway. Most of us don’t handle our own commenting systems, so what we do is oursource it all to wherever we crosspost content to. Especially since more likely than not, and especially if the content is fully there, people are likely to comment within their chosen environments.

What would then be interesting to see is to aggregate those places that get the comments back onto the blog. Then you have a fully outsourced commenting system. Though that now starts to beg the question, why bother at all? Since comments are outsourced to Disqus anyway, what difference does it make if it comes from twitter or facebook or google+ or disqus? So perhaps the whole issue isn’t so much about spam or outsourcing or the logistics of the comments, at least for Dave, it’s more about having a clean white space where you can simply put out your thoughts without having to think much about the comments and so on.

I think this works well for a Dave type personality where he has strong opinions, and if looking for comments, only really wants something from people he gets and respects. I, on the other hand, am not so confident in my thoughts and ideas. And I also dont have a popularity issue that will detract from the content of my post. I can certainly see the whole logistics of a runaway commenting system to be just worthless after a while, but I think it will work well for a majority of those that are still in between.

I’m not sure if this is really a solvable problem because it’s not a technology issue, it’s really a more psychological, comprehension or simply human issue, take your pick. I do think the way we comment on something needs to be done better, and perhaps that’s mainly where a conversation like this should lead to, the generation of something more functional and interesting than something that’s slapped onto a page. What that is yet, I’m not sure. Any ideas? :)

And it’s pointless to spend it worrying about what you could do or what you should do or what you want to do instead of simply going out there and doing it. So here we are. I’m rebooting this blog. The old content was crap anyway. I’ve been pondering when and how and what I should use and if whatever I choose would be good enough… but in the end, really, the framework doesn’t matter so long at it at least has some semblance of coherence to it.

So for this reboot, I picked Octopress. The obvious reason is that I like to tinker with things… or rather I pretend I do. I just wanted to experiment with something off the beaten path because sometimes sticking to the norm just doesn’t allow you to experience the new and different. So at least this is my attempt at trying to do something different. And maybe it’ll get me in touch with a little bit of the new fangled stuff like git and ruby.

A little about what you will see here. It’s going to be mostly technical stuff, work and non work related, that I find interesting, explored, have questions about, or in general, and most likely, just want to see if anyone out there might be in a similar position. I work as a “software engineer” by profession, but I dabble in the black arts of communication and even UI stuff from time to time. It really depends on what catches my interest at the moment. I tend to try to be diverse in my interests, but unfortunately I find myself falling back way too often on what I know instead of what I should know. I want to change that, and part of that want is to do something like this where I can just write, easily and quickly, to try out new ideas and push out new content so that I can find interaction and get some feedback.

So don’t be shy, which is exactly what I’m trying to do too. Leave a comment, drop a note, let’s chat about things that interest us. Educate me on what you know, cause god knows I don’t know much. Which brings me full circle to why I’m here: time is short, and I want to learn and explore.