Seeping Matter

I started working for Jive Communications in Orem yesterday, and I’m pretty excited about it.

I had a number of people asking about my decision to move on from Microsoft, including a number of Microsoft employees.  These reasons are hard enough to explain in person.  A job change is a very personal thing made for very personal reasons.  And if it is hard to explain in person, I can’t imagine trying to do it in writing to a faceless mob of perhaps two devoted readers, whoever you are.

So I’ll just leave it at this.  I was at work one day when I got an e-mail indicating that someone at Jive Communications in Orem wanted to connect with me via LinkedIn.  I’d heard of Jive Communications before because they’d been mentioned as one of UVEF’s “Top 25 Under 5″ in years past, so I was curious and responded to the inquiry.  After some number of discussions and conversations, they offered me an opportunity to join their team.

The simple fact is, I weighed the opportunity against the opportunity I felt I had at Microsoft, and for me, my family, and my career goals, I felt the opportunity with Jive was better.  Better for what I wanted out of life.  Better for what I wanted to offer to the employer I work for.

To be clear, that’s the essence of it.  This wasn’t about leaving Microsoft, it was about aligning myself with what I perceived as a better opportunity.  One I’m pretty stoked about.

UDC is Microsoft’s Utah Development Center in Lehi.  Here’s some fun facts about Microsoft UDC:

• Yes, the inception of UDC really did begin with a conversation between Brad Anderson and Steve Ballmer.  Brad, a Utah native and former Novell executive, now an executive at Microsoft, was apparently on a flight with Steve Ballmer wherein he suggested that Microsoft should open an office in Utah to help to attract more technical Utah talent to Microsoft.
• Microsoft UDC was started just over three years ago, in 2008.
• Microsoft UDC’s original location was in Draper and moved to Thanksgiving Point in Lehi in August of 2009.
• I was the 16th person on the UDC team when I joined in July of 2009.
• Since the day I joined UDC, I’ve seen 30 other people join our organization, not including contractors and interns.
• Since the day I joined UDC, I’ve seen three people choose to move on from Microsoft to other opportunities in the area.
• I’ve been involved in three different product releases at UDC, including MED-V v1 SP1, MED-V v2, and a currently unnamed and unannounced product that I really can’t talk any more about.
• The 43 people at UDC are an amazingly, enrichingly diverse group.  There are highly experienced employees and new college hires, people with lots of Microsoft experience and those with very little, people from other parts of the United States, India, China, Sudan, and Great Britain.
• Today was my last day as an employee of Microsoft at UDC.

Recently Forbes magazine has reiterated that Utah is one of the top places in the nation for businesses.  This is especially true in the tech industry.  The country as a whole may be struggling in recession, but things aren’t so bad here in the Beehive State, even if we have to deal with being called “the Beehive State.”

Tech is alive and well in Utah.  I don’t know about other professions, but if you are an experienced software engineer and are good at what you do, it seems you can just about fall over backwards into a good opportunity here, at least if you know what you are doing.  There’s a lot of growth in Utah.  Adobe has a sizable Utah presence and they are planning to grow.  I see their new campus taking shape every day.  My employer, Microsoft, has a site here in Utah and we own multiple Microsoft products from this location.  Symantec has a notable presence in Utah and they are also hiring.  Even Novell seems to have found their feet again and are doubling down on some of their main products and ramping up headcount.  That’s not to mention the significant number of smaller technology companies that are making their presence known and hiring people as fast as they can find them.

Recently a fellow in my neighborhood asked for some pointers for a tech person who is looking for employment or looking to improve their employment situation.  Instead of answering him directly I told him I’d blog about it.

My first suggestion is to make sure you are employable.  If you’ve been successful in the tech field for a while, you’ve probably got this one covered.  If you are a bit rusty, it might be time to learn a new language or platform.  I think everyone in the software industry — developers, test engineers, product managers, system administrators, etc. — should at least know a scripting language like Ruby or Python.  Not Perl.  Perl is lame.

If you are thinking of entering the tech sector, you need to get the right kind of education.  Think about the kind of jobs you want, and then before you choose a program, find out about their track record placing people in those types of jobs.  One thing to be aware of is that lots of educational programs claim to offer the training you need to get you into the field you are interested in, fast.  Fact is, many of those types of programs don’t adequately prepare people for certain tech jobs.  As a case in point, many tech schools offer to train you to learn to be a computer programmer.  However, in my experience, these schools do not sufficiently prepare you for a job as a software developer in a high-tech software company.  If you want to write software for a bank or an insurance company, a tech-school certificate may be good enough, but if you want to write software for a software company you’d better get a Computer Science degree from a reputable university.  Fortunately, there are several good options here in Utah so that shouldn’t be a problem for you.

My second suggestion is to make sure you are visible.  For tech companies this means that you must be visible on the Internet.  You may hate social media, but you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t have at least a cursory presence there.  I would consider a completed LinkedIn profile to be the minimum requirement.  For software engineers, I’d additionally suggest a profile on StackOverflow; other tech jobs might have a corresponding site that is like StackOverflow (for example, ServerFault for sysadmins).  Having a well-managed, thoughtfully-curated presence elsewhere, like on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog, is certainly helpful.  Employers are scouring the social sites looking for people with the skills they need, and are then following up with a Google search.  Curating your online presence is something that takes regular work over time, like gardening.  Just call it career management and make it a habit.  If you do this and you are good at your profession, you won’t even have to look for new opportunities at all.  The demand for good software engineers in Utah today is so strong that they will come looking for you.

My third suggestion is to make sure you are connected.  You need to be maintaining and nurturing your network of colleagues and professionals, as well as expanding it.  Keep tabs on your former colleagues and what they are involved in, where they are working, etc.  If you are looking for a new opportunity, make sure your network knows you are looking.

You also need to be expanding that network by meeting new people.  One way to do this is to try to get involved a bit with some of the interest groups.  In Utah County there are platform based user groups (like PLUG, the Provo Linux Users Group), technology groups (like the Utah County .NET user group), language groups (like the user groups for Ruby or Python), practice groups (like the Utah Software Craftsmanship Group), or others, like LaunchUp for tech startups.  If you look around a bit you can find some that interest you and get involved.  Even signing up for the mailing list can help.

Finally, my last suggestion is to be passionate.  Get involved in SOMETHING that you can talk openly about with other people.  Contributing to an open source project or creating your own software product are good ways to do this.  You don’t need to be working on this side project a lot.  If you are involved in it enough to talk openly and with spirited passion about it, even the most socially backwards of us tech geeks can convey that yes, we really do care about this job for more than just the money.

So I’m riding in the Seattle Airport Shuttle back from the Hyatt Olive 8 to SeaTac yesterday afternoon.  It’s just me and the shuttle driver who appears to be maybe in his early to mid 50s.  The conversation leads to careers, and he happens to mention, “Yeah, I used to do computer work for Boeing.”

“What kind of computer work did you do?” I asked.

He replied, “Oh, I worked for Boeing for 24 years writing COBOL software.  Then they laid me off, and I couldn’t find another job.  So now I drive an airport shuttle for minimum wage plus tips.”

I’ll be 16 years into my career this  year.

To say that was a bit of a wake up call is an understatement.  It said to me, “Matt, you are 2/3 of the way to irrelevancy.”  Time to get things into gear before it is too late.

Yes, you read that correctly.  For far too long all us coding frogs have been neglected and discriminated against.  But no more!  My new software development website, www.codingfrogs.net, is up and running!

I will now take questions.

Q:  What is codingfrogs.net?

A:  It is my new software development blog, dealing with the technical, process, and business aspects of software development.

Q:  Where did you get that outstanding frog picture?

A:  I know, huh!

Q:  No, really – where?

A:  It is the original creation of Rosie Leung, which she made available via Creative Commons on her website.

Q:  Are only coding frogs allowed at that website, or may any type of coding animal visit?

A:  codingfrogs.net welcomes any type of coding animal, but frogs get preferred seating.

Q:  Will you allow other coding frogs to guest-post on codingfrogs.net?

A:  Yes, but only if I let them.

Q:  Isn’t the purpose of this post primarily to drive up your PageRank score for codingfrogs.net, even if only by a tiny amount?

A:  Next question.

Q:  Why codingfrogs.net?

A:  Because the domain name was available, of course.

Q:  Is it true that you created this website to Michelle Barnum would quit complaining about your technical posts?

A:  Pretty much.

The Go Gopher

Earlier this week Google announced their new programming language, called Go.

Usually I don’t get too worked up about programming languages.  I already feel like I know more languages than I should need to know, and often a new language seems to me like “Hey, check this out!  Here’s a more complex or non-intuitive way to accomplish a task you already know how to accomplish, but in a language you will never use professionally!”

I know, I’m disappointing you.

But Go!  Oh my, this seems different.  From the blog post:

Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical…

Wait!  Hold on there — my heart just skipped a beat and it freaked me out.  Can you please repeat that again?

…a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++.

Ooh baby.  Someone help me — I’m shaking with anticipation.  A systems programming language that combines Python and C++?  Can it really be?  It seems too good to be true!  My two favorite programming languages combined in one:  It’s like true programming nirvana!

Last week marked three months that I’ve been working at Microsoft.

As I’ve discussed before, making the decision to leave Mozy for Microsoft was not an easy one.  Let’s face it:  I’m not exactly a spritely youth anymore.  I’ve worked at a lot of different companies — and when I say “different,” I also mean, “different from each other:”  Small companies you’ve never heard of (Spillman Technologies), large companies you’ve surely heard of (IBM), companies whose politics continue to keep them from succeeding (Novell), companies who manage to succeed in spite of the politics (Mozy), and companies that just frankly exist only as dark, ghostly nightmares in the frightening nether regions of my mind (Enterasys Networks).  Yet as different as these places are from each other, one thing mostly remains the same:  the process of creating software is the same everywhere.

So that makes a decision to leave hard.  Since the process of creating software is the same everywhere, it is the intangibles that end up mattering, such as whether you like your boss, whether you get a nice computer or monitor, how comfortable your chair is, etc.  When you consider leaving, you wonder what unidentified intangibles you’ll be giving up and what you’ll be getting, and whether you will feel like this was a good trade a year later.

Leaving Novell for Mozy was like this for me.  I got many, but not all, of the intangibles I expected when I went to Mozy.  I gave up all of the intangibles I expected I’d give up from Novell, like five weeks of paid vacation and a beautiful window office on the 7th floor looking directly north to Mount Timpanogos.  Some things at Mozy ended up being worse than I expected, e.g. the 5% pay cut last spring.  Of course, I do realize that it is not Mozy’s fault that I didn’t get all the intangibles I expected; I set that expectation, not them; I failed to assess the situation accurately.

Nonetheless, as I contemplated leaving Mozy for Microsoft, I thought about this.  “Well, software engineering is the same everywhere.  So since the in-and-out of the job function is mostly the same, I wonder what intangibles I’m gaining and what I’m giving up?”

Well, I failed to assess the situation accurately again.  I made one key error:  Software engineering is NOT the same everywhere.

In particular, it is not the same at Microsoft.  At Microsoft, software engineering is more… uh… yeah:  more.

More better.

Have you ever worked for Microsoft?  If you haven’t, you don’t know anything about us.  I know you think you do.  You don’t.

Never in my career have I ever worked in any organization that took software engineering as seriously as Microsoft does.  I was very surprised to see how seriously we consider things like security and software quality.  I’m aware of the reputation Microsoft has received over the years for bugs and security issues.  Maybe things are different now, or maybe that whole thing was just a function of being the world’s largest, most powerful, and most widely used software company.  At any rate, I can tell you from personal experience that security and quality are very important here — important enough that we will delay shipment if we don’t feel like it meets our standards.  While this may seem obvious, I’ve never seen this commitment to quality permeate throughout an organization like it does here.

It has been incredibly refreshing to see a company take software engineering as seriously as I do.  I love that I’m free to require explanation or justification from my management when I don’t understand something.  I love that I’m supported in insisting on perfection in software design, code, and process to the degree that I can help us deliver it.  I love that people can communicate with me honestly and openly without worrying about my feelings, and that I can do the same with them, because, unlike some places I’ve worked, there is an undercurrent of trust and mutual respect between me and all of my peers wherein we know and believe that, despite having different opinions, we are each talented and capable professionals with the best interests of the company at heart.  I love being surrounded by incredible talent that makes me feel both humbled to be a part of the group and inspired to improve myself every day.  I love working for a company where, instead of feeling like my career has topped out and has nowhere else to go, I feel I have broad, wide-open vistas of learning and advancement just laying before my feet; opportunities sitting before me just waiting for me to seize them.

I had no idea a software company could be that much better than what I’d experienced in the past.  It is really awesome.  It may not be for everybody.  Not all software engineers care enough about delivering quality software that they will do whatever it takes — write unit tests, participate in code reviews, follow rigorous and time-consuming processes, be a small fish in a big pond — in order to do it.  But if you care about delivering quality software, like I do, I must say I highly recommend us.

After only three months I find myself saying something I never thought I’d say:  I love working at Microsoft.  I really do.  Intending absolutely no negative to any other company I’ve worked for (with the exception of Enterasys Networks, I have fond memories of great talent, great people, and great product deliveries at every company), working at Microsoft is unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced.

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines discipline as:  “…”

Nah.  Just kidding.

Most software teams I’ve worked on have had some degree of discipline around what code changes go into the codebase.  This tends to take the form of:

• Any change should be associated with a defect or feature that is documented somewhere.
• Commit small, isolated, related changes, all associated with a single defect or feature, that can be easily rolled back.
• Test changes before committing them; avoid breaking the build at all costs.

That last one seems most obvious, but it is so critical that it has to be stated anyway.  Think of it this way:  If you work for me on an already functioning product, I would rather have you do NO WORK AT ALL than to break the build.

Of course, I would not pay you to do no work at all, either.  But breaking the build is taking the product in the opposite direction from where we want it to go.

Some time ago I worked on a software team* where a team member had a problem with this kind of discipline.  Details don’t matter too much, but the net effect was that whenever this person made a commit, the rest of the team would tense up and hold their breath as they integrated the updates.  This person had broken the build enough that his/her commits weren’t trusted by the rest of the team.  And even if the code would compile and run, you still didn’t trust the changes because this person would often sprinkle in little changes hither and yon that were not tied to a documented defect or feature, and often wouldn’t even call out the changes in the commit message.

(As a slight distraction here, I’ll point out how frustrating this is when the team member works in the same office as you, as cited above.  When that person works remotely, it becomes MUCH MUCH WORSE.)

I discussed this with my boss one day who wasn’t sure what to do.  We had a person on the team who was obviously very talented, but who was just not following good practice despite repeated requests to do so.  I offered up the suggestion that I’m restating here, which is basically the following:

Disciplined software engineering should be a prerequisite to having the rights to make critical code contributions.

In other words, no matter how talented a programmer is, they shouldn’t be allowed to contribute code to critical parts of the product if they do not exhibit sufficient discipline to be there.  So what are the “critical parts” and what is the “sufficient discipline”?  The critical parts are the parts that, if they are broken, the software doesn’t perform it’s primary function.  For a product like Firefox, the “Help” dialog is almost certainly not critical, but the HTML parsing engine definitely is.  The sufficient discipline is what I outlined above, but primarily centered around not breaking the build.

So to summarize, what it means is, someone who continually breaks the build should be disallowed to commit changes directly to the critical parts of the product until they earn that right back by adopting the discipline required.  Of course, if you are that free-spirited maverick, there’s a pretty strong incentive now to change your approach.  You may not be paid to be disciplined, but you are paid to deliver software, and if you can’t deliver software because your approach is irresponsible, this should encourage you to get on track.

Some teams choose to approach this by building elaborate systems that enforce proper behavior.  I could build a complex checkin proxy that automatically merges my changes with the latest changes in the repository, builds the product, and then runs the tests (there are tests, right?), and then only makes my commit once all of that passes acceptably.  That’s nice and all, I suppose.  But it seems like a lot of infrastructure, overhead, and process to impose upon the whole team, when to me it seems reasonable to expect that professional software engineers have enough discipline to do this on their own.

So if you aren’t doing this now, how do you go about changing?

Well, you’ve gotta have a suite of automated tests in order to do any of this – a “broken” build is defined as one that does not pass the automated tests.  If you do not have any automated tests, it is time for you to repent, my son.  I do not have time to go into this here, but you must confess your grievous sin and atone by writing an automated test and adding it to your build process.  Just one test is enough to get started – but it MUST be available as a part of the normal build process.  Then every time a build passes the test suite but is, in fact, broken, update your test suite.

Now that you have automated tests, insist that your developers do the following before they commit:

• Update.
• Build.
• Test.

See?  It’s easy.  If the tests pass, they can commit.

Now it is time for you to be disciplined.  Committing code that does not pass the tests is a naughty thing to do.  Do not let your developers be naughty.  Take immediate action.  I think I’d take the following approach:

• First time is a meeting with the boss.  Go over the process.  Make sure they understand the process and what happened.  Personally, it seems like it would be tough to misunderstand, but hey, things happen.  Don’t be presumptuous or condescending.  This meeting alone might be enough to get most people in line.
• If the problem continues, require peer review before checkin.
• If the problem continues, another meeting.  This time, express that all of their current assignments have been reassigned to other members of the team, and they are being reassigned work that is not critical to the functionality of the project.  Let them know that you are concerned about the impact this will have on their performance, because they are expected to contribute at a higher level than what their new assignments will allow.  They have to demonstrate changed behavior and commitment to discipline in order to earn the right to do the important work again.
• If the problem continues after that, it is probably performance-improvement-plan time.  Or mutual-agreement-that-they-find-a-different-employer time.

*(To my faithful readers who think they know what situation I’m speaking of, may I remind you that I’ve worked for seven different software companies and thirteen-ish different software teams over fourteen-plus years in this career, so be careful what assumptions you might make.  Thank you.)

It took me a while, but I finally settled into my routine and got to where I’m reading my RSS feeds most days again.  I was going through the posts of the past month or so, since the job change, and ran across this article on the “Making Good Software” blog about things that keep someone from being a good software engineer, outside of (and often in spite of) an ability to engineer software.

I’ll summarize here.  It isn’t my intent to plagiarize; if you are remotely interested go read the article.  Here are the things:

• Lack of discipline
• Big ego
• Poor communication
• Forgetting the customer
• Lack of proper work prioritization

I have known many of these people during my career.  Indeed, I was one of them.  I remember coming to Novell from IBM almost ten years ago.  I thought I was pretty hot stuff and I made sure my team knew it.  In fact, I actually said (this is embarrassing to admit) on more than one occasion, “There are people who know C++ better than I do, but I haven’t met any of them.”  My ego surely made me hard to work with.  It definitely was a cause of friction between myself and my management chain, and ended up being a (deserved) source of frustration and difficulty for me, until I recognized the problem and started working to address it.

I’m pretty ashamed of having behaved that way back then.  I hope I’m better than that today.  I guess recognizing the weakness is a good first step.  Fortunately for me, back then I was on a really great team with a lot of very capable, patient, and talented engineers that waited for me to learn from my mistakes and to grant them the mutual respect they deserved.  I consider myself pretty fortunate to have been able to learn from them what real software engineering is about.

Over my career I’ve had to work with people like this from time to time, software engineers that manifest one or more of these traits.  Sometimes these guys are pretty talented technically.  I’ve felt sorry for them as I’ve observed, realizing that these weaknesses are going to hold their career back until they recognize them and work to overcome them.  No amount of programming prowess will compensate for it.  And what’s even worse is, often because these people have the personality issues they have, you don’t get anywhere by trying to bring these weaknesses to their attention; they are often unreceptive to this type of feedback.  Like I said, you just have to wait until they recognize it themselves.

I can imagine being in a performance review with someone like this, having them explain to me all the technical awesome they did, and me replying, “Your poor soft skills are shouting so loudly that I cannot hear your technical awesomeness.”  Or, as I said in the title, actions speak louder than code.

I really believe this is true.  To write software professionally, of course you must have technical ability; however, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for greatness.  The best software engineers I’ve had the fortune to work with in my career, past and present, not only had awesome technical ability but did not exhibit weakness in these areas.  And I’ll tell you what:  Those teams are wonderful teams to be a part of.  Those teams create strong. uplifting work environments and are able to deliver great products that meet customer demand.

Another way to say this is, in order to be a good software engineer, you must first be a good employee.

In fact, I’ll tell you how important I think this is.  The ability to mitigate or eliminate these defects from a software engineer’s persona is so important to me that, if I had my own company and were making the hiring decisions, I would not hire a candidate that I knew had these problems, no matter how incredible their technical ability.

A person with these weaknesses is really only suited to be set to the side to work on a special side R&D project where interaction with other employees is limited, and they don’t have to interact with customers at all.  Problem is, those kind of projects are either a) strategically important to the long-term future of the company, or b) of little to no real value, or c) a combination, often high potential value but with a lot of inherent risk that causes the real value to be low.  If the project is strategically important or of high value, do you really want to reward the biggest jerk in your company by giving him the highest profile assignment, leaving your best engineers to maintain the legacy project?  Wouldn’t you want to have someone working on that high profile assignment that knows how to collaborate with others and assemble all the best ideas to solve the problem the best way, even if that solution isn’t his/her own?  Contrariwise, if the project is of little real value or has so much risk that it offsets the real value, why even do it at all?

Nope.  In my company, if I were ever to have one, I wouldn’t hire or keep an employee who had these weaknesses and was not committed to addressing them.  I’ve seen the difference, both in morale and productivity, between teams where they don’t have these problems and teams that do.

The software development community is abuzz because of this article written by Tom DeMarco, author of that seminal work “Peopleware” that I ordered from some joker on eBay about six weeks ago but has not come yet.

You really should read the article.  I say this because I assume that you are a software engineer, like me.  Otherwise, let me summarize it for you.

Nah, that’ll take too long.  Let me sum up.

DeMarco basically says in the article the best software development on the most valuable software products with the highest degree of utility happens in the absence of control and measurement.  In other words, everything every software engineer on earth was taught about software engineering in college is wrong.

Yeah, that’s pretty much what he’s saying.

This has led to a lot of discussion around what we call all those people that we used to call software engineers just last month.  The impetus is that if the best software is created by not managing or quantifying the work and the deliverables in the project, is this really engineering per se?

Well, I’ve known this for a long time.  I just haven’t said anything about it.  Seriously, stop laughing.  I don’t expect you to believe me.  In fact, I’m happy to give credit to all the other people.  But it is certainly true that, although I’ve had that word in my job title for well over a decade now, I’ve felt for some time that software engineers are unique from other types of engineers.  Indeed, good “software engineering” requires creativity and artistry as much as it requires engineering.  “Software craftsmanship” is the term Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror is pushing today; “Software Artisan” is another term I’ve heard today as the new replacement for “Software Engineer.”

Whatever.  I know what it is I do, so you can call me a Software Masseur if you feel like you must.  I’ll just keep doing my job like always.

Joking aside, this article is a big deal because someone (more specifically, someone people will listen to) has finally come out and said what we’ve felt all along – trying to measure and control the creation of software is not helping, primarily because it is at least as much a creative process as it is a technical one.  Convincing the Employees Formerly Known As Software Engineers around the world this is true is not going to be a hard sell.

Convincing their employers and customers, on the other hand, is going to be tough.  That’s because the customers have come to expect that they will know what features will be in what products by what date, and they aren’t likely to give that up willingly.  They need (or think they need) to know all of this so they can plan – when to buy their next computer, when to get trained on the new version of a product, when to rollout system updates to an enterprise, when a partner can promise the delivery of new functionality to their customers, etc.

Interestingly, some organizations are able to avoid this expectation of their customers.  Open source projects are particularly good at this.  Eclipse, for example, delivers a release every year but makes no promise as to what features will be included in that release; other projects, like Linux and Apache, release whenever they feel like it.

I remember writing a software product that was going to be delivered as Apache modules for Apache 2.0, way back before Apache 2.0 was officially released.  We e-mailed the Apache project during development to ask when Apache 2.0 was scheduled to ship, and they said in essence, “We don’t know.  And, we don’t publicize or even set release date goals.  We ship it when it is ready.”  Of course that made it hard to plan, but part of me secretly wished I could get paid to work on Apache.

Open source projects are not the only ones that do this, however.  I defy you to figure out when any given Google app will ship, for example.  And consider Blizzard Software, one of the most successful video game companies EVER (ever heard of World of Warcraft?).  As I understand it, they are like Apache in this regard – their product will ship when it is ready, and not a day before, and it doesn’t matter what big holiday or trade show is coming up.  And so far they’ve done alright.

And then there’s Duke Nukem Forever.  Wait…