What was interesting was that my initial reaction wasn’t as extreme as I thought – I didn’t think it was obviously some terrible idea. I think it will be a mistake but my gut feel is that I know why it was done and I can see some benefits for Yahoo’s particular situation. Yahoo’s situation is unique because remote workers were a minority and they are trying to completely reboot.

For an established company like Yahoo, to have a few hundred remote workers means that:

1. They didn’t really support remote work. They have most likely rejected it for the newer workers who have asked for it.
2. The ones that worked remotely were likely special cases: long-term employees from acquisitions that stayed where they were, employees that used to work in an office but convinced the company that they should stay on after a big move, people who smelled really bad, etc.
3. Really key people that were able to bend the rules.

Seems like cutting them all loose would be a very risky thing to do (especially #3).

Mayer is trying to reboot the culture at Yahoo. From some of her other moves it seems she wants it to transform into a smaller startup-style firm like the younger Google that she joined. She wants to start over and redefine the culture and remote employees of the sort that Yahoo had respond more slowly to cultural changes that happen on-site.

Many companies that need more production out of their employees use subtle cultural clues. One of the most effective means of creating culture is enduring shared pain. The effort to launch a new product which translates into long nights at the office with no showers and slurred speech is one example. Psychological peer pressure – the subtle enforcement of 80 hour weeks by people staying until the lights go out – is another. These are the components of building teamwork in its rawest form.  Yahoo should expect some of these actions.

In a remote minority situation not everyone feels the ripples in the pond. Remote employees don’t feel these subtle cues; they don’t hear the ra-ra of employee pep rallies and don’t see the odd looks when they logoff at 6:30pm. They only see work and process – if you send me more work or improve the process more will get done.

Remote employees have a default culture that fills in any remaining space: a culture of working efficiently. They optimize down such that they do the work as quickly as possible. Their entire work paradigm is based on the idea that travel time is inefficient and they are constantly dealing with the fact that they aren’t in the office and have to adjust for any barriers this creates. So to them, arbitrarily working an extra three hours a day to build teamwork is not effective.

So if you are looking to build a startup from within a large, established company by rebooting it; maybe the remote employees are risks. Maybe.

• He didn’t know our system at all.
• I would never meet him.
• We didn’t have much documentation of our systems.  All our knowledge transfer was done in person using heavy sarcasm and obscure hand waving.
• We didn’t have a good ticket tracking system or history of service incidents we could point him at for self-study.
• I wasn’t sure how I could judge whether or not he was helping or hurting.
• I was afraid that instead of getting woken up in the middle of the night to solve a problem I would be woken up in the middle of the night to talk to him and explain the context because of the above problems.

All my objections were about how we weren’t ready to support him, monitor him, and grow him sitting where we sat as an immature support team. All my objections were things that we needed to change anyway and that he would serve as a canary and catalyst for these things to actually change.  We would be a better team by moving towards being able to support him.

***

With the developer job market being what it is  (i.e. a little nuts) some companies are offering work from home as an attractive add-on option – “Work from home Fridays”, “We support remote workers”, “Flexible schedule”.  This is being done as an after-thought and is not part of the core culture.

The difference between a company that can support a remote worker and one that cannot is not a small difference in perks: it is a chromosome-level difference. Companies that truly support remote workers win against those that don’t.

***

Having now myself been the remote person on the other side over the last 2+ years I’ve found a large range of differences between those that truly support remote work and those that just talk about it.  Think of it as the difference between a watch being water-resistant [you can wash your hands with it on] and diving-level waterproof [you can operate it underwater].

The reasoning is pretty simple: in order for a remote employee to succeed a company has to have clear communication, a standard process, and a clear focus on results above other secondary concerns.

A company has to provide the following:

• A pipeline of work that is ready to actually be worked upon (It is packaged with its context and links to how to find out information for any questions)
• Clear expectations for results and the ability to track how things are progressing.
• Clear communication channels: this might include some permanence and search-ability for work already done but also includes some form of ~democratic decision-making that includes those that includes more people than can fit in a conference room.
• A teaching culture that includes helpful coworkers ready to answer questions and help out remote workers if there are gaps of context.
• A Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) culture that allows workers to get as much done as they are able, and processes feedback from those workers about obstacles they encounter.

All of those things are good for the company supporting remote work even without a remote workforce – they create less friction around communication and infrastructure and make results the top priority.  In the end a company that focuses on primary complexity will beat those that are optimized for other things.

Super-productivity is a deeply personal thing – and you can’t take advice from someone else’s surface-level understanding of how you work

Tapping into your potential for getting a lot of important work done isn’t about figuring out a way to actually get more tasks done an hour – it’s about tapping into yourself emotionally to see what you care about enough to just do what is best for great work to happen. That’s it.

But isn’t there is so much great information on how to get more done?  Not really – all the standard blog posts about productivity tell you surface-level ways to:

1. Block distractions (turn off notifications, go to a quiet place, tell that herd of rhinos to keep it down or move along)
2. Guard your physical health to increase mental energy (eat clean, sleep, exercise, no or less coffee/heroin)
3. Write down your to-do list, goals, and what you achieved (your to-do list should be as complex as your taxes)
4. Gain 1.5 hours a day by being your best self ever today! (i.e. small foolish tips such as Learn keyboard shortcuts, use auto-responders, hire a virtual assistant, use two monitors, listen to music while working, never listen to music while working)

Great. Outstanding. Well-Done. There are about a million people that read those sorts of “Top 8 Things that Massively-Productive People Do” posts a few times a week.  So I guess they aren’t working.

Let’s turn the tables:

1. Why do you get so easily distracted
2. Why can’t you take care of yourself
3. Why don’t you know your goals, what you are doing now, or what you did yesterday
4. Why do you need a daily pep-talk from some stranger on the Internet (who may or may not be a cat)

Articles that talk about this stuff aren’t as catchy: “8 Ways to Care Enough to Do Good Work“, “Stop Being Distracted: Do Not Read This” don’t encourage or get page views.  Answering these “on the couch” personal questions leads to some interesting answers:

Calculus cat is aware of his emotions and really likes bookmarks.

• Well if I get behind on emails its going to look like I’m not working, so I have to check my email every 5 microseconds
• If I don’t see the latest cool/funny/shocking thing on Twitter/Facebook then I’ll miss out on it and feel left out
• I want to feel connected even though I’m in this cube/office/airport Starbucks (the saddest kind of Starbucks)
• I need a distraction that makes me feel good when work is hard because the work makes me feel stupid
• I need the validation of new email, new notifications, new whatever
• I don’t feel as if my work is that important, so I take breaks to get through the day

The list above might be nonsense to you – make your own list (that’s sort of the point).  My point is that you have to tap into why you don’t care enough to not tolerate petty distractions and instead allow obvious ways to improve your work occur to you naturally.  You have to care.  Maybe you don’t care about every single cell in this Excel spreadsheet that you are editing by hand but for what it represents – care that it is a way to provide for yourself and others, a way to have time for other things, a lucky accident that allows you to work inside and safely.  Your work has to be important to you either by faith or fact.

If you can tap into those issues preventing you from being passionate then you’ll find that doing well at your work matters more than they do and you will naturally focus, naturally take care of yourself, and naturally figure out your own ways to improve so that you can do great work.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

My family in the last few years has already gotten a little weird by adopting all our kids, me working almost exclusively from home, and expecting twins. Just these simple actions have gotten us to the point of feeling like we are different enough to not accept anyone else’s advice without actually sitting down to think it over as our situation doesn’t really easily line up with anything else.

This being weird is a strength as this “normal bubble” is quite dangerous. Most people follow the crowd with small decisions and it becomes a habit so they don’t realize the power it has over them in big decisions like when to buy a house or how to spend their money.

Or infinitely more importantly: how to spend their time. Most people end up spending their lives based on the crowd formula of work vs. family vs. hobbies and it infects their thinking. There are other ways to work than 9 to 5 over 45 and other hobbies to have other than watching TV and playing golf for the love of all things.

The default choice for most people involves other people profiting from it. The default career choice benefits the company at your expense, the default eating habit benefits restaurants at your expense, the default choice of hobbies benefits some organization, and the default financial choices benefit anyone that profits from you being in debt. The smart money influences the crowd to hurt themselves.

So I plan to be weirder with how I spend my time and money and to teach my kids to move far enough away to the crowd’s collective voice and to more easily hear their own. As per the prophecy.

John Cleese – a lecture on creativity

Cleese makes the following high level points:

• Creativity is a mode of operating and not a talent
• Creativity happens when you are ‘open’ and not ‘closed’ where ‘open’ means a state of play and ‘closed’ a state of tactical completion-ism
• Block off multiple small amounts of time (he said 90 minutes) rather than some huge session once a week
• For creativity to foster you need:
• Space (quiet, free of distractions)
• Time (set start and end times so you can let go of other worries)
• Time (you have to be patient and allow yourself time to think and chew on a problem and not quickly resolve the tension of not knowing)
• Confidence (that you will think of something and not die alone then get eaten by your cats after never coming up with anything)
• Humor (it helps us move from closed to open and encourages play and new combinations of ideas)

At an organizational level he raised some interesting points:

• You can be more creative in groups if you are confident and work well together, but it can go bad easily:
• It is hard to be creative if people expect you to be (or appear) very decisive
• It is hard to be creative around people that you are trying to impress
• To discourage creativity discourage humor and people talking about intermediate ideas that might be bad

People have trouble calculating small amounts of risk (example: By getting in a car today you increased your chances of dying today 100x) they also have trouble understanding small chances of success.  Since it is unlikely that you win big with a startup you need to know how much you are paying to work at a startup.

Opportunity Cost

Working at a startup means that you need to commit to doing something for a few years. While the normal IT turnover is about two years to really have a chance of making money with a startup you need to be obsessively focused on that one thing for greater than two years – no side work or consulting unless absolutely needed.  You have to turn down that call from a friend who just got a job writing the billing system for Krispy Kreme with – you guessed it – awesome employee perks.

Personal Cost

At a startup you are all-in in most cases. Not all startup are like this, but the average startup is based on building a product that scales from the start as fast as possible to meet a certain market need. You are expected to work longer hours and be more committed than in a traditional job. This means it will cost you personal time – everything that isn’t nailed down or a way to recharge yourself for more work will be replaced by work. Watching TV, hanging out with friends, having a close family, lawn care, listening to podcasts, competitive knitting, blinking contests with your parrot – whatever.

Literal Cost

There are many cases where the startup just costs you straight-up money. You make less at a startup and can’t take on additional work so if the options/equity doesn’t work out you lose money.

Well then why do it?

Every startup is different – not all demand 80 hour weeks, no vacation, and daily blood-letting for 3 years before there is any relief. Some cost less than others – but they all cost something compared to other opportunities; it’s the nature of the risk/reward equation in play.

This post so far has come off as anti-startup – it isn’t. You just need to know what the cost is before you pay it; for many the rewards are worth it. So what do you get from paying all this time/money?

Learn to play offense

Big companies play defense, small companies play offense. The bigger the company the more likely they are to be protecting revenue from existing products which means there is less creation/innovation going on and more maintenance/low-risk activity. This is not as exciting, and not something that challenges every type of worker. In addition big companies play defense with themselves – politics between departments and personalities get ugly and awkward and creepy.

Avoid Defense

Getting tired of the co-worker on co-worker political crime? If you have worked more than a few years in IT working at a startup is a breath of fresh air. No HR, no maintenance, no bureaucracy, no weird politics, no grand-standing, no asking for permission, no entrenched product managers on foobar’d products that aren’t evolving.

Make contacts with people who create opportunity

Working at a big company you can meet more people than at a startup and many of them are wicked smart, but the type of people you meet working at a startup are the type of people that a few years later will probably build another company while the big company people probably won’t. Working alongside people that are smart, courageous, and motivated enough to work at startups can teach you and expose you to more than the default choice of a typical job.

Learn by watching fireworks up close

Working at a typical IT firm you don’t normally get to see the whole picture. How much are we billing customers? Who is our most profitable client, and how do we treat their contract negotiations? What is the CTO/Product Manager doing day to day? How much are we growing, and in what markets? What was the thinking behind this decision, and how was it analyzed and tracked after it was made? At a startup you typically get to see the feedback loop up close since it is a buzz saw moving closer to your neck every day. What features should we put in the product, what market should we go after, what is working, what is failing? These are questions you get exposed to all the time working at a startup.

So should I work at a startup?

Every startup is different and every worker is different and every snowflake is different. For some stability is more important, or better insurance, or maybe there really are people that like awkward corporate work parties. For others the chance to learn to move fast, build something from nothing, rub up against people that want to do things differently, and avoid all the defense and hedging in big companies are worth it.  The experience you gain from being that close to the fire at a super-small business like a startup can all be applied at later jobs with bigger companies – everyone wants someone who can play offense, avoid defense, and make smart decisions.

BTB: Broke the build

Hey Ralph you BTB with that last check-in so I have touched one of your keys to my  inner elbow to punish you with creepiness

GDOS: Grumpy DBA Over Shoulder

GDOS - I’ve never heard of cursors and definitely never ever used them also I hate NULLs and wide tables and I think that ok he’s gone yeah just do an index rebuild and see if that works

UIT: Using Insufficient Technology; using any tool or framework that makes you dumber

Sorry I yelled at you I’m all UIT with Crystal Reports over here

NTRDTB: Numb to Reality Due To Boredom

I’m still UIT but I figured it out now I have to go all NTRDTB to fill in all these fields one by one

FNG: Green programmer, new guy

Look at FNG suggesting we need to add more comments – he is so cute like a kitten in a shoebox

STR: Spec Tremor

Oh we had a STR and now it’s not a time-tracking system it’s a gambling system for cats with a social networking add-on module

THOSB: Take A Hit Off The Scope Balloon, an advanced technique in which you calm down scope creep by participating in it and overwhelm everyone until they stop adding scope

And it should use your social media profiles and advanced heuristics to tell whether or not you want to install the program for you or just for everyone and did I mention a mobile version because a remote interface into an installer is just so hot right now and also Sharepoint integration and does it export to CSV and what out internalization because I’m talking to this one guy in Nigeria who seems interested and XML plus Javascript packages and Cloud technologies and have you guys ever thought about adding advertising to the window that shows during the installation?

NTPM: Non Technical Project Manager

Hey dude go tell the NTPM that Ruby is now illegal after the election and we have to start over

What the cloud changes

Your local IT staff leaves the best practices to the experts who worry about security and patches fulltime. They still help with the setup of servers but focus more on the configuration and not the “build” piece as the cloud vendor can provide off-the-shelf configurations. This frees up your local IT staff to focus on support specific to your business.

There are some other specific advantages of the cloud infrastructure as well:

• Pay as you grow: Instead of paying in large 25K server purchases you pay as your needs increase slowly
• Geographic independence: Instead of one datacenter where you hope nothing happens you have increased fault tolerance and performance of multiple locations of your resources
• Easier deployment: Cloud vendors provide services that allow you to easily upgrade your services and rollback if there are issues

Check out the full post here.

A blurb:

Functionality and Constraints

So let’s assume you have a mobile-friendly version of your site but your product is either a traditional web application or desktop application. Should you build a mobile version?

The mobile device, due to its constraints, presents some challenges:

• It is hard for the user to enter data as the on-screen keyboard is slower and error-prone
• Due to slower network speeds it is harder for the user to consume large content or have to click multiple times to find the information they need
• The smaller overall form factor means that visually intense or detailed information is hard to consume

Yet mobile devices, due to their features, offer some opportunities as well:

• The accelerometer (the magic part that allows the device to tell which direct it is tilted) can be exploited to present completely new experiences
• A touch screen provides fast intuitive access

The mobile experience is different due to typical use patterns:

• People use their mobile devices during leisure time as well as work time
• Users are out in the world while using mobile devices so location-based data can be exploited
• Mobile users like to try new things out more than the typical desktop user (easily searchable marketplaces and free apps help this)
• People have their mobile devices with them all the time so this increases the amount of advertising or usage that can happen
• People are more likely to be interacting with other people (and new people) when they have their mobile devices instead of sitting in a cubicle or at home

Check out the full post here.

I write first thing in the morning and then intentionally at lunch a few days during the week or I jot down notes as the day passes over me.  I just write anything.  Sometimes it’s in the form of a 13 year old girl’s diary in that I dump my emotions on the page and other times its intentional work towards a blog post.  More often it’s simply noting patterns, entertaining myself, and processing whatever is in me.

Most of the writing that I do is not published – it is a language of communication in which the sender is the present me and the receiver is future me.  I started writing in 2002 after graduating college and being really bored in my first job.  I wrote it on a Movable Type blog that had a password on it – a personal pay-wall of sorts to ensures that only I read it.  Write for yourself first.

Why spend time writing?

If you don’t intend to ever pursue writing as a career or serious hobby why would you spend time writing?  I mean don’t you have Facebook stalking to do and fart apps to download?

Well let’s start with a list of small to medium-size benefits:

1. If you work for a small business you can easily use your writing skills to establish a culture, public voice, and internal attitude for your company.
2. It doesn’t matter what your job is – if you can clearly convey an idea over email, the phone, text message, smoke signal etc. you are going to be better at your job. It is a natural prejudice but a positive one: if you can clearly communicate people think you are much better at other things.  Software developers with clearly-written blogs are thought to be great programmers even if it isn’t so.
3. Writing gets you in touch with yourself – what is in you comes out with stream of consciousness writing.  It reveals your prejudices, in-the-moment emotions, and things that you can’t process without “talking about it”.
4. Archived writing is stored state of mind.  I go back and read stuff I wrote when we had our first child in 2007 and it is fascinating and beautiful just because it takes me back there better than music or photos.
5. Writing is an effective break during work – you clear your head in the same way that reading does while keeping your mind more active.
6. Writing gets new ideas out of your head and new ideas are stuck behind old ideas.

On to the bigger benefits:

Writing helps you learn to create

In writing you create something from nothing.  Most of us don’t think that we can draw or sing or dance or freestyle rap but any literate person can write.  You don’t have to be fancy; you can write a story about anything to please yourself and create a thing. Creating changes you in many positive ways and writing is the most accessible of those ways.  One of my takeaways this year was how often I came up with something new while writing.

Writing helps you learn to focus

Writing is a very intensive focus-based activity.  You can switch over to a web browser while writing but the structure of words and sentences means you probably won’t do so in the middle of typing out the word “encyclopedia”.  In this way writing is a good way to bootstrap your focus muscles – letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book, obscenity by obscenity.

Resolve to write

Anyway, my unsolicited advice: write something this year.  No excuses.