What is the best professional advice you ever received? And where did it come from?

I meant to write a post in response to this, but the usual events (news, work, family) thwarted my efforts. Given that today is Labor Day here in the United States, I figured it was a good time to revisit this topic.

The Best Professional Advice I Received

Early in my career, around 1998, I was working as a consultant. A project that I was designing had a fundamental constraint, internet access could not be assumed at all times when using the application. So, we needed to have some sort of synchronization process. Our initial design was a complete failure, due to the lack of research in some key technologies where they would not truly support our processes. So, I went to my boss to deliver the news. I told him that the synchronization process would not work as designed and we would need to start over. He asked what options we had and how long they would take. I stood there without an answer. My boss had a fairly hot temper, but this time he obviously restrained himself and said:

When your design will not work, do not come in here with complaints, only come in with options.

It is very easy to get mired in the failure itself. I was still young (around 26) and had not dealt with much project failure. Dave Winer has a very good tale on one of his potential failures as well:

Over on Ycombinator one of the commenters, TotlolRon, quoted Apollo 13 Flight Controller Jerry Bostick. “When bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them.” I think that’s pretty close to the sentiment. You’re out there, you’re alone, and if you fail, you aren’t coming back. That is the feeling I had outside the office that night.

The key in Dave’s story is that you need to think about the options to avoid failure and not dwell on the failure itself. In that doomed project, I was dwelling on the failure. So, I took my boss’ advice and came back the next day with options. Granted, the options did not appear like a vision, I needed to work on them. I was dealing with a mobile sales force that might only connect to the internet while at the office, or so I thought. I talked with the VP of Sales and the CIO, and found that a connectivity deal had been signed just a few days before our meeting. So, I could now depend on constant connectivity through dialup modems.

With connectivity came the answers. So, the next day I presented my options with potential issues to my boss. I had a recommendation ready among the options as well as contingency plans for the issues. From that point onward, the project was fine and we delivered a solid solution within the budget.

“Failure is not an option” is a widely used mantra. I think this misleads people to think that all failure should be avoided. Let’s change this mantra to “Failure as an end status is not an option.” You can fail along the path, but you need to learn from those failures. You need to think of options to your failure in order to achieve success. In some cases, the answer may be obvious. In other cases, it will be much easier to just complain about the failure. The next time you fail at something, first think about what options you have. You may find that a alternative solution is easier to deal with than the consequences of the failure.

So, what are you offering, complaints or options?

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If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).

I know I wrote about the continuous Google Me rumors recently, and the VOIP integration seemed like a logical extension at the time.

Social features are starting to permeate all of Google’s products. Lots of products are getting mobile updates. Even the Contacts application has been recently and nicely revamped. What if all of these changes are really related to Google’s new social push and Google Me?

Given this idea, the VOIP inclusion with the contacts updates still just seemed like a small move in a bigger plan. The recent release of GMail Priority Inbox has me thinking that there might be a different direction:

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”

Granted, this seems like a logical extension to GMail and a good way to deal with the flood of information that people receive daily. The only problem with this is that GMail and its inbox has not changed in years. I had always figured this was one of those “sacred” areas that could not be touched. Priority Inbox is not a small adjustment either. Partitioning your inbox into 3 sections based upon importance is definitely a Google thing to do, but it is a fairly big change. In addition to the basic concept, the inbox learns as you use it:

Over time, Priority Inbox gets better at predicting what’s important to you. You can help train it using the buttons.

So, this likely means that this change is part of a bigger plan as well. By including VOIP, text chat, email priorities and a vastly improved contacts manger, GMail has become your communications hub. Google is obviously taking many chances to increase your engagement. If you include Google Buzz in this equation, you can see the makings of a social network. If you look at this from the Google Me perspective, why put this much work into GMail when you will push people to Google Me in the hopefully near future? That seems fairly short-sighted or there is no communication within Google projects. Or there is another option.

Some people have been arguing that email is the first social network. What if your email program became your new social network? What if those changes to Orkut were really a way to move it closer to GMail? Let’s look at the feature list I wrote about for Google Me:

• Messaging provided by GMail
• IM provided by Google Talk
• Google Buzz integrated with the basic status updates on the network
• Orkut, new and improved with social circles provides the core social network features and a platform to build upon
• Google Docs integration so that you can share documents with specific social circles
• Picasa integration so that you can share pictures with specific social circles
• Wave integration so that a specific social circle can have real-time collaboration features.
• Latitude integration in order to share location information with specific social circles

Messaging is already provided by GMail, and it has IM integration. Google Buzz has already been integrated with GMail, but not entirely thrust in your face yet. Social circles could likely be inferred from your email history within GMail. GMail has integration with Google Docs. The real-time collaboration features would be an interesting addition to GMail, may be more successful there because there is not a new contacts list to create and it deals with people you already collaborate with. Latitude integration would be the only tricky thing to include as the integration has to be done very carefully. If it gets pushed through Buzz, then Google would be following the Foursquare/Gowalla route. If it has deeper integration with your social circles and email, then it could be more like Facebook Places and promote more serendipitous meetings. That is one of the greater potential benefits of social location services.

I am not sure if Google is really making GMail your next social network, but there is a lot of work that seems to be moving it in that direction. It could be that Google Me is just a name for GMail 2.0.

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The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000?  Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”.  As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.

Initially, I was going to leave this topic alone, but Dave Winer decided to complain as well:

If I can’t get into the game, I can’t imagine there’s much chance for most other people in their 50′s to play a role. Which is really fucked up. It’s probably the reason why we keep going around in the same loops over and over, because we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so.

The combination of the two struck a nerve. I only partially agree with either quote as they do not look at the real issues here. In particular, both posts talk about ages and startups. Startups are not a huge portion of the software development industry. They may be the beginnings of it, but there are tons of engineers slaving away in a cube for some corporation that has 50,000 employees. However, even in a large corporation, age can be an issue for a few reasons.

Age and Hours Worked

For startups, hours worked are extremely important. Sometimes developers will work 80 hour weeks for months in order to get the product shipped. Many people assume that this is a young person’s game. This is technically true, but not because the people are young. The main reason that older people cannot work long hours is because they typically have a family and kids at home. They may not want to work long hours because they want to see their children at night. Some of these family people will work long hours after their children go back to sleep, but this is not the majority of software developers. If your company requires long hours, and you do not want to work those hours, age is not the issue, the hours are the issue. Maybe you are just not cut out for the startup life.

Age and Cost

For a startup, cost can be a significant issue. Many veteran (10+ years) software developers will have a salary in the top 25% of the industry. This problem is also not specific to the startup world, though startups do feel the cost pinch sooner than a large corporation. Startups have a tendency to pay for significant benefits to offset a lower salary. Sometimes you can get stock options or maybe it is just free food. In either case, your startup salary is likely lower than your salary at an equivalent corporate job. The corporation will eventually cap the experienced developer’s salary as well. Experience is important, but sometimes people just become too expensive. If you are that person, you must realize that you will not always get a raise when you change jobs or get more experience. If you decide to stay in software development, you have decided to make some maximum dollar amount in your city. If you want more money, you need to get into management.

Age and Skills

The TechCrunch post states that “The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate”. Dave Winer feels that we make the same mistakes over again because we are throwing away or ignoring experience by only hiring younger developers. The truth is somewhere in between. Experience is somewhat helpful when a product is first being developed, but that is not critical at the early stage. Experience is critical when the early startup gains more adoption and needs to become stable. Younger developers do not have the experience to stabilize a product, whether it is by scaling a product for millions of users or just dealing with all of the issues that software has after being used for some time. These skills come with experience. Younger developers can learn these skills, but typically the knowledge is passed on from someone with experience.

Older developers have always had the stigma of staleness attached to them as well. I think this stems from the long tenure at large corporations. The internet changed a lot of that as well. Now, older developers are starting companies of their own. Technology is significantly easier to learn today because of the wealth of information available. 15 years ago, your ability to learn a new technology depended upon how many books you could read and whether your company would send you to training. This would become very expensive, potentially over $5000 per year. Now, I can find better information, quick than before and it is free.

Age Is Just A Number

In reality, age is just a number. There are plenty of younger developers that have no interest in working at a startup, just like those family-oriented older developers. Older developers can learn new technologies without being hampered by whatever “technology baggage” they carry. They just need to decide to do so. There are some younger developers that learned Java in school and have no interest in learning anything else because it is stable and used at many large corporations. There are people of all ages that refuse to work for less than they feel they are worth. Some of these people are misguided, and others may be worth the money. In all of these cases, developers young and old may not be a fit for a startup. To be a fit for a startup, you must have the desire to be in a startup. If that means working long hours at a lower salary while learning all sorts of new technology, then you must be prepared.

Preparation and desire are not age related.

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As an example, look at Google Wave. Wave was extremely aggressive in what it was trying to do, reinventing email and collaboration. In hindsight, we can easily say that the change was too great for mainstream adoption, but there were a lot of people that love using Wave for collaboration. What if Wave was really just a market test of real-time technologies and collaboration? If that was the case, then Wave was hugely successful in testing real-time collaboration. They also received useful feedback on their “reinvention” of email and saw first-hand how resistant to change people can be.

Timing is also another important feature of these types of market tests. Google Buzz was released and had privacy issues around the same time that Facebook was having serious privacy issues. Buzz was not a reinvention of email, but it was a limited foray into changing your inbox. It looks just like any other folder. Sometimes Buzz items end up in your inbox because you commented on them as well. Buzz saw some backlash about the integration with email, but that criticism did not really stick with the product. Maybe Google was onto something.

In the past few months we have also seen the “real life social network” presentation from Google researcher Paul Adams. The presentation talks about the limitations of current social networks and how people really interact differently with their various circles of friends. That presentation spurred many of the rumors about the possibility of a new social network called Google Me.

Now, we see that Google Orkut has received an interesting update.

we all maintain different groups of friends (or “social circles”), and the Internet was not able to reflect that. Until now, social networks treated people from different groups like they were all the same: they were all “friends” … To make it easier for you to interact with your groups of friends, now you can open them from your homepage. Your groups will always be a click away from you, on the top of the page.

So, social circles are being introduced to Orkut where you can share items differently with each group. This is very interesting timing. Orkut is getting some nice updates, and people continue to talk about Google Me. Social features are starting to permeate all of Google’s products. Lots of products are getting mobile updates. Even the Contacts application has been recently and nicely revamped. What if all of these changes are really related to Google’s new social push and Google Me?

Think about Google Me with the following features:

• Messaging provided by GMail
• IM provided by Google Talk
• Google Buzz integrated with the basic status updates on the network
• Orkut, new and improved with social circles provides the core social network features and a platform to build upon
• Google Docs integration so that you can share documents with specific social circles
• Picasa integration so that you can share pictures with specific social circles
• Wave integration so that a specific social circle can have real-time collaboration features.
• Latitude integration in order to share location information with specific social circles

I would not call this a Facebook killer, but I would be very impressed if this is what Google Me had in store for us. It takes a long time to kill an application with 500 million users. The difference in this case is that Google has millions of users already in various products and could quickly ramp up to 100 million users. That would make for an interesting battle between Google and Facebook.

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We’re working with an initial set of partners including Gowalla, foursquare, Yelp and Booyah‘s InCrowd to enable users to share check-ins on Facebook.

Booyah has an application soon to be released already, and Gowalla is already talking about building on top of the Places platform. So, Facebook has started with some good third-party adoption. Assuming that these partners get access to the write API, integration will probably be swift.

However, having partners does not mean you don’t get to make fun of them. The funniest part of all this was the inclusion (or exclusion) of Foursquare:

Facebook has now “helped” out Foursquare by making them wonder what’s next. They also welcomed the company up on stage to announce that they would … GASP … consider what to do with Facebook Places! Wait, so their launch partner didn’t have early access to the Places API? Nope! Instead, Holger Luedorf of Foursquare was brought on stage to announce nothing, just stand there.

That is a nice slap in the face, but the public API is read-only for now so there is little that a third party can do. Of course, this gets more interesting as Facebook opens up the write API, which would make Facebook a location sharing platform. As a platform, Places becomes much more interesting.

First, look at the Places API that is currently available. You can lookup a specific check-in by ID, all the check-ins for a user ID, or all of the check-ins for a “place page” ID. What is a place page? Well, the API documentation has a short note about that:

Check-ins are associated with locations represented by Facebook Pages; the location must have a Facebook Page ID, whether the Page was created on Facebook directly or using the Open Graph protocol.

So, this location database is being displayed and stored as Facebook pages. If you look at the main help page for Places, they have already answered some basic questions like “How do I claim a Place I represent?”. This is interesting because it unifies the painful location database merges that other services have needed to deal with. Because Facebook has 500 million potential Places users, they will quickly become the defacto standard for location databases.

There is one major problem with Places, it is very limited in functionality. You can search a little, and you can check-in. They are only providing a platform for third-party developers to fill in the details. I think this was done for a reason. They want the users to determine who has the best application. The winner gets purchased by Facebook, in what I call the Facebook Places Sweepstakes, so that they can integrate the most mainstream application that their users already wanted. This is market testing at its best.

Of course, it would be easy to just say Foursquare is king, but the location applications are very immature still. My personal favorite in the Facebook Places Sweepstakes is Groupon. The main reason is that Groupon has a significant application that is not based solely on check-ins. We have seen that businesses like the idea of giving discounts to the “mayor” or people that check-in. Yelp is another interesting possibility as it has a significant number of user reviews that can not be ignored and it has check-ins too. Adding discounts for frequent diners or even new visitors would be simple to add if it was integrated with Places.

What this all points to in the end is search. Facebook is becoming a major player in search because of its size. If you look at Facebook Questions, that is a way to create a knowledgebase on Facebook. If Places does gain adoption and starts to include more content from Yelp and basic check-ins from Gowalla and Foursquare, Places could be the business recommendation service everyone has been looking for. As an example, John Battelle complained about Google yesterday when he tried finding a yogurt shop a mile away. At the end he mentions the obvious:

What if Foursquare or Facebook had Places search? Man, that’d be great! I could search for yogurt shops in Edgartown, and I bet, without a doubt, I could find what I’m looking for.

Yep, that is what this is about, relevance and location in searches.

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So, what do the trends from Indeed.com look like?

Obviously, JavaScript continues to grow like a weed, showing a more rapid increase in the last 6 months. Flex seems to have gotten out of the doldrums with a nice upward trend over the past year. PHP is also growing nicely as it continues to be used for major sites like Facebook. In the past six months, Python has started to distance itself from the remaining languages. Ruby and Rails are showing slow growth with Ruby finally separating itself from its Rails legacy. Groovy is still trailing the pack and not growing very rapidly, but it is still having a decent growth period.

Now, let’s look at the trends from SimplyHired.com.

As stated in other job trends posts, because the SimplyHired data is limited to 2 years, we really see the short term bumps. SimplyHired does not show JavaScript to have a dominant position over the other languages like its Indeed counterpart. Javascript is still the leader and has more consistent growth than Flex. Flex had a really good bump in the last quarter, but it seems to be coming down from that temporary high. The trend for PHP looks like it may be stabilizing a bit over the past year with only limited growth. The others, Python, Ruby, Rails and Groovy, show only limited or flat growth. In all of the languages, there was a significant downward trend from January through April probably due to the continued economic issues around the world. Overall, Indeed is showing much more growth than SimplyHired, and this should be concerning for people as you would not expect two job posting aggregators to have such different trends. Hopefully, this is not pointing to a slowdown in web programming jobs overall.

Lastly, lets look at the relative trends for job growth from Indeed.com. This shows an interesting perspective of the job trends, comparing language growth as opposed to percentage of all postings.

Groovy demand has continued its tremendous rise over the past 2 years. Groovy may not have the same number of postings, but this type of growth could mean that it is ready for more mainstream adoption. Ruby and Rails have also shown an increasing growth trend that is much higher than the others. This has not translated to a huge increase in jobs, but even this growth trend shows that Ruby is now able to stand on its own, and not require the Rails framework. Python seems to be pulling away from the other languages in the list in the past year. We could see a rapid rise of demand for Python in the near future if this growth trend continues. PHP, Javascript and Flex do not share the huge growth of the other languages, but they are the current leaders overall and it would be difficult to sustain 1000% growth over a long period.

Based on all of these trends, you can see that web and scripting languages still have excellent demand. The relative growth of Python and Groovy make them “need to know” languages, even if you just start using them for side projects. Javascript is something anyone involved with web applications should already know, and dynamic websites require significant amounts of it. Ruby, Rails and PHP continue to grow and are an excellent addition to any programmer’s toolbox.

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The philosophy of economics, and psychology, and morality, all overlap in studies that show how people will readily abandon moral responsibilities if they are given ways to avoid the stigma of doing so. This leads me to feel more justified in my belief that programmers do a poorer job of reading, understanding, and implementing a specification when someone else has the responsibility of verification.

To put this more simply, if you do not have the responsibility to test your own code, it will be of lesser quality. I have seen this in practice, and I would have to agree. Code that does not have unit tests almost always has more defects than code that is unit tested. So, why do programmers avoid writing unit tests? There are plenty of excuses, and the second article has a good list of them. From that post comes my favorite excuse:

It’s not my job to test code – I don’t know at what stage a software developer decides that he can just throw code over the wall. If your job title was simple Coder than maybe there’s an excuse. But as your job is to develop working software, you need to be able to say that your code is functional.

Read that last sentence again, “your job is to develop working software, you need to be able to say that your code is functional.” As a software developer, can you really say that you have done your job without providing unit tests?

If you are not writing unit tests, you are not providing any proof that your code actually works. You are doing yourself a disservice and any developer that maintains your code will complain at length about it.

Another classic excuse is that it takes too much time to write unit tests or there is not enough time in the schedule to write the tests. The schedule excuse appears a lot as project scheduling is never as good as we would like. When I first started writing unit tests ages ago, I believed that the schedule excuse was OK. As I continued through my career, I realized that there were more defects in my code that did not have unit tests. I also realized that fixing the defects was harder if there were not unit tests. I know this is anecdotal evidence, but when so many people in our industry say the same things, the anecdotal evidence becomes more than just coincidence.

An interesting side benefit of creating testable code is that the design typically ends up easier to deal with. I think this has to do with the fact that your code becomes more component-oriented. You need to break many of the dependencies that quick-and-dirty coding tends to introduce. If your code is hard to test, it could point to design flaws or at least unnecessary complexities.

So, if you are a software developer, even if you are just learning the trade, test your code. It is your job to show that your software is working. Quit complaining, get over it and start writing unit tests.

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1. Caffeine – You need to find your preferred caffeine delivery system. Mine is black coffee, early and often. Others may prefer diet soda throughout the day. There are always the classics as well, Mountain Dew and Jolt.
2. Logic – As a programmer, you deal with logic constantly. Your true mettle will be defined by how you deal with the insanity (real or perceived) of the customer. The customer could be your project manager, the business analyst or the users. For any given project, you can count on someone sounding completely insane.
3. Hours – Expect to be working a lot of them. Programming is one of those jobs that refuses to follow the 9 to 5 path. As you get closer to your deadline, the hours you work will increase quickly. Just hope that you can work from home sometimes. Also, weekends and time off are for management, and you need to be available at all times.
4. Corporate Leash –  You may not have any power to make decisions, but that does not mean the company cannot give you a leash. The ability of constant communication is too much for companies to pass on so you will likely get a crackberry, a pager (people still use them), or some other company provided cell phone. No, your leash will not be an iPhone, this is not meant for fun this is business.
5. Blame – As a programmer, you are the low man (or woman) on the totem poll. Just remember that shit rolls downhill, the buck stops with you and if there is a defect it is obviously the programmer’s fault.
6. Sleep – More importantly it is the lack of sleep that you need to be concerned with. As your hours increase, you will find there is less time to sleep. You will have to call into a conference call at 7AM with your offshore team, or support a 5AM deployment on Saturday.
7. Skills – Your skills typically do not matter in the corporate environment. There are plenty of programmers that do not have jobs and could fill your position. Your expertise in the business domain is not important because there are business analysts that are supposed to be the experts in the business. You are replaceable, you are just a part in the corporate machine.
8. Odors – As the hours get longer and management reads something about the productivity of team rooms, the odors start to get worse. We are not talking about someone heating up their lunch. We are talking about the stereotypical, unkempt programmer sitting in a room full of other unkempt programmers. After some time, the room starts to smell like a camel, and it is not pretty.
9. 24/7 support – Yes, you will be pulled into support at various times, even for something like a customer service site. The application may not be life threatening or revenue threatening, it is just job threatening. So, your corporate leash will ring at the worst possible moment and you will have to get on a conference call with 10 people who have no idea how to fix the problem but need to be involved from the management perspective and one other person that might be able to help you.
10. Stress – Project failure is never an option. You cannot miss the deadline even though it was not the deadline you proposed. No, you cannot remove features from the application in order to make the deadline either. You need to deliver the entire application by the deadline, or the entire team could be fired. Nothing like a little pressure with your morning coffee.
11. Non technical managers – These people are considered the bane of most programmer’s existence. They need to manage a group of programmers, but they do not understand what they do for a living besides “they write code”. They typically overpromise, underdeliver and treat their programmers like cattle or “resources”.
12. Political battles – This is one of those things that programmers are rarely directly involved in. However, your project and even the whole team could become the casualty of some political war. You have no power to prevent any of it, but you are definitely involved. Keep listening to the rumors so that you have some warning that something bad could happen.

Obviously, these ideas will not happen everywhere and are much more of a worst-case scenario. If you see several of these things at your current employer or even a prospective employer, you may want to run the other way. Given that you already carry a cell phone anyway, don’t worry about the corporate leash, they will just want your current cell phone number.

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