Engineers: Premiums or Prima Donnas?

I love building things. Teams, products, solutions, meals: if there is a way to see it as construction, that is almost certainly the perspective I’ll take. And given that love, I spend a tremendous amount of time working directly with engineers, both to build my own projects and helping with others.

As a whole, I tend to like engineers, which is perhaps unsurprising given my own perspective as a scientist. They like logic and rules, have a problem solving approach that is slanted heavily towards the analytic, and their geeky side interests are appealing to me.

But lately, I have the growing feeling that something has turned the corner in tech. Engineers are starting to suck.

I don’t mean they are becoming bad coders; if anything, the average ability of even a junior engineer has risen and that should continue as higher education and other training programs reorient themselves to practical, rather than theoretical, computer science. Rather, I mean that engineers are becoming disappointingly lame people. Not because they are losing their geekiness, but because they are becoming prima donnas.

Engineers are seen as indispensable by companies and are constantly told by the startup community that they make or break many startups. There is a culture in tech right now of engineers being somewhat like wizards: if you have really good ones, you are bound to win, even against overwhelming odds. They are the single most recruited position, no successful startup goes without them, and they are allowed remarkable freedoms in terms of where they work, how they work, and personal grooming.

And then there is the economic reality of engineer scarcity: we need more than we have and that results in heavy competition for them. The average pay for a starting engineer in Silicon Valley is literally twice or three times as much as other members of a startup team (marketing, product, design, etc.). And according to strict economic principles, it should be: scarcity governs price.

But teams are not strictly economic. When you take kids fresh out of college and start paying them eighty thousand dollar starting salaries, bad things happen. They do it in finance and look how well that has been working for us. When people don’t know what to do with their money, they generally choose incredibly stupid things that are not need (or even really want) driven. As anyone walking around Silicon Valley right now will tell you, it is a good time to be in luxury goods.

And praise is the same way. Even if we stopped paying them too much money, if we continue to tell engineers that they are the only thing that truly matters, it will ruin them. That’s just part of human nature: if one cog thinks it is THE COG, it will start and stop when it damn well feels like it, just to exercise some control in the world.

In reality, this is a love letter to all the engineers who don’t suck. Sumit Ahluwalia. Bill Cromie. Will Koshuta. Hilary Mason. The legion more that I know. They are all the more awesome because it would have been so easy for them to slip into being a “brogrammer”, but they didn’t. And by and large, what distinguishes them is that they actually care more about the machine than their own little cogdom. They aren’t coding as part of making a million dollars, they are coding in service of something that generally actually believe in. Like me, they love building, and I suspect they’d be doing it if even if it paid a heck of a lot less.

So what’s the takeaway?  Treat engineers like you would treat other employees you are leading.  Sell them on the mission, not their individual fiefdom.  And for the love of god, stop paying them so much – to quote The Streets, when playing blackjack, “He might get the ace or the top one / So organise your two’s and three’s into a run then you’ll have fucked him son”.  Take a few junior engineers with one good leader and train them to be the kind of people who will make things better.

How many in-jokes is too many in-jokes?

So after I wrote about the in-group references in Diablo III, Melissa Anderson asked my opinion about “aggressive” in-groupness and how it turns off new members.  Which then got me thinking about what makes some in-groupness awesome and some dramatically less awesome.

When we think of in-groupness as “aggressive”, I think it is actually behavior that has a specific function: keeping people out.  But there is another kind of in-group reference, which is more about layers of meaning – and technically, the Diablo III sort is that.

Take the treasure goblin.  It stands alone as a great game feature and character; you don’t have to know anything about the Golden Axe connection to enjoy it.  What being weird/geeky/old enough to know about Golden Axe does is add something.  That’s the key: addition.  An in-group reference is meant to make you feel that warm buzz of inclusion and recognition, but that doesn’t necessarily have to mean that it makes others feel that harsh note of rejection.

But you could make the treasure goblin obnoxious.  First, it could actually be a detriment to the game by either a) not being a standalone good (like a secret level that gives you infinite power for no good reason) or b) being actually stupid, like a joke that isn’t bad because it is a reference but rather bad because it just isn’t funny.  Second, you could make other people feel actively bad for not knowing what it was.  You could make the treasure goblin, for example, ask you “Gilius?” and force you to type “Thunderhead”.  Not only would that be not standalone good, but it would actually make out-group members feel dumb for not knowing what the heck is going on.  Like the first few seconds of a flash mob, but lasting forever.

Sadly, there is a lot of that sort of in-group behavior in the world – the kind that says “haha, fuck you for not knowing this, newb”.  It has a reason for existing, which is that sometimes we want to be part of small, exclusive groups.  But honestly, isn’t that what esoteric knowledge is for?  If you really want to be part of an exclusive in-group, go join a truly obscure community.  Where we get into trouble as a society is when we start trying to make in-groups that sit somewhere in the mainstream context.  The whole point of the mainstream is that it is inherently inclusive.  It is the actual meaning of the word.

When creating communities around a product, then, the key is fairly simple.  For any reference, ask yourself two questions:

1) If I have no idea what you are referencing, does this still make sense?  Can it stand alone, without the reference?
2) Is there a way someone could feel bad about this?

The only exception should be if you’re making a specifically in-group product, in which case: feel free to make it as bizarre and exclusive as you want.  And rest assured, if you do, someone will write fanfiction about it.

Titling blog posts is the hardest thing about them

Though I suspect few people actually stop to think about it, titling blog posts is actually quite a bit harder than writing them.  In reality, most of what is interesting about a post boils down to a few words: NYC soda ban is not an issue of freedom pretty much says it all.  But you want people to read, to understand the finer point that you’re trying to make.  So a truly good title gets people in the door, but doesn’t give away the whole plotline.

That isn’t actually all that easy to do.  As I remember one of my content-heavy friends noting, statistically the best titles are the “list” titles: 3 ways to shoot your dog, 6 things never to do on a date, The 100 most creative people in cajun music.  They tell you what you are going to be reading about, without actually imparting any of the important information, so that you’re forced to click-through if you’re interested.  And the click-through, the view, is the metric of all things holy in commercial blogging.

Where title writing gets interesting to me is for non-commercial bloggers.  You could argue they don’t exist, in that even those who do not make direct money off their blogs are still trying to get people to read it (otherwise, why write it at all?), but I do think the motivation set is different.  The longer I’m at this, the more I realize I don’t really mind if people get the main point from the title, since my whole endgame is to nudge people around with the knowledge contained in the points themselves.  So the title is actually a fairly good means to that end, provided I can do it well.

But that presents its own set of problems.  Writing your main point down into a few words that are difficult to misconstrue is not an easy thing, especially if your chief talent is in science rather than communication.  In the long format of a post, I feel that I can be forgiven for rambling; as any writer will tell you, it is the concise, dense prose that is the hardest.  And what could possibly be more concise than a title?

In-group identity and Diablo III

I finally got around to buying Diablo III (which really does have some serious connection issues) and the first hour made me feel all warm and geeky, mostly because of references that reinforce in-group identity.

Teaching in-group identity is fun, because everybody gets it at an instinctive level: competing against the desire to be a unique individual is the desire to be part of a group, a group that is defined in opposition to others outside the group.  Everybody’s group has the shared knowledge that reinforce these, like what Avi means when he calls me an alien or burritos from “down space town”.  And when instances of those shared knowledge come up, they make us feel special, because we’re in that group of people who know what they mean.

Geek culture (like movie culture, music culture, etc.) is rife with these sort of references, and in our minds, they sort out who is a “true geek” and who is just a pretender to the crown.  It isn’t often conscious: only with really identity-threatened folks do you see aggressive sorting into in- and out-groups.  But there is that thrill of discovery, that “oh, the Diablo guys know that?  I know that too!”

Like the mad king’s name in Diablo 3 being Leoric (which I took to be a reference to the mad elven king Lorac in the Dragonlance books).  Or the treasure goblin, which runs away with treasure and you are rewarded for killing it before it portals away.  Golden Axe, anyone?  Also, can “portals” be used as a verb?

Ultimately, these references may not even be true conscious references: the person who named the mad king may never have read Dragonlance.  But that doesn’t actually matter – even falsely identified references still make us feel special, part of the group that truly knows the subject matter.  And our brains love these puzzles; some psychologists have even suggested that this is evolutionary and that we get a little shot of pleasure hormones every time we resolve something ambiguous or make a difficult knowledge connection.

Which argues for why in-jokes are worth spending some time creating in products.  Moments that bind us closer to the communities that form around a product create product loyalty and make us feel a little special.  I always think of them as “pirate squirrels”, which were the bizarre, cute error screens that we used in place of 404’s at Thrive.  And chances are, if you are a geek, you just got a little tiny rush of pleasure for knowing what a 404 was.  Knowledge is power…but it is also pleasure.

Barry Schwartz and Andrew Ward and Dan Ariely, stumbling home one night

So it is 1am and I’m walking with Arjan Haring to his place in the suburbs of Utrecht on my last night in Holland.  We’re chatting about the hackathon, psychologists we admire, and general troublemaking, while I try to draw a mental map in my head so I can make sure I get home.  And as I’m walking the three miles back to my apartment after dropping him off, dodging around on the highway and trying not to die (because while the Netherlands believes in bike paths, it does not believe in sidewalks), it occurs to me: We are all united by these walks in the dark.

Think about someone you look up to and, while it is almost impossible to picture, I can guarantee you that they have had some crazy night walking back alone in some strange place, trying not to get lost.  Presidents to parents, heroes and villains, I think we often underestimate the degree to which there are these fragile moments in our lives that we all experience in much the same way.  I’m sure Barry Schwartz and Andrew Ward and Dan Ariely all stumbled home at some point.

And, of course, someone will probably think of us that way at some point.  Or at least, I think that should be part of our goal: to live a life grand enough that someone else has trouble imagining us wandering home alone at night when we were young.  Which means we all could have the sweet pleasure of surprising with the story of how we did.  Maybe being great is just doing enough that someone is surprised we ever had the time to do absolutely nothing at all.

TEDActive 2012: Atul Gawande, Jonathan Haidt

Though I was a bit distracted by the Hackathon, I still managed to listen to and watch several talks from TED while out in Palm Springs.  Here are a couple of brief notes and opinions, and links to the talks themselves from TED.com when available.

Atul Gawande: So I probably took the dramatically wrong message from this talk.

He was talking about improving healthcare, and where I ended up was: what happens when the problems at the upper right just become too expensive to solve?  Given my chosen field, I spend most of my time thinking about interventions like Gawande’s lists: simple, small things that make big differences by changing environments and systems.  And while I think there will always be optimizations (especially as technology advances so that the tools available change and our behaviors change right along with it), there comes some point at which it just gets harder and more expensive to keep continuing.

As Gawande points out, in the 30s, medicine meant getting people someplace warm, feeding them, and some very basic holistic health practices.  And while people still die because medical professionals (and everyone else) forget to wash their hands, we’re moving up and to the right on the graph: doing better medicine and keeping more people alive, longer.  But how long can we keep that up?  When we nail lists, when we’ve got people washing their hands and built machines that automatically kill bacteria anyway, and people still die…then what?  What happens when progress slows down?

It doesn’t have to just be health.  When we look at the human graph for the last hundred years, we’ve seen some huge increases in basically every measure of human prosperity.  But what about when that slows down?  We’ll still be moving forward, but if we can’t maintain the same rate, can we handle that as a society?

Jonathan Haidt: I really wanted to like Jonathan’s talk, because his work on morals is truly great.  But he seems to be building a rather shaky bridge between transcendent mental experiences and our evolutionary development of cooperation giving rise to our ascendance as a species, ultimately saying that we’re all searching for “more” than we currently have in the moral/spiritual/belonging sense.

The first part is utterly uninteresting to me.  The second is mildly interesting, though not in the sense of evolution, but only in that it mimics what I think the next great psychological question is: the need for people to both be individuals and part of a group, which seem to be competing desires but that both require satisfaction.  He’s nodding to the “part of a group” bit, and I do think we need more investigation there, as what we think of as “being part of a group” doesn’t seem to be honored by Facebook or the sort of solutions that seem like they would matter.  I think it is actually about purpose and accomplishment, but that’s another blog post.

I like the Dutch (and why I'm in Holland to begin with)

I like the Dutch.  They’re blunt, practical, and have remarkably low ego.  Sure, they may be a little fatalistic (they recently played in the Euro Football Championship and despite being tapped to win the whole thing, everyone was convinced they would lose, which, predictably, they then did), but their low-stress, high-progress approach to life is great.  And perfectly suited to entrepreneurship.

I’ve been in Holland for a few days this week as part of the first ever Groen Doen (Green Doing) Hackathon, sponsored by Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, the Sustainable Behavior Lab, UtrechtInc, and Jaludo (a Dutch gaming company who are hunting for new ideas and new talent).  It is an interesting mix of partners: an academic setting that focuses on actually getting things done, an incubator, and a private business, coming together to help kids learn through doing (which I was recently ranting about).

And as an educational experience, the Hackathon is fascinating.  There are almost as many mentors here as student participants, which means that they all have access to a lot of personal attention and time.  Dirk Franssens gave what seemed like a great opening talk on behavior change (it was in Dutch, but with English slides, so I got the gist), designer Ramon Goedvree is providing visual and communications coaching, members of the UtrechtInc are sharing their experience founding companies, and the organizer of the whole event is himself an entrepreneur (Arjan Haring of PersuasionAPI).

But what I’m most interested by is the creativity of the participants themselves.  With just 24 hours or so of worktime, they’ve managed to crank out several high-quality ideas, complete with business plans, LaunchRock landing pages, logos, and wireframes.  It reminds me how important a solid foundation is to a good app; you can buy engineering to help create something, but for that style of Elance-type development, you have to have precisely thought through what you want before you put on the cash to do it.  Which means paper prototypes and hours of bouncing things off the wall and being able to freely suggest (and abandon) ideas.

Which is where the Dutchness comes in.  Often at hackathons people are arguing within their group about what the right idea is and how to best pursue it, and  a certain amount of that debate is healthy.  But too often, people are just arguing about something they feel attached to, rather than towards a place of progress; its about ego, not quality.

In my experience at this Hackathon, however, there has been very little of that type of discussion.  In small teams of 3 or so, people are plowing ahead excitedly as a unit – even when someone distinctly comes up with something awesome, they always attribute it to the team.  It is refreshing and bodes well for Holland’s long-term entrepreneurial scene; avoiding the egotism of The Valley could be a real edge for the country as it pursues the concept of small business.

Note: the organizers just told me that Dutch people check their poo before flushing and proposed putting a label in the toilet that reminded people to use less toilet paper.  I may like Dutch people slightly less now.

European ads are gay (and do they work?)

In an attempt to stay awake on my first day in Holland and conquer jetlag, I spent several hours today watching television. The shows themselves are the same, because I was really just flipping back and forth between the Discovery Channel and Comedy Central, (though I did notice that MythBusters has a different guy doing voiceover than the American version). But the commercials? Awesome.

For example, I saw a car ad that I presume was talking about how modern and flexible the car was (I speak no Dutch). How modern, I pretend you ask?  Modern enough that a young woman gives her father away at a wedding instead of the reverse. That’s right: if I’m understanding this right, in Europe, they’re selling cars with gay marriage. Let’s see Ford try that one!

In a broader sense, what is interesting about watching ads in other countries is that because you can’t be sucked into the verbal message, you start focusing on elements you never really realized you were missing before.  The individual visual elements, for example; I never noticed how ads are just voiceovers with generic visuals before.  Voiceovers have all but disappeared from the narrative structure of TV programs (as opposed to the original, very voiceovered method of telling stories via radio) and yet ads still rely heavily on a 3rd-person perspective.

Is that because we can’t effectively tell a first-person, authentic narrative in an ad?  Certainly I feel like some companies have been able to: the Volkswagen ads, for example, have been tremendously successful at telling emotive stories without even using much language.  So one could argue that companies who aren’t making solid need to rethink their ad strategy.

And yet they must think that what they put out their works, right?  They are spending truly massive sums buying the airtime, and surely no company would waste so much money buying airtime to run ineffective content?

The scientist in me is curious.  I know that measuring the impact of brand advertising is difficult, since it doesn’t track to a specific sale, but some attempts have been made by marketing companies; how much is the difference between a truly world-class ad and a bad voiceover spot?  They feel different (certainly the well-told gay father ad got me thinking and noticing the car) but I wonder if they are, empirically.

Random closing side note: there are posters all over this campus featuring a woman in a bikini on a donkey wearing sunglasses.  I’m presuming they’re advertising a party of some sort, but it is amusing to consider alternatives.

Education from scratch

I spent the day working on tech/ed mashups and surveying the space, and two things are painfully true.

First, far too many companies are focused on supporting an educational system that is crumbling.  If it isn’t abundantly clear at this point, the classroom model of education isn’t going to be around for all that incredibly much longer.  So why are we just taking existing educational processes and making them electronic?  There is no long term business model in remaking the same mistakes.

Second, change is not going to happen at the institutional level, so stop trying to sell to them.  The sales cycle is way, way too long to be able to effectively do anything but really big startups, and what we need right now is small change.  We need to demonstrate other ways of learning that are so much more immersive and powerful that they can grow to popularity to outside the classroom and institution.  At which points institutions themselves will change or be eliminated by new institutions that form around the new paradigms.

Education is one of those truly frustrating spaces for me.  In part because, like anything truly frustrating, I care far too much about it – it is hard for me to create the distance that building good product often entails.  It is also one of those broken products that is actively fucked up every minute you don’t fix it.  We can survive without the next social media network and if it takes an extra day for us to create it, it will not be an actual problem.  But every single day that goes by where kids aren’t able to live up to their full potential is a real problem.  This isn’t something we can fix – it is something we have to fix.

That statement feels a bit hypocritical, given that I have had such fortunate educational luck.  I went to a great high school (given that it was public and in a rural state, I could have done considerably worse), attended a bizarre but excellent international school, and finished up at possibly the best college in the US.  I came out with around $20K of debt, which thanks to government grants was actually at a very low interest rate, and I paid that debt off within 12 months by working two jobs provided by the very college to which I had just paid so much money.  It was actually a bit like indentured servitude, now that I think about it, but I’m still a free man at the end of it, so it is hard to complain.

It is probably true that even in today’s job market, my path would have looked more or less the same; people are big on me as this incredibly driven guy and while it is hard to see myself that way, I certainly recognize it is what others perceive.  But good lord do I feel bad for current college graduates.  More than half of college graduates were unemployed or underemployed last year and that is seriously fucked up.

It isn’t like we have no problems that need solving – as anyone at TED will tell you, there are lots of global issues that need work (just don’t ask them to solve them, they’re “just a media company”).  So why aren’t we employing our young people to do so?  Start an Innovation Corp with a small (very small) living stipend and start forgiving student loans.  How’s this for an educational innovation: take those 1.5 million college grads with no jobs and put them in the schools!  There are about 100,000 public schools in America and I’m pretty sure all of them could use an extra fifteen teachers.  And yes, given my teaching degree, I recognize that is sacrilege and that we really need teachers who have at least some pedagogical background.  But even if they are completely hopelessly lost, these are the kids who learned delay of gratification well enough to go to college.  They do have lessons to teach and I’d rather have them than not have them.

This wandered away from ed tech but I’m pissed and I didn’t get enough sleep.  I’m not apologizing – I’m pissed for a damn good reason.  And the next kid that tries to pitch me a Pinterest-clone is going to get an ass chewing.  Fix a real problem, asshole.

More investors need to watch Any Given Sunday

You know that moment in every sports movie where the hero, who has achieved success through ability but not personality, has to be reminded of the importance of effort? Whether it is going back to the ghetto to watch kids play in an empty lot or a raging girlfriend who finds him in bed with someone else or a coach who gives him the speech, there is always some pivotal scene where the hero realizes it isn’t just about being able to do something, it is having the will to do it better and in a way that doesn’t suck for the world.

More big companies need that moment.

I spent the day watching investors and large private and public companies interact, and while there were many lovely moments (how often are you going to be in a room with Tim Armstrong and 20 people?), one reoccurring, frustrating theme was the degree to which investors were pushing companies to forget all the things that they learned from fighting hard on the way up. I heard one investor gripe that a presentation was “mostly bullshit” and I wanted to yell that even if that was true, it was because they demanded bullshit. They don’t want to hear the vision of the CEO, the part of the business that is heart and sweat and staying up way too late at night. They want to hear the business EBIDTA and why next quarter will be better than this quarter.

Clearly, I’ll never be the CEO of a major company. But if I ever am, I hope I have the courage to stand up to investors and talk back about why business is worth doing in the first place. Tim Armstrong fielded a question from an investor who essentially implied that without the need to appease the public market, AOL would have “wastefully” used the money derived from the recent patent business to acquire companies.

Good! AOL is adept at getting eyeballs, which they then sell to advertisers. But they could just as easily be advertising their own properties and there are many smart startups that are adept at turning users into cash, either through ecommerce or direct services. AOL should be spending cash on those sorts of deals and investors should count their lucky stars whenever those deals go through, especially with early-stage startups at low valuations. In a time where there are thousands of open jobs at the top internet companies and everyone is fighting for talent, it is hard to lose on a small dollar acquisition of a smart team; even if their product fails, you can find other great things for them to do.

In the Any Given Sunday of business, investors are the owner’s daughter, looking for pure profit as quickly as possible. And that is unlikely to change anytime soon. So it is up to companies and CEOs to be finding their way back to the reasons that they started doing this in the first place. Which probably didn’t have much to do with profit.

Playing with heart still matters.

I could end it there, but I want to say a little more about why playing with heart is so important. If your company becomes just about investors, you will never keep the employees you want. Because you want employees that are playing with heart and that’s a pervasive culture: it only works if everyone tacitly agrees to be part of it. You can’t have just your quarterback playing with heart – he’ll get sacked, receivers will shrug off their mistakes, and he’ll implode trying to get the ball down the field. Good teams require heart and heart only works when everyone has it. Which is why firing heartless people (or benching them somewhere to recharge) is so important: it keeps trouble from spreading.

Also, customers can tell. I’d love to do the experiment asking customers to rate how much they think Company A’s employees care about what they do, versus Company A’s employees own ratings. People respond, time and time again, to companies who are playing with heart. We consume companies in the way we consume sports teams, and honestly, you can find everyday people like my parents cheering for companies as they do battle with their competitors. It isn’t just the technorati that know when a company gives up and settles.  That is the whole point of corporate branding.

And finally, heart matters because without it, what the fuck is the point? The reason that you see satisfaction leveling off with pay increases is precisely the fact that money is not heartening. It may enable you to do some heartening things. But going to work everyday to blah just sounds terrible. You wouldn’t expect your employees to do it, so why should you?