Running Diary: The college speaking gig

I have shocking news: Pizza attracts college students.

I know, you're probably thinking that pizza and beer would do better, but I couldn't exactly justify an alcohol expense for an official company visit to a college, now could I?

My boss has teleworked from Vermont for about 15 years now and is an active alumnus of the University of Vermont, having chaired the advisory committee to the school of engineering. When she had her staff out to the Trapp Family Lodge for the second year in a row for a multi-day planning meeting, we had the idea that I could come out a day early and do a talk at the university. I also did some interviews while I was there as well, following up from my University of Wisconsin job fair experience a few months ago in an attempt to be active in company recruiting.

In the weeks leading up to the trip, I worked closely with some very nice folks at the UVM Career Services department (ask a Vermonter to explain why "VM" is the correct initials for the school) and the chair of the Computer Science Department. I was given an hour in a conference room and some in-class advertising. A few people emailed me resumes ahead of time who were interested in interviewing after the event was over and I was told that about a dozen people would show for the talk. Given that there were 80 students in the department, that wasn't too bad a number, really.

When it came to the room selection, I neglected to follow my own advice on appreciating the perspectives of others. The department chair insisted the talk take place in his main building instead of at the career center. I was willing to do whatever they wanted me to, but I didn't understand why it was such a big deal to walk across campus for a talk. Then I got there:




This was not the 60F temperatures I enjoyed in my college days in San Diego. The UVM campus is charming and many of the buildings have a beautiful colonial style you just don't see outside the New England area, but it was freaking cold. Now, I admit to being a weather wimp having been raised in California, but the morning wind chill was -15F that day. Hence, the reluctance to walk across campus.

The more speaking I do to completely cold audiences (as opposed to presentations I do for my normal work experience where I usually have a relationship with half the crowd already), I'm discovering that a key is to warm up the crowd a bit with informal conversation before the structured talk begins. I did this in my recent trade show presentation I did with Slawek and found it worked well here too. There was 1 student in the room already when I arrived and engaging him in some small talk seemed to gradually ease everybody else who came in into the setting.

I suspect had I just sat there and waited to start until everybody came in, I would have come across as stogy and condescending. But because I got a chance to talk to a lot of people and just be myself before presenting any material, I think it relaxed the atmosphere quite a bit. That and the pizza, of course.

Starting out, I did about a 15 minute spiel about what my schooling was and what we studied back in the day (lots of C programming, the cool kids were doing object oriented stuff with C++), how I had been lucky enough to land in a place out of college that turned out to be on the forefront of web development, and how that enabled me to grow into my current role with an important sounding title (stressing, as always, that it sounds a lot more important than it is). I talked a bit about what HP's web architecture is like and then took questions.

It went exceedingly well. Inquiries ranged from what I thought of web development techniques today to the importance of testing to what big company life is like. I plugged the idea that soft skills are important and specifically recommended Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home to people. We went so long that we got kicked out of the conference room and about half the audience followed me to another room so the session could continue.

It was there that I got the best question of the day. One student wondered how much latitude people are given in coming up with their own solutions. Are we given the problem and are allowed to solve it any way we want to or are their restraints on what you can do? The example he gave was with what programming language he could theoretically use if he were working for me, as he was a big LISP fan.

When I told him that there are limitations involved in those kind of choices for replacement resource reasons (when he leaves or gets promoted, now I have to go find a LISP knowledgeable replacement which aren't nearly in as high supply as a Java developer might be), he remarked that it seemed a bit too restrictive. I took that opportunity to tell one of my favorite engineering stories, on how restrictions led to creativity when building Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.

I felt good about how the session went and so did the department chair. My boss and I had dinner with the dean of the school of engineering and he seemed satisfied as well. My hope is that I get a chance to do more of these in the future.

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Running Diary: The 18 hour travel day, Part 2

In Part 1 of this Running Diary, which started yesterday and prompted an attempt to record the events real time, I got hosed. Two canceled flights caused what should have been an easy 4 hour trip from Portland to Cincinnati into an 18 hour ordeal of a lot of waiting. To top that off, I'd miss the Pop-Up Video version of the Lost Season 3 finale. I suppose that's what Tivo is for.

Mostly, this turned into a recording of absurd observations, although I did score yesterday with my tactics to get access to ticket agents that I'm particularly proud of. Then again, I did spend 9 hours at the Portland airport yesterday so I can't be that smart.

When I last left off yesterday, I staked out a spot at a restaurant at the Portland airport where I had to buy something trivial in order to justify my claim on a table. I had ESPNHD at my disposal, but I also had to pee. As I pondered what the ethics are of if I packed up my stuff to use the bathroom, could I come back to the same spot without buying anything else, SportsCenter held a series of live interviews from the Super Bowl site in Arizona and I got a tip from my wife:

3:33p, PST - LaDanian Tomlinson is on damage control after having is toughness questioned for missing the AFC Championship game with an injury. Political posturing on SportsCenter may be a sign of the apocalypse. Etiquette update: I just got offered a refill for a 2nd time and this time I took it. The pressure mounts.

3:45p, PST - My wife just alerted me to something from the Civil Aeronautics Board called "Rule 240". Earlier, when the guy next to me in line asked about other airlines, the ticket agent told him they couldn't do that. Apparently if you ask about Rule 240, they have to. This is worth giving up my spot for. Gonna go check it out.

4:05p, PST - The ticket agent was very nice about Rule 240 and looked up every major city between Portland and Cincinnati for me, but nothing was available. Because of the time difference, there's a wave of flights that leave West Coast cities for the East in the early afternoon and because of how my delays fell, I missed my chance at all of them. Doh!

4:26p, PST - At some point in history, the following conversation took place:

Executive #1: "We have to find a way to cut costs!"

Executive #2: "Yes, I know and I've been researching some solutions."

Executive #1: "What's the best one so far?"

Executive #2: "Well, if we replace the regular toilet paper we put in the public restrooms with some cheaper product we can get from a fine grit sandpaper manufacturer, we could save TENS of dollars a month!"

Executive #1: "That's brilliant, let's do it!"

4:40p, PST - Getting caught up on email since I'll probably be a zombie tomorrow (or, as my 6 year old daughter would say, a "zompie"). On a related note, Amazon just told me I made $0.79 in referrals for the month of November. What's sadder: the amount I earned or that it took them 2 months to tell me that?

4:47p, PST - Listening to Van Halen's The Best of Both Worlds compilation while slogging through FY '09 planning emails (which I know some will find absurd that I'm doing, but this is our planning process), I can't help but be reminded that the David Lee Roth years featured a harder edge and plenty of covers (most notably Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman) while the Sammy Hagar era was more about wider appeal with songs about love that chicks could dig. My heavy metal friends circa 1986 in high school (particularly Ginther, who drew"Van Hagar" logos all over his Pee-Chee folders) were pretty devastated by that sequence of events that resulted in songs they hated (he later scratched out his artwork).

In retrospect, the Roth songs are all much, much better and not used to sell inferior Pepsi products.

5:35p, PST - It turns out that I wasn't granted a $7 meal voucher for my 12 hour delay, but TWO $7 meal vouchers. That let me pretty much clean out the cookie bin at Quiznos. Their cookies were baked yesterday instead of the one I sold out for so I could watch ESPNHD earlier, which was to days old. I wouldn't call them "fresh" per se, but "less stale" or the kinder "fresher" than the others.

5:41p, PST - You know you're having a bad day when the guy running the x-ray machine at airport security sees you and says, with a puzzled look, "You're STILL here?" 4th time through security is a charm, I'm told (is that a record?).

6:16p, PST - I keep forgetting that I'm missing the re-air of the Lost Season 3 finale with extras. The promos for that made it seem like it'd be like Pop-Up Video, but I guess I'll have to wait to see. I'm pretty psyched for the new season to start. While I haven't been able to get into the whole Find 815 alternate reality game, I've religiously been watching the mobisodes.

6:20p, PST - There's no physical plane here at good old Gate D7, so I somehow doubt we'll be boarding in the next 14 minutes. All 9 of us waiting in the area, that is. Oh wait, my posse just got here, meaning, the other two guys who got screwed out of the same two flights I did so there's 11 of us now.

6:33p, PST - We must be boarding, right? Uh, no. Still no plane. I have a bad feeling about this.

6:45p, PST - No plane but we've been assured it is landing.

6:49p, PST - The plane got here, supposedly we're boarding in 10 minutes.

7:16, PST - We take off.

9:57p, PST – Welcome to Los Angeles! Why is it you can leave 15 minutes late for a flight and magically you “make it up in the air” and arrive on time? I never understand this. It implies they aren't always flying at an optimum speed unless they need to work on their on time record, so why not just always fly at that speed? I'm sure I'll get an angry comment response from a pilot on this, perhaps even my new ophthalmologist brother-in-law.

The approach to LAX was pretty awesome because we swung over downtown LA right on top of Staples Center, almost like we were riding Soarin’ at one of my beloved Disney parks. I, of course, had to change terminals but I had the time because I have a 2 hour layover here.

Then something weird happened. The connecting tunnel at the midpoints of terminals 5 and 6 at LAX looks more like a maintenance hallway than a walkway. In the middle of it was this steel door marked as something like “SteelCurtain security area” and upon approaching this door, it closed. Then, imagine the loudest, most muffled PA system saying, “WARNING, STAY CLEAR OF THE YELLO MARKED AREA!”. An extremely annoying buzzer accompanied this as well.

Sure enough, there was a yellow marked area and my fellow walkers and I, many of whom were on the same flight I was, obeyed as the message repeated itself in Spanish.

Only, it never stopped. We all stood there for 10 minutes listening to this horribly loud warning over and over again in seeming perpetuity. I started to laugh out loud when I realized I could never properly capture the scene. Of course, as I took the picture below, the doors opened and we continued on our journey:

Now for an odd coincidence: I’m leaving out of the gate next to the one me, my daughter, and wife few out of on our annual Disneyworld vacation 3 years ago when we were living here in SoCal. It’s an extremely weird experience because I haven’t been to this airport since then. Instead of going to the McDonald’s I got my daughter breakfast at 3 years ago, I’m partaking in a 5 cheese and tomato CPK ASAP offering.

10:43p, PST – Got some time to kill so I’m watching a Seinfeld DVD.

11:18p, PST - At least with the sound muted, Romney looks pretty presidential and McCain looks just unhealthy. I worry about that guy.

11:23p, PST - Boarding begins early.

11:41p, PST - Of course, I am seated in a middle seat next to a lap sitting infant for a red eye to end my journey. Better yet, with mom and daughter next to me, dad and twin brother are behind me. As to door closes, though, there is a row with two empty seats and at the mom's suggestion I snag it so they can have more room.

11:55p, PST to 7:04a, EST - Hazy sleep. At 6'6", 250 lbs, I don't fit terribly well in an airplane seat for sitting purposes let alone shut-eye. Plus, while the twin brother snoozes, his sister is quite unhappy. They are both about a year old and it's not their fault that they don't have their usual surroundings. I've been there. She's just cranky and confused. Unfortunately, she's also loud as she wakes me up about 5 times over the next 4 hours.

7:11a, EST - Why is it that when you are taxiing to the gate you can turn on your cel phone but they specifically tell you that you cannot turn on any other electronic devices? Like my MP3 player is going to cause radio interference that my Blackberry wouldn't. I need to ask Bing about this.

7:25a, EST - Miracle of miracles, despite being booked on 3 different itineraries in the last 18 hours, my bags arrive at baggage claim!


8:02a, EST - I think I just got taken. Wouldn't it stand to reason that if you were a cab driver for a living that having change is a vital component? It's a $27 flat fare from the airport to where I live and I got $40 cash from the ATM at baggage claim in preparation for this. I hand the guy the bills and ask him for $8 back, thinking I'm giving him a decent $5 tip for 30 minutes work.

Then, he tells me he has no change and could I please go into my house to look for different bills. What the heck?

I go in and am unable to find anything smaller than a $20 and left with a quandary almost like the giving up my seat thing in Portland: Do I stiff this guy $7 or tip him $13 on a $27 fare?

I decided it was good travel karma for next time to just give him both 20's. I'm a sap sometimes, I guess, but at least now I'm home.

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Running Diary: The 18 hour travel day, Part 1

I'm having a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles kind of day today. It is Wednesday, January 30 at 2:25p, PST as I type and I usually don't go for stream of consciousness entries. Even my usual Running Diary's are typically told in past tense and, truth be told, I write them after the events have transpired not as they are happening.

But today is different. Everybody has had a bad travel day and I'm having one right now. But with wireless access and 5 more hours to kill before my next flight, I thought I'd try to find some humor in this situation and share. This entry might end up sucking and it is admittedly more for me than it is for my faithful readers, but I'm guessing everybody can at least relate to what I'm going through today.

Background- Why am I traveling from Portland to Cincinnati today? Because I'm trying to sell my house in the greater Portland area in the worst housing market in 40 years. The house we bought in April 2006 had some wood flooring issues that took 11 months to resolve. The good people at Lowe's came through for us after an evil and soulless flooring manufacturer claimed that the breathing habits of my family were the cause for the finish chipping off the 2500 square feet of wood we had installed, not any faulty manufacturing on their part. I'm not making that up, the manufacturer actually put the breathing thing in writing.

Lowe's was awesome, though, and dropped the manufacturer regionally, and just made everything right. I came back to Portland to approve the work and put the house back together so we could get it back on the market. Originally I was supposed to be on an 11:45a, PST flight that would land in Cincinnati at 7p, EST. Then, fate heartily laughed at me.

9:58a, PST -A friend of mine is kind enough to give me a ride to the airport and came right on time. You have to appreciate that and it looks like a good start to my travel day.

10:21a, PST - I love the airport kiosks because I hated when you'd burst into the terminal and see that huge line, no knowing how much it might hold your day hostage. I check in and have to shift some clothes from one bag to another to make the weight limit, no big deal. I left Portland with 3 dogs and a ridiculously packed Ford Explorer on Labor Day weekend and have quite a bit of things my family needed that we had to leave behind. Barbie's, winter clothes, some DVDs, etc.

10:29a, PST - Security is pretty easy and my flight isn't scheduled to leave for awhile, so I walk over to where the better post-security food is in Terminal C. My lunch consists of two slices of cheese pizza and a bottle of water. Price: $8.34. That becomes relevant later.

11:15a, PST - I got to my gate and assume the boarding will begin the usual 30 minutes before departure, but we are told there is a problem with the door from when it was opened from the previous arrival. My friend Bing spent quite a few years in the aerospace industry and told me once that it's best that you not think about the physics of flight or all the things that could possibly go wrong. The airlines and the plane manufacturers do an amazing job of keeping us all safe and there are about a bazillion things that could break, but really, the door broke when they opened it? Tonka doesn't have this problem with it's products.

11:22a, PST - We are told that they have no idea how long it will take to fix the problem and suggest people start inquiring about rerouting their trip. This announcement causes several hundred people to get in line at the gate, but I have another plan. I go back out through security to the ticket counter, where I find there's no line. Score! The agent there didn't even know about the problem yet (but got the call while I was standing there) and told me there was a 1:23p to Salt Lake City (hello Jason Alba) and then a connector to Cincinnati that would get me there at 10:45p, EST (about 4 hours later than originally scheduled).

Knowledge is power, right? Now I know what my options are but don't want to switch yet given that my luggage is still on the other plane and that the fix might take less than the hour wait and still get me home at 7p.

11:31a, PST - After going back through security I get back to the gate just in time to hear the announcement that the flight will get delayed at least 8 hours while they wait on parts to fix the door. Seems to me you could cast the new parts yourself in less time than that, but I hustle back to ticketing.

11:37a, PST - Score again! No line and I get on the flights I was told about before. Now I have about 90 minutes to kill but realize that I'll be getting home to late to meet a deadline so I go in search of electricity in a good wi-fi spot.

11:45a, PST - 3rd time through security, but I find my spot, get caught up on work, and write a future blog article inspired by my recent DVD viewing of the Seinfeld Season 2 episode "The Deal"

12:57p, PST - I hand my boarding pass to the gate agent and when she feeds it to the machine, it sounds off an alarm that sounds like they've found that tall, bald, white, terrorist they've been looking for. Instead, they tell me that my connecting flight in SLC has been can canceled.

What are the odds you'd get booked on two separate canceled flights like that? Several thousand to one, I think. Why can't my lotto ticket buys come up like this?

1:35p, PST - I have three choices, all of which suck:

A) 7p departure to LA and a red eye to Cincinnati that lands at 7a the next morning.
B) 10:45p departure to Atlanta and a connecting to Cincinnati that lands at 9:30a the next morning.
C) Same flight I was originally on, but tomorrow.

Now, I realize this is hardly as bad as living in a hut in Rwanda and that I'm having a better day than either John Edwards or Rudy Guliani, so I try to take a positive attitude with this. I have a healthy family who loves me and getting pissed off at an airline isn't going to take that away from me..

I choose A) because not only does that get me in earlier but if something happens in LA, virtue of being raised there I have plenty of family there I could shack up with.

1:57p, PST - It takes quite awhile to locate my luggage, but I am assured it will be on the LA flight with me. For the trouble of having been subjected to multiple canceled flights, I get offered a meal voucher. It is good at any restaurant at the airport and is worth $7. Yes, I can get two more pieces of pizza but I'm on my own for that water bottle.

2:25p, PST - After filling my wife in on the situation, I find a counter service restaurant with an electrical outlet and ESPN-HD. I get dirty looks from the staff as I look for a place to sit and respond to the unspoken demand that I buy something by getting a Diet Coke and a cookie. As I go to eat the cookie, which is wrapped in Saran wrap, the sticker on it says it was baked two days ago and, boy oh boy, does it taste like it.

3:00p, PST - SportsCenter starts and feeds me Super Bowl hype. That lady who asked Tom Brady to marry her yesterday was pretty hilarious as was his "I'm a one woman man" reply, which makes him sound like a sweet guy. I'm not sure if the irony in that statement of his lies in the fact that he left his last girlfriend because she became pregnant (not so sweet any more) or that he could have said, "I'm a one Brazillian super-model man" (why I'm obsessed with using "Brazillian" as an adjective there is unclear to me).

3:11p, PST - Can I get an etiquette ruling on this? If I pack up my bag and go pee, do I have to buy another stale cookie in order to justify getting my seat back? What's the length of time a small purchase buys me? I'm literally the only person sitting in this restaurant, if that's a factor, and they already offered me a drink refill. Hmm, I'm not sure and will hold it instead for now.

I'm going to publish this now on the off chance that I can actually get this etiquette suggestion while I'm sitting here. A Part 2 will come, though.

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Running Diary: The trade show presentation, Part 2

In Part 1 of this Running Diary, I discussed how I hoped not to repeat a failed trade show presentation from 8 years ago and what the process was for my coworker Slawek and I went through to get our submission accepted was like. While contemplating how to pronounce "Slawek" (you say the "w" almost as a "v", but not quite), you've likely been on pins and needles wondering how it all turned out.

Good thing for you, that's exactly what this entry is about.

The actual presentation

Once at the conference, I borrowed an old trick I learned from high school football: case out the venue first. The first thing we used to do when we got off the bus at a road game was go walk around on the field. The idea is that you want to get a feel for the environment before you have to perform in it and there's a ton of people starring at you.

Not only did I look around the empty room between sessions, I attended a session I wasn't really interested in so I could get a better feel for the acoustics. That may be going to far, but at the very least this tactic helps calm the butterflies that come up whenever I do something like this.

As our time slot came up, I was pleasantly surprised that the room that held about 75 people filled up quickly. So quickly, in fact, that with about 5 minutes before the start of the session, there weren't any seats left. While it was nice to have that many people, it was awkward because it wasn't quite time to get going yet.

So, I worked the crowd. Since it was a conference, everybody had name tags on that listed what company they worked for and where they were from. I wasn't exactly David Letterman, but by chit chatting with people it at the very least warmed me up.

Unfortunately, that can be taken literally. I have a history of sweating a lot. Yeah, I said it, I sweat a lot. I was smart enough to wear an appropriate shirt to disguise this (the darker the better and a high tech fabric golf polo shirt just to be safe), but by the time the session began, I had already downed a glass and a half of ice water. No, that didn't cause the obvious bladder-related side effect during my little spiel, fortunately.

My portion went pretty well, but not perfect. That is, nobody left and only 2 people fell asleep by my count. I was careless with my time, though, and went over by 5 minutes, putting Slawek at a disadvantage for his longer portion.

Then came the cool part: so many people lined up afterward to come up and ask us questions, the room police had to come in and kick us out! I handed out about a dozen business cards but Slawek forgot his. One person almost was brought to tears at the thought of having to remember his email address given that his last name is Polish and contains a sequence that reads "chc" in the middle, so that's a mistake he'll recover from for next time. Heck, I even got stopped in the parking lot on my way to the airport by somebody who enjoyed the talk. You can't get much more fulfilling than that.

Final score: 4 people left early, 5 visibly fell asleep, and we generated lots of interest judging by the questions.

If I had to do it over again, I'd press more for a pre-lunch session. I really think that would have cut the snoozers in half. Other than watching my time better and Slawek forgetting his business cards, it went about as well as it could have.

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Running Diary: The trade show presentation, Part 1

In 1999, when I did my first trade show presentation, the room I was given sat 150 people. Unfortunately for me, 138 of them were vacant. That wouldn't have been so bad had I not worked with 6 of the people present, including my boss, my boss' boss, and my boss' boss' boss. It was a nice show of support, but it turned pretty embarrassing when one of the 6 strangers who showed up left half way through.

I swear, though, I had those other 5 entranced. Heck, one of them even asked a question and that's 20% of my audience engaged enough to start a dialog. I'm sure that impressed the big bosses of mine in the room.

Not.

It's been awhile since that nightmarish debacle. This two part Running Diary tells the story recent presentation a colleague and I gave at a vendor trade show with my buddy Slawek (and who among you has a buddy named Slawek, I ask?). Here in Part 1, the genesis and creation of the presentation is covered and in Part 2 I'll go over how the actual event panned out.

The idea

Slawek and I came up with the idea for the presentation we would ultimately give at last year's vendor trade show. At lunch on the final day of the conference, he remarked to me that a specific technology we were making great use of was hardly touched upon at all. As I was contemplating this, the light bulb went off for both of us at the same time and we gave each other a knowing look.

What we stumbled into is the advice that just about anybody who is an expert on getting into conference presentation track will tell you: Look at what was presented the year before and find a niche that is missing. While that may not sound like an awe inspiring idea because of it's simplicity, you have to have (or obtain) the knowledge to make yourself a credible speaker on the topic you find is missing too. We lucked into that since we already were (admittedly, Slawek more than I).

The submission

The process for submitting a topic to these sorts of things is pretty standard. You typically have to submit an abstract that describes what you'd say, why the audience of this particular conference would be interested, and what makes you an expert on the subject. What helped us here was the fact that HP has a particularly strong relationship with this particular vendor, so we had an "in".

Breaking up the tasks

Once our topic was accepted, we had to design the slides. Given our very deep technical topic, we felt like we had to explain the context of our particular business problem and why this specific technology was a good fit. That led to a very natural split in the presentation. I would set the scene for IT in HP and lay out why we went down this road. Slawek would then go into the technology details.

This made it pretty easy for me, as I reused a lot of the material I wrote in my recent The Server Side article, specifically the part about HP IT's transformation. Slawek and I went back and forth on his part a few times, setting up the presentation so that he could go into lots of detail if the questions or time steered the discussion in that direction. Once we submitted the final to the vendor putting on the conference, we felt good about it but worried whether or not our topic was so niche that nobody would show up.

In Part 2, I'll reveal whether or not anybody did or if we had a room full of empty chairs.

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Running Diary: 259 post-vacation emails

We've all been there: you take some time off and you come back to an avalanche of email. As you may know, I recently went on my annual vacation (last time I mention it, I promise 8)) and when I came back I had 259 emails to read. This Running Diary tells gives a rundown of how I reduced it to zero in about three hours.

The Goal

Every time I do this, the goal is the same: figure out what's important.

My biggest and constant fear in my work life is that somebody can't get their job done because they are waiting on me for some decision or crucial piece of information. Be a roadblock too often and it'll show on your performance evaluation in a bad, bad way. So, the key is to get down to what those things might be as quickly as possible.

When you have a lot of messages to go through, you can't really tell just at a glance what the most important thing is to look at. It's all just noise to you since you were just away overeating at the lunch buffet while steel drums echoed in the background and not at all thinking about your project load. As you'll see, my early efforts were just to try to reduce the list as much as possible. Then I moved on to sorting them using my usual system. Finally, I could get some real work done and began to take action on things. This post ends at that point, before I got into "take action" mode.

Receiving the swell

As I connected to my VPN and launched Outlook, I asked some friends over IM how many it would add up to. It is a hard thing to predict, really. I'd only missed 4 US work days because I was gone the week of Thanksgiving, but those pesky Europeans insist on working when we're fattening up on pumpkin pie and watching the Detroit Lions and/or Dallas Cowboys (or, if you are my cousin Bill, switching to the Twilight Zone marathon on KTLA when nobody's looking). My friend Sam had the highest guess at 500, but it came in at 259.

I expected it to be more, a lot more actually. A number so large that it would impress you all at how important I am, but I guess nobody is as important as they think they are. I feel kinda wimpy it was that few, but I'll get over it.

At any rate, I started with 259 and, as a devoted Getting Things Done convert I had 3 existing items on my Actions list with another 13 in Waiting when I began my journey.

From 259 to 154 in 30 minutes

This trip was unusual because I was coming back on a Monday morning instead of an evening, so it was possible that I had meetings that afternoon to attend. That skewed my usual vacation return email reading process, which this time started by sorting the messages in Outlook so that meeting invitations were grouped together.

After accepting/declining/tentative each of those, I sorted by sender which is usually my first step. Although most of my junk email goes to my gmail account now from the likes of Ballard Designs or The Gap, I still get some of those and wasn't interested in any of them. Those all get deleted and I'll be missing my 20% off coupon.

Finally, I left two days before a rather important project milestone, so I next sorted by importance (gotta love that little red ! that Outlook uses to denote important messages). I asked those working on the project in my absence to flag things as urgent if they wanted me to see something first off when I returned.

What I realized is that you can't mark an email as urgent for a specific person on the distribution list (To or CC). Everybody gets it as urgent or everybody doesn't, there's no in between. It turned out that I had about a dozen urgent emails, but only one of them was urgent for me specifically.

And with that, I was about 1/3 done already. I invoked my inner Homer Simpson with a "Woo Hoo!"

Getting below 100 in the second half hour

Next, I made sure to recognize where my paycheck comes from. I sorted by sender again and looked for the messages from my boss. Most of those were FYI's and dutifully archived in the right subject folder, one went in Actions, and others were broadcasts that didn't pertain to me so I deleted them. Then, I sent her an email that summarized what I just saw from her and asked her if there was anything in particular she wanted me to look at first.

Since I pointed people to her in my out of office reply message, I figured she'd know if there was anything urgent that wasn't marked as such. Plus, I wanted her to know I was back and plowing through my inbox. Brownie points, definitely.

While I was waiting for a reply, I used my next trick of sorting by subject. At this point, I was pretty much trying to eliminate all the noise I could so I scanned the lists looking for the longest threads. The trick there is to read the last one in the thread first. Most of the time, it'll include all the parts of the other messages in it and that's what I was looking for at this stage.

I didn't actually read the emails I discovered this way looking for content. Instead, I read them to make sure all the information was captured in the last message. When I confirmed that, I deleted the other messages and reduced the number of messages I had to worry about and left the top one in the inbox to be processed later. It might have been important, it might not have been, but I just wanted to reduce the volume for now. This got me down to 89 messages by the time I got the reply from my boss.

The Long Tail of vacation email processing

Now, I was depressed. I'd exhausted all my dirty tricks for reducing the volume of messages I had to actually read and comprehend. The good news was that I'd received guidance from my boss for what topics to scan for first in subject lines. The bad news was there were still 89 things to read and people had begun to realize I was back and were sending me more messages. I totally felt like that juggler whose helpful assistant keeps throwing him more bowling pins before tossing in a chainsaw.

While I eliminated 170 messages in the first 60 minutes of this exercise (almost 3 per minute), I got through only 33 in the next half hour. This trend would continue as what I had left I had to spend a lot more time on than what I was able to more easily dismiss earlier.

I was in full GTD mode now. If a message was garbage (a rarity at this point) it got deleted. If it was an FYI, it got archived. If I could do something about a message in less than 2 minutes, I did it, otherwise it went in my growing Actions folder. I finish my second hour of this with 56 messages to go, a number that taunted me into consuming multiple Diet Pepsi Caramel Cream Jazz' in an attempt to maintain my sanity.

Finishing out and the final toll

My favorite line from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (the first book I read in high school that had swear words I wouldn't say in front of my mother) comes from the Chief where he swears that some days the second hand on the clock moves more slowly than on other days. That's what the next hour was like for those last 56 messages. I found I had to invent little games for myself to keep me going seeing as 48 hours earlier I was on Disney's private Caribbean beach with a snorkel in my mouth.

Sort by date and read the oldest one. Sort by sender and read the first one. Scan the list looking for a "z" or a "q" in the subject line. Clearly, by the end, the caffeine was beginning to wear off.

Eventually, I reached pay dirt. Zero messages in my inbox! Somewhere, David Allen was smiling.

When I started, I had 3 existing items on my Actions list with another 13 in Waiting. When I was done three hours later, I still had 13 in Waiting (some got done by folks when I was gone, but I had others come up during the email processing) but 20 in Actions, which made me wince. That would grow to a horrifying 26 by mid day on Tuesday before I got a handle on it, bringing it below 5 by the time the sun went down on Wednesday. I'm back into the flow now, but would still rather be on that beach thinking about the lunch buffet on the cruise ship.

Sigh, there's always next year.

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Running Diary: The online community article, Part 3

Originally, this was going to be a 2 part series on my experience writing an article for the Java developer community website The Server Side (TSS). But, enough happened in the week after the article went live that I thought it warranted a third entry. In Part 1, I went into how I got hooked up to write the article in the first place and some of the struggles I had in the first draft. Part 2 discussed the review process and how easy it is to get defensive when you get feedback on something, especially when you spent a lot of time on its initial creation.

Here, I'll cover the aftermath. There was a lot of interaction after the article went live, some expected, some unexpected. A random list of what happened:

• You never know who's reading. It turns out, a whole lot more friends and coworkers read TSS than I thought. I got several nice comments from people I never told I was writing the article, who stumbled upon it because they are regular TSS readers.


• Breaking up fights. It's almost a rule that if you have enough people on a discussion group that eventually a fight will break out. Somebody will disagree with someone over something which leads to insults, finger pointing, and people trying to outsmart each other for smarts sake. It didn't get too bad in the thread for my article, but there was a heated disagreement which I made my best effort to extinguish.


• Pre-answering questions through blogging. I intended all along to blog about the experience of writing this article, but it didn't occur to me to post a link to the entry on it in the discussion thread until the thread went live. It turns out, by doing so I answered a question somebody had about why I didn't get into as much detail as you might expect. Check out the comments on Part 1 and you'll see what I mean.


• Building somebody else's performance evaluation. Rather unexpectedly, I got a cold email from an architect working for a major insurance company with a request to get together and discuss the details of the Authentication and Authorization services mentioned in the article. While I can speak to those topics pretty well, my friend Jeff is our Identity Management Architect and I passed the request onto him, giving him an opportunity to work with an external customer he wouldn't have otherwise had. By paying it forward, he's got an outside consultation to put on his performance evaluation now.


• Making better inside contacts. There's a saying around the hallways of HP, and I'm sure around other big companies too: "If HP only knew what HP knew". While the new processes mentioned in the article have improved the distribution of information nicely, we still struggle with that sometimes due to our size. The article led to another Chief Architect in a part of IT I almost never deal with reaching out to me and offering to share ideas more openly. It's a contact I would have made eventually (my team uses his hosting services for several applications), but his catching my article expedited it by quite a bit.


• Improved personal branding. Before the article got posted, if you did a Google search on "Pete Johnson" this site would come up on the 2nd or 3rd page. With a pointer from TSS, it's now the 7th result on the first page after entries for the jazz musician, former pro football player, and current children's author by the same relatively common name.
  


• Possibly getting another article. Friday, I got approached by a similar Java community site to write an article for them, giving me a shot at perpetuating this whole thing all over again.
  

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Running Diary: The online community article, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a trio of posts on my experience writing an article on HP.com's architecture for the Java online community The Server Side. Part 1 covers the genesis of the article, the restrictions I had to adhere to, and how I got over writer's block. Here in Part 2, I discuss getting defensive over what turned out to be very good feedback, losing touch with details as you move up the corporate ladder, and I summarize this very interesting experience. Part 3 goes into the things that happened after the article went live.

The HP Review cycle

Before I could submit the article to editors at TSS, I needed some feedback from some folks inside HP. Not only was this for technical correctness, but to make sure I was protecting proprietary strategy as well. Among the hardest things for me to do is to accept feedback and I don't think I'm alone there. Even when that feedback ends up being correct, I can't help but initially feel defensive about it. I'd like to think that's a natural reaction, but maybe there's something wrong with me.

The most constructive piece of feedback I got fell into this pattern as well. I spent several hours putting together this diagram that attempts to show the different kinds of sites there are, which are most complex, and what kinds of reusable services are available:


The Development Manager of the Portal Platform told me that, while he could see where I was going with the idea, it was clunky to look at. After I got over feeling like I wasted time putting the graphic together, I followed his suggestion to have some of our people with graphic arts backgrounds look at it. The concept they came up with, that I then modified slightly was much, much better:


The next time I feel defensive about feedback I've received, I need to remember this experience. That's not to say that you have to follow every piece of advice you receive. You don't. But, be open to the suggestions you get and you'll end up with a better product. With the HP feedback complete, it was time to submit my paper to the TSS staff.

The TSS Review Cycle

After the productive defensiveness of the internal review process, the suggestions from the TSS folks was pretty painless. The hard part wasn't fielding their feedback for more details in certain areas of what I had already written. It was delegating the necessary response.

The part of my job I'm most uncomfortable with is that I no longer know the same level of detail on the 30+ projects that I'm involved with at a very high level as I did when I was intimately familiar with the 2-3 I was directly writing code for. That's a curse for any job. As you begin to accumulate responsibility you lose direct control over the details as you delegate various aspects of the project to others.

That was the problem I had here. I didn't know the exact details the TSS staff was asking for, but I knew who did. Of course, then I ran into the next problem: the most knowledgeable person was on vacation. So was his backup and the backup's backup too. This paralyzing realization swept over me that I was at the mercy of others for something I could have had the answer for had I had the time, but instead had to wait out several other people's summer plans.

Not that everyone isn't entitled to their vacation, they certainly are and it's not beneficial to the group longer term if you don't go recharge yourself every once in awhile. The timing was just unfortunate. It happens.

Publication and what I learned

Eventually, I got the details the TSS staff asked for and they approved my changes. My article got put in their publication queue and a few weeks later, when it was my turn, it went live. In hindsight, I obviously learned a lot from the experience:

1. Networking and how you present yourself online matters, a lot. I wouldn't have had the opportunity had I not used my job title openly in a blog comment.
2. There's an art to showing technical competence without revealing proprietary information. I haven't exactly mastered that, but got some good experience with it.
3. Don't get defensive about feedback. Nobody thinks that my original drawing is better than the one it evolved to. Ask for feedback and then be serious about improving the end product without taking it personal.

The third part of this series discusses the interaction I had with the readers of the article, some surprising some not so surprising.

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Running Diary: The online community article, Part 1

Recently, I was fortunate enough to get a chance to write a case study on HP.com architecture for The Server Side (TSS), a community for Java developers with upwards of 600,000 members. This Running Diary is separated into three pieces and details the whole process, starting with how I got approached about doing it, moving on to the writing process and how difficult it can be to accept negative feedback (Part 2), and finally some of the surprising things that happened in the aftermath of the article going live (Part 3).

The Pitch

Over the first 6 months of this blog, among the most eye opening metrics was the amount of traffic and conversions of visitors to subscribers I received from making comments over at TSS. It wasn't surprising, since the typical audience for a site devoted to Java development is also the target I'm trying to serve with the things I write here and based on my job, I have a decent amount of credibility on that forum so I was getting a lot of crossover. Because of this, I was getting ready to approach the editors about an article post when, based on the techniques I described in my review of The Virtual Handshake regarding transparency and branding yourself online, they approached me instead. While they were more interested in a technical slant on my HP.com activities than in the career topics I write about here, I was excited for the opportunity regardless of what they wanted me to discuss.

We exchanged a few emails to get a feel for what kind of topics they wanted me to cover (a 50,000 foot view of the HP.com domain followed by a zoom in on some specific aspects, including how Java is used to solve problems we have) and how long the article would need to be (less than 3000 words). With that settled, I was ready to write.

Then, it occurred to me: I better make sure I don't get fired over this.

HP Legal: What's proprietary and what isn't

How much of our architectural plans are sharable? At what point are you giving competitors too big a view at what you are doing so they gain an advantage on you? I didn't know the answers to these questions, so I sought help from the HP Legal department.

The first question I got asked by my contact there was, "What's in it for us?" Meaning, why write this article at all? It turns out "Because it'll look good on my resume" isn't a good enough answer. In my case, given that HP is in the business of selling products and services to IT departments, exposing how our own IT functions passes the litmus test since it delivers some benefit to HP. Then, Legal had a few other suggestions that proved useful:

• Get your materials reviewed by your management before you publish them. That may sound obvious, but it is a good reminder. I went ahead and had a superior along the technical path of jobs take a look too, just to be safe.
  



• What would a competitor do with this information? Imagine yourself being your counterpart at a major competitor. If you read this article, what would you then be able to do differently to get an edge? Are there any security concerns about describing a software architecture publicly?



• Stay away from vendor specifics. Although we use a lot of vendors to help us deliver solutions, leave it up to them to tout our relationship. Don't advertise it for them, especially in a medium where the article may stay around longer than the relationship does.



• Be as generic as you can while getting your points across. The biggest effect of this point was to not use internal names for most architectural components but to describe what they did.
  

Now with the parameters of the submission in place and some guidance to make sure I wouldn't get fired for accidentally revealing too much, I actually had to write the article.

Writer's block and getting unstuck

When the page is as empty as the ideas in your head, a blinking cursor in Microsoft Word is like mocking laughter. I found that with all these rules I now had to adhere to and with the pressure of not sucking, I just couldn't get started. I was worried about the tone not being too boring, the context for why we made certain decisions going on too long, and fitting in the 3000 word length limit while still following the HP Legal guidelines.

Then, I remembered to follow my own advice.

Much like I did for her sewing project, my wife was willing to listen to the combination of problems I was having. While I was explaining these restrictions to her, I realized that I needed start with reasons that drove the architecture before I described the architecture itself. Once I got over that organizational hurdle, it flowed pretty well. Exactly like the sewing incident, she solved my problem without having to say a word.

With the article written, I was ready for feedback. I was hoping for the "wow, this is perfect as is" kind of feedback and got a little defensive when I got something less flattering, but ultimately more useful when I got over myself. This, and the remainder of my experience writing this article, is covered in Part 2. What happened afterward is discussed in Part 3.

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Running Diary: The college job fair

I recently spent a pleasant, sunny day at the University of Wisconsin (UW) working as a volunteer for HP Recruiting at a job fair. Seeing as I originally came to HP in 1993 via HP Recruiting and attended similar events when I was a student myself, I thought it would be an interesting way to give back a little. What was it like to be on the flip side of the job fair experience? Read on.

Getting Involved

I got into contact with the folks at HP Recruiting in a weird way. The HR department, which the recruiting group is a part of, had a random gathering to discuss issues going on in IT and among the things that got mentioned was our starting up college hiring again. As we got into off-shoring in the late 1990's with software development, entry level positions took a hit for awhile, but management is dedicated to bringing in a fresh crop of folks from colleges on a regular basis now.

Since I came from the program myself and armed with my new view of networking thanks to Scott Allen, I eventually worked through contacts until I got put on a list of experienced folks interested in making college visits. I took some training on the process including the question sets we use to be ready for my first opportunity to go to a college. I'd ever been to Wisconsin before, so I didn't exactly have any insider knowledge of the engineering program there, but it ended up being my first trip.

UW and surrounding Madison

Being a SoCal boy for most of my life, I had never set foot on a Big 10 campus before. Wow, was I impressed. UCSD had about 12,000 students when I went there and San Diego State, where my wife went, had just over 30,000. UW has 41,000+ and the size of the campus sure fits that. Impressive buildings and huge throngs of people all over the place. I managed to turn the wrong way down a one way street at one point but thankfully didn't injure anything except my ego.

The geography of Madison, WI is pretty interesting. The state capital and a good portion of the university are situated on a fairly thin strip of land between two nicely sized lakes. That made for pleasant views and a nice breeze on a day in the mid 80's that I'm sure isn't so nice come winter time.

The IT Career Fair was being put on by a campus group called the Association of Information Systems Professionals and had a pretty good cross section of companies there looking for mostly programmers for IT departments. It was a well organized affair that included not only technology companies like us, IBM, and Intuit, but folks like Target and General Mills too.

Setup and give-aways

My first task representing one of the largest companies in the world on a recruiting trip?

Folding shirts.

Poorly, I might add. I could never get hired at The Gap, certainly. It wasn't my recruiting training, though, so maybe it's not my fault I was so bad at it.


We were given a table on the 3rd floor of the Grainger Hall atrium to display our give-aways, flyer's, and a laptop showing our job application web site. The HR folks that were running our table told me that a recent survey they performed showed that college students prefer wearables of some sort. So, we were giving away bright UW red t-shirts (which we also wore) that said "Got IT?" on the front and had http://www.hp.com/go/jobs (the URL to our job application site) on the back. My job was to help fold them so they could be neatly stacked on the table.

Plus, we had glowy pens (barely visible in the picture above). They had a strobe light in them and actually did a pretty good job of attracting attention to the table. Whenever you attend a trade show or similar event like this job fair, though, you can't help but check out the competition when it comes to the free stuff.

Our table was situated next to General Mills, who was giving away food (Chex mix and a variety of pretty tasty granola bars). Downstairs, our nemesis IBM was giving away slinky's and GE was giving away pens that had this hypnotic robotic-like folding mechanism to them. The consensus seemed to be that Target had the best stuff (highlighted by a small plush toy of their current mascot) and the least desirable freebies were cleaning products (unless college students are a lot tidier than they were back my day).

The meet and greet drill

So me and my three other HP compatriots would stand around this table with all our stuff on it, a student would approach and the following would ensue:

1. Friendly smiles, firm handshakes, and names were exchanged.
2. Hand student a flyer describing all HP technical jobs we are hiring for and a business card that has the http://www.hp.com/go/jobs URL on it that explains the application process.
3. Give spiel on the software work going on at HP, both in our transformational IT department (where I work) and the growing HP Software division.
4. Optionally get a resume from them and talk to student about their job experiences.

The main point of the event for us was to promote the fact that we have jobs but if someone had a resume to hand out, we did a mini-interview with them. I cycled through the 4 steps above about a dozen times over the 2 hours I worked the booth and I'm glad I did it (thankful that nobody asked me to fix their printer, but instead, a few people praised HP products, which made me smile). The training helped a lot for the #4 part as I probed for specific fit guidelines for both technical skill and personality fit. The coolest job anybody had on their resume was an IT internship for the Green Bay Packers (no, she didn't get to meet Brett Favre).

More generally, though, it was kinda fun to stand up and talk to people about how cool it is to work for HP. We really are doing some exciting things with software. The transformation our IT division is undergoing is unlike anything that has ever happened before, most famously our activity to reduce our number of worldwide data centers from 85 down to 6 and a host of other application stack consolidations. This isn't something somebody showed me on a slide set, I deal with this exact stuff on a weekly basis, so it was invigorating to talk about with somebody on the outside.

If you measure it by revenue, HP Software is one of the largest providers of software in the world. Nobody knows that because you don't go buy our bits on a CD at CompUSA for your PC, but it is something scores of Fortune 1000 companies use to manage their data centers. As you might imagine, the strategy ties together nicely with the fact that we sell a lot of high end servers to populate those same data centers.

It's hard to realize how neat all that is when you've got your head down doing your job every day. To explain it to somebody who has been in college and to see them get wide eyed about it was very rewarding. It was a nice "time out" for me to realize how good I have it and to get others excited about what we're doing as a company to the point where they want to join up.

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Running Diary: Preparing for my performance evaluation, Part 2

In Part 1 of this running diary, I discussed the things I like to do first when preparing for my annual performance evaluation. This important period is what management bases rewards on, so it is important to get right. The first part discusses tasks to help you get the ball rolling while simultaneously getting some positive press for yourself with others. Here in this part, I'll go into how I prepare for my meeting with my boss and show a version of what I sent in last year.

The Annual Resume and Cover Letter

Yes, as masochistic as that sounds, I think of my performance evaluation that way. Every year when I fill out my accomplishments list for my performance evaluation, I do it as if I'm filling out an annual resume. As such, I go though the same set of exercises I do when I work on my resume or my LinkedIn profile, but restrict myself to the last 12 months. When I deliver it, I pay careful attention to action verbs leading off each bullet item on the list, try to make use of numbers where possible, and draw attention to items that go beyond the normal expectations of my normal responsibilities. There are certainly other ways to approach this, but I can't complain about how well it has worked for me.

I like to send my list off to my boss with an informal letter that reflects on what has gone on during the year. Admitting what things were difficult and what challenges lie ahead while humbly nodding to key achievements sets the tone nicely for the actual list.

My actual list

As an example, here's the list I submitted for my 2006 performance evaluation with Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors substituted for project names and Star Wars characters for names of people so I don't accidentally reveal any company secrets:

• Answered the strategic question “Does it make sense to merge more New York Super Fudge Chunk and Jamaican Me Crazy Sorbet?” as a “no”. Instead of solving that single problem, the approach was to solve the class of problem through the merging of all kinds of different flavors so that wider reuse can be made of the union than the original question posed.
• Constructed the Creme Brule prototype, which served as a central figure in demonstrations to business partners, upper management, and other development teams. It was able to pull flavors from Jamaican Me Crazy Sorbet, Chocolate Fudge Brownie, and Phish Food, while providing a repeatable design pattern for other flavors to come.
• Created the Cool Britiana prototype, which was based on the strawberry dessert I had on vacation and showed how a simplified model can make future design changes easier and centralized.
• Authored three different contributions to the Taste Standards Release
• Constructed initial vanilla ice cream enhancements that enables simple use cases to function correctly whether or not fresh beans are available while other resources made the concept production ready.
• In conjunction with Ice Cream Bar, Exotic Desserts, and other teams, wrote cookie usage guidelines that increased the efficiencies of the number of cookies used in various products.
  
• Authored Cookie Usage Recommendations based on some initial Frameworks team work in addition to further research.
• Championed the acceleration of FY ’08 planning with a variety of business sponsors.
• Performed initial Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough -> Half Baked assessment and discussed implementation possibilities with ISV developers at a trade conference.
• Shared Chunky Monkey learnings with the Expanded Dessert program without allowing their direction to distract us from ours.
• Orchestrated Cream Technologies migration to Cream Research teams, freeing up the Chunky Monkey team to attend to other dessert matters.
• Conducted monthly meetings with the various lead architects in the organization, leading to better cross pollination among projects
• Assessed the ISV Dippin' Dots and created preliminary freezing strategy
• Created the go-forward publishing strategy for BenAndJerrys.com with Ki Adi-Mundi
  
• Performed the Heath Bar Crunch acquisition architectural assessment with Obi-Wan Kenobi
• With Mace Windu and Yoda, represented architectural perspectives in a meeting between Chancellor Palpatine and Dippin' Dots senior management
• Represented architectural concerns in the Dessert Triage Team

Final Thoughts

As mentioned before, there are lots of ways to prepare for this important occasion, but this method has worked for me. Understand what it is your boss will go through when he or she fills out the paperwork so that you can make it as easy as possible. Start with comments on others. You will probably be asked for thoughts on them anyway and it will help jog your memory when it comes to the things you did as well. Finally, approach it like a resume using action verbs and numbers where possible. That increases the readability of your list and puts your accomplishments in the best light possible.

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Running Diary: Preparing for my performance evaluation, Part 1

I had a recent post based on an article on another site touting how best to prepare for your performance evaluation, so I thought I'd write sort of a retroactive piece on how I prepared for my last evaluation. I say "retroactive" because I'm telling it in present tense when really, I'm just remembering it as best I can since I didn't take notes, which is my usual Running Diary habit.

Knowing the process

In my first post on this subject, I stressed how important it is to understand the performance evaluation process that your company uses as it will shape how you interact with your boss (yes, that's a picture of mine at left). In my case, every employee that reports directly to my boss will get their evaluation at the same time. That means that, in addition to my grade, my manager will be filling out forms for around 6 other people at the same time. Most of my peers that also report to the same supervisor as me have a staff of their own that they must evaluate as well. While I don't have any formal subordinates, I interact with theirs on a daily basis and will be expected to provide feedback on as many people as possible.

Every employee is given a grade on a scale. Although I'll intentionally leave out how many points there are on that scale, there is a corporate mandate that a certain percentage of employees should fall within each part of that scale, within a reasonable amount of variance. Each manager is typically held to that percentage so that when all the grades for the entire company are rolled up, it meets the desired company-wide distribution. So, if you are on the cusp between two grades, you might artificially get moved one way or another not because of your performance, but because of the manager's requirement to fit the distribution a certain way.

The deadlines for submitting the evaluations are notoriously tight and the more of them someone has to fill out, the worse the workload gets. Plus, there are the normal projects to track and issues to keep track of while the whole process is going on. This is the primary reason I've avoided direct reports my whole career.

Starting with others

I start my performance evaluation process in what might be considered an unusual way: by collecting my thoughts on other people. There are three reasons for this:

1. I know I'm going to be asked for feedback on others, so I might as well get it over with.



2. By commenting on others first, it forces me to think about what all I've worked on during the year and who I've interacted with. In order to intelligently comment on someone else, I have to take good stock of what I've done too, so it ends up laying the groundwork for my own accomplishments list later in the process.



3. I get "in the mood" of writing about accomplishments by constructing statements about others first. Just about everybody is uncomfortable writing nice things about themselves, so by starting with nice things about others, you get some vocabulary and wording momentum going.
   

For fiscal year 2006, I filled out feedback on 23 people before being prompted, which was more than I ever did before in previous jobs. A few were a page long, most were a paragraph or two, and others were as little as two sentences. I completed this exercise over about a week and a half and it definitely got me in a good frame of mind to work on my own accomplishments list.


In Part 2, I'll go over approaching your accomplishments list as a resume and show a version of the one I filled out in Fall '06.

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Running Diary: Attending the exotic team offsite, Part 3

This last installment of my exotic team offsite diary covers the best part of the trip in the form of a tour of the Ben & Jerry's factory. Part 1 introduced my loose definition of "exotic" when it comes to meeting locations and Part 2 discussed how our team chose to deal with its distributed nature.

Wednesday - Second Life, boring budgets, and Ben & Jerry
The morning session was my biggest contribution to the gathering as I presented some future
looking ideas for our online presence. The coolest part was telling everybody about Second Life. By far the most satisfying part of my job is getting to learn things all the time and be the guy people go to when they want to know about new stuff. I worked into the presentation the history of network gaming and briefly talked about my long gone two year addiction to Star Wars Galaxies in the process. When showing these kinds of things to the managers, though, it's never clear to me if they are impressed and excited or glassy-eyed and not comprehending what I'm talking about. This, despite utilizing my own oral delivery tips.

Along those lines came our late morning agenda: budgets. Given that my body was still on West Coast time and we started at 7:30 Eastern two days in a row, I literally almost fell asleep.

The afternoon picked up, though, with our second fun activity: a tour of the Ben & Jerry's factory. Maybe it’s because of my software background and we never build anything tangible, but just about any manufacturing floor is fascinating to me. The tour started with a short video about the genesis of the company. Two creative slackers paid $5 to take a correspondence course on ice cream making and turned it into a well-known international dessert empire. What did you do today? Me too.

The film chronicled the list of funny flavor names, the instance of quality ingredients, and giving back to the community. Great product, great company. Then we got to see the floor. The company actually has two factories. The one we were standing above in a special glass enclosure was the original factory, but there is a bigger one up the road that produces most Ben & Jerry’s products. It’s just the two facilities, but they ship worldwide, which was also pretty interesting.

The machines all do pretty much what you’d expect. There is a phase where he milk, cream, and sugar are chilled and then mixed. Flavor is added. Bulk ingredients are added and, if necessary, ribbons of caramel, fudge, marshmallow or whatever is inserted before the whole concoction is packaged in the familiar pints (including a special maneuver to prevent air pockets from forming) and given a “best used by” date. In a step I never would have thought of, they also freeze the pints immediately to something like -40 degrees F. That helps the preservation process and they have a special machine that uses wind chill techniques in order to achieve such low temperatures.

Then, the people with one of the greatest jobs on the planet takes over: the Ben & Jerry’s Quality Assurance Team. They randomly grab a few pints from each production run and first test them for consistent distribution of all the ingredients. Taking a huge machete, one container is dissected to form circular discs to inspect lateral consistency. Then, another container is sliced open length-wise to check the other direction. Finally, there’s the taste testing. Yes, there are people who get paid to taste test Ben & Jerry’s every day.

In fact, at the end of the tour where we got a free sample of a new flavor for St. Patrick’s day, the employee who led our tour told me about a key perk of working for Ben & Jerry’s. FOR EVERY DAY YOU WORK, YOU GET A FREE PINT!!!! She said that she’s actually a little sick of eating ice cream, but that is a key reason for people who get hired on for summer help, when the tour is quite popular.

The last notable from the tour is that a collage history of the company is chronicled in the hallway between the “free sample room” and the gift shop. Among the things along those walls are a series of newspaper articles about an incident when Ben & Jerry’s attempted to reach supermarkets in their first major US city (Boston). Pillsbury, who owns the Hagen Daas brand of premium ice cream, threatened Boston chains that they would pull their products from stores if they chose to carry Ben & Jerry’s, which responded to the situation with a letter writing and bumper sticker campaign to expose these illegal and monopolistic practices. Eventually Pillsbury relented and Ben & Jerry’s eventually expanded to practically every grocery store in the country.

After all those good stories and experiences there, it was a little bit of a letdown to finish our budget discussions back at the lodge. I scored some maple products to bring home and an illustrated children’s book based on the lyrics to My Favorite Things for my daughter. All in all, it was a productive offsite that had a nice blend of grinding through work and some team bonding over ice cream.

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Running Diary: Attending the exotic team offsite, Part 2

What makes an offsite "exotic"? That, along with the joys of travel on this particular occasion were covered in Part 1. Here in Part 2, the actual proceedings begin and we deal with massive geographic distribution before I get left out of the fun activity.


Tuesday - Hitting the ground running

Most of the times at gatherings like this, the agenda starts early and goes pretty late in the day. If you are going to spend the money to get everybody together, you might as well get as much out of it as you can. The part that was hard about that for me was that we had a 7:30 am Eastern start time for breakfast and my body was still on Pacific time and wasn't happy about being awake at 4:30. Some sugar helped with that, but I was pretty out of it for most of the morning.

Our first real topic was to discuss performance evaluations. My 4 other peers in attendance manage a full time staff of 30 (in addition to a contingent staff of almost 70 that are managed by others) to fill out paperwork on and give feedback for on their performance the previous year. Thankfully, I was spared this task, although I did have to provide feedback on around 20 of the 30 to the appropriate manager. It was pretty easy giving confidential praises and criticisms, but it was quite another to have to plan the development of your subordinates and pass out performance grades. As such, their jobs were a lot harder than mine on this topic. Passing out those grades was especially tough for our managers because the rankings have to meet certain distribution thresholds. Not everybody can get an "A" even if everybody deserves it, that's a corporate mandate.

Moving on, we talked about our physical location problem. Our 30 people were spread across 6 different US locations, 2 European sites, and 3 low cost offices in India, Central America, and Mexico. Planning meetings with people working on different projects could be tough if they were spread all over the world. In an effort to combat that, one of the managers presented a plan to at least pair people together by logical time zone groupings and, longer term, replace people who leave via attrition in sites where we already had people. We didn't want to force moves on people so that we could co-locate them with others. That hadn't gone well in other parts of the company, so replacing people as they left on their own in the most logical places was really all we could do.

After the catered lunch, I missed my first activity. Everybody else went on a sleigh ride through the country that the lodge offers while I had to stay in the room and attend a meeting I couldn't get out of despite being in an offsite and supposedly focused on specific tasks. Sometimes, that happens. Usually it's not too bad because you just miss a part of the meeting, but here I missed out on some fun stuff.

For the afternoon, we spent time moving people around to different projects than the one they were currently assigned so we could better balance them geographically before it was time for dinner. Even in cases like this one where I really like the people I'm at the offisite with, it can be a little weird spending 8 hours locked in a room with a group of people only to have dinner with them too. It just feels like I have to be in "work" mode all that much longer. Still, the food is usually really good because the company is paying the tab and I get to have dinner conversation with real adults. Contrast that with my wife, who would be having dinner alone with a 5 year old all week while 3 dogs constantly tried to steal food off the table, and I was making out pretty good despite the extended work hours.

That's it for today, but on Thursday's big finale the highlight of the trip (the Ben & Jerry's factory tour) gets covered in Part 3.

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Running Diary: Attending the exotic team offsite, Part 1

From time to time, you and some team of people who reside in different physical locations will get together for multiple days worth of meetings. Sometimes these gatherings are called "retreats", but in the company I work for, we call them "offsites" (an example being the one I ran and called the Engineering Summit). According to most spell checkers, "offsite" is not even a real word, but the term comes from the old days where we all actually reported to the same work site every day and we used to go away from that site for meetings in order to focus on some particular task. Somehow, the name stuck despite the fact that it's full meaning doesn't really apply any more.

There are two kinds of offsites and they depend entirely on the location in question. Which would you rather hear your boss suggest?

1) I was thinking we should all get together in Boise pretty soon.

2) Vegas, baby.

So basically, there are exotic locales that people actually want to go to and there is every place else. This running diary is about one such exotic locale team offsite.

Pre-Trip

Whether or not you think this one in particular is "exotic", per se ,depends on whether or not you like snow and/or Julie Andrews. Despite being among the worst skiers in the world, I like both so when my boss sent out an email entitled "Get ready to yodel" I was actually excited to be going to the Trapp Family Lodge for 3 days in January. Yes, the actual von Trapp family as depicted in The Sound of Music. After their escape from Europe, they set up a resort in Vermont which will now serve as the location for our big series of meetings where we'll discuss the strategic direction of our multi-million dollar budget. Not exactly Vegas, but way better than Idaho so I feel comfortable calling it "exotic", OK?

There would be 6 of us there. My boss, our financial accountant-type person, and our three project managers. We sit atop an organization of a little over 100 other people who write code, maintain software environments, run test suites, or manage the various web site programs we are responsible for. I'll be the only techie yodeling, but out of those 100, roughly 60 of them are software engineers of some kind whose technical knowledge of the programs I'll be representing at these meetings.

Monday - Travel Day

One of the things I especially appreciate about my boss is her sensitivity to travel. Whenever possible, she tries to schedule these things Tuesday through Thursday so that people don't have to travel on the weekend. She theorizes that she's taking you away from your family as it is, you shouldn't have to miss out on weekend time too. Throw in the fact that the NFL playoffs are going on, and I couldn't agree more. I admit some bitterness, though, as I had a stopover in Chicago the day after the evil and soulless Bears eliminated my beloved Saints. Troubled Bears QB Rex Grossman chooses to have a turnover free game against my team instead of playing in his typical stupor which handed the Colts the Super Bowl two weeks later. Yes, I'm still upset.

I otherwise lucked out, though. Two of my teammates had their luggage get lost and one of them missed a flight altogether, so at least I'd have clean clothes for Tuesday. The hotel itself was beautiful. Lots and lots of pictures of the von Trapp family depicting their history both in Europe and here after the fled Austria. Views in the valley are gorgeous and there was plenty of snow to play in (although that would elude me on this trip as it would turn out due to temperatures that my California born and bread body didn't know existed). Very comfortable setting for a meeting like this.

In Part 2, the meeting starts and we deal with having people work across 7 different time zones before taking the Ben & Jerry's factory tour in Part 3 (coming Thursday).

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