/bill's House O Insomnia : Cool Stuff

A cool new blog to follow

William — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:07:00 GMT

I've been using Twitter for about a year now, ever since Ryan Olshan turned me on to it. Shortly after I started Tweeting (or whatever the correctly conjugated verb for it is), I came across a fellow Tweeter in Atlanta @Streetlightlilly . She's...(read more)

Fighting the Bull

William — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:15:28 GMT

A few years ago, I read a truly excellent book called Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide . I really liked it b/c I was working at a place with a whole lot of people who were really into talking in business speak and thought they were really cool for doing it. Little by little, they all battled with each other to outdo the other ones. At the same time, they all started to think that talking ambiguously, meaning answering questions by not answering the question was some kind of holy virtue. Meetings were bad enough, but this idiocy makes them unbearable. Because talking in business speak is all about trying to convince people you're smart and hip, it turns into a pissing battle. You only need one of these people in a meeting to really make it so painful it hurts, but G*d help you if you get three or more b/c they will spend the whole time trying to outdo each other. And that's when they aren't battling to be the first to say 'That's a great point" every time a boss says something. They think it makes them sound important and I have yet to find anyone that seriously respects this style of communication. When i read the Bullfighter's Guide, it was really liberating in the same way it's always liberating to find out that not only aren't you alone, that there are many others that agree with you out there.

Purely for therapeutic value, I'd like to describe the phenomenon in a little more detail. The crux of this post is about a tool that's been around for a while and a book that's been around for a while. The book is mentioned above and is an in depth look at the annoying phenomenon known as Business Speak and how to avoid it. There is a Word Add-In that you can use to analyze documents and help you remove Bull as well as let you compute a Bull Index. Better yet, you can create your own lists and add your own words, so this tool can adapt to fight this evil phenomenon.

Here's what it looks like:

You can run the tool (the left hand icon) which works like Word's Spell Checker, or you can compute the Bull Index:

So why is this necessary? Well, because not only do many people think talking in Business Speak is cool, many people now it's stupid and pretentious, yet are uncomfortable saying so out loud b/c it will invariably anger at least a few coworkers. It's a classic case of the Emperor having no clothes. And today, at least in my experience, talking like this is the defacto standard. For example, a few years ago, I was talking with a few of my former coworkers (we all worked for the same Big X Consulting firm where talking like this was mandatory). A competitor of ours actually made Bullfighter. We'd run it on our documents (which were called Deliverables - can you ever imagine talking to your wife or kid and use Deliverable in a sentence? Can you imagine using the term Deliverables ANYWHERE other than work without causing confusion and laughter?) and try to remove all the bull we could find. We'd send it up the chain to the project manager and then to the managing partner, and what we got back was our document, except with Bull words added back in. Just to put it in perspective, this was back in the day when we were still called Resources. Again, imagine telling your wife "Honey, I'm going to be at work pretty late tonight, would you mind running by the school and picking up our resources and making sure our resources get their homework done?) I think the current word is Asset but I hear Resources still lingering around. Is Asset the most up to date one, or is there something newer?

In high school, you have the kids that are teacher's pets. They are the kids who love lecturing you about how 'immature' you are for laughing at potty humor. In a classroom discussion, they always figure out what the teacher's opinion is and spout it out as though it was their long held belief. Then they head off to college. The second week into school when few students know what they really want to do and are busy trying to get drunk and find easy freshman, you often hear these folks at the lunch table or on the sideline of the intramural fields raping people's ears. You hear some poor chap ask them "So what are you majoring in?" and it's all over. They haven't finished a single course or even taken their first test and you hear "Well, I'm going to double major in Poli-Sci and English. You know, 98% of lawyers at the nation's top firms were English majors. So I'm going to go to school on summers and take my LSAT's in my 3rd year. If I score over 190, then I'll be heading off to UVA or Princeton. If I score between 160 and 189, I'll shoot for Penn or Columbia. but i may take the dual MBA/JD program because there are so many MBAs and JDs, that you really need both to distinguish themselves." Then your senior year it turns into "Well, I'm going to work for a few years to get experience and find a company that will pay for my MBA. You know, you can't really get into a MBA program without work experience" They torture their first few sets of coworkers with this nonsense and say really smart sounding things like "You know, the market is going to close up today" every freaking day as though they were the only people in the world that know that the futures markets and market open often indicate the overall mood the traders that day. They start to see that no one likes their ideas and that they offer very little. Then they think "If only I was in management...." At that point, it fully takes over and what you get is a platitude generating Dilbertesque robot that induces vomit on a regular basis.

What happens usually is that someone in your office, usually a younger person on the verge of making management, starts it. These folks spot them and try to copy everything they do. All of a sudden you're in a meeting and they are asked a question and they reply "I'll be glad to take this off-line with you." At that point, you can see the eyes of all the kiss asses and management wannabes light up and you can almost hear them thinking "ooooh, impressive, I need to use that." Two days later, everyone is taking things offline instead of talking to you after the meeting. In another meeting you hear the trendoid say "Well, I have concerns that you may not have the bandwidth..." The same folks mentioned before perk up and take note. Bandwidth, oooh, now that sounds impressive. And then they discover the wonders of ambiguity. Next thing you know everyone is talking about bandwidth and everyone with some pathological agenda is talking about their concerns or telling you that so and so manager has concerns about something {something almost always directly related to their own agenda}. By using concerns, every petty tyrant in empowered to wreak havoc on their coworkers. You see, if you tell people "Well, John said Mr Whoever is pissed off about the network downtime" and John gets called on it, He'll just hide behind the ambiguity "Well, Mr Whoever did have concerns, hugh amounts of downtime is not good for business {all such people also love to slip in completely obvious truisms and state them like it's something profound}, but that's all I was saying. But when they said it in the meetings, they emphasized it in such a way that said "If this isn't fixed, heads are going to roll". The ambiguity is perfect for them because they can get people worked up or hide behind someone else's name and then have complete deniability if they get called out. In short order, they'll start using "We" all the time, so they can take credit if management agrees with their point, but pawn it off on others if management doesn't. This all starts creeping in, just like the business platitudes. These people then start freestyling with each of these techniques:

Bill: "Hey, John, the full database backup didn't run last night nor did the incrementals. I looked into it and the job wasn't enabled. Did someone disable it after you enabled it or did you not enable it before you left?"

John: "Well Bill, we have to do everything possible to take care of customer data. We might be staff here but we are customers at many places and we certainly want our data handled as carefully as possible. It's critical that we leverage each of our core competencies to strategically manage our client's data, even if we're running low on bandwidth or getting pushback about it"

Bill: "Uhh, ok, but I didn't have a chance to look at the error logs, I just want to know if it was left disabled for a reason, or it was an oversight, and if there was a reason, can we re-enable it now, it's been 8 hours since we've had a backup."

John: "Well, we look at our business model as the key to our success and you have to do what's best for the customer and do things that make sense. Right now, I don't have a comfort level with the backup strategy and we may need to have a meeting. I understand you have a concern about it and we totally share your concern. Maybe you could google it and see what comes up and then you can call a meeting and share your findings."

As stupid as this sounds, it's not far from a real conversation I've had and ones I've overheard. I know I'm really long on this rant which is slightly ironic b/c what I'm complaining about is poor communication, but it's because this nonsense is so prevalent that I often wish things were different. the thing is that if you talk to people individually, everyone will tell you they hate this sort of stuff. Depending on the guilt level, you'll typically hear some level of apologetics for their own sins. On the other hand, you just know that there are some people you could never even bring the subject up with, b/c for them, talking like this is absolutely critical to their existence. And if you look deep, you'll find that the more someone talks like this, the less technical skills they have. There are a few exceptions of talented people that speak like this, but the folks with talent are doing it b/c they think it's expected. For the rest, they literally depend on this sort of stuff.

Why do I mention all of this? because I'm going to bet that every single person that reads this works with someone like this. In fact, I bet they work with more than a few people that talk and behave like this, and have worked with many in the past. And these people have driven you nuts. And you've wanted to call Bullsh*t as loudly as possible. At one point, you actually fell for it, thinking that they speak so confidently and sounds so sophisticated that they have to really know what they are talking about. Then you realize that every morning on the ride into work, they hear about the futures markets and that alone is what dictates their daily market predictions. You realize taht without the fancy lingo, they have nothing to offer. And it drives you nuts. If you've felt this and want a good laugh, pull a sample of about 20 of their emails or memos. One day, in a meeting, bring in your notebook and just type in as many phrases as you can without attracting attention. Then run the Bullfighter (yes, it works on everything from Word 97 to 2007) and laugh at the results. Then look at their Bull Index. When you see their pathetic Bull Score, sit back and laugh to yourself knowing they are absolutely full of it as measured by a good objective standard. And run it on your own work just to make sure you never go over to the dark side (the lowest I've scored is a 5.5 and the highest is an 8. I usually score in the 7.0s. The more I use it, the more I 'get it' and hopefully I can improve that.

If you have any really good examples of Business speak (I know I've asked before but figured there are some new good ones based on what I"ve been hearing lately) or memos, Please please please post them or send them to me. I'll keep them confidential unless you tell me it's ok to mention it. For some reason, I find this quite amusing.

I can almost hear Jeff Foxworthy saying...If you write blog posts at 5:00 AM about how much you like running writing analyzers on office memos, you might be a DORK.

Theory matters after all...

William — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 03:53:00 GMT

There are many discussions developers have with each other that always make for interesting discussions. One of the best ones is "How much does a Computer Science degree matter?" If you argue that it's really important, you'll invariably have your argument countered with anecdotes of 'some idiot who was totally Ivorty Tower" and examples of people who were self taught and complete bad asses.

I definitely know many many examples of the latter. I'm pretty skeptical about the former which I'll get to in a minute. I don't consider myself a bad ass or guru in any sense, but I've had a pretty successful career and been able to excel in every job I've held. I'm kind of a hybrid though b/c I have taken 30 credit hours of CS even though most of what I know is self taught. However had I not had the education that I did, I know there's more than a few subjects I would have had a lot more trouble with. Outside of the formal education, there's a lot of vicarious learning thrust upon you while taking college courses and at least in my case, I'm pretty sure a good bit of my success is attributable directly to my education. I work/have worked with more than a few folks though who had little or no formal CS education and are far better developers than I am. Experience and learning are ultimately what matter and at the end of the day, if you learn to create effective classes for instance, it doesn't much matter if you learned to creat them in a class room or at work. Ultimately, the reason this always makes for such a good discussion is precisely because there are so many excellent examples to support either side of the argument.

One thing I hear a lot though are people that criticize people that 'think they are still in college', 'all theory' 'too much textbook' or 'ivory tower'. I have yet to meet or work with someone who's so well educated that they are poor at development. Like most things, I think good theory makes good practice. What I have come across however is posers who hide behind big words. In every single case where I've been told someone is 'all theory' and had the opportunity to work with this person, what I've found is that they aren't all theory at all. They are all 'use words and phrases they don't understand to compensate for their disturbing level of ignorance'. In most cases, these folks learned just enough to sound like they know what they are talking about (to others that aren't familiar with the theory they claim to espouse). A few notable examples come to mind, in most cases, I've run into and/or heard from friends about this more times than I care to remember:

Tonight though, I was flipping through Wired and came across an article which proves that without a firm command of theory, you're going to be in over your head in some cases. Even cooler than the article is the source code they posted with it . I'm not very familiar with the .jpg file format, but this article really got me thinking. I mean, I would never have even thought to look for such things. The code isn't really all that complex, but understanding what it's doing and why is something you aren't just going to figure out on your own. At least I know I wouldn't. Not surprising, Neal Krawetz the guy who performed this analysis has a Ph.D in Computer Science. Read the article, look at the source code, hit his web site - seems to me this is true Ivory Tower stuff and it's pretty darned impressive if you ask me.

Jack the Cuckoo

William — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 05:21:00 GMT

As my regulars know, I use an oversized blue cuckoo bird as one of my online alter egos. I flip in between the big blue one and the were-cuckoo (who's dressed as a dapper vampire cuckoo above) and switch them out regularly. Being a huge bird lover (and a dog lover), I'm a natural cat hater. You see, cats, and not just feral ones, are the number 1 killers of birds. Cats should be outlawed unless they are willing to prove their worthiness by being cat-a-paulted (get it?) a few hundred feet in the air into a sewer, or at least a really murky pond. But this isn't about how much cats suck, it's about how cool cuckooz are.

So I'm watching Jack and notice his color - He's blue. Blue ahhh? I know one of those. And he's a grumpy smart a33. The one I know is grumpy and a smart a33 too. Doesn't get much cooler than that - although he needs ported to Silverlight.

Jack The Cuckoo Rulez!

Cool stuff in alternative energy

William — Mon, 28 May 2007 04:09:00 GMT

My homie Cornbread Canfield/ sent me this and as always, it's way cool