Author: adamo

I am a Greek DevOps Engineer ranting about everything, from email to sports; to living in Athens, Greece.

downsizing

* Initially this post was started because of Sun’s layoffs (18%). Now Sun is no more, and so seems work for a large percentage of the Greek workforce.

Downsizing is to be expected in great numbers. At the scale that this seems it is going to happen, these will not really be informed layoffs, the criteria being simple: You have a high salary (for some definition of high) and your choices may include: retirement, layoff, substantial pay-cut (equals to morale / motivation downsizing) and/or transfer to another organization (in a take it or bye-bye offer).

The short term result of such a massive violent move will of course be proof of elimination of the so called “cost centers”. The mid and long term results will be far more different: The information flow within the organizations will be severely disrupted. There exists the organizational structure and then there exists the informal structure that gets built over time. The departure of a key person can be dealt with by an “unconscious” team auto-configuration. But what about more than one? While small teams communicate more effectively, small teams cannot be made smaller. Time is a limited resource and there is not enough to perform the required analysis before downsizing.

That is the price to be paid for not trying to be lean when you had the chance. And new “cost centers” will emerge.

Appendix: Chalk one up for math (or How even retirement disrupts information flow)

Steinmetz‘ most gratifying moment may have occurred after his retirement. An emergency brought him back to GE’s Schenectady plant to troubleshoot a malfunctioning generator. For days, the hobbled genius pored over drawings with paper and pencil in hand. Finally, he placed a chalk mark on the side of the generator, instructing the repairmen to cut through the casing and remove a number of turns from the stator. It worked.

When asked to submit an invoice, Steinmetz delivered a slip of paper with nothing on it but the surprisingly large figure of $10,000. The accountants, in shock, said they couldn’t process the paperwork without a more detailed breakdown. Steinmetz then forwarded another note on which was typed:

One chalk mark $1. Knowing where to put it $9,999.

A short time later, Steinmetz received his pay in full.

To those that believe that this was not because of disrupted information flow, but because of Steinmetz’ genius, I can only say that I know of cases where retired for decades engineers were called back for consulting due to lack of documentation. And today’s knowledge workers are not better at keeping it either.

on lisp and pseudocode

Remember that it is written in “The Roots of Lisp” that:

If you want a language for describing algorithms, you might want something more abstract, and that was one of McCarthy’s aims in defining Lisp.

It was only after Steve Russell programmed eval (in machine code) that Lisp became a tool for the keyboard rather than a tool for pen and paper.

Lean Behaviors

I’ve briefly mentioned Emiliani’s “Lean Behaviors” before, but lately I am finding myself coming back to it on a number of occasions. This time it was Al Iverson’s amazement in “What You Suggest Will Kill Email for Everyone“:

It’s amazing to me that some people are so blind to that outcome. A savvy marketer ought to already know that it’s not all that smart to burn up the medium in a way that arrests your future ability to make money from it?

Oh but people are not blind. They just have a different agenda. They aim for short-term profits (and bonuses) and results that last as long as they are part of an organization. Whether their actions set in motion the demise of the organization (which might occur after they have left) is not something to bother them. After all, the organization failed after they left, so it is not their fault, right? Wrong! I quote from “Lean Behaviors”:

Behaving poorly in the workplace makes everyone, including management, ignorant of how well people can actually behave, and results in the evolution of new types of undesirable behavior patterns. Poor behaviors allow people to avoid co-operation, gain personal advantage, and protect personal or departmental interests. These self-serving habits become well-developed over time, resulting in highly skilled but unproductive gamesmanship that no customer would want to pay for. All too often the most highly skilled gameplayers become unwholesome ego-driven role models for future generations. Survival of the fittest, in this context, means the lowest forms of behavior win – but only on a personal level, which is good enough for many people. However, the corporate culture, which mirrors the aggregate of individual behavior of managers, will likely fail to serve the larger community. The result is a deterioration of trust between workers, management, suppliers (Sheridan, 1997), and investors, which can further erode a company’s competitive position. Competitors may also suffer from this, as they now often work together in joint ventures or other co-operative business arrangements. A lack of trust and differences in corporate culture have been cited as primary reasons why collaborative business arrangements often fail or at least fall well below expectations (Kanter, 1994).

(I could quote the whole of the paper, but it is freely available, so go download it)

So it is not blindness. It is about the “take the money and run” attitude. Use whatever half-baked idea seems to bring money on the table regardless of whether it will slain the goose in the long run. With such people switching jobs every three to five years, by that time they will already be aiming at another goose.

NATO’s New Strategic Concept and the Cyberspace

Excerpts from NATO’s “Active Engagement, Modern Defence“:

12. Cyber attacks are becoming more frequent, more organised and more costly in the damage that they inflict on government administrations, businesses, economies and potentially also transportation and supply networks and other critical infrastructure; they can reach a threshold that threatens national and Euro-Atlantic prosperity, security and stability. Foreign militaries and intelligence services, organised criminals, terrorist and/or extremist groups can each be the source of such attacks

19. We will ensure that NATO has the full range of capabilities necessary to deter and defend against any threat to the safety and security of our populations. Therefore, we will:

* develop further our ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks, including by using the NATO planning process to enhance and coordinate national cyber-defence capabilities, bringing all NATO bodies under centralized cyber protection, and better integrating NATO cyber awareness, warning and response with member nations

[via]

On vendor lock-in

(and sometimes open-source vendor lock-in)

Thanks to @nzaharioudakis (whom I had asked whether Debian stable is an adequate platform to run Zimbra on) I remembered the following quote from “Conquest in Cyberspace“:

“The seducer, for instance, could have an information system attractive enough to entice other individuals or institutions to interact with it by, for instance, exchanging information or being granted access. This exchange would be considered valuable; the value would be worth keeping. Over time, one side, typically the dominant system owner, would enjoy more discretion and influence over the relationship, with the other side becoming increasingly dependent. Sometimes the victim has cause to regret entering the relationship; sometimes all victim regrets is not receiving its fair share of the joint benefits. But if the “friendly” conquest is successful, the conqueror is clearly even better off.”

Even though the above is written in cyberwarfare (political) language, the point is very clear and the IBM executive’s phrase becomes well understood:

“Because you don’t want to get locked into an open system”

(One has to keep in mind that the phrase is taken somewhat out of context. Some 20 years ago when he spoke of “open systems” he meant OSI).

I do not want to get locked in any system.

→ “You ALWAYS pay“

re: See the Messages that Matter

After reading Facebook’s blog on Messages, I thought I should write down some thoughts:

“Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”

Initially I thought of write(1). This feels like unix communiation (ytalk, irc, etc) done the Web 2.0 way. Or as some pointed out on twitter, like Wave without collaboration tools.

As for the Social Inbox, this is an implementation of a concept similar to Gmail’s Priority Inbox. Messages from people I know go into the Inbox, the rest go to the Other Inbox. Pretty simple classification mechanism (and quite effective).

“We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not.”

Messages is not email, but it builds a walled garden. And like I once read (and frequently repeat) in the Internet walled gardens are doomed to communicate via SMTP.

A simple Pomodoro timer

I first heard about the Pomodoro Technique by @sugarenia. The technique is basically this:

Work on a task for 25 minutes (a “pomodoro”) and then take a break for 5 minutes. Every four pomodoros, take a longer break.

Like the book proposes, I am using a kitchen timer (I did so after reading Lakein’s book back in 2008). Besides using hardware, there exist a number of software packages that countdown from 25 minutes. I think however, that that following shell script is among the simplest (if not the simplest) implementations:

#!/bin/sh
( sleep 1500 && xlock ) &

If you find the xlock(1) approach harsh, you can always use a variation like xsetroot -solid red.

( Tested on OpenBSD-4.7 )