Category: Uncategorized

Manger Advice

I had some notes that I think were originally from a Twitter thread.

I think the question was from someone who had been a developer for several years and had just got a new role as a manager, so asked for advice.

One point someone made was that as a developer, you can gain a lot of success via individual contributions. Fixing a bug, delivering a feature, fixing a test environment etc, but as a manager, you are only really successful if your team is. Therefore, the focus is no longer on yourself. It’s about enabling people to work by dealing with impediments, and motivating them.

Another point was to value the 1-on-1 meetings. This builds relationships and trust, and you can learn about emerging problems and concerns. It gives you new perspectives and reminds you of how people are progressing when it comes to performance reviews.

Management goes in 3 directions, and all these directions have their own traits and challenges. Down – take care of your people and ensure they are cared for. Talk to them; lead them. Sideways – be aligned with another manager. Understand what is happening in other teams and how that will affect your team. Collaborate with them. Expand or adopt practices that they are adopting.

Up – you must sell your team’s success and communicate potential problems/challenges… Ensure the boss knows and understands the right things at the right time. Embrace the fact that you must balance these three directions well to make it work.

Although some managers could keep programming, a proper transition means you should be using your expertise to guide.

You are managing people, not Kubernetes pods. People have good days, bad days, birthdays, divorce, death… it’s all part of the “people deal”. You have to have a healthy distance/relationship as, at the end of the day, you must hire/fire/manipulate/lead/promote/demote them. Be humane, but be professional.

Invest in culture and lead by example. Don’t do things that you wouldn’t want to be done to you, and show a positive attitude towards whatever comes. Negative emotions and scepticism can ruin so many beautiful things.

See yourself as the conductor of an orchestra: Realise that, on the night, the instrumentalists can do this without you ONLY if they’ve worked well with you in rehearsals That your place is not to make the best sound from one instrument, but to bring the best out of all the players cohesively.

Read Codes

 When doctors add information about a patient to a computer system, they use a standardised “coding” system. This allows better searching, reporting and  data analysis compared to relying on free text entries which could contain typos, abbreviations and synonyms to represent the same data.

I was sent a collection of interesting terms by a friend using the “Read” coding system which is quite old and no longer used in England. Some of them must be really rare to have on your record, and some must have bizarre reasons for their existence.

9N46 – Doctor walked out  

TM281 – Legal execution by beheading 

TG80A – Accidental burning by soup, stew or curries 

T5500 – Spacecraft launching pad accident, occupant of spacecraft injured 

1BX5 – C/O sweet/pleasant dreams 

TE6Y6 – Run over by unridden animal 

TP8 – Injury due to war operations but occurring after war stopped 

22J-1 – O/E dead -condition fatal 

13HV4 – Seven year itch – marital 

7G020 – Buttock lift 

T412 – Crushed by lifeboat after abandoning ship 

U1282 – Bitten or struck by crocodile or alligator, occurrence at school, other institution or other administered area. 

[X] 197 – Victim of cataclysmic storm

I’d love to know why the word “cataclysmic” was added there, since that sounds like it should be world-ending. Then why didn’t they just stop at “bitten by alligator”? Why did they have to have several versions that specify really random locations?

Tournament for fonts! fight!

When it comes to text editors, I usually leave my font as the default as I assume that is deemed to be the best. However, other software developers can end up using weird coloured themes, and fonts and swear it’s an improvement and even helps them code better.

Choosing a new font can be difficult with all the choices and it’s hard to compare them. However, there is this website that compares two fonts at a time and goes through a “tournament” system to find a winner for you.

https://www.codingfont.com/

My winner was Azeret_Mono which I’ll try code in and see if I actually like it.

Employee Profiles: Gerald

Although I always got on with Gerald, his programming skills were a bit lacking. He was definitely one of those software developers that may have been good in his prime, but the languages he has used are now obsolete and he struggles to learn new things, so was a poor C# developer. 

One trait he had is that he seemed focussed on his own work and didn’t pay attention to what anyone else was doing. So there could be well-known employees at the company and he wouldn’t know who they are. So there were plenty of conversations like “go and ask George for assistance” and he would be like “who’s that?” or “what does he do?” much to the derision of team-mates.

There were several times where he was working on items that had been picked up by others, or had completely misinterpreted the requirements.

A few examples of bad programming

Declaring a boolean is easy; it’s just true or false, but Gerald created a string “False” then used the parse function to convert it to a boolean.

IsSelected = bool.Parse("False") 

There was a simple stored procedure that he needed to write to set a boolean flag. So normally you would just write one procedure that took a boolean parameter and set the database field to that value. But Gerald wrote 2 stored procs. One to set a bool value to 0, and another to set it to 1. 

So some weird solutions to some primitive problems.

A few examples of Lack Of Awareness

We were doing a project where we made the main feature. There was a requirement for the user to be able to write custom searches to generate reports, so another team was adding the new options into our Searches module. We were about to wrap up the project and Gerald was surprised that another team had been checking code into our project branch. 

There was one time Gerald volunteered to help out with software testing. He managed to pick the item that the actual tester was testing; so he didn’t help out at all – no time was saved. When we asked him how it happened, he said he thought Rob’s name was on it because he was the last person that worked on it. Even though that would have a developer’s name against it and not a tester; so that’s exactly the reason why he shouldn’t have chosen it.

A few weeks before that, he did something similar on three occasions. So he completely wasted a week by looking at things other people were working on.

Another time, Gerald was struggling with his work and asked me to help him. He said he was struggling with how to change the behaviour of pressing the spacebar to select an item in the tree view. I thought that behaviour sounded odd because I’d probably expect Enter to select, and maybe spacebar expands the nodes. I read the requirements and it was about toggling radio buttons, and nothing to do with a tree view.

A funny exchange on one of his code reviews: 

Rich: Do we need to update DateInserted and UploadAttemptCount when these are just the same as the defaults? 

Gerald: Ah, of course - think Rich said that too, but I didn't quite get what he meant. I'll drop them.

Gerald: What am I on about - you are Rich. D'oh!

Flapjack Chronicles

When we worked in the office, I noticed a Developer Keith often ate flapjacks from our vending machine. I started some bantz with a colleague called Josh who had a wild imagination and then it became a bit of a running joke.

These conversations are from some old chat logs I found.

Me 10:39:
have you noticed that Keith likes Flapjacks?
Josh 10:40:
lmao
yeah I have actually
Me 10:40:
that's the worst thing I can come up with for him
Josh 10:40:
love Keith, such a pleasant man
i know that's like his worst feature
im convinced he's a sleeper agent for our government
and he's got a silenced pistol in his drawer
in the event of a terrorist attack he'll preserve the technical staff
Me 10:44:
good theory

Josh 10:41:
I'm a bit concerned about Keith
he came up to me yesterday outside my house and asked me if I was interested in a metric ton of those flapjacks
apparently he "knows a guy"
 
Josh 14:01:
is he writing out the ingredients listed on the back of the flapjack packet again?
Me 14:03:
one day he will work out the recipe
Josh 14:03:
hahahah
that 0.1% missing, but vital ingredient he can't pinpoint

Josh 16:36:
bumped into des
we were discussing our mutual theories of Keith's secret agent/sleeper government agent mission
we both can't be wrong..

Me 09:53:
just so you know, Keith has already ate his flapjack
Josh 09:53:
wtf
already?
Dude can you get together a Flapjack Crisis Meeting
?
I'll call in backup
Me 09:56:
looks like he has 2 coffee cups as well
something isn't right
Josh 09:56:
hold him down
im coming in right now with flapjack concentrate
i reckon 50ml in a pinhead syringe should do
do we have alcoholic wipes to disinfect the injection area?
something isn't right
lol
anyone looking at these conversations would think we're the odd ones, right heheh? idiots.... :^)
Me 10:00:
50% of our conversations start with Flapjack

Strange keyboards

Recently, I’ve come across some interesting keyboard designs.

Optimus

Optimus Maximus Keyboard review (Cherry ML)

This one which has customisable screens under the main keys. Very pricey and very gimmicky

Emoji

 Logitech Pop Keys keyboard review: form over function – The Verge

This one has a selection of emoji keys. For someone that loves emojis, it sounds like a great idea in theory. However, at work, I tend to react to messages on Slack/Teams and I think this would only add them when you are writing text. Also, they have chosen very generic ones which they think are popular. Although I might use a laughing emoji, I like using more obscure ones based on inside-jokes. So it wouldn’t really work for me.

Lego

There is this Lego-like keyboard which looks bizarre, and the straight layout and limited keys makes it much harder to type. A total gimmick.

Keyboards Should Have Been Like This

The Future

Remember when we stopped using keyboards? Basically just examples of zany ideas which aren’t that practical for most people.

2002: COMPUTER KEYBOARDs of the FUTURE | Tomorrow’s World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive

Growth Mindset

Recently, our CEO has become obsessed with the idea of “Growth Mindset” which she seems to crowbar into all her company updates, and we received a talk from an external speaker. The actual talk seemed like a lot of waffle to me, but the general idea sounds like the type of life lessons that Simon Sinek says (he calls his philosophy “The Infinite Game“). Although I normally think ideas/mentality like this are pretentious, I respect Simon and I think there’s probably something in this way of thinking, so shouldn’t be put off by the external speaker’s presentation. Many colleagues stated they were aware of the idea of Growth Mindset and cited the book “Mindset” by Dr Carol Dweck.

Join us on the latest and most exciting stage of our journey with Growth Mindset. We have been working with the NeuroLeadership Institute on embedding a growth mindset culture in order to increase employee engagement, equip our people with tools and techniques for personal and professional development and to help everyone in the organisation navigate change. We have been running Growth Mindset sessions with our leadership team since September last year and we will be making a set of incredible tools and resources available for everyone to benefit from.

Company announcement

Growth mindset is thinking that every day is a learning experience and you don’t know everything. When you change your perspective, it changes outcomes. You have to allow for failure which is a learning opportunity. Don’t strive for perfection. In Software Development, you may never release software if you always strive for perfection. 

“Growth Mindset can be applied to all aspects of your life. It’s easier to think about what a growth mindset is by thinking about what it isn’t. So if you think about a fixed mindset, a fixed mindset says this is the way it’s always done and this is the way it will always be. I can only do this, I can’t do that. I don’t want to share. I don’t want to learn. I’m in my swim-lane. I’m not getting out of it, and I’m not interacting with anyone else. A Growth Mindset is the opposite of all of that. It’s like, we’ve done it this way, but there are other ways to do it. I can learn to do anything. I believe that I can learn to do anything that I put my mind to. It’s genuinely sharing in other people’s success, making it not just about you. The fact that other people have achieved something based on what you’ve kind of started or an idea that you might have had. Let yourself be happy about other people’s success.“

NeuroLeadership Institute

The application of a growth mindset is not confined to any single aspect of life. It can be equally impactful at work, in personal relationships, or in pursuing personal hobbies and interests. The concept of a growth mindset is a transformative and powerful approach to personal development. It’s the belief that one’s abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication, hard work, and perseverance. While we may have inherent talents, our abilities are not fixed. Unlike a fixed mindset, which limits potential and discourages risk-taking, a growth mindset thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a springboard for growth and for stretching existing abilities.

I believe the growth mindset is an antidote to cynicism. I hate cynicism – it doesn’t lead anywhere and worse than that it spreads. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work hard, smart and you’re kind, amazing things can happen! 

Joshua (colleague)

A new scheme, which I expect to be fairly short-lived is the idea of mentorship. Several people across the business put themselves forward to be a mentor and one person could ask them to be their mentor. To put yourself forward, you had to create a profile of your skills to show what you were offering mentoring support on. One colleague came up with the following:

Key skills, experience and behaviours:

  • Growth Mindset
  • People Management
  • Interpersonal skills development
  • Commercial awareness and negotiation
  • Presentation creation and delivery

What sort of person puts “Growth Mindset” at the top of their list of skills? Surely number 1 should be your top skill. Seems like he is just sucking up to the CEO.

Why Blog?

I was going through my old Twitter bookmarks and I have this from Jack Rhysider on blogging. Jack makes one of my favourite podcasts, Darknet Diaries which I recommend if you are interested in cyber security stories.

If you’re in IT, I highly encourage you to write a blog.

Here are 17 reasons why you should be blogging.

1. Don’t think of the blog as some new profound insight that makes you look smart. Instead, just write notes to yourself. If you make the blog useful to you, it’ll be useful to others.

2. Throughout your career you’ll stumble onto lots of great tips and advice and commands and tricks and ways to do thing. Blog all that. You will remember it better if you write it down. And it’ll be easy for you to find it later.

3. You are in IT, so how’s your web presence lookin? You know there are people who have a bigger web presence than you who live out on a farm and know nothing about computers? This is your passion. Show us what you can do!

4. Have you ever run into a problem, Googled for a solution but couldn’t find one? You’ve gotta keep doing trial and error until you fix it. That’s gold blog content. You’ll have the only page on the internet with how to fix that problem, and maybe save lives.

5. Do you keep seeing people ask the same question over and over that is so obvious to you? Blog that. Then point people to it every time you see the question. Psst, your co-workers will bug you less if you point them to your super helpful blog posts that answers their questions.

6. The more you explain technical concepts to people. The better you’ll get at understanding technical concepts yourself. Sounds backwards but it’s true. Teach to learn.

7. The most underrated skill to have in IT is ability to communicate effectively. Blogging is leveling that skill up. Are people getting what they need efficiently and effectively when they land on your site? Can you explain the concepts even better? Rewrite it, level up.

8. If you’re sending people to your blog and it’s not helping them, learn why so you can do better. My system is to clearly state the problem first, then write the answer after. Then explain details and alternative solutions. Don’t waste time with making people scroll for the answer.

9. If you find yourself having to Google answers to the same problem over and over, that’s good blog content. Write down exactly how to solve that problem that’s most effective for you, and it’ll be faster to reference your own notes, and it’ll be better suited to you.

10. Chances are, if you work in IT, the only people who know you’re any good are your co-workers and customers. Blogging expands that and suddenly there are people all over the world who respect you and appreciate your skills. This can open a lot of doors for new possibilities.

11. Taking classes on a technology new to you? You’re taking notes ya? Blog those notes! Trust me. Taking your notes from class and rewriting them into your blog will help you understand the content so much better, while helping others too. It’s a magical thing.

12. Now once you start putting content out into the world. Some magic stuff happens. First people will start correcting you. It’s inevitable. Don’t take this negatively. Take it as an opportunity to learn how to do something even better or more thoroughly.

13. Strangers might write to you thanking you for helping them. And let me tell you, fan mail is one of the best drugs. Because it’s pure and clean and feels great.

14. Did you know blogging was the precursor for my podcast? I blogged for 7 years before starting a podcast. It taught me how to write better, and produce content. It was from there that I got the idea and skills needed to podcast. Now I podcast full time. Blogs take you places.

15. If you blog for a while, you’re now a content creator with an audience. Chances are the blog won’t be the last thing you create. You can use your blog audience to seed your next project. My blog has been one of the best places to get new listeners for my podcast.

16. Bloggers can make money. You can put ads in your blog, get Brave rewards, or even just get tipped by random strangers.

17. Oh yeah and when you blog you have to solve all kinds of problems like domain registration, DNS servers, hosting, backups, web design, securing the site, and HTML/CSS/JS. The more you have your hands dirty in doing different IT stuff the more well rounded you’ll be.

So to recap. By blogging you will become a better writer and communicator, learn the concepts better, open new opportunities, have a fantastic notebook for self reference, maybe make money, become appreciated by more people, and show off your IT skills.

International Women’s Day

In recent years, we have been progressively highlighting social justice topics at work. With our recent takeover with American owners, they have said it is one of our company objectives to be more Diverse, so expect more over the coming years.

I’ve stated in other blogs that if there is actually a problem to solve, then I am all for it. As far as I am aware, there is no problem with Diversity/Sexism etc where I work.

In Software Development, the demographics is male-dominated in the UK. However, I have found when we have hired women, they might only stay for a few years before leaving, or want to switch to management. I’m tempted to say women seem to be favoured for promotions and requests to change contract (reduced days or working hours). When it comes to Software Testing, it seemed fairly balanced between men and women. Management level seemed predominantly women.

In our India office, women are much better represented in all areas. Not sure of the exact breakdowns but it could be like 5% female developers in the UK, but 35% women in India.

Our head office in the UK is next to a predominantly Asian city so we have a high amount of Asian staff.

So with the new American owners, their constant claims that we need to improve diversity makes them seem foolish and makes me worry they might start making negative changes and introduce new problems. Constantly telling people we need to make things “equitable” and “inclusive”, and questioning how we are supporting certain groups of people – just creates a victim mindset. Spotlighting a certain group is also divisive if you think about it…

Today, on International Women’s Day, we take time out to celebrate the incredible women we work alongside and their achievements. Our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality is shown through the value we place on the incredible women employed here and their impact, as well as the hugely positive influence we all have on women’s experiences.
 
This is a place where women have long, successful careers, and with that in mind, I want to inspire women and advocates by spotlighting women’s careers. I am delighted to share their views and experiences in this video and the images below, with even more great content and stories featured here on Sharepoint. Whilst you watch, I’d like everyone to think about what part you play in shaping our industry to be an equitable, inclusive space for all. How do you support women in the industry? In your department? In your team? It's up to us all to challenge gender stereotypes, call out discrimination, draw attention to bias, and seek out inclusion.
 
International Women’s Day is about raising awareness for gender parity, however you identify, and it’s an opportunity to put a spotlight on the successful contributions women make in our business.

Isn’t the entire post hypocritical? It opens saying how we have incredible women here, they have long, successful careers, then switches tone and implies that we aren’t supporting women and there’s discrimination!

Question: where have you seen the positive impact?

“it’s happening right now. The CEO is inspiring”

Director of Business Operations

In the video, we saw our female CTO who was talking about the company we merged with, also led by a female CTO. We then heard from the “Director of Business Operations” (who I think has been promoted every 2-3 years since she joined), then finally someone slightly lower down the hierarchy, a “Principal Software Engineer”.

So we have examples of women that have had no trouble being promoted. We are led by women, the Human Resources department is 80% women. If we do have a gender pay-gap, or if women struggle to get promoted, then whose fault is it? 

One manager replied to the post and used similar statements implying that there is a problem with sexism here.

Woo! Some amazing women right here and across the business, feel so lucky to work alongside some incredible women and for a company that is striving to tackle inequality and find new ways to support women in the workplace!

Manager

So much inequality here. If there is so much, then why aren’t they suing. It’s against the law isn’t it? 

:thinking_face:

Quiet Quitting

Early on during lockdown, a new term seemed to be trending in articles. I don’t even think it was lockdown-specific, so the timing was probably a coincidence. The term was “Quiet Quitting”.

One interpretation of this buzzword is when an employee deliberately gives the minimum effort in order to avoid being fired. Another interpretation is when an employee is more focussed on avoiding burnout (balancing their work with other interests).

The Coasting Definition

Doing the minimum is not a new concept since there’s always people looking to get out of work – be it: casually browsing the internet, taking breaks away from the desk, talking to colleagues, dragging out tasks for longer than expected, and more. Terms get thrown around like “slacking”, “goofing off”, “coasting”, “cruising”, “staying under the radar”.

Avoiding Burnout Definition

For the second definition, you could interpret that to mean they still care about their job, but are more focussed on consistent performance over time; therefore Quiet Quitting doesn’t really apply. 

Quitting at 5pm

I never know what is real or fake on the internet these days . I saw a post apparently from a CEO saying they have a group of colleagues that are good but refuse to do, or think about work after 5pm – so he was asking what can be done about it. It seems ridiculous to have the expectation that employees should want to work outside the terms you pay them for, but it does happen. I’ve had a manager say to me I was overlooked for a promotion because I never did overtime. Yet the reason was that I did my work during work hours, and it was others that were basically “quiet quitting”, then asking for more money to complete the tasks they were already paid to do.

Thinking about work 24/7 probably ain’t healthy, and I find you can be more productive by having free time. Working long hours one day, then being productive for the very next 9-5 day seems impossible to me. So what’s the point working longer to make up time, when you lose time the next day?

There’s been times I have worked hard and didn’t even get a rise to match inflation which is basically a paycut. I’ve then proceeded to do the bare minimum, even cut corners because I’m just doing the job they are paying me to do at the current rate. There’s no point maintaining performance “above and beyond” when they aren’t paying for that level. 

Even though you could say your effort is an investment and you will be rewarded in future; in reality – it doesn’t always work that way. I wrote plenty of blogs about Derek who was clearly incompetent and was constantly slacking, often only working half the day – and he got promoted a couple of years before I did.

Creating Healthy Engagement

In recent years, the executives would use terms and phrases like “caring about employees”, “work life balance”, “mental health awareness”. But then when it comes down to it, it might not be reflected in all manager’s opinions. 

Where I work, I don’t think it is actually bad – just the occasional moment, or occasional comment from certain managers, and often hints of payrises in the next quarter that never materialise.

I think some people just see the job as a means to earn money, and I’m not sure you can do that much to change their attitude. 

Removing stressful elements, overtime culture, and trusting employees to do their jobs could create a culture of “healthy engagement”. If employees see a consistent approach in payrises and promotions, then that can also motivate people to engage and improve. If there’s not much incentive to grow your career from the job you have, then it’s more beneficial to “Quiet Quit” rather than perform high.

There’s going to be times where overtime is required when deadlines loom, or there is “Red Flag” and an urgent fix is required. But regardless of why the overtime is needed, it’s probably better just rewarding the employee with an extra day holiday. As discussed earlier, offering additional money rewards people that create the need for overtime.

References:

Spotify – https://hrblog.spotify.com/2022/09/22/how-to-fight-quiet-quitting-by-creating-healthy-engagement/

Joshua Fluke –