Monthly Archives: June 2012

Tie Guy, Reporting for Duty

28 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by in Business

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“I’ve wanted to ask for a while… why do you wear a tie?”

Not an unusual question for me. My office dress code is perfectly fine with jeans and a T-Shirt; in fact, that’s the norm. Plaid flannel, beige shorts, “pumped up kicks”, all good. As far as I know, I’m the only one who shows up in a shirt and tie on a daily basis. Honestly, the fact that I can dress differently and not be an outsider is an ironic testament to the open-mindedness of the office culture.

But why do I do it?

The simple answer: I like it.

The longer answer… well that’s more complicated. Personally, the process of getting ready in the morning and “suiting up” (sans blazer during the warmer months) gets me in the mood for work every day. It is a ritual sacrifice to the gods of business in hopes they will bless me with fewer bug reports. But when I get those bug reports, you can bet I’m ready to take them on.

To me, the tie is a reminder that I am part of a larger whole. It is a reminder in looking professional that I should also act professional. When I’m having a bad day and drudging through complicated problems, it’s a reminder that whenever it sucks for me, it sucks for somebody else who is using my creations even worse. Every moment I haven’t fixed the problem, they are less productive. It’s a reminder that as much as it would be nice to pass the problem on to somebody and forget about it, it is my responsibility, as part of the bigger group, to make sure it gets solved and not endlessly passed around. The people who need it fixed are funding our paychecks and they can take their money elsewhere. It is a reminder that when I screw up and it could affect other members of the greater team, they have a right to know as soon as possible so they can have the best shot at solving whatever problems it may cause them.

If a problem becomes frustrating and I want to just throw up my hands, it is a reminder that getting angry doesn’t help the company. Holding grudges doesn’t solve the problems for the customer. It’s a reminder to stop taking it personally and just look for the path that leads to an answer, no matter how much patience or time that answer is going to take. As a professional, it is my responsibility to have answers, get answers or direct people to answers. We’re all in it together.

You don’t need a tie to be professional, and a lot of people are much more comfortable not wearing one. Mandatory dress codes enforcing ties or suits don’t lead to more professional employees.

I just like ties.

The tie is my talisman.

Flow Revisited

26 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Engineering

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During a big buy-out announcement recently within my company, one of the speakers mentioned the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Now that I spend a lot of time as an NYC straphanger, I get a lot reading in during my daily commute and decided that coming from influential and successful people, it was a safe bet that it was a good read.

Let me just say up front: wow. It is not a smooth read, and at times the writing style is a bit repetitive, but the content of the book is amazing, and the majority of it is references to psychological studies around the world. If you have any desire to understand what motivates you or how you as a manager could motivate your employees, this is a must read. I’ve discovered things about myself that I did not effectively realize before, and beyond that discovered that I am not alone in them.

The core concept of the book is that human beings are far more complicated than can be modeled with a simple reward-driven behavior (“carrot and stick“). We have an innate desire to solve problems as well. When it comes to salary, as long as we are receiving fair pay or are not having money problems, more money is a very poor motivator. In fact, if you dangle the carrot of a (especially monetary) reward as a reason to do something, you can severely damage long term motivation and the desire to excel on that project. Essentially you can turn a fun project into drudgery by associating money with it.

They actually brought up Open Source web development as an example of how great things can come out of volunteer work. I take a bit of issue with that since most successful open source projects have some of the core pieces in place and are only supported because big money-spending companies back them and pay people within their own companies to make contributions. However, the idea is still reasonably sound.

Bringing this back to my previous post on the “good vs bad” sides of achieving “flow“, the book noted that it becomes much more difficult to reach flow when you are working on a project for a monetary reward. This helps to explain why when you are writing code for fun and solving problems on your own time, you can end up glancing bleary-eyed out of the window and realize it’s 5AM. If you are doing the same project for work because somebody is pushing a deadline on you, you can be checking the clock every five minutes until it’s 6PM and you can leave without feeling too guilty.

In independent analysis of the results of work in both situations, the people building for fun very consistently create higher quality code.

I say score ++ for flow.