Time has been scarce these past few weeks, and this week in particular has been the busiest. Recovery time from work has been compressed to approximately three hours a day. Each work day this week has started at approximately 6:30am. At that time, a 1.5-hour commute to Irvine begins. Then, approximately seven to nine hours of continous work is committed. Work is interrupted by a 1.5-hour dinner, and work resumes for about three hours before the one-hour commute back home. Another two to three hour session of work occurs before I sleep and recondition for the next day. Time for sleep has started between the hours of 11pm and 2am this week. This week has been very busy. More importantly, this week resulted in multiple accomplishments.
I was dropped into a somewhat alien environment and utilized as a resource to develop the environment into one of stability and normalcy. I believe I effectively used the resources that were made available to me, and these resources were vital to the timely completion of my objectives. I observed a lot of interesting things that I intend to examine in future postmortems.
After reading Ed Bott’s “Is Microsoft about to release a Windows ‘kill switch’?” , my only recommendation is that people take their money out of Microsoft and put it somewhere else. A computer that runs Microsoft Windows, pirated or not, is owned by a potential customer for software publishers that target the platform. Microsoft might be reducing software theft and pressuring people to get software licenses in order to increase short-term shareholder value. There is a slight risk of some consumers turning away from Microsoft, further reducing Microsoft Windows market share in desktop operating systems and making Microsoft more irrelevant. On a positive note, this may encourage software publishers to target operating systems other than Microsoft Windows and help foster alternative productivity environments.
Note: I do not have any positions in either of the companies mentioned.
There has been a lot of negative sentiment on technical support and customer care representatives lately. I’ve voiced some frustration with Sprint’s front-line technical support staff before. Poor customer service over the phone has also been publicized with Vincent Ferrari’s AOL episode as well as a recent video taping of a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch while waiting for assistance from his peers. Because people are likely driven by self-interest, there really is no reason for customers to give feedback for anything other than complaints.
This entry bucks the trend. I was recently frustrated with my DSL connection. I have had this connection for almost three years, and I have never before had a problem. My connection started dropping multiple times throughout each day. I reached for technical support at AT&T (formerly SBC). The phone support was mediocre, but the people that provided service at my house were exceptional technicians. Both of these technicians did their job above my expectations and perhaps outside of their protocol.
Now, my connection is stable, and I am a content customer once again. Their equipment may or may not have been faulty, but my home’s phone wiring is a more likely cause of the service disruptions. There were two ways to resolve the problem: go with cable or fix my inside wiring. Since the necessary wires were readily available, ahem, my inside wiring was fixed quickly.
In Tales of Vista development at MSFT, Scott Berkun finds a money quote from a former Vista development manager. After finding resistance when reporting the truth, particularly of but not limited to slipping project schedules, engineers tend to fold. Travel 3,000 miles on foot within 2 hours? You, got it boss!
An article claims that Backward Switches Doomed Probe. This does not mean that Lockheed Martin’s engineers are incompetent. Aerospace engineers are highly respected for the engineering problems they have solved and continually face. The article, instead, discusses the possibility that time and cost constraints on the production of the probe resulted in the probe’s failure. This brings to mind a chef analogy that I consistently use to control production schedules and damper client demands for immediate results.
Fred Brooks states in The Mythical Man-Month:
Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it is not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices–wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.
The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save–burned in one part, raw in another.
Although euphoria or a sense of power may be experienced by tightening a production schedule, doing so for artificial reasons unnecessarily minimizes a key resource that is available to an engineer for producing a quality system. Engineers pride themselves on the quality of their work. They gain pride in developing efficient systems in an efficient manner. Time is a fundamental resource used throughout the development effort. Most time is spent on coordination and planning to minimize the amount of time that is used on implementation and error correction. If an engineer takes time in implementing a system, it is simply because the engineer is building a system that works well. Fred Brooks notes, “More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.”