I was just reading Don’t Dismiss Office Politics—Teach It and thinking about my own and others’ experiences with this subject. While the Wall Street Journal article focuses on executives, dismissing the role of office politics in non-executive jobs can be quite harmful to one’s career.

Now mind you, most office politics are completely ridiculous and counterproductive.

That’s right: counterproductive.

Most office politics issues create friction between people based on illusions and people’s inflated egos. The office society is very much like high school. Sometimes middle school. The popular do what they want, even if that is not doing their job, while the ones who want to get their job done are usually berated without cause and hated for actually wanting to work and doing their jobs!

Whoa! Now we’ve gone back to elementary school. People are shunned, cliques are formed, and productivity goes down.

Why are there so many managers stuck with this childish attitude?

One of the reasons I notice is that most managers are not qualified to be managers. Period. Yet they want the job because of the power, prestige, and money. Another reason that goes along with this, especially in the technology industry, is the self-illusion many engineers have that they can both manage and still be hands on and technical. This is an extremely rare combination and usually requires one working double the hours: two jobs at the same company for much less than twice the pay. This is something very few managers are willing to do. In addition, the rarity of this capability in people makes people defensive when they take a manager position, realize they can’t do both hands on work and managerial work, but don’t want to give it up.

So what to do?

I certainly don’t have all the answers. Part of the solution is for higher level executives to learn and train to recognize talent. To promote according to skill and ability, not simply according to seniority in years. Another is for people to honestly look at themselves and what they can do. If you’re putting in 60 hours a week now hands on and you want a manager’s title, are you willing to put in 120 hours a week to still be hands on and (assuming you have managerial skills–most people don’t) be a manger? If not, don’t apply.

The simplest solution and one that I see not being exercised over and over again is this: impose penalties on workers that do not do their job. I have seen everyone from junior members to CEOs and everyone in between not doing their job along with the negative effect this has had on their respective companies. Yet people are unwilling to take reprimanding, corrective action even when they admit there are problems, even when the problems are affecting the company, even when the problems are so huge, they have the potential to ruin the whole company and drive it out of business.

This is not surprising considering the indecisiveness and fear of most managers and their childish attitudes. It is unacceptable, however. If someone is not performing up to par constantly, it’s time to fire them!

Just don’t do it based on your feelings. Do it based on performance.

If you are fair and rational, you will realize you may have to quit or demote yourself if you are the problem you cannot fix. This is, unfortunately highly unlikely as most people are unwilling to even admit they are the problem and project it onto someone else, continuing the cycle of creating companies whose culture is about as professional as that of teenagers in middle school.

http://mwop.net/blog/267-Getting-started-writing-ZF2-modules

Yet another reason shares/options are bullshit. Actually, they’re worth less. Bullshit at least fertilizes soil.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stock-or-youll-be-fired/

UPDATE: Another interesting article:

‘”I know you had a higher salary in mind, but Zynga’s really going places. We’re offering you some shares in the company that will be incredibly valuable once we go public. I don’t want to make any promises, but when Google went public in 2004, more than 900 of its employees instantly became millionaires! So this is a potentially wealth-creating opportunity.”‘

http://www.itworld.com/software/223167/way-build-employee-morale-zynga

Life is about learning. Without learning, we get stuck in the same patterns, the same ideas and ways of thinking. Memes begin to rule our thoughts and slowly, our minds degrade, melting like lava down a mountain–a slow smolten crawl till we finally reach death.

Death while physiologically alive.

So what to do? Learn something new. It’s time to embark on yet another journey into the unknown and rekindle the love for knowledge.

Philosophia

The power of siu nim tao should never be underestimated!

Sure, it must have been relatively easy (or perhaps quite difficult, who knows?) for these business folk to convince themselves of this very fact. But what about convincing other business people, executives, VPs, managers, etc? Why are people falling for this?

If I offered you monopoly money to work 16 hour days at meager to non-existent pay for months, neglecting yourself, your health, your family, your passions, your activities, your hobbies, the outside world, the sun, and everything that constitutes your life, would you do it? Probably not. Yet, people do it constantly for something that is worth even less than monopoly money–monopoly money can at least be used to play the board game, which can be quite fun.

Think about the odds of getting rich off of options. Even as the CEO of a new startup, your startup still has to become successful. It must be able to pay off the large parts that were sold to venture capitalists, angels, and other types of investors, and still have money for your 5-10% (if you’re lucky). Money enough to retire? Hardly. Or at least money enough to make worthwhile giving away at least four years of your life for?

Chances are, you’re more likely to win the lottery than become a millionaire from startup options. True, I haven’t actually calculated mathematical probability. I have calculated the probability of that happening at various startups I’ve worked at, however, based on my past experiences and experience at the startup. I have seen people leave startups and not even spend a few hundred dollars to cash in their options. I’ve listened to startup veterans describe the worthlessness of their shares.

The chances of success are not only extremely low, they are made lower by incompetent people, usually of the business or product variety, that will cause even a startup with a lot of potential to lose any value it might have in the off-chance that it might reach its exit strategy and either sell out (good luck) or even possibly IPO (yeah right). Decisions made in a hurried fashion to get a product to market, a product that has no reason to be hurried. Trading a quality product because of perceived competition from whom? And who the hell wrote this horrible codebase to get us here?

In fact, where the hell is here? Where are we? And what are we doing here other than pretending to create something revolutionary and amazing and celebrating this pretension?

For the adrenaline junkies who get a rush from this, more power to you. For the rest of us, myself included, I’d like to stop hearing how “amazing” a job opportunity can be. How it can be “life changing.” Damn right it can be life changing. As in not having a life! Losing years drowned out in working only to get neither the satisfaction of having worked on a great product or the monetary compensation of having worked on a product, whether great, average, or piss-poor.

I’ll take the cash please. If it can’t go towards a plane ticket that takes me to my vacation spot where I don’t need to bring my laptop or smart phone, where I won’t be bothered by people who only value me for what I can do when I put myself between the chair and the monitor, then it’s just simply not worth it. I’ve missed out on years of my life and I’m through doing that to myself.

Repeating the same thing and expecting different results: the definition of insanity. Will this insanity ever stop? I see so many job postings that specifically state you are trading your life away for meager pay and a bunch of worthless paper.

Work to live or live to work?

How much of your life are you going to gamble away? For how much longer?

GA anyone?

I feel something deep in the pit of my stomach as if I had just woken up with an extreme hangover. A pounding headache starts to pulsate from the back of my skull getting stronger and stronger. First the dizziness and then the double vision. I can feel vomit in my throat and I struggle to keep it down. Losing my balance, I just can’t take it any more and …

… WAIT! I realize I’m in an interview talking to a prospective employer or contractee. I’m not hung over. And I’m not physically sick.

Yet I am. What makes people want to rewrite the wheel for the n^th time? Then the “reasons” come:

“We wanted to fully understand what was going on in our code.” — Why because you have a bunch of stupid monkeys who can’t read code?

“We wanted control.” — Ah retarded control freaks. Wonderful!

“We have a really smart and schooled guy who created this specifically for our needs.” — Oh you mean he or she is smarter than the thousands of people contributing thousands of hours for free in the open source community? Oh wait, he’s just a brazen egomaniac. Do you even know your needs?

I thought that as engineers, we were supposed to be logical.

“I think that reinventing the wheel is silly … It is a sign of the immaturity of our field that people resists adopting more advanced tools and prefer to spend their energies reinventing things using primitive tools rather than taking the time to learn more powerful ones.” – Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++ (http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/nantes-interview-english.html)

I’ve been programming for about 17 years, the last 6 or so doing web development using PHP and JS as server and client side languages respectively. Back in the days when I used to program in C or C++, even QBasic, I had little communication with the outside world. A few books with highly treasured floppies or perhaps even a CD-ROM! Then I finally got internet access, and I was almost overwhelmed. The treasure I had been seeking out was not so elusive, so expensive, so mysterious as it once had been. In fact, it was free and quite readily available.

I had found more code! Tons of it. Other people’s code. Now, I know that last phrase scares the shit out of many mediocre (at best) code monkeys. At times, I too have been wary of approaching and using other people’s code. And this is not a bad attitude per se. Just like meeting other people, we have to be careful, be on guard, have a little skepticism. We have to judge others just as we judge others’ code. After all, there’s a ton of bad people out there and even more bad code.

Then again, there are a ton of better developers out there than me, many of which are writing this code and giving it away for free.

We’re talking about tried and true frameworks a.k.a. libraries. Things like Zend Framework and jQuery. Code that has been used in large, professional applications and has prevailed in the real world, in real-world apps. Code that is backed by a community–a community of people who care enough about it to spend their spare time, without compensation, creating, maintaining, and improving the code. Not just the code either. Documentation, tests, email lists, forums, etc.

“Beg, borrow, or steal before rewriting your own code.” These are wise words from someone I respect very much. Each application, before being started has to be evaluated for its requirements and the best tools need to be chosen to complete it. Most web applications are really not all that different and implement commonly used patterns such as MVC. In 99.999% of cases, a web app is not that unique that it needs to be rewritten from the ground up.

Yet still so many people do it. I can only attribute this to stupidity and ego. People dumb and brazen enough to think they can do better than the open source community, people who have not studied the current tools available and prefer to play this children’s game. Immature children writing and architecting supposedly mature software.

I’ve seen it over and over and I think it’s time this needs to stop. These “engineers” and “architects” need to be called out and held accountable for the shit they have created. The abominations they have brought into the world. In a lot of cases, they themselves do not wish to program or use the “framework” or “library” they have created, but still claim that it is “better than anything else out there.” The engineers who have to work in this garbage are stuck with it because product and business people do not realize the problem.

It’s time for companies to realize the technical debt they are incurring by allowing these retarded rogue developers to roam free. If not now, it will be too late by the time it comes to the attention of the business people that their app is no longer maintainable, no one (employee or potential employee) wants to work on the garbage that was once the “magnificent” idea of some moron, and no big company wants to buy out their startup because any worth it may have conceptually had would be in the technology which is proven to be abhorrent to the buyer after a code audit.

If philosophies and perceptions are not changed now, it is likely there won’t be a chance later.

refactor($perceptions, $philosophies, $code) or die;