What makes a good technical manager?

Is it possible to engineer the perfect boss? Google was up to the task and found data that will forever change the keys to getting promoted.

A few people posted, quoted and retweeted this INC. Article on my social media streams. The “Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.” is a good list and set of checkpoints.

For me though, as longtime readers will know, I’ve long been a believer in the non-technical manager, most of my best managers and executives were managers first and technical second. On one post on Facebook it summed it up as:

A good company employs managers to manage the company for employees, and employees for the company.

If the company doesn’t have senior technical non-manager positions and technicians are becoming managers to get promoted, you and the managers are at the wrong company in the first place.

I’d tried being a teamlead very early on in my career, it wasn’t good for me or the team, but then I was just 25-years old. Later on, not being a manager became a source of pride, making it through the corporate ranks at IBM without ever being a manager. My mentoring/career presentation has it on slide-2 and slide-10.

These days I think I’d be a good manager, my patience has certainly improved, I’ve achieved everything and more, that I set out to do, and while I’m still technical, I know my boundaries and wouldn’t want to cross them.

(My) Influential Women in Tech

Taking some time out of work in the technical, software, computer industry has been really helpful to give my brain time to sift through the required, the necessary, the nice, and the pointless things that I’ve been involved in over 41-years in technology.

Given that today is International Women’s Day 2016 and numerous tweets have flown by celebrating women, and given the people I follow, many women in Technology. I thought I’d take a minute to note some of the great women in Tech I had the opportunity to work with.

I was fortunate in that I spent much of my career at IBM. There is no doubt that IBM was a progressive employer on all fronts, women, minorities, the physically challenged, and that continues today with their unrelenting endorsement of the LGBT community. I never personally met or worked with current IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty, she like many that I did have the opportunity to work with, started out in Systems Engineering and moved into management. Those that I worked with included Barbara McDuffie, Leslie Wilkes, Linda Sanford and many others.

Among those in management at IBM that were most influential, Anona Amis at IBM UK. Anona was my manager in 1989-1990, at a time when I was frustrated and lacking direction after joining IBM two years earlier, with high hopes of doing important things. Anona, in the period of a year, taught me both how to value my contributions, but also how to make more valuable contributions. She was one of what I grew to learn, was the backbone of IBM, professional managers.

My four women of tech, may at sometime or other, have been managers. That though wasn’t why I was inspired by them.

Susan Malika: Sue, I met Sue initially through the CICS Product group, when we were first looking at ways to interface a web server to the CICS Transaction Monitor. Sue and the team already had a prototype connector implemented as a CGI. Over the coming years, I was influenced by Sue in a number of fields, especially in data interchange and her work on XML. Sue is still active in tech.

Peggy Zagelow: I’d always been pretty dismissive of databases, apart from a brief period with SQL/DS; I’d always managed fine without one. Early on in the days of evangelizing Java, I was routed to the IBM Santa Teresa lab, on an ad hoc query from Peggy about using Java as a procedures language for DB2. Her enthusiasm, and dogma about the structured, relational database; as well as her ability to code eloquently in Assembler was an inspiration. We later wrote a paper together, still available online[here]. Peggy is also still active in the tech sector at IBM.

Donna Dillenberger: Sometime in 1999, Donna and the then President of the IBM Academy of Technology, Ian Brackenbury, came to the IBM Bedfont office to discuss some ideas I had on making the Java Virtual Machine viable on large scale mainframe servers. Donna, translated a group of unconnected ideas and concepts I sketched out on a white board, into the “Scalable JVM”. The evolution of the JVM was a key stepping stone in the IBM evolution of Java. I’m pleased to see Donna was appointed an IBM Fellow in 2015. The paper on the JVM is here.(1).

Gerry Hackett: Finally, but most importantly, Geraldine aka Gerry Hackett. Gerry and I  met when she was a first line development manager in the IBM Virtual Machine development laboratory in Endicott New York, sometime around 1985. While Gerry would normally fall in the category of management, she is most steadfastly still an amazing technologist. Some years later I had the [dubious] pleasure of “flipping slides” for her as Gerry presented IBM Strategy. Aside: “Todays generation will never understand the tension between a speaker and a slide turner.” Today, Gerry is a Vice President at Dell. She recruited me to work at Dell in 2009, and under her leadership the firmware and embedded management team have made steady progress, and implemented some great ideas. Gerry has been a longtime advocate for women in technology, a career mentor, and a fantastic roll model.

Importantly, what all these women demonstrated, by the “bucketload”, was quiet, technological confidence; the ability to see, deliver and celebrate great ideas and great people. They were quiet unlike their male peers, not in achievement, but in approach. This why we need more women in technology, not because they are women, but because technical companies, and their products will not be as good without them.

(1). Edited to link to correct Dillenberger et al paper.

Retired Until Further Notice

RUFN. I can’t remember where I first saw this, I think on an ex-colleagues linked-in status(*1). Back in September I declared I was done with cube life and it didn’t take long before it was time to part company with Dell.

I’m at an important crossroads, starting to pack up my Austin home, and move to a new house my partner, Kate, and I are building just south east of Boulder CO. Kate is already living in Boulder, where we are partners in Boulder Bodyworker.

So it seemed like an appropriate time to take some time out, and start an exciting new phase of life for me. I’ll be keeping busy, while I don’t have any active movie or music projects at the moment, I am behind on working on a project for Tri Equal and also a member of the advisory board  of the Professional Triathlon Union and continuing generally as an activist in the triathlon community.

I’m available for consulting work in the new year, especially for small to medium sized businesses that want to get an insight or review of their technology strategy; a perspective and advice on working with open source; data center operations.

Otherwise I’ll post here as appropriate and see how things develop next year. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

 

*1. Yeah I’m aware of the slang usage.

Dell and EMC together

I’ve been asked a few times about the Dell/EMC merger/acquisition, I can say nothing, not because of financial or security regulations, but because I know nothing at all. Although it was clear some changes were afoot at Dell, the announcement came as a surprise to me.

A couple of things are amusing though in the industry analysis. The most amusing is the quotes coming out of other industry based organizations and their CEO’s. This is a classic of it’s kind, on the Register about Meg Whitman at HP, and then this one from Dietzen the CEO at Pure.

This moves comes out of ‘weakness, not strength’, claims CE Dietzen

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of this entirely predictable FUD a confident CEO would say something to the effect of

The acquisition will be challenging, but we welcome the increased competition and are sure customers and businesses will recognize and continue to benefit from the great products we already have, and those on our roadmap.

Of course no one would ever actually say that, one it doesn’t make headlines, and two because well…

The other thing that’s been disappointing is that other Dell trope, you can’t use Apple products. See as an example The Register:

I have one thing to say to MacBook users at EMC: Whoops

I have to say, I’m always surprised when I hear this kind of thing. Seriously, while I’m sure Michael Dell would prefer everyone use a dell tablet or laptop, I’m sure he’d rather have the most talented, productive people and being acquired and having to use new apps is enough of a productivity hit. Why on earth would he want to want to make it worse by enforcing a move of hardware, software and app paradigms. FYI there are a number of people in Dell Software Group, especially from the Quest acquisition, that have been using Apple products since the Quest acquisition.

Goodbye Cube life…

This month marks the end of my 41st year in information technology, IT; or a it was called back when I started, Data Processing.

Interestingly, officially yesterday I cleared out my “executive” cubicle at the mau5trap and for the first time became a remote (work-at-home) worker. I have to say I’d have preferred not to, but really given the distributed nature of our team it was simply a waste of time and space to maintain the cube, especially since I’m there infrequently; and for the most part, none of the other technical team members are.

It also means I don’t have to waste 90-minutes per day getting to and from the mau5trap, which has got significantly worse in the last 5-years. Yesterdays drive home was an epic waste of time, nearly 2-hours of which 90-mins was getting through downtown Austin.

Over the years I’ve worked at the head office of the businesses I’ve worked for; commuted by train, planes and automobiles to offices; worked on international assignment, temporary assignment, and virtual assignment; but I don’t ever recall actually giving up an office entirely before. In my later projects at IBM I was remote from the team and regularly worked from home; that was actually pretty demotivating.

As it turns out, it’s a pre-cursor to the start of other changes, and probably marks the beginning of the end of my technology career. I have no plans to retire just yet, but as someone who spent his career thriving off the enthusiasm and excitement created by being around others, spending days doing whiteboard architecture and design, I find the current state of tools, webex, powerpoint, chat and the omnipresent  email less and less an attraction.

Add to that my recent tendency to take-on the jobs and assignments no one else wants, or is hoping someone else will do, and there you have it.

| Edit. Thanks to #1 for pointing out I had too many “too’s”

Come work with us

We’re looking for a Senior Software Development Performance Engineer with a proven track record around performance engineering to join our Dell Software Common Engineering (CE) performance team. This team, as part of the Office of the CTO, helps product teams across the Software Group achieve their performance and scalability objectives through direct involvement and consulting engagements.

We are working on some key forward looking technologies essential to the future of Dell Software Group, and we need someone specifically to help on both performance design, as well as recommendations to the design and implementation teams.

Here is a direct link for the job application with a referral from me. As an Exec. I don’t qualify for the referral bonus, so if you know another Dell employee who isn’t an exec. feel free to reach out to them!

Operational Transparency

I’ve had a couple of emails and facebook comments that asked, or at least inferred, was this a real email? Yes, it was. I do get questions like these from time to time, it’s unusual to get all them all in a single email. The final question in the email from my colleague was:

 How important do you think operational transparency is?

My response was again curt and to the point. I think. without context for the question, this was the best I can do.

Very. There are time when it is OK to be opaque there is never a time to be deceptive. Your manager should never tell you he/she will work on a promotion for you when they know they have no ability to deliver it. They should never tell you your position is solid, when they know it isn’t.

Austin Business Journal posted an article with a quote from a University of Texas (UT) expert on recent staff actions at Dell. I wrote a response/comment which I think nicely bookends this series of posts. Thanks for all the positive feedback.

Dealing with difficult people

Question 3. in the email, and my answer, is really why I ended up writing this short series of blog posts. Having read back what I’d written, I realized that that after a couple of good answers, I’d been pretty superficial with my 3rd. The question posed was:

How do you go about dealing with difficult people and company politics?

My response was:

See my answer to 1. And 2. above. Got a family? It’s not different. If you shout at kids, yours, nieces, nephews, how productive is that really? Sometimes you can bully people to change, it is almost always better to show them a better way.

This is indeed over simplistic, without context. Of course, it’s what you should do. The more you get embroiled in office politics, the more it is likely to distract you from your real value, being great at what you do. If being great at what you do is being difficult and company politics, well good luck with that, we all know people that have to some degree “made it” because they’ve been good at using system, for everyone of those though, there are 5 who made it because they are good at what they do.

Failing organizations and companies are ripe with people trying to control the system to their advantage; trying to cheat or deceive on their contributions, but my experience has always been that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Again, Nigel covers in the 3 Minute Mentor a goodr case where company politics come into play, where teams, departments are pitted against themselves, either deliberately or inadvertently, it’s worth watching or reading his show notes.

Still, I fall back on be good, have fun, do what you love and leave the politics to others.

Career goals and aspirations

Following on from yesterdays post, the 2nd question that came up in the email was:

What is the most effective way to build and achieve career goals?

Before I get to my answer, I’d like put in a plug for the 3 Minute Mentor website created, run and produced by long time friend, ex-colleague and fellow Brit’ ex-pat Nigel Dessau. Nigel and I worked together as far back as 1991, and he has produced a fine set of short, topic based video advice guides. I don’t agree with all of them, but they are a fantastic resource.

The very first 3 Minute Mentor episode was in fact, “How should I plan a career?” – My take of careers has been long documented in my now 15-year old, “Ways to measure progress” presentation, available in it’s original format on slideshare.net or in the 2012 format Technical and Professional careers I delivered at Texas A&M.

My approach has always been to set a long term goal, and then judge changes and opportunities against that goal. My email answer makes sense in that context.

This is a long term objective. As per the presentation(see above), you need to evaluate each and every job and assignment against a long term objective, depending on what you are aiming for long term, you may or may not decide to take a short term job. For example, I took an assignment in New York as a stepping stone to get here in Austin. I’d worked in NY before had had no desire to go back. However, equally it wasn’t clear how I would get assigned to Austin, so I took the NY job and worked on connections here[Austin] to create the opportunity to move to Austin

Next up, “How do you go about dealing with difficult people and company politics?”

How to stay relevant

I received an email from a colleague in one of the acquired companies, he asked among other things

What is the most effective way to influence or implement positive change at large companies

Rather than dump my entire email reply here, I thought I’d break it up into a few shorter posts.

Easy to say, not so easy to do. You have to demonstrate sustained track record of delivering on important projects. You have to make yourself relevant. How do you stay relevant? Start with tracking what is important to your boss, then meet deadlines; volunteer for hard projects; mentor; measure and report results; always be positive, the glass is always half full; work hard; volunteer more. Make yourself indispensable. When you think you’ve done that for your boss, move on, track what his/her boss thinks is important, lather, rinse, repeat.

Recently someone told me they couldn’t make progress because corporate “branding” was telling him that he had to deliver what was important to them. I asked who “they” was, he was evasive. This was useful as it showed he’d been beaten down by the system. There is no such person as Corporate Branding, it’s a team of people, managers and executives. They have a job and they have objectives. Getting beaten down by them just shows that he hadn’t thought it through and taken his case to the right people. Everything, yes, everything is fixable in a large company, you just have to decide its worth fixing and knowing that you can only do this in a positive forward looking way. Anything else requires people to admit they were wrong, who does that?

Some things are not worth fixing.

Design and development in a globally distributed corporation

This wasn’t a rehearsed or officially blessed presentation. I was given a last minute opportunity to speak to the students at the Sun Yat-sen University(SYSU) school mobile engineering (SMIE) Industry Elite Lecture Series.

We spent longer than planned looking at a number of the unique mobile/transportation, “Internet of Things” student projects. When we arrived late, at 7:45 in the evening, the room was already packed with students lined up on the back wall, as well as sat on the floor.

Speaking to students is always much more challenging than a industry organization. It’s much easier to make assumptions about the level of knowledge of the attendees at Industry events, you can’t make the same assumption about students. Also, giving a talk to those who don’t have the same first language, also requires you to to speak at a cadence that allows them to do realtime translation. A mistake a lot of speakers make, is they speak at their normal pace(often very fast) and stop and wait; the alternative and much worse as both a speaker, and as a listener is when the speaker speaks words slowly and leave big gaps between words, this means lost context and emphasis for both the speaker and the listener, either makes for a dull presentation.

I clearly need to work on my fillers, I said “right?” a few too many times. Based on the long Q&A period after the presentation, both Geoff and I got our points over and overall it was a very enjoyable visit.

The second half of the presentation Geoff talks about the Dell Software Application Monitoring product Foglight, and some of its’ features and functions.

Dell software growth

We have a lot of things going on now, with the new Dell Software group emerging rapidly from the acquisitions we’ve made over the past few years.

I just saw a tweet this tweet

Join @dell Software in #Madison – Senior Software Engineer for #NoSQL #WebServices shar.es/l57f7 #job #Wisconsin

— Tom Willis (@TomWillisQSFT) May 2, 2013

During my tour of Dell Software Group R&D centers last year, one I was really impressed with was the Madison , WI center. Vibrant, community engaged, and doing interesting projects. This is one vacancy, there many available across the portfolio, you can search starting at the page in the tweet. Feel free to get in touch if you are interested in any of them, leave a comment here, or contact me via mark underscore cathcart at dell dot com.

Good at PowerPoint?

Current status (to quote @cathcam): “I used to be good at my job. Now I’m just good at PowerPoint.”

— cote (@cote) May 23, 2012

Careers and Professions in IT

I’ve updated my old “Seven” presentation on managing your career, which I developed some 10-12 years ago, I’m giving a talk at Texas A&M University next week.Careers and Professions in IT.

Large-scale Software Engineering at High Speed

I very much enjoyed presenting the Distinguished Lecture at this years Texas A&M Industrial Affiliates Program, and have uploaded my slides to slideshare.net. I had the opportunity to review and judge a number of the under grad and doctorate poster sessions, and was impressed with both the breadth of the ideas being explored and the depth of the doctoral thesis topics. Some very imaginative projects. I liked a couple so much I’m going to make an effort to get them in as summer interns here at Dell.

Visiting Universities and especially Computer Science classes is always fascinating, any trends that are going to happen are often really visible in this type of environment. What I noticed, and I shouldn’t have been surprised, was a number of this year under-grad class with projects using Android phones and bluetooth, combined with GPS. There were proximity projects, location awareness projects, directions finding projects and more. None really required a GSM contract.

What this indicates is that Android based mobile phones are becoming generalized computing platforms, not just smart phones. Of course, if they are doing this at Texas A&M, similar projects will be running at other universities all over the world. The knowledge, education and development in this space will push the next generation apps, often around the same platform. Back in 1998, I visited Warwick and a number of other Universities and this convinced me Linux was coming.

Today, we’re in an era where speed is of the essence.

• It’s critical for competitive reasons to stay ahead of the competition.
• The customer expectation for the Internet is much higher.

Engineering is a discipline.

• Foundation: I look for people who have a firm foundation in engineering and treat it like a discipline
• Definition: Look up engineering on Wikipedia and the first descriptive word behind it is discipline (followed by art and profession)
• Software: Software is NOT [treated like] an engineering discipline today.[It’s all about invention]
• Discipline: The key to success: We have to get better as a profession at treating software engineering like a discipline.

Culture is critical.

• Garage band?: The days of four or five people starting out of their garage and working that way is less common now[in the enterprise app space, but increasing IS in the personal space].
• Big=global. Most big projects are globally distributed and developed.
• Global differences. The attitude and approach of teams in the USA, India, and China will be vastly different.
• Play to cultural strengths. Adapt to cultural strengths — understand, and use them to your benefit.

Process matters.

• The “how”: It’s not just what you’re doing, but how you do it.
• No surprises: Good ≠ good; Bad ≠ bad
• Communicate: Overcommunicate if needed, but make sure people understand and are aligned.
• Incremental works: Let people see checkpoints where they can gauge progress and give individual groups/teams a chance to report out. You don’t need everyone to review.

Architecture must support the engineering.

• No roadblock: Architecture can’t get in the way of engineering/development.
• Good architecture: Allows people to work effectively in a globally distributed environment.
• Vertical no more: Silos were the old way; technology grew up vertically.
• Alignment: The way people think about constructing systems needs to match the engineering.
• x86 and Cloud: Both allow for globally distributed environment (open source is another example)

Customer First: Dells Software Approach

• Starting anew: Starting and building from scratch
• Integration: It’s all about bringing elements together
• Customer choice: We’re taking a different approach, delivering customer choice through open, horizontal integration (customers can choose hardware – storage, networking – and hypervisor)

Thanks to Michael Conway in Dell Product Group for helping me crystallize my thoughts into a concise structure for the slides. Also to Dr Valerie Taylor, Department Head and Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship in Engineering at Texas A&M for the invitation and for hosting my visit.

As always, if you have any comments or feedback, please feel free to post here, or via email.