Completely Geeked

If you’ve worked with me on a consulting project, there’s a fair likelihood you know I don’t like referring to potential members of ad hoc teams as “resources”. Why? People make a project succeed or fail. “Resource” attempts to abstract away this dependence on individuals.

In the more-of-the-same department, I am also coming to dislike the term “consumers”. It tries to do the same thing as “resources”: provide a convenient abstraction that lets you consider individuals in bulk, en masse. It conveniently dehumanizes people for easier handling.

Is there an alternative?

Could we build a culture that focuses on individuals?

What if we could consider every shorthand for human suffering, every statistic, every financial human excess, every normal success, every modest virtue — not at an aggregate level, but on a by the individual basis?

Admittedly, from my current point of view, this would be overwhelming. How would I assimilate the information about even one day’s worth of human activity with zero aggregation?

I wouldn’t — much would drop, just like it does today, but the information I connected with would be much clearer, the people on the end of it much more human.

And that would be interesting.

First, a confession: back when I was hip deep in code every day, I didn’t have a lot of respect for marketing. It seemed fluffy and too close to the Dilbert world.

I started to change my mind a few years ago, and the job I took in Feb 2010 is actually part of the marketing department (yes, I knew that going in   ). It brings me into contact with marketing people day in and day out and I have a new-found respect for  marketers and recognize a few differences in the way practitioners of each discipline think.

One difference that’s stood out to me lately is the concept of “done”.

Most developers I know look at their //TODO list, and start to tackle it. With enthusiasm. Sometimes a little too much. For example, most less-experienced devs will breeze through their list, declare it “DONE!” and ask what’s next. Which sounds great until you realize their definition of “done” is grossly inadequate. So you give them a definition that works for you and that usually fixes the problem. More-experienced developers take a different tack but strive to end up in the same place: done.  Done is accomplishment.  Done is satisfaction.  Done is virtue.

Marketers on the other hand don’t seem to hold the concept of “done” in the same esteem. It’s not that there aren’t deadlines or milestones or tasks that need doing — of course there are. The difference is that the goal is typically to connect with potential customers, and “connect” is very ambiguous.  It always ends up with the idea that someone who can benefit from the product becomes willing to pay for the product, but it can take many turns between start and finish.  A marketer will try something, and then try a slight variation, and then another, and then another, and so on.

Where a dev might think, I’ve already done that, why would I do it again? A marketer will think, let me try this one more time.   It’s an endless refactor.

Sure, it’s true that devs create the things marketing wants to use (although hopefully there’s some cooperation and cross-functional design, right?) but marketers often have a very tough gig: exposing the product, helping people understand the product and building a message that really helps people connect with the product.

You might be thinking (like I have sometimes thought), yeah, but if the product is any good, all that happens on its own via word of mouth.  That might be true for 0.01% of products, but you can’t count on that.  If 80% of new products deserve to die, and 20% are worthwhile, getting people to see and understand the 19.99% that aren’t overnight successes takes creativity, patience and insight.

So if you are a dev who is occasionally a little under appreciative of your marketing brethren, take another look.  You might like what you see.

If I go out for Mexican food, as we are want to do on Easter, I can pretty much guarantee that I will eat more than I should.  The delicious guacamole — who can resist its powers?

Which got me thinking about great Mexican food themed band names.

The Enchilada Aftermath.

The Fajita Hangover.

The Guacamole Underground.

You get the idea.  In fact, there should be a generator for these.  Someone should get on that.  Someone other than me.  But please definitely let me know about it and if you are a band with this kind of name please by all means let me know.

Side note: it’s shockingly easy to find a picture of a bunny in a sombrero.  The world is a strange place.

If I got lost in a store as a child, you could be pretty sure I’d wind up on the small home appliances aisle. I’ve never spent much time trying to deconstruct this. Blenders. Toaster ovens. Electric can openers. Juicers.

Yet, this morning, this Easter, it’s front brain material. Why? Who knows. Maybe it’s just easier than wondering why she-who-must-not-be-named (you know, former “leader” of Alaska, etc) showed up in my dream leading, of all things, a standing ovation for me.

Childhood obsession? Semi-relevant politicians? You can’t explain that.

Look: just because I didn’t respond to you, it doesn’t mean I’m ignoring you. Times being what they are, I might have attempted to listen to you while I was multi-tasking and interpreted your comment through that context and arrived at a totally different meaning from what you intended–or maybe I arrived at no meaning whatsoever. Sorry. Try saying it again. Try a different approach. And if it seems like the message didn’t stick, try reminding me about it. It won’t bother me. I’ll appreciate it. I promise.

The end of the week finds me both frustrated and optimistic: frustrated because almost never a week goes by where I accomplish everything I want to and optimistic because, well, it’s almost the most highly prized period known to the modern western salaryman, The Weekend.  I’ve always had a hard time balancing my goals at work with the time available to accomplish them and this border day is where I notice the leftovers most clearly.  This out-of-balance-ness and sudden-notice-ness occasionally leads to regrettable interpersonal awkwardness, my own mild kernal panic, something I might also call a prominent not-so-fresh-feeling (to steal a phrase and then use it inappropriately for light comedic affect).  Sadly, the titans of industry haven’t yet invented a convenient spray to control this condition, which means I’m on my own.  So here’s my strategy: today will be about careful attention to detail, clean contexts for all interactions and acceptance that there’s only so much time in the day.

Day after week after month after year, information floats by, some useful, some benign, some purely malevolent.  The best kind expands our consciousness of the world, the worst kind causes us to focus even more deeply on our basest human shortcomings.  Somewhere in the middle is “news”.  How do you tell the difference?  I look at the aftertaste.  Is it sickly sweet? Salty enough that I need to rinse my mouth out?  Was it a new flavor, something I’ve never experienced before?  Am I emotionally out of control?  Are my passions inflamed or are my curiosities tingled?  Does it feel like this “news” will have meaning in an hour? in a day? Week? Month? Year?  Most “news” doesn’t, which means most “news” isn’t.  Call it eyeball attractor.  Call it ego candy. Call it artificial sweetener.  Call it, not worth my time.

The cadence of my day is almost always entirely up to me. Since I have a persistent curiosity about the world and it’s doings, I can, if I choose, put in regular visits to a variety of “news” sites throughout the day (throughout the hour, throughout the half hour, throughout the quarter hour, throughout the minute). It’s emotional candy, even when I see that no, the major sites haven’t added anything new. In other words, even when my information gathering strategy fails, it feels like success: I’ve verified that I’m reasonably up to date.  This is a frustrating side effect of newspapers’ (pending) extinction: the shared organizing principle around the morning news has been replaced with a constant anxiety that there is something, somewhere, dramatic and important and life changing, that I’m missing because I haven’t taken the time to look for it.

I’ve started to write in Mac’s TextEdit. It’s completely clean. No formatting options, no help bubbles, just text on a clean background — zero distractions. It helps me focus on what I want to say, what I want to think about, instead of how what I want to say looks. What a relief.