Seebach Exhibit 7

I recently picked up a copy of Robert Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule.

It’s pretty interesting. The basic thesis: People who are demeaning, hostile, and basically bullies, make work less pleasant and overall harm performance. The widespread belief that such people are worth it if they perform better than other people is, it turns out, not particularly justified.

This resonates with things I’ve experienced. One of my first jobs had a tendency for derision, bullying, and hostility. People who screwed up had fast food job apps left in their inboxes. I was doing testing, and one of my bug reports (a program crashed if you clicked a button too often) got posted in someone’s cube with “QA Hard At Work!” on it. Well, let me tell you, that sure wasn’t motivational in any positive sense. I didn’t help by being pretty blunt with criticisms — but then, how was I supposed to know better? It’s not as if I had a lot of prior work environments to compare them with. I do remember being particularly frustrated that, although I did get admonished once for being too critical:

1. Nothing was done about the bugs. Not much point to having testing if you ignore the bugs the testers find, right?
2. So far as I can tell, the problem wasn’t “being too critical” but “being too critical while a junior employee”.

Fastforward a while. I’m now pretty good at this stuff, and I have reputation and experience. I have a fair amount of room to pick what I want out of a job. I’m working with people I like, in a corporate culture I like. Some thoughts on that.

I don’t think we explicitly have a “no-asshole” rule; if we do, I’ve not been told of it. We do, however, have a corporate culture which undermines the things that are essential for bullying. There’s a total lack of interest in blame, so far as I can tell. People certainly can, and do, try to figure out how something went wrong — but not for the purpose of assigning blame, just for the purpose of fixing it. No one expects that people won’t make mistakes, or yells at them for making mistakes. As a result, people are more comfortable than they might otherwise be coming forward with information about problems which were caused by their mistakes. Net result: Less time trying to shift blame, less time before the problem is fixed.

Beyond that, openness about the existence of mistakes and problems makes it easier to fix things. Try to correct a mistake you can’t admit that you made, and watch how hard it is. Now look what happens when you can admit that you made a mistake; you have a much easier time addressing it and correcting it.

One of the things I found most fascinating in this book is the discussion of how bullies and status relationships go together. I’m mostly status-blind; I’m aware of the concept, but I don’t seem to process it. Life at Wind River has been a good fit for me. No one cares whether I’m junior or senior. If someone asks me a question, I try to give a good answer. If I ask someone a question, they try to give me a good answer.

When I was at that job long ago, and I said something looked wrong, it was treated as a violation of protocol, because I was wasting the time of people who were better paid. Well, at Wind River, some of my coworkers are fresh out of college… and live in China. I dunno what they get paid, but it’s a lot less, I suspect, than we get over hear in North America. (Both because of cost of living and because they’re relatively inexperienced.) But no one expects them to refrain from questioning us. They do, and sometimes they’re right. If we were gonna be bottom-line focused, that would be enough. It only takes me a few minutes to answer a question from someone who thinks I’ve made a mistake; the one time they caught something that would have cost a week’s work for the whole testing team, which I’d (incorrectly) dismissed, that more than paid for the next twenty or thirty times.

But, ultimately, that’s not the right question. The question is not whether my time is worth more than their time; it’s whether my time is worth more than their dignity as human beings. And it frankly isn’t. Once you understand that, the rest falls into place.

It’s not that there’s no teasing at work. It’s that the teasing is friendly. If people are actually upset, they don’t tease, they criticize calmly, politely, and usually in private. Public criticisms are carefully directed away from the person who happened to do something, to the general pattern of the action, or the reason for which it was a problem. We have a relaxed and informal culture, where people are encouraged to speak their minds without regard to nominal status, or some perception of the “value” of different peoples’ time. It works; we have a good time, and we get stuff done.

This book is awesome, not because the conclusion is particularly surprising or unexpected, but because Sutton did a great job of finding statistics, studies, and evidence to show that the conclusion is good even if you don’t care about people. In other words, even if you don’t care about people, just about the bottom line, the way to success is to learn to care about people. Not hugely surprising, but nice to have stronger evidence for it.

This place is crazy.

Never mind the gambling all over. This place is deeply confusing to me. Jesse wanted a smoking room, so we asked for one. The hotel said that they were out, so the clerk said “just smoke in the bathroom”.

I got a coke with dinner. If you’ve ever filled a cup of pop from a fountain machine, you’ll be aware that the cup fills up with foam before it’s full of liquid. Elsewhere, normally, I see people wait two or three seconds, then pour in more liquid. Here, the lady running the fountain just tilted the cup and kept running the coke into it, with the foam pouring down the drain, until the cup was full of liquid. No problem. It’s not like they’re wasting drinkable water in a desert… oh, wait.

The whole thing is built on sand, in more ways than one. The hotel has beautiful polished marble floors, and none of the lights ever seem to be burned out. On the other hand, the buttons to push for a walk signal are decrepit and shoddy-looking. The roads and sidewalks don’t seem well-maintained. The convenience store doesn’t even take credit cards — only debit cards (for which they charge extra) and cash.

It’s fascinating to be someplace where there are places to have weddings all over the place, but not a single depiction in sight of any kind of connection between any kind of sexual activity and any kind of affection. There’s a wedding chapel in the hotel, right next to the casino you have to walk through to get from the checkin desk to the elevators to your rooms. My room has a 42” LCD color TV — but the bathtub doesn’t drain right, and the tub faucet is sorta broken. There’s a safe in the room, but no coffeemaker or fridge.

Las Vegas is clearly designed for people who aren’t paying for their stay, or who could easily be made to feel guilty about counting the money. Motel 6 has free internet most of the time; here, it’s $13.99 per day… per computer. You can only hook up one computer for that $13.99 charge.

The place feels barren and empty. All those lights are so shiny and pretty, but the people seem to have no hope, and they just don’t care. It’s sorta weird. Interesting to have been here, wouldn’t probably come here for anything but a convention or meeting or somesuch. The marketers make an impressive pitch about how Las Vegas is free and “sinful” (I would, having seen it, actually grant that I suppose). They tell a story of a place of freedom and excitement, drama and adventure. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

This is a bit of family history, uncovered while sorting through boxes of paperwork.

My grandfather wrote this letter, to which he actually stapled a piece of asparagus. We have a copy of the letter. I don’t recall the outcome, but I think it was positive.

                             January 22nd, 1946

E. Pritchard Inc.
Bridgeton, N. J.

Gentleman:
        We had your cut spears asparagus for dinner tonight and they are
so incredible that I know you could not believe a description of them with-
out a sample before you, and so you may know I do not exaggerate, one of
these faggots is enclosed.
        It seems that these must have been especially bred for toughness,
for even ordinary uncooked asparagus does not approximate this in tensile
strength and indestructability.  I have never eaten bamboo, but I imagine
it could only be as tough as this if sufficiently aged.
        Seriously, we have enjoyed your catsup for years and am taking the
trouble to write you since I am convinced that you must be unaware of this
product which masquerades as a food under your brand name.  One can of the
stuff could undo $1000. in good advertising.
                              Yours very truly,

                              (name/address)

(This letter was written when the notion of a “faggot” as a strong piece of wood was not an innuendo.)

Okay, so, one of the problems I have is that with all this stuff, I can’t find stuff, so I can’t even tell if I already have something.

Solution: A database. Since I sprained my ankle, I’ve been sitting around without much to do, so I decided to implement this. This is pretty much the polar opposite of most inventory-management programs I’ve seen, because it’s built about a particular use case. I’m not looking for a database which can have multiple photographs of every item, serial numbers, warranty information, and so on. I want something where if I type in a list of things really quickly, just banging out short descriptions, I don’t have to stop typing or click or do anything else — I can just fill out a list of things for a box and move onto the next box.

I’ve put the source up at:

http://www.seebs.net/boxes-0.01.tgz

This is a rails app. I make no promises that it’ll work for anyone else, or that I included everything you need, or that it’ll work without hassle. All I did on top of a basic rails installation (I’m using phusion passenger, because it makes life easy) is add will_paginate. That seems to be enough. It’s a pretty lightweight app. It’s not particularly well-written, secure, robust, or anything like that — the goal is that I can have the netbook next to me, pick a box, put stuff in it, type up what I put in it, close the box, hit save, and then the computer remembers what’s in the box, and if I type “sharpie” it says that the sharpie markers are in Box #4 (plastic tub on black rack in basement), Box #8 (banker’s box on wire rack in garage), Box #11 (banker’s box by radiator in bedroom), and Box #26 (plastic tub on chrome rack in basement).

Once I have that, I can do a few things. One is I can start packing more freely. Another is that, if I think “didn’t I just see one of those recently”, I’ll be able to find out where. Finally, and this is the cool part, once I realize that I have four sets of sharpies, I could maybe consolidate them, get them all in one place — and then not feel that I need to buy more because I’m not sure I have any.

I hope.

We’ll see.

So, it turns out, I’m a hoarder.

This is one of those revelations at a scale similar to that of a cat who suddenly realizes it’s covered with fur.

I’ve been cleaning my office, and I’ve been finding Stuff. Stuff that’s been sitting in boxes for about two years (since we moved here), and which I haven’t had any interest in or use for, but which I am eerily resistant to throwing away. I have, however, made progress towards understanding why I’m so resistant to throwing things away.

There are two criteria by which I am judging things. One is whether or not I have any use for them. The other is whether they are replaceable. I recently discovered a device called a “SoundMaster ™”, made by Aegis, a division of Oxxi, Inc. It’s a sound digitizer. For the Amiga. (Yes, I still have my Amigas.) It’s a parallel-port digitizer which, in conjunction with software I probably still have the original disks for, can, well. Digitize sound. It can digitize sound from line inputs, or microphones, and it has a volume control. As I recall, it could digitize at rates up to around 56KHz — a bit better than CD quality, in terms of sample rate. … In glorious 8-bit sound. Which is to say… I think nearly everything I own can do better out of the box. Maybe a few of them don’t actually have stereo line inputs, but I’d guess nearly all of them do. It’s easy to downgrade audio, so even if I really, really, wanted to use sound software on the Amiga (no reason for which I should want to do this suggests itself), I could just record audio on something else and downsample it. I think I have a 24-bit USB audio sampler and playback device sitting around my room somewhere, probably. I can’t find it because of all the stuff.

So why do I have this thing? Because I can’t replace it. Nevermind that I probably have things which are unequivocally better.

For instance, I still have all the parts for my video gizmo for the Amiga (not a Toaster, the GVP competitor) which, with an external box I got for it, can transcode from component to S-video to VGA and so on. Awesome. But… I also have a gizmo which can take any of those formats and convert them to FireWire, at which point I can store it digitally. (The old Amiga thing could, I believe, digitize a single frame every few seconds.) Again… It’s not that I can conceive of a use for a device which, given about fifteen seconds, can load a single 24-bit frame at TV quality. Not when I have several machines which can display video like that at full 30/60 frame per second rates without noticably loading up their processors.

But… I can’t replace it. If I throw it away or toss it out, it’s GONE. If I get rid of my 7-port serial card capable of a princely 19,200bps transfer rates, there is NO WAY I could ever get it back. I can’t buy one of those. And, uhm… Well, again, that’s the problem. There’s no reason I should want to. But since I wouldn’t be able to replace it, I’m very unwilling to toss it out.

I haven’t really gotten anywhere towards figuring out to what degree this behavior has any rational justification. It’s the same thing as overpacking. And yet, while people make fun of me for overpacking, the first convention I went to with Rah, she ended up having a bit of artwork which, for reasons unknowable, she had ONLY as a JPEG file on an actual floppy… And looky here, I brought the floppy disk adapter for my laptop even though I’d probably never once used it before that day. So every so often it pays off… Every so often.

I don’t know whether I want to change this hoarding behavior, but I think maybe I need to try to rein it in a bit. There really is a problem with being able to find things I really DO have a use or need for because there’s so much stuff I don’t have a use or need for in the way. I just, you know, worry. Because some of this stuff is irreplaceable.