Transparency...

Back in the early '80s I worked for a company with what seemed to me a radical policy with respect to employee compensation: everyone's compensation was posted so that all could see.  This had all sorts of repercussions, most of them, I have to say, quite good.  Everybody knew exactly where they stood; there was no worrying about whether you'd negotiated the right salary for yourself.  It made questions about compensation very easy to raise.  Most of all, it made it impossible for the company to sustain any sort of compensation that didn't match the merit. 

I suspect this particular company maintained this unusual level of transparency because there were several relatives and close friends of the founder employed there.  By being completely transparent about compensation, many potentially destructive rumors were quashed.

This morning I read that there's a detectable trend toward such transparency, and more...

The Office is More Threatening than I'd Thought!

Here's a primer on how to weaponize ordinary office supplies.  Yikes!

Quote of the Day...

Spoken by Dilbert in today's strip:

Do whatever makes you feel less absurd.

Awesome!

Open Office and Your Brain...

When I work at my company's offices, I work in an “open office” environment.  This is an area (a room with just three sides) about 30' by 15', with nine people working in it on tables.  Each of us has a fairly small area, perhaps 30" wide by 24" deep.  It works well for some things, especially when multiple people are collaborating on the same thing.  I find it nearly impossible to concentrate on programming while there, however – there are innumerable interruptions and distractions that keep me from the kind of deep, sustained focus in which I am most productive. 

Here's someone else with similar observations.

I observe, though, that some people seem to be almost immune to problems I encounter.  This immunity is definitely more prevalent amongst younger people.  I don't know whether it's actually age-related, cultural, or training.  My cure is to work from home as much as possible – there I actually stand a chance of sustained focus for hours at a stretch.  I balance this with days at the office, where I can be available to teach and help others (and I can get help from others).  If the balance was to be determined purely by my own personal productivity, I'd probably work from home 80% to 90% of the time.  But that is not the case; some of the value I supply to my employer depends on my being available for other people, and it's a challenge to figure out where the right balance is when including that factor...

Light Blogging Alert...

I'm about to get on a plane for Cincinnati, Ohio to visit one of our early runbook customers.  I'll be there (tentatively) through Thursday night, and I'm not sure how much attention this blog will get. 

The place we're staying, by purest happenstance, is a mere 40 miles from my mother-in-law's (Kate's) home in Liberty, Indiana.  On Tuesday night I'm going to go visit with her and my sister-in-law Judy (who lives nearby).  Kate doesn't know I'm coming, but Judy does.  Judy and Debbie seem to think it's a good idea to surprise Kate, but I'm not so sure...

Runbook Automation...

Runbook Automation (RBA for short) is one of the products that my little team is responsible for developing at ServiceNow.  Our marketing department has started commissioning little videos introducing various products, and Runbook Automation is one of the first of them to be released.  I understand that this video is in the process of being tweaked, but even as is I think it does a great job of introducing the product:

Rumors of My Demise...

...are slightly premature.  I wasn't amongst the departed, I was just busy. 

For the past three days, I've been part of the team at my company putting on the Knowledge11 User Conference.  It was a fantastic experience, but exhausting.  My own participation is typical; over 100 of our employees were there.  I gave two presentations on my own, one presentation as one of a group of presenters, and was a moderator in two roundtable discussions.  All of these were well-attended, and very intense experiences.  I learned a lot, and hopefully so did the customers who attended.

But the best part of the experience, by far, was the one-on-one meetings I had with customers.  The roughly dozen pre-arranged time slots were all booked before the convention even began, but we managed to put together about two dozen more meetings ad hoc.  All told, I had 38 organized meetings with customers, and probably half that again that “just happened” in the hallways (and in one case, the restroom!).  Even after a night of sleep, my head is still spinning with all the things that I learned, and ideas that I got from our customers.

Part of me wishes that these events happened more than annually, and part of me is glad I have a whole year to rest up for the next one.  Except...I don't.  We have a second event happening later this year in Europe.  Woo hoo!

It Seems Impossible...

...but each and every day, my job seems to get busier and busier – and even more chaotic.  Each day as I drive home, I tell myself “It can't possibly get any crazier!” – and each day, it gets even crazier.  These are symptoms of a very good problem at the company I work for: success!

In the past year, my little team has gone from two people to five people (and probably a sixth within a couple of weeks).  I still have five more “official” openings (Are you a crazy good programmer?  Talk to me!) – and I suspect by the time I get those positions filled, I'll have even more.

And meanwhile, the work keeps piling on.  We're acquiring new customers at an ever-increasing rate, and existing customers are using our product for more and more things.

All of this means lots and lots of work for us.  But it's a good kind of problem to have, compared with the opposite (a product that nobody wants to buy).

So when you see a few days with no posts from me, now you know why!

Conference Over...

Our user conference is over, and it was a nice success.  The attendees seemed to be very happy with their experience, and all of us participating had the sense that we had actually done something useful for our customers, our prospective customers, and our partners.  The video below is a highlight reel that someone put together; it runs about two minutes.  I have a (very) brief appearance in it (and I never saw the camera!).





Yesterday afternoon I took a taxi from central London to Richmond-upon-Thames, where our company's U.K. offices are.  My hotel is up on Richmond Hill, where there's a famous view over the Thames.  The photos below are a few I took (with my cell phone) on my walk from the hotel to our offices this morning.  As usual, click to enlarge...

Growth...

A rare work-related post:

The company I work for is growing very rapidly, and many of us are changing roles as that growth accelerates.  In my case, that means that I'm moving from being an individual contributor (something I love doing) to being a team leader.  This is not quite as much fun for me, but it has some offsetting rewards – especially the standing to help shape the future of some pieces of our product. 

So I'm building a little team.  I've got two great guys on my team now (one whom I've been working with for over a year, one just starting).  I've got two openings that I'm trying to fill – I'm looking for insanely great programmers with a strong large-enterprise IT gear familiarity (that is, people who know about things like big routers, switches, SANs, NAS, fabric switches, datacenter architecture, UPSs, etc.).  We work in Java and JavaScript (client- and server-side).  If that's you, or someone you know, there may be a mutually beneficial opportunity here – so please write me!

Service-now.com On YouTube!

I work for Service-now.com, primarily developing software that does “discovery” – finding out about the existence of any sort of equipment plugged into the network, and then finds out all about it. This software will discover workstations, servers, routers, switches, printers and just about any other kind of device you can imagine.

We're a small company – less than 100 employees worldwide – but we're making a big impact in our world of IT management. One of the ways we're reaching out to prospective customers is in the “new media”, such as YouTube. Here's one of our first YouTube offerings:


YouTube is owned by Google – and Google's technologies are one of the sources of inspiration for our software.

I can't help but think back to the days when I was involved in starting up a company. For example, back in the early '80s, a partner and I founded a company to sell practice management software to optometrists. In those days before YouTube, web sites, or even email, it was very expensive to simply get a message in front of our prospects. Primarily we used direct mail and trade shows. What a difference today's technologies make!

Light Posting

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much. My feeble excuse is that I've just started a new job, and I've been devoting much time to coming up to speed there. Losing some sleep, too, as the work is quite interesting…

My new title, at the moment, is my all-time favorite (which I'd love to keep forever!): “TBD”

That pretty much describes my entire career!