Long ago I interviewed with a small company that had something to do with the lumber industry. They advertised for a programmer would would get to use new and interesting tools & techniques. When I got there they talked in vague terms about the exciting new projects. Then a pause. "But first, we have this software that we need fixed." It was reams of assembly code, no documentation, no obvious structure. Your basic nightmare. It was a bait-and-switch -- my impression was that they had been forced into doing it this way because they couldn't get anyone to show up if they were honest about the job. (And I suspect they ended up rewriting the code from scratch in C, or else abandoning the project). This company had been backed into a corner by the transactional, buy-low-sell-high model of doing business, which is how they ended up with lack of software quality.
I've heard of other companies doing this: ostensibly hiring you for something really interesting, and then, when you show up, "But first, we have this other project." Even Google, desperate as it has become to acquire top talent, apparently puts their new hires through a somewhat-surprise boot camp of working on Adwords (I don't know if this still happens, and it also seems like some high-profile people like Guido Van Rossum and Josh Bloch would be exempt).
In response to Certified Organic, several people mentioned Glassdoor.com. I perused this site a bit and it seemed to have problems. First, it appears to be skewed towards employees (current and former) with complaints. This makes sense -- someone with a beef needs an outlet and is far more likely to expend energy on the site than someone who is happy with it. Second, the site seems rather heavily gamed by HR departments, who have a vested interest in convincing you that theirs is a wonderful place to to work (because if you believe that, you're more likely to come to work there and make concessions on salary and benefits. I would certainly be happy to take less in exchange for working at a wonderful place, and this seems generally true. The majority of people would rather have a job that they love and pays moderately well than one they hate that pays a lot better).
The more fundamental problem is that we even need some third party site to tell the truth about a company. If we have to ask, "How much does this company tell the truth about themselves?" we're already off to a bad start.
Why do I love shopping at Costco? Here's their business model: the markup on products is just a few percent, only enough to cover all their costs of doing business. All the profit comes from membership sales. This establishes a clear goal, which is that profits only come from customers. Costco's entire goal becomes making me happy so that I will continue to buy my membership each year, and to tell everyone else how great it is so those people will also buy memberships (it's a little bit like joining a country that has a flat annual tax). Their business model is transparent, and all about making me happy. How many MBAs does it take to come up with the Costco business model? Zero, because they can't think that way.
Notice also that the ostensible goal and actual goal are identical, unlike most companies where they say they want to serve the customer but the actual goal is bonuses for senior management or maximizing shareholder profit. It really, really makes a difference if your goal is clear and honest.
Now let's consider the typical goal of HR, which is "to find and retain good people." On its face, this seems appropriate and reasonable. But consider this: There's nothing in there about happiness. Admittedly, that's vague and hard to measure, but if making employees happy isn't an explicit part of HR's goal, it's no wonder that HR so often becomes an adversarial force. Worse, that goal allows HR to do anything in order to "find and retain." Trickery and outright lying would not seem to violate the goal.
How to create a company that is transparent and honest? It can't just be part of the mission statement, but instead must be inexorably woven into the core goal of the company. If that core goal involves profits then transparency can't be contravariant with profit, because eventually some MBA will observe that you can make more profit by lying to employees and customers. With Costco's model, the connection is obvious to everyone: happy customers mean more profits.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
150 Companies and the Solar Future
Bill Gross is an amazing guy. He founded Idealab which seems to be not so much an incubator but a womb for creating new companies, and it has created 150 of them. When you listen to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader podcasts, each speaker you hear has had success in creating their company, and they each believe they know what they did to cause that success. As you listen to more of these talks (I'm amazed at how great they are), you begin to realize that there's a fair amount of superstition mixed in. But someone who has created 150 companies has seen enough to have a pretty good idea of what works.
Unfortunately, the web site doesn't seem to be kept up that well, so you can't just go find the podcast and listen to it. I heard it because I was subscribed via Itunes and it came up.
After giving his background, Bill tells how he decided to pursue solar energy. How he did the calculations -- which he tells you about -- and realized just how unsustainable our current rate of consumption is, and how geothermal, wind, etc. is all great and we should do that stuff, but ultimately those won't cover all our needs. The only energy that is big enough to feed our needs is solar. Photovoltaics are getting better and cheaper, but the most efficient conversion involves high-temperature concentrators and turbines.
Bill said he saw everything getting more expensive, and the only thing that kept getting a lot cheaper is CPU processing power. He created eSolar based on the idea that in a field of mirrors, each mirror can be independently controlled with its own processor. Each mirror unit is a standard size that can be cheaply and easily set up by a person. This means that developing countries can assemble them as well. To make larger systems, just add more mirror units. The goal is to make solar cost-competitive with fossil fuel.
I found the talk inspiring on many levels, especially the tips he gave for creating successful companies (one point he made very strongly was that everyone in the company must have a financial interest in the success of the company). But what hung over me like a dark cloud was his description of the energy consumption of the world.
There are other influences, surely. The move to lower-power lighting devices (especially LEDs, which are 10x more efficient than incandescent) has slowed the building of power plants. Other efficiencies can help, as well.
We may find alternative energy sources. One promising area is bioengineered algae; Craig Venter was just interviewed on 60 Minutes and this subject came up. Algae is the most efficient biological converter of sunshine to energy, and it's possible that the right algae could even create oil that could go directly into our fuel tanks. Other things like switch grass, which happily grows in rough terrain not suitable for farming, is good for the soil, and can be used in numerous ways for energy, might help fill the gaps. This segment on PBS Nova profiles Jay Keasling and his progress in bioengineering E. Coli to convert switch grass into liquid fuel.
It feels to me that we need to make some significant leaps in order to get to the future -- a future that, for starters, is not fighting about such a fundamental need as energy (how many wars are actually about energy, rather than what we're told they're about?). It's possible that we'll have an amazing breakthrough that will produce clean, renewable energy for all, but I think I'd rather place bets on things we know will work. It's the first step towards the kind of future I'd like to see: peaceful, abundant and focused on the development of the individual -- all individuals, not just those who happen to be born into happy circumstances.
Unfortunately, the web site doesn't seem to be kept up that well, so you can't just go find the podcast and listen to it. I heard it because I was subscribed via Itunes and it came up.
After giving his background, Bill tells how he decided to pursue solar energy. How he did the calculations -- which he tells you about -- and realized just how unsustainable our current rate of consumption is, and how geothermal, wind, etc. is all great and we should do that stuff, but ultimately those won't cover all our needs. The only energy that is big enough to feed our needs is solar. Photovoltaics are getting better and cheaper, but the most efficient conversion involves high-temperature concentrators and turbines.
Bill said he saw everything getting more expensive, and the only thing that kept getting a lot cheaper is CPU processing power. He created eSolar based on the idea that in a field of mirrors, each mirror can be independently controlled with its own processor. Each mirror unit is a standard size that can be cheaply and easily set up by a person. This means that developing countries can assemble them as well. To make larger systems, just add more mirror units. The goal is to make solar cost-competitive with fossil fuel.
I found the talk inspiring on many levels, especially the tips he gave for creating successful companies (one point he made very strongly was that everyone in the company must have a financial interest in the success of the company). But what hung over me like a dark cloud was his description of the energy consumption of the world.
There are other influences, surely. The move to lower-power lighting devices (especially LEDs, which are 10x more efficient than incandescent) has slowed the building of power plants. Other efficiencies can help, as well.
We may find alternative energy sources. One promising area is bioengineered algae; Craig Venter was just interviewed on 60 Minutes and this subject came up. Algae is the most efficient biological converter of sunshine to energy, and it's possible that the right algae could even create oil that could go directly into our fuel tanks. Other things like switch grass, which happily grows in rough terrain not suitable for farming, is good for the soil, and can be used in numerous ways for energy, might help fill the gaps. This segment on PBS Nova profiles Jay Keasling and his progress in bioengineering E. Coli to convert switch grass into liquid fuel.
It feels to me that we need to make some significant leaps in order to get to the future -- a future that, for starters, is not fighting about such a fundamental need as energy (how many wars are actually about energy, rather than what we're told they're about?). It's possible that we'll have an amazing breakthrough that will produce clean, renewable energy for all, but I think I'd rather place bets on things we know will work. It's the first step towards the kind of future I'd like to see: peaceful, abundant and focused on the development of the individual -- all individuals, not just those who happen to be born into happy circumstances.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Certified Organic
My friend, let's call him John, was recently ousted from a company so that the CEO could perform some corporate shenanigans to sell the company to an unsuspecting buyer. Many other jobs were lost and families put into hardship, but the CEO came out smelling like (financial) roses. Money was made -- so what if a lot of people got hurt in the process? In the end, the bottom line is all that counts (at least, if you've got a piece of the bottom line).
John made great contributions to the company, as he does for all the companies he has worked for. He's someone who stays at the head of his profession and is a thought leader in the technologies he practices. But he seems to have a shadow following him, and he ends up working for companies who say they value what he does, but what they do is quite different.
This kind of thing is what made me decide that all companies are terrible to work for, across the board. After all these years I've begun to realize my myopia. I wasn't able to see the -- admittedly very rare -- great companies because I had already decided that companies by definition couldn't be great.
And finding such companies is really hard. Recently, John had a number of high-level interviews at companies that have exceptional reputations. But those interviews revealed less-than-stellar behavior on the part of those companies. Their PR seems better than the reality.
If I were to lapse into a mystical analysis of the situation, I might say that the world is telling John that working for a company, or at least a traditional, mainstream company, is not his path.
Wouldn't it be great, though, if we could:
John made great contributions to the company, as he does for all the companies he has worked for. He's someone who stays at the head of his profession and is a thought leader in the technologies he practices. But he seems to have a shadow following him, and he ends up working for companies who say they value what he does, but what they do is quite different.
This kind of thing is what made me decide that all companies are terrible to work for, across the board. After all these years I've begun to realize my myopia. I wasn't able to see the -- admittedly very rare -- great companies because I had already decided that companies by definition couldn't be great.
And finding such companies is really hard. Recently, John had a number of high-level interviews at companies that have exceptional reputations. But those interviews revealed less-than-stellar behavior on the part of those companies. Their PR seems better than the reality.
If I were to lapse into a mystical analysis of the situation, I might say that the world is telling John that working for a company, or at least a traditional, mainstream company, is not his path.
Wouldn't it be great, though, if we could:
- Describe the characteristics of the great company to work for?
- Somehow certify that a particular company actually followed those characteristics?
Point 2 is very important because companies already want to get on the "great to work for" lists (subjectively created by those who publish such lists). They know they can get better employees, and often pay them less, if they seem to offer a much better quality-of-working experience. But, as John has discovered, a company can easily have a great reputation that doesn't pan out.
Wouldn't it be terrific if you could know, for sure, that a company is great to work for? Like when you buy a certified-organic apple, you know it's almost certainly going to taste good, while non-organic apples taste like mushy cardboard.
If such a list existed, I might even be tempted.
It would be tricky, though, to get it right and keep it from being gamed by companies who wanted to trick their way onto the list. It almost sounds like a job for ... (cue flash bombs, smoke, lasers) ... Social Networking! (Later: someone suggested Glassdoor.com for this. Have people had success with this system?).
Why It's Been Quiet
I've been drawn into learning and writing about the Scala programming language. This is rather amazing to me because for awhile I thought I couldn't be interested in programming languages again. It turns out I was just really, really tired of all the tedious trivia involved in programming languages, and the discussions surrounding that trivia. Scala leapfrogs all that; it doesn't tell you what you can't do or what hoops you must jump through -- it works for you so you can focus on expressing your goals.
It's also excellent to have my hands on something tangible again. While it's great to attempt to create completely new things -- like a new business structure -- it turns out that I need to balance this by doing something concrete that creates a product.
This reminds me of when I was studying physics as an undergraduate. I was never a very good physicist, but I got terrific value from studying it. It taught me to struggle with problems that seem intractable, and to keep trying and poking until I discover a crack that might begin to yield a solution. This was extremely helpful in the early days of C++ when there was no introductory learning material and a buggy compiler.
Although I felt a bit dirty going from the purity of physics to the practicality of engineering, it was delightful to be so functional -- the background in physics and math made engineering problems relatively easy. I went from fighting with seemingly impossible problems to an easy understanding of everything. It was wonderful; it felt like the payoff from years of feeling a bit dim in physics.
This is the same. After a year of (exclusively) trying to stretch my brain so that it might be able to fit some of these new ideas, I need to be functional for awhile, to take a breather and do something that I know I can accomplish.
This project is still "my personal Everest," the mountain I must try to climb because it's there. I might be reading the alternative-business books a little slower, but I'm not worried -- it's an ambitious project and it will probably take many years to begin to bear fruit. I have no expectations of instant results.
This might be a step of possibility, however. It has occurred to me that reading and writing and talking about different ways of doing business is no substitute for doing experiments. And one experiment, certainly, is starting a business -- by which I mean a business with a group of people, not a sole proprietorship as I have been doing for the past ... um ... bunch of years. I am arguably best equipped to start a software-development business (which also requires minimal capital to start). Since I have personal difficulty not using the most advanced tools I can get my hands on (tools which are typically not yet used in the mainstream), and also because I like to invent new things and solve new problems, I suspect this would be a product company rather than any kind of programming services.
I don't feel like I'm ready to start a business yet. But from listing to the (really great) Stanford Entrepreneurial Though Leaders lectures, it sounds like you're never really ready -- the idea comes and takes you by the throat and there's nothing you can do about it.
I will continue to struggle to discover the next organizational structure. But now, at least for awhile, I've got a bit more balance in my life.
It's also excellent to have my hands on something tangible again. While it's great to attempt to create completely new things -- like a new business structure -- it turns out that I need to balance this by doing something concrete that creates a product.
This reminds me of when I was studying physics as an undergraduate. I was never a very good physicist, but I got terrific value from studying it. It taught me to struggle with problems that seem intractable, and to keep trying and poking until I discover a crack that might begin to yield a solution. This was extremely helpful in the early days of C++ when there was no introductory learning material and a buggy compiler.
Although I felt a bit dirty going from the purity of physics to the practicality of engineering, it was delightful to be so functional -- the background in physics and math made engineering problems relatively easy. I went from fighting with seemingly impossible problems to an easy understanding of everything. It was wonderful; it felt like the payoff from years of feeling a bit dim in physics.
This is the same. After a year of (exclusively) trying to stretch my brain so that it might be able to fit some of these new ideas, I need to be functional for awhile, to take a breather and do something that I know I can accomplish.
This project is still "my personal Everest," the mountain I must try to climb because it's there. I might be reading the alternative-business books a little slower, but I'm not worried -- it's an ambitious project and it will probably take many years to begin to bear fruit. I have no expectations of instant results.
This might be a step of possibility, however. It has occurred to me that reading and writing and talking about different ways of doing business is no substitute for doing experiments. And one experiment, certainly, is starting a business -- by which I mean a business with a group of people, not a sole proprietorship as I have been doing for the past ... um ... bunch of years. I am arguably best equipped to start a software-development business (which also requires minimal capital to start). Since I have personal difficulty not using the most advanced tools I can get my hands on (tools which are typically not yet used in the mainstream), and also because I like to invent new things and solve new problems, I suspect this would be a product company rather than any kind of programming services.
I don't feel like I'm ready to start a business yet. But from listing to the (really great) Stanford Entrepreneurial Though Leaders lectures, it sounds like you're never really ready -- the idea comes and takes you by the throat and there's nothing you can do about it.
I will continue to struggle to discover the next organizational structure. But now, at least for awhile, I've got a bit more balance in my life.
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