Friday Philosophy

I was involved in a discussion recently with Debra Lilley which version of Oracle to use. You can see her blog about it here (and she would love any further feedback from others). Oracle now has a policy that it will release the quarterly PSUs for a given point release for 12 months once that point release is superseded. ie once 11.2.0.3 came out, Oracle will only guarantee to provide PSUs for 11.2.0.2 for 12 months. See “My Oracle Support” note ID 742060.1. However, an older Terminal release such as 11.1.0.7 is not superseded and is supported until 2015 – and will get the quarterly PSU updates. This left the customer with an issue. Should they start doing their development on the latest and theoretically greatest version of Oracle and be forced to do a point upgrade “soon” to keep getting the PSUs, or use an older version of Oracle and avoid the need to upgrade?

For many, today is the last working day before Christmas and the festive season – So I sincerely wish upon everyone a Merry Christmas.. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, well the intent of my wishes still holds – I hope everyone; whether working or not; religious leanings for, against or indifferent; has an enjoyable few days during whatever end-of-year festives you have.

I’m going to be miserably now. You might want to stop reading here and maybe go to the shops for that last spell of retail hell or some other Christmas tradition. It’s probably best if you do…

I don’t carry business cards around with me. I just never, ever think to get some done (either properly or with my trusty printer) and maybe this says something about my personal failings to sell myself. If anyone wants to contact me I tell them my email address and if they look confused I just say “ahh, Google me”. You see, having a very odd Surname means I am easy to find. {Reading this back I guess it could be interpreted as saying “I am so famous you will find me” but that is way, way, way from my meaning – I am going on the very unusual name that I have and nothing other than that!}

A while back I was asked by a friend to blog about being a contractor. In the pub last week my friend reminded me of this and that I had not obliged him. I will – think of this as instalment one Jason…

I’ve been a contractor on and off for 18 years. For anyone not familiar with the concept, it is where you are self-employed and you simply hire yourself out to a company for a period of time or to do a specific job. You generally have less job security than an employee and less rights and benefits – No holiday pay, no paid sick leave, no annual pay increase {OK, so that one is rare for employees too these days}, no training and generally the first out the door when the money gets tight. In return you get more money when working and a lot, lot less to do with office politics, HR, annual reviews and the like.

It is not for everyone but I like being a contractor. It gives me a broader degree of experience.

I like it apart from one main thing.

Not a very exciting Friday Philosophy this week I’m afraid, just a self-publicising announcement that I am now on Twitter. I’ve put the wordpress widget on the blog for a while (days or weeks, I don’t know), my twitter name is MDWidlake. {I was a little surprised mwidlake had gone already but that says more about how rare I consider my surname to be than naivety, I hope}. It seems you can click on a part of the widget to follow me, which is a pretty safe thing to do as I am not very verbal as yet.

As I said, I’m not very active at the moment, I’m more following just a few friends and seeing what people use Twitter for. So far it mostly seems to be about:

I got pinged by someone else missing the Friday Philosophy today {BTW, Good news, the technical blogs start again on Monday}, so…

Take a look at the below. It is a rather pleasant spot of countryside on Sao Migel in the Azores, where the area in the foreground has been converted into a bit of a garden to take advantage of the natural beauty.

Something I have been pondering for a while now is should I join in with the “happening crowd” and sign up to Twitter? I know, I’m two or three years behind the times on this, but more and more people who I like have signed up – even Doug Burns now uses twitter and he used to be negative about it in the same way as I. I’ve asked a few of these friends what they think.

Alternative title “The lady from Patient Admin – she says YEEESSSS!!!!!!”

What must you always achieve for an IT system to be a success?

• Bug free? Never happens.
• Within budget/time frame? That would be nice.
• Includes critical business functionality? Please define critical.
• Secure? Well, it’s important for many systems but then it is often lacking (even when it is important).
• That it is to specification? Well we all know that’s wrong.

There is only one thing that an IT system must always achieve to be a success.

User Acceptance.

For an individual system other considerations may well be very important, but the user acceptance is, I think, non-negotiable.

This week I finally made a visit to Bletchley Park in the middle of England. Sue and I have been meaning to go there for several years, it is the site of the British code-breaking efforts during the second world war and, despite difficulties getting any funding, there has been a growing museum there for a number of years. {Hopefully, a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, granted only this month, will secure it’s future}.

Why is Bletchley Park so significant? Well, for us IT-types it is significant because Alan Turing did a lot of work there and it was the home of Colossus, one of the very first electrical, programmable computers. More generally of interrest, their efforts and success in cracking enemy ciphers during WW2 were incredibly important and beneficial to the UK and the rest of the allies.

In this post, I am not going to touch on Colossus or Alan Turing, but rather a machine called the “Bombe”. The Bombe was used to help discover the daily settings of the German Enigma machines, used for decrypting nearly all German and Italian radio messages. All the Bombes were destroyed after the war (at least, all the UK ones were) to help keep secret the work done to crack the cyphers – but at Bletchley Park the volunteers have recreated one. Just like the working model of Babbage’s Difference Engine, it looks more like a work of art than a machine. Here is a slightly rough video I took of it in action:

My slightly rough video of the bombe

{OK, if you want a better video try a clearer video by someone else.}

I had a chat with the gentleman you see in both videos about the machine and he explained something that the tour we had just been on did not make clear – the Bombe is a parallel processing unit. Enigma machines have three wheels. There are banks of three coloured disks in the bombe (see the picture below). eg, in the middle bank the top row of disks are black, middle are yellow and bottom are red. Each vertical set of three disks, black-yellow-red, is the equivalent of a single “enigma machine”. Each trio of disks is set to different starting positions, based on educated guesses as to what the likely start positions for a given message might be. The colour of the disk matches, I think, one of the known sets of wheels the enigma machines could be set up with. The machine is then set to run the encrypted message through up to 36 “Enigmas” at once. If the output exceeds a certain level of sense (in this case quite crucially, no letter is every encrypted back to itself) then the settings might be correct and are worth further investigation. This machine has been set up with the top set of “Enigmas” not in place, either to demonstrate the workings or because the machine is set up for one of the more complex deciphering attempts where only some of the banks can be used.

This is the bombe seen from the front

The reason the chap I was talking to really became fascinated with this machine is that, back in about 1999, a home PC programmed to do this work was no faster than the original electro-mechanical machines from 1944 were supposed to have taken. So as an engineer he wanted to help build one and find out why it was so fast. This struck a chord with me because back in the late 1990′s I came across several examples of bespoke computers designed to do specific jobs (either stuff to do with natural gas calorific value, DNA matching or protein folding), but by 2000, 2002 they had all been abandoned as a general PC could be programmed to be just as fast as these bespoke machines – because bespoke means specialist means longer and more costly development time means less bangs for your buck.

Admittedly the Bombe is only doing one task, but it did it incredibly fast, in parallel, and as a part of the whole deciphering process that some of the best minds of their time had come up with (part of the reason the Bletchley Park site was chosen was that it was equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge and, at that time, there were direct train links. {Thanks, Dr Beeching}. ).

Tuning and reliability was as important then as it is now. In the below picture of the back of the machine (sorry about the poor quality, it was dim in that room), you can see all the complex wiring in the “door” and, in the back of the machine itself, those three rows of bronze “pipes” are in fact…Pipes. Oil pipes. This is a machine, they quickly realised that it was worth a lot of effort to keep those disks oiled, both for speed and reliability.

All the workings of the Bombe from the back

Talking of reliability, one other thing my guide said to me. These machines are complex and also have some ability to cope with failures or errors built into them. But of course, you needed to know they were working properly. When these machines were built and set up, they came with a set of diagnostic tests. These were designed to push the machine, try the edge cases and to be as susceptible to mechanical error as possible. The first thing you did to a new or maintained machine was run your tests.

1943, you had awesome parallel processing, incredible speed and test-driven development and regression testing. We almost caught up with all of this in the early 21st Century.

If you manage people, it helps if they don’t dislike you. Sadly, this can be the default starting opinion for some people who have never been managers (we all know someone who “has never had a decent manager, they are all bloody idiots”). Frozen dairy products might be a route to easing this situation.

I mention this as we in the UK are having an unusually warm start to autumn, an Indian Summer as we call it. I used to work in a place that had an on-site cafe and a nice area outside to sit. If the weather was warm and I knew my team was not facing some crisis, I would occasionally pop my head around the door and announce “Team Ice-Cream!”. Anyone who wished could come down with me and I would buy them an ice-cream of their choice and we would sit out in the sun for 15 minutes and talk rubbish.

I’ve done similar in other situations. Taking the guys to the pub is the obvious one and it usually is appreciated, but in some ways it is less successful. I think this is because people will come to the pub because they want a pint and will put up with any idiot willing to provide a pint of Fosters (why is it so many of the “all managers are idiots” brigade drink some brand of nasty lager?). People will come for a tea/coffee or an ice-cream only if they are at least ambivalent to the provider. If you really dislike someone, who cares about an ice-cream? The serious malcontents will stay away and this helps identify people who really are not happy with you {so you can beat them mercilessly of course – or, if you’ve progressed beyond the school-yard, put some thought into why they are unhappy and what to do about it}.

By the way, this is very different to everyone going to the pub/restaurant in the evening and spending hours telling people what “you really think” and trying to impress Jessica the new trainee/intern. Such team building events generally need much more planning.

It’s a cheap bribe, should you resort to such shallow tactics to make people like you? Well, it’s only a cheap bribe as I said above. The trick to it is that it has to be {almost} spontaneous, such that the team are not expecting it, and not all the time. I’m not sure the teams I have done this for have always appreciated that I made special effort to do this either after a hard period of work or when there had been some malcontent within the team (people fall out, it impacts the rest of the team). The way I look at it, it also has to be a team thing and not an individual thing as the sitting around talking rubbish is a key part to the team being a team. Even if it is just over a cup of nasty coffee in the basement – that particular company’s canteen was not the best.

Oh, I should mention that I have access to a wife that makes wonderful cakes. Left-over cake is a brilliant “team ice-cream” substitute, it is both “cheap” so not a bribe but also appreciated as someone put effort in. My wife in this case. I Never claim I made the cake. well, not often.

TeddyBear Picnic Cake

That’s the carrot. What about the stick? When it comes down to it, you are there to guide the team and the individuals in it and get the best you can out of them. Not being disliked is important but you are not there to be their friend either. If someone transgresses you need to correct them.

In my opinion one of the very worst things a manager can do is dress down a member of their staff in public. That is not correcting them, that is either an attempt to humiliate them or an attempt by the boss to scape-goat the blame to a subordinate. Neither is morally correct and both are highly likely to engender considerable dislike or even hatred.

I distinctly remember one situation where I was in a team meeting and the boss’s managers came in and wanted to know why a recent change had gone so badly wrong. The manager’s response was immediate, he picked one of the team and said something like “It was him, he didn’t test the change properly”. It was so obvious that the sub-text was “it was not my fault”. In reality the sacrificed staff member was not at fault but the boss sure as heck was. A manager gets paid more as a boss and part of the reason is that you take both the credit and the blame for your team’s efforts. This action by that boss did not make us scared of failing and thus work harder, it made us distrust the man and demoralised us.

Sadly it is something I’ve seen a lot over the years and never by what I would call a good manager. I just don’t understand why these people think a public dressing down is going to inspire the target or the audience to work more effectively.

If I’m in the situation where, in a meeting or discussion, it becomes obvious one of my guys has screwed up we discuss how to sort it out as a team. Then after the meeting, the transgressor and I have a private conversation. This has several benefits:

• I am not publicly humiliating them or scoring points in front of a crowd.
• Neither of us is playing to the crowd and so are more likely to be honest.
• Things can be said that stay private. I’ve had team members mess things up because they have more important issues on their mind that they are uncomfortable with the team knowing about. I’ve had to tell a guy this is chance #last and the next step is disciplinary.
• This never happens, but there is a very small theoretical chance I could have misunderstood and, in fact, it’s my fault. You look a right idiot if you attempt to dress someone down in public and it turns out to be you.

As I said, that last point has never happened to me {yes, this is an outrageous lie }. I’ve experienced that last point from the other side as well. In a large meeting I had a board member pushing me as to why we had not finished a project on the date I promised. I kept giving vague answers about “other things coming up” and it would be done by a new, given date. She would not let it go though so eventually I had to say “It is late because you told me to do other stuff as top priority, I raised this project and you told me to delay it. So it is late because you changed the priorities. That would make it your responsibility.” She was very angry but it had been her choice to do this publicly.

All this boils down to – Reward the team in public. Chastise the individual in private.