I recently went through a major high-risk scenario at work. When you’re in my line of work, these things are your worst nightmares. We have computational theory itself against us – what we code cannot be verified for correctness by a machine. So we do the best we can, and hope it works. Literally. Even the “best of the best” amongst us is reducing the odds that something could go wrong, rather than improving the odds that everything is right. There’s a big semantic difference between the two.

An year ago, I’d have handled the situation very differently. Usual responses by a human include a lot of things. First is blame. Second is “how do I get out of this as soon as possible?” Third is, “how do I justify my actions”? etc. However, I realized I could handle the pressure with great enjoyment. I’ve been called a masochist before, but this wasn’t that. A few recent rules learnt in my diving world, played a huge role in preparing me to handle anything.

Anyone who has techie friends knows we love our jargon. You can’t walk into a bar in Bellevue without overhearing boasts of “mission critical” and “strategy” and “tactical decision” and all sorts of awesome that would make James Bond walk out in shame.

When you’re training for rescue scenarios however, it is VERY REAL. A wrong decision and someone dies. You can do everything right and someone can still die. Those words actually mean something. An “emergency” doesn’t mean “oh I need a promotion, so I’m going to make things seem important.” An “emergency” means “unless you act now, and use the next 30 seconds correctly, someone is going to die.”

But here are five things I learnt out of diving and rescue training that can really relieve your pressure when dealing with “mission critical” situations.

1. Have reserves for the worst: This is a fundamental rule you learn after you’ve been in horrid situations and have exhausted yourself earlier. Everyone else can say it, but you only mean it when your life is at risk. When you are trying to salvage a dive halfway through, and someone’s reg starts to freeflow and he runs out of air, and you drained your resources in debugging a smaller issue, someone is going to die. When prioritizing, ensure that if at that moment, your entire company’s service went down or your product on millions of machines suddenly has some critical vulnerability, you have the energy to deal with it. If you’re using your reserve energy for anything else, you’re doing it wrong. Take a rescue class and you’ll gain the backbone to tell people to go away. They are important, no doubt, but are they important enough to burn your reserves on at that moment? Reserves are called “reserves” for a reason.

2. You’re not in a life-threatening situation: When you really have been in a situation from which you’re glad to have simply come out alive, you’ll find stress in life goes way down. Lost keys, or a disappointing interruption in internet connectivity, or some pissed-off coworker or whatever the heck you get worked up about, it’s not like you took your last breath, your reg won’t open, and unless you figure it out in 30 seconds, you’re not sure you will ever breathe again.

3. Use your importance: An year ago, I would have double-checked, questioned, and hesitated. Life-threatening situations teach you one thing: you’re the best chance the victim has. By definition you are the best person equipped to make decisions. Use that power. Make those decisions. That is not the time to educate a bystander on the physiology of emergency oxygen. It is not a time to build “consensus”. Nobody can validate your actions. That is the time to get that oxygen in the mouth of the victim as soon as possible. Everything else be damned! Also learn to hand over charge when someone more qualified comes along (a medical doctor for instance.) Life-guarding school should be mandatory to every MBA in dealing with “mission critical” stuff. When you’re dealing with an emergency, and someone says, “He should never have done that in the first place.”, you learn to treat that statement as “noise” rather than a discussion to be had at that moment.

4. Partial aid provided is better than full aid withheld: This is one statement they will drill into your brain every other minute. Derives from point 3 above. When you’re the BEST hope the victim has, everything that you do is helping. If you forget rescue breathing, that’s bad, but not the worst. Others didn’t know WHAT to do at all. As an owner of some task at work or in life, YOU know how something works. YOU have more information than anyone else involved. No matter how disturbed you are, or how tired you are, or how pissed off you are. YOUR bad decision, is statistically likely to be better than someone else’s random guess.

5. Look Cool Doing it: Perhaps the big point I learnt from GUE folks. If you’re doing something, do it well. There’s no excuse to not have your skills up-to-date. Others derive their cues from you. When you falter, they lose confidence. In a way this derives from point 3 & 4: People have already decided you’re the best hope they have. If you’re the most qualified person, where your decision is likely to be the best one, if you panic, you’re making the situation much much worse. You won’t know everything. But that’s better than not knowing anything. Think of your last doctor visit. If your doctor is worried, concerned, sweating, and informs you that you have a cold, you’re not going to go home very confident. If you’ve not delegated, then you’re in-charge. When people begin panicking, your calm assertive behavior can do wonders to get everyone to focus. There’s a reason I mentioned those IT showoffs. With all that language, it is very easy to lose perspective of the fact that while things are BAD, they’re not THAT BAD. Don’t be the panicking doctor who kills their patient of a heart attack, while informing them they have a cold.

I learnt that applying points 3 & 4 can be quite valuable in emergencies. Whether it’s your service failing, a bad press release, a badly received feature, an angry coworker or whatever it is you’re dealing with. Learn to identify when you KNOW better than others. Learn to USE that advantage to take control because at that moment YOU’RE the best of the worst. Learn to identify a BETTER QUALIFIED PERSON fast and handoff! PROVIDE HELP even if isn’t ALL the help needed. Some help is better than none. IGNORE noise. Remember that all hell can break lose. Your company could go bankrupt. You could get fired. And yet it’s not like someone is DYING. When you face your first panicked diver or your first low-on-air emergency (and I’ve thankfully never had someone go completely out of air on me,) when you’re thinking about whether you’re going to see the surface alive, whether you’re going to surface alone, etc. you really do get a much better grasp on everything else that can go wrong on the surface – you’re ON THE SURFACE!

Started with non-diet sweeted soda:

Then, I left it to evaporate. Lets assume an evaporation loss of 0%. Add another 10% offset for stuff-that’s-not-water-or-sugar.

After a week of careful evaporation, here is what I was left with:

Since high fructose corn syrup is sugar in liquid form, and when my rate-of-change as well as the change-of-content went to zero for a week, I assumed I had gotten rid of water and nothing else.

This is, empirically, the actual amount of sugar in your drink.

Now I don’t doubt sodas are bad. I don’t doubt the amount of sugar is bad. You probably shouldn’t be subjecting your body to that kind of ingestion. I know that the “amount” isn’t visually comparable to crystallized sucrose. That’s my point too. It may contain the “equivalent of” a pound of table sugar. It doesn’t actually contain a pound of table sugar.

Therefore, I want to know, when someone posts those visual amounts, by what scientific method do they identify equivalent crystalline sucrose.

At the age of 14 or 15, 8 years later, I realized what the purpose of that assignment was. The school did little else after that assignment, but when I went home, I spent a lot of time lifting objects and checking their labels. An instinctive ability to estimate weights, temperatures (and someday… bouyancy) developed in me.

Much is written about organic. India hasn’t been spared the fad either. A people who have been eating natural, local, sustainable food for thousands of years, will now go into international chain stores and look for labels that say “locally grown organic”. I have nothing against that practice, mind you.

I do believe, however, that every kid in school, should have an assignment to simply grow an onion. No points, marks or grades. No objective or outcome. All they have to do, is pick up a reusable clay pot that the school holds in stock, walk outside, gather some dirt, plan onion seeds, and grow it. You can use Google or facebook or whatever the heck else you want. The assignment stops when the onion is grown.

I know plenty of people who insist on ensuring a chicken had a happy life before it landed on their tables. I don’t know a lot of people who can tell me what a “good chicken” should look like. I have a hard time explaining to most people what a good quality vegetable should look like. I have nothing against regulatory agencies, and oversight committees. But at a very fundamental level, if you care about such things, by looking at an onion, by smelling and tasting it, you have to be able to tell whether it was naturally grown or not.

Today I bought some spring onions at an Indian store, and I assure you, it had no USDA sticker. It had no certifications. But when they cook, I can objectively tell you they don’t release the amount of water the most expensive bunch bought from OFC would. They may not look as good, but they taste better, and cook better. The other day I was in a grocery store, wanting to buy maple syrup. I had so many syrups thrown in my face, “pancake syrup”, “waffle syrup”, “90% fat-free syrup”, but after 10 minutes of hunting is one bottle that says, “Maple Syrup.” I turn it around and look at ingredients, and there’s only one. “Maple Syrup”. Hallelujah!

How do I know? Glad you asked. Hold on to that thought about how I don’t know shit, and perhaps others may prefer onions in a certain other way. I actually grew hundreds of onions as a kid. Tomatoes, basil, gourds, and what not. My mom was kind of obsessed with her garden, and three of my neighbours were farmers.

Every single problem about locally grown, organic, sustainable, and happiness of farm animals, would be solved, if we relied less on the “Certified Organic” label, and knew what a good wild hen is supposed to taste like. Remember, I have nothing against convenience. I want someone else to watch my back. There is nothing wrong in not being suspicious of every single thing in life. However, when push comes to shove, you have to know what “one pound” feels like.

Here’s where my hypocrisy kicks in. I’ve never read TAOCP either. And yet, I’ve never once questioned Donald Knuth’s authority as a programmer. In my mind, he’s simply a good programmer, and the book is known to be a good guide on how to write good code.

The answer behind my hypocrisy it seems, is covered by this excellent person who calls themselves The Last Psychiatrist. Go read it. For your convenience, I’m inserting the relevant excerpt here (emphasis mine).

She realized that King didn’t care about her, only about the sex tape.  The only reason he asked that question is to get to the sex tape.  She’s not a full person to him, she’s a news story.  Now, you can say she’s an idiot for thinking there is any other reason to interview her, but regardless she thinks she’s much more interesting than just that.  From her perspective, he is a man who only cares about her because she is currently hot and previously naked.

When King asks about the settlement, it’s the most provocative question he, given his limited ability as provocateur, can ask.  But if Howard Stern asks about the settlement, he’s actually  asking about the settlement.  When he wants to get inappropriate, we’ll know.

It appears, that having spent too long a time in a gigantic monolithic machine, I can have two entirely opposite reactions to the same sentence. I’ve become so paranoid apparently, that I’m afraid of yielding even one word to the synergists, for fear that they will take over and I sleep being afraid of that reality every night. I already hated that computers and IT became so big so fast that my expectation of entering an esoteric and ignored branch of the mathematical sciences, suddenly pushed me into a giant industry filled with bullshit (don’t hate me for this – there is statistically no more bullshit in our industry than any other in its hey-day.)

When Knuth wants to talk about art, I am prepared to genuinely talk about art, because I know he’s not making an excuse or shadowing an issue. When other tech people talk about art and computers, I’m shutting down for an hour and a half of  impedence mismatches. I’m instantly assuming three things, without ever having met them or known them (remember those psychological tests where they show you a picture of a model and ask you to judge her as a person?):

1. One of their organizational “pillars” is to do Agile because Facebook and Twitter, and Google something. Thence comes the “Agile”.

2. One of their personal yearly goals is to find “excellence” in some field of expertise. Thence comes the “art”. (Oh you just ship fast? But are you ISO 9000 scrum-operation-rated? No? Didn’t think so!)

3. Everyone else in the organization has the same two constraints above, hence a book (when everyone has an external impartial point of reference, it is easier to acknowledge).

Would I have the same outburst if someone from Facebook said that? Not likely. When FB employees want to break the rules, they’ll more than likely brag about it. Additionally they’ll brag about results to make you feel worse about it. So what gives?

Adjust for my self-righteousness

So I’ll admit there’s a gigantic component of self-righteousness here. “In my day, we didn’t have no ISO 9000. We just did Agile.” or whatever. Us old-timers don’t use guidelines or books, we just wing it. I dive a lot with people who began diving before the existence of modern deco theory and tables. So I know there’s certainly that aspect of it.

There’s an amount of “loss” you feel when you are one of the first embracers, take the risks and invest in a methodology, only to have the MBAs taking over and mass-applying it. I will lose my bragging rights when everyone is doing it. Commoditisation is a natural part of life that I am not entirely unaware of. In fact, there are times when I feel a great sense of relief that I can walk into a multi-billion dollar company, and with a straight face, propose to build something using node.js without having to endure a long-drawn political battle. Must be even better in places like Facebook, where you can challenge the unestablished liberal standard too.

Add desensitization

I’m one of those who refuses to believe that ADHD and Clinical Depression suddenly spiked for no reasons whatsoever in the past decade. While I have NO problem with over-medicating people, I do fear that those who are really in pain receive less attention and care. Seen that south park episode where, once medical marijuana is made legal, every male suddenly got cancer? Actually can happen in real life a lot.

It is the same with NoSQL, Agile, Ruby, Python, Node.js, REST, and more. When rational arguments can be made about their usage, they are excellent and effective tools to reduce some costs at the expensive of other costs (say longevity vs development speed.)

The reality is, all these “new” things are a symptom, and an outcome of a necessity. If you don’t have any issues with strong-typing, you’re going to gain nothing by using a weakly typed language, and are probably going to have a maintenance nightmare on your hands. “Applying NoSQL” will not reduce costs of the DB. NoSQL is usually the reluctant outcome of attempts to reduce costs of the DB (if you’ve ever had to provide stateful storage to a customer, trust me – it is FAR more tempting to just pay Oracle a million dollars and let them take the blame of a missed integer increment – the risk is too high and the pain is far too much.)

Mixing of concepts

One of the other problems is you lose fidelity when the information is rehashed. As no blogpost on earth goes without the chain of “apple stole -> microsoft -> stole apple -> stole microsoft -> stole apple -> stole xerox -> stole <something>”, you’ll realize that not a lot of the ideas are brand new. What does happen though, is fallacies are created when half-baked ideas are mixed together with good ones – you may not notice it, by psychologically you are associating the two.

Someone may be a great author on design patterns. This person may also have built a good marketing relationship. Mixing the two is surprisingly dangerous. Either you have a sales rep reading it, who starts filing bugs against the devs to “Use the Visitor Pattern to do something”, or you have a developer opening a company because they know how to market crap. It’s next to impossible to fix the problem, because do you really want to say “Donald Knuth was wrong!”? Doesn’t do good to anyone.

I’ve had plenty of such arguments where I disagreed with RMS on a mailing list, and people sent me his biographies. God damn morons!

Philosophy

The problem with philosophy is that once it comes into existence, it is nearly impossible to get rid of. It spreads like a cancer. I really dread the day someone walks up to me and says, “I am a NoSQL philosophy kinda guy.” and you’re thinking to yourself, “What the heck does that mean? It’s a compromise to gain performance. Where did philosophy come from?”

There have been times when absolutely no amount of rational argument, cost-benefit analysis or data when “doing things right” is the goal. I’ve been scarred for life by such people, and boy am I afraid of them.

Decisions

Now you might say, “So what? They can believe what they want.” And that would be true. There’s a difference between a decision-maker and a philosopher. A decision maker tells you that they want you to use NoSQL and you can get by quite easily. You may disagree, but it doesn’t cause pain. The problem with the philosopher is that it is never their decision. In fact it isn’t a decision at all. It is simply the “right” thing to be done.

Thereby, any disagreer is by definition, wrong. And every failed outcome is everyone’s fault because having “right” on your side, your pivot is akin to Superman himself. Those around must be failing.

You would find a thousand articles speaking against Extreme Programming, and while I love to hate on those people, if the XP people go to an extreme (see what I did there?), I’m going to side with them. XP is a symptom of the necessity to build something fast and at low cost. XP is not the beginning.

Sinofsky was right all along!

There’s something you never expected me to say, did you? There’s been a misconception that I hate Sinofsky and his methods. I don’t. I would never actually work on his teams, unless food was a problem, but I would do EXACTLY what he did at Microsoft. When you have the time and the money, you don’t have to operate like Facebook, and doing a bittorrent deployment on stateless machines will gain you nothing if you don’t have the scale.

In my experience, he never pushed back if you really did present him with data and numbers. I will only nitpick one tiny thing with his latest blog on decision making – decisions NEED a sponsor. That who stuff about “let the organization make the decision” is crap.

Beyond that, he allowed people to make commitments, and then live up to them. When you make the money that Windows and Office does, you don’t HAVE to hurry. You want to get it right, and you can take the time to do it.

Now there were the reverse-philosophers which really caused the problems, but that’s for another time and day. Why WP’s MSFT-built apps weren’t updating weekly is beyond me. Why Hotmail wasn’t releasing an inbox update here, a formatting update there, is also beyond me. Overall though? That guy is darned brilliant.

Art has valuation

For those of you still not convinced about the dangers of mixing “art” where none exists, I’m going to part with these final words.

Art has valuation. The word “art” is not a license to escape responsibility. So you are not only pissing off the engineers and scientists, you’re insulting people who work night and day to make something that is highly valued. Ever hated a movie in your life? Yeah. Would you buy merchandise of a shitty movie because it was “art”? Thought so.

Artists need critics to be good – which explains why Edward Scissorhands was so good, and I clench at the thought of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp getting together ever again – they’ll make a lot of money. It is no longer an art. It’s a formula. When you hate a Michael Bay movie, how’d you feel if he took all your money and told you, “It’s art. You just don’t get it.” Yeah right bozo. We don’t. Give our money back! That’s how I feel when a techie responds to a serious technical question with “It’s really an art. You just don’t get it.”

I have double standards and they will remain so

In conclusion, I’m going to continue my double standards. If you’re someone I know and respect, if you’ve built LaTex, or if your name shows up on the LKML contributors list, I’m going to cut you a great deal of slack on writing about philosophy and art. I’ll read it with interest and share it. I know when you want to talk art, you’re not hiding a technical failing behind it.

Otherwise, I’m going to treat you with a great deal of fear for being that guy who will put some new fad in the hands of people who will think that “applying it” is the magic formula to their problems. Further more, they don’t have to reason or rationalize it because it’s “art”.

I come across plenty of paranoid people. Some more annoying than others (for various reasons, the least of which isn’t that they are massive wastes of your time.) The difference between annoying paranoia and just general fear, is assertiveness. The paranoid love the feeling of being in fear, in much the same way many love the feeling of heartbreak (just read “Man and Superman” already, and save me the need for elaboration.)

As a child, I grew up near some farmland on the outskirts of a major city in India. Plenty of visitors to our home were afraid of “animals” attacking them (). If you’ve been shielded from the forests, you probably know the feeling. They were remarkably afraid of snakes – which is stupid because not every jungle (a farm isn’t a jungle) comes with a stock crew of snakes, tigers, lions waiting to specifically to bite/eat you; the difference between being afraid of lions, and just loving the feeling of being afraid of a suburb and thus inventing lions. This is not to say that snakes aren’t dangerous. So can our dogs be. They’re huge, and they’re highly protective. You especially don’t want to mess with one whose jaw can cleanly cut off a human limb in one bite when necessary.

What was amusing about the fear is the reassurance of self-importance they derived from it. Our dogs, while quite dangerous, were also quite lazy. Same with the snakes. They had comfortable lives, and it was a damned inconvenience for them to even be bothered to get up and do something, unless it involved eating a juicy rat. The idea that a snake is struggling to survive, doesn’t harm a human soul for over five decades, to secretly build up the trust of larger society, all the while waiting for this specific person to walk out of the city limits, and then bite him! We’re not talking about the Australian outback here.

I frequently feel the same paranoia when suggesting anything out of the ordinary. You really are tempting me at times, if you want me to seriously believe that someone went out of their way to invent an entire sport (snowboarding, skiing, etc.) or a restaurant, run the business for many years, build up a reputation, exactly so they could tempt YOU to walk in one day, and that would be the specific day they try to kill you. I’d say if you were really that important, more than likely that industry of choice is the automobile business and commercial flight.

For the paranoid few, I have four words: Nobody gives a damn! Face it. Yes, it sucks, that nobody goes out of their way to build strange webs of conspiracies around you. That doesn’t make it untrue. To cause harm requires effort. Unless causing you harm is of any gain (in the Outback, the gain is ‘tender free-range human’), very few will even think about it. Those who try will do so lazily (causing you harm is the same as going to work – they want to get it done with and hit the bar.)

I understand it sucks to live life knowing nobody’s going to “hack into your accounts” because you have nothing in them that others want. It sucks to know that all that whispering you do in plain visible sight does get attention, but for the amusement others derive out of it. Important secret things aren’t whispered in bars with conspicuous sunglasses. You never know such things are being said – that being the entire point of secrecy. It sucks to know that the products that piss you off, weren’t built to piss you off, but rather because nobody cared that you existed.

The temptation to feel victimized is certainly great – because then you get instant importance. Someone is taking the trouble to victimize you. The reality, I’m afraid, is much much worse than that!

Anyone who even read a couple of paragraphs about the case would consider this a semantic jump of spaghetti-monster-religion proportions, and yet I had to endure a few headlines.

I’m going to straighten all this out for you – for those of you who wish to learn some objectivity while you’re at it.

1. The Apple vs. Samsung case, was not, as much as Android-fanboys love to promote this, about pinch-to-zoom or various patents. Even more than Microsoft, Apple doesn’t have secret deals that avoid listing the specific patents; they went to court. One of my friends in fact was somehow blaming Apple that the courts made the documentation public. I’m not sure how Apple can control the US court system. I am convinced that going to court at least gets us a “decision” either way, and imposes fair rules on everyone. If cloning had been okay’d, then it allows Apple to clone their competitors.

Coming back to the point, this case was about cloning the product, not about having simply used unlicenced patents. There’s a difference, and not even a subtle one. A specific ridge pepsi figures out on the edge of a bottle which makes it say 20% less likely to slip out of a hand, then pepsi is rewarded for that trial-and-error by limited exclusivity. But putting that ridge alone isn’t cloning by a competitor. If you used the same color schemes, positioning of text, etc. which made the coke bottle look nearly identical, then that’s cloning.

Yes it is also a very subjective thing – let’s leave it to the Jury.

2. The direct outcome if you accept the above (and you can go read the public case documents), is that Samsung (or Android if you equate the two), succeeded directly as a result of cloning the iPhone. They didn’t clone *all* competitor phones. They cloned the *iPhone*.

Therefore, the market wants either an *iPhone* or *iPhone*-look-a-like.

3. This third predicate, doesn’t fit the first two – that by going with a vehemently non-iPhone-like Windows Phone, Samsung will benefit.

Samsung wasn’t attacked on patents. Samsung was attacked on cloning. Samsung couldn’t sell enough phones until they cloned it. Windows Phones are apparently selling like hot cakes (almost 277% more people wanted Windows Phones in 2012 than those who wanted it in 2011 – that’s pretty darn awesome – go look at the numbers.)

Samsung wasn’t convinced by them though. They could have used widgets or whatever to mimic the live-tiles from the “Windows 8-style UI”. They picked icons. It benefited them.

I fail to see the logic people are using on this one. This seems like a straw-man’s argument – write a bunch of stuff that’s confusing, then insert your punchline. Read my post on “Therefore God exists.” to find out how this can be used to connect any arbitrary logic to any other arbitrary logic.

The tech press is going nuts over Stack Ranking. Sure, rewards are great, and ego-boosts are great. There’s maybe a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft (as any other company), and this stack ranking may perhaps also be one of them – but it wouldn’t be my big one. The biggest ego boost you get ever in your life, is when a customer who has absolutely no reason to thank you, takes the trouble of finding out who worked on a certain project, and then mail you personally telling you how awesome your product was. I’ve been there just once, and let me tell you, it doesn’t happen often. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have worked on the iPad – a product that without coersion or caveats or excuses, and despite three bigshots attempting to kill, sells because “customers love it”. One can only hope that in their lives, they contribute in a small part to a product for which a customer happily parts with their money. More so one that isn’t an essential commodity like food, clothes, etc.

I’d have been happy to be ranked as the bottom 10%er if only they’d just let me speed up the website, fix issues and ship them fast. I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass who becomes Principal or Partner, so long as they promised to keep me out of meetings in which five highly-educated engineers debated the merits of using an Int32 vs Int64 when storing data in a text file, with arguments based not on designs, facts, or outcomes, but rather on synergies, and lenses and perspectives and prisms (you can’t make this stuff up).

There are still a significant number of people at Microsoft who wouldn’t exactly want to be rated the worst, but so long as they’re rated average, they are willing to fight for the cause of their product – that of seeing their product succeed in the market! There is no ego boost as really conducting an iPhone funeral, then delivering update-after-update every month that makes Apple crap their pants and being No. 2 in two years. I argue there are still these gems sitting within the company willing to do this for the market-ego-boost and would gladly give up titles for that (I know them personally).

Of course, it helps if the Stacking is directly correlated to it, but what do I know of big corporations? Please get a grip members of the tech press, and Vanity Fair. Stack Ranking while perhaps flawed, isn’t the problem. It’s the criteria used to rank that makes a great deal of difference – whether it is free-for-all or forced-curve. If shipping products, or making decisions,  or adding features isn’t on your priority list, getting rid of Stack Ranking won’t do much.  You still won’t make good decisions if your desire is not to make your products better. For all the Microsoft employees claiming to LOVE Windows Phone, how many of them spend their spare time fixing bugs or improving it? As opposed to trash talking everyone on Facebook who has an iPhone? Why didn’t 20 employees get together to make a Bing Maps app that provided transit directions? Why didn’t Skydrive, Hotmail, Messenger keep adding a gazillion features in an effort by employees to not fall in the bottom 10%? Why didn’t Windows Phone’s in-house apps keep shipping every weekend in an ever-tougher race to be ranked in the top 20%?

Stack Ranking had nothing to do with this. Heck if Stack Ranking worked, it’d only encourage crazy-ass hotshots to join Microsoft in an ever-escalating Darwinian race to see who makes the best product, for the best price, with the best quality as fast as possible!

We aren’t hearing a lot of complaints to the tune of, “I delivered this feature, and despite it being better than anyone else’s outside the company, another team came up with something that beat mine. So I was forced to the bottom 10%.” We certainly don’t see the products in the market to back this up either.

Come on, am I the only person who thinks the scenario doesn’t make sense? A brutally stack-ranked company would indeed produce not a compromise phone, but something that changes the world (to all the apologists who will use the same five rehashed arguments telling me Windows Phone is great – it’s not. Deal with it.)

It’s a trick question on multiple levels. On the one hand, it’s designed to give you some humility – telling your boss you want to be the king of Earth is only considered arrogant, despite that being what you would like to see yourself doing. So honesty is pretty much out the door in the first 10 milliseconds.

Given that the answer is no longer honest, what is it for? Well, one big possibility is that it’s a precursor to a grand knowledge-transfer – some ancient pearls of wisdom are about to fall your way. A few Yoda-like sentences with deep voices by super-old people telling you how the world works. I have a major distaste for all of the above (though not Yoda himself), mainly because I was given way too much life advice during college to have scarred me for life. When a person goes to corny Tom Hanks one-liners from Forest Gump, you pretty much know they’ve got nothing.

Getting past the personalities, the question itself is irrelevant. It is a means at demonstrating you are having a serious discussion without having one. The question you should be asking is what needs to be done today? No matter who you are – even Apple or Exxon or Walmart – there is ALWAYS a pressing need at the moment. Using the words “prisms”, “lenses”, “tactical vs strategic”, “synergistic dynamism”, and my favourite of this year, “impedence mismatch” don’t really make the need go away, and really only hide the fact that you have no idea what to do about today’s need, you have no answer, you have no response (whether tactical or strategic when viewed from any perspective through various prisms in front of different lenses that all work synergistically to provide a a clear view without impedence mismatch with the world.)

So you attempt to paint a picture of how things will be five years from now. What pains me about this is that people do fall for it. I wrote once before (way back in 2007) as an advice for college projects – on how the kids who do boring stuff like writing a simple kernel or device driver or a payroll system are taking a higher risk, as the world expects them to deliver on what they promise. As opposed to those who want to make experimental holographic displays and they already set themselves up for an “out” by saying they made ‘significant progress’ towards the cause.

The same with the computing industry or any other industry. The five-year question is simply a way of saying, “Dude, if you ask me what I’m doing right now, I got nothing. How about I make something up for a timeline so ridiculously far in the future that you probably will forget to hold me accountable, or even if you do, I can call you a petty vindictive person for holding on to grudges for five years, and still avoid answering the question.”

Defense:

This part is for those who won’t get the point above, and hence is a pre-emptive strike at the top questions/comments/criticisms you will try to make. Let’s see how well I can predict – though I suspect I’ll only get as far as five days in the future – yeah, I’m that bad.

1. Long-Term Strategizing is important: Yes, I totally agree. The words strategy and tactics do have very valid well-known semantic meanings. But a strategy and tactic both are processes – and any process has an expected outcome (Expectation as defined through the prism of mathematics.)

Where means there is an immediate, quantifiable, verifiable, observable “step” you’re taking today. It may be the first of many. It may be a small one. But it is one you should be able to point at and say, “That’s what we’re doing NOW to get to the ideal in FIVE YEARS.” Whether it is employee growth or product deliverable, or whatever the heck else you want out of life (what I’m doing to become the king of Earth depends on the lens you look at it from.)

Long-term strategizing is not an EXCUSE for not answering for what you’re up to today.

2. Shouldn’t you have a vision for yourself? 

One absolutely should. I have one for me, and I’m sure you have one for yourself. As House would say, “Everybody lies”, and that’s true. I really don’t want to be King of Earth – that was a blatant unabashed lie! I want to be “King of Earth where others will run Earth, and I will only reap benefits.” – What I want, the English language doesn’t have a word for. Even a Dictator comes with risks. I want to be a weasel risk-free dictator.

Whether you want to be a “CEO” or “Senior VP” or whatever the heck your company has, we both know you’re lying. That’s not where you see yourself five years from now. That’s where you realistically hope you’ll be given that the world operates somewhat rationally. It would save everyone a great deal of time if we just began with where we can be given that literally everything went in our favour – the right president, the right immigration laws, free college, a 10-million dollar loan for my private business, etc. and then aim to get as many things right as we can.

3. Maybe others aren’t as narcissistic as you:

That’s true. But they’re every bit as ambitious, if not more. If they were narcissistic, they’d admit that they’re as ambitious. Well that’s a lie too. Not everybody; I’m sure there are still monks in China, India, Italy, etc. who may have suppressed ambition – but I haven’t met them, so I must account for the possibility that they exist.

Find me one person who couldn’t find one thing to improve about their lives. Yes – literally one person. Even Bill Gates would love to cure all Polio on earth, and given the veto power, would probably make it happen. If he didn’t, he’d be an idiot. Or maybe he wants to educate people to make choices that would help them cure Polio – to respect Free Will and all that. Still – that power of education – to reach that many people with that information is an enviable power over Earth.

We all have our pet causes – and without going into the rationality of them, we can all agree given veto power over all of Earth, we each have things we would change – even if the change was that no one person should ever have such power over all of Earth again (and I’m glad and deeply respectful towards our forefathers who fought a costly and bloody battle to keep that from happening – which allows me to write this blog without fear of a dissident killing me without consequence, if they disagree with what I say.)

So there you go – nothing is ever enough. That’s what makes life fun and fascination, etc. – go watch an underdog movie for the relevant quotes here.

4. Why do you take things to such extremes?

Because it leaves no wiggle room. If I came up with something like, “Senior Product Manager”, there’d be at least one smartass telling me how I’m just not thinking big enough. Hence the Veto-power-over-Earth. Even given that power, there are things people will find to do, and people will find to do NOW. In fact, I’d say I can’t think big enough – because I still haven’t been able to hypothesize a situation/position where you would have nothing you’d want to do, if you could get it for free.

Rolling back up the stack, there’s no excuse left for not doing something NOW!

5. So what’re you really saying?

Before you rehash, this is what I’m saying. That question is irrelevant – because we already know the answer – “As much as I can”, and also redundant because, “I’m already on my way there.”

When someone does bring it up, it is usually a means of avoidance. Watch out for that.

It’s a silly thing to stand out, but a lot of times, you come across non-information or non-opinions. There’s speech. There’s words. There’s even text or written language. Its effective information content is zero.

Every notice when someone comes up to you, presents an idea and says, “We think this idea may or may not work.”

And you’re staring back and nodding seriously, but you’re thinking of Steve Martin in your head and trying not to laugh. “Hmm… let me see here. That’s a tough one… it may work, or it may not work…. Wow… Need to really think of this here. Boy you’ve really narrowed it down to some close contenders, I’ll give you that.”

Background: Today morning Seattle City Lights politely sent me a mail saying, “You’ve paid your light bill successfully. Thank you.” I rarely ever open those mails, but for some or the other reason, I clicked on it. The initial reaction was shock, and then panic. My bill was almost $900. After some careful analysis, I realized a large part of it had to be my stupid circuitry. The amount of load my wine heater was drawing from mains was… let’s just say, ambitious. (Cops, if you’re reading this, you’re welcome to inspect my home as many times as you wish. I have no meth lab going on here. If those white vans across the street are of surveillance teams, could you come in? I’ve been dying to join some awesome secret organization, but they never seem to want me in.)

After the initial jerk, I decided to go out and replace each and every one of the light bulbs in my house with CFL variants. I emptied out QFC and my bulbs won’t end. I never knew how much crap I had in the house. At last count, I have eight100-watt lights from the kitchen (replaced with 12-watt equivalents), and get this – eighteen 60-watt bulbs including the bathrooms and kitchen (I have some elaborate bathrooms with decorative light-strips like the ones found in movie-star dressing rooms.)

WHOA! So everytime I was in the kitchen, I was burning 800 watts. Every time I was brushing, I was burning nearly 600+ watts. My 65″ LCD TV runs at about 600 watts!

Forget the long-term savings, just replacing everything with an, on-average, 15-watt equivalent brings the consumption down to 400 watts overall for the entire freakin’ house if I’m extravagantly keeping every single light on. And that’s still less than what I was burning just while brushing.

More updates to come. I emptied the local QFC and replaced only about half my apartment. There’s still at least 15 or so 100-watt bulbs that could use replacing. Out I go…..