Twitter Blizzard - 21 December 2022

There has been a blizzard of commentary about the Musk takeover of Twitter and the consequences thereof.  My personal experience is that Twitter took a massive nosedive in the quality of the content and I have migrated to a Mastodon instance.  There remains a tumultuous debate about alternatives that replace Twitter, but there remains a singular problem that Twitter has solved and that is a barrier to entry for all alternatives.  Scale.

The "magic" of Twitter is not who owns it, who moderates it, or who subscribes.  These are all interesting and important factors, but they are not the key differentiator that made Twitter successful.  The key differentiator is that Twitter exchanges messages among millions of users in fractions of a second and creates a storehouse of comments that can be served up in seconds.  I could write code that collected short comments, microblog entries, and redistributes them, but it would handle a few hundred users, tops.  Much  more than that, and my little empire would fall over.  The good folks at Twitter have spent the last decade learning how to collect new entries, sort out subscribers, and redistribute those messages - and how to be efficient about it.  The blockchain/bitcoinage people designed a system that was intentionally inefficient while Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the others were seeking ultraefficiency at the scale of millions.  Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) used to say his strategy was "get big fast", but I think it would be more accurate to say "get big AND fast".  If you want a counter example, insurance companies and banks are big but hardly fast.

'Tis snowy outside.  Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Coffee as a metric of business success - 13 December 2022

Coffee was not always my favorite beverage.  For a long time, I drank tea, both hot and iced.  At some point in college, I learned to drink coffee.  It would be more accurate to say that I trained myself to drink coffee for in the early days I did not like the actual taste of coffee; I merely tolerated it because of the caffeine and the warmth.  

I was an engineering co-op student in college.  At Purdue University, this meant that one alternated semesters of work and school.  Freshman and Senior years were two semesters and the intervening Sophmore and Junior years were spread across three years' duration with work semesters filling the time.  In my case, I worked During one of the work semesters and decided that I needed coffee to keep up with my work and social plans.  This was reinforced by the fact that the company provided free coffee.  

The company was a small company that made medical computing equipment.  Today, we would call them a start-up, but then it was simply "a small company".  Several departments were under one roof - business, marketing, manufacturing, test, and engineering - and there was a designated cafeteria.  There was no food service, no microwave ovens, no refrigerators, and no vending machines, but there were tables, chairs, and a coffee pot.  It was the kind of coffee pot that used paper filters to hold the coffee grounds that was brewed into glass carafes.  A coffee service provide packets of coffee containing the proper measure of grounds.  I quickly learned how to brew coffee as I tended to come in (relatively) early, and this got me warm and moving in the morning.  

The company made medical equipment and computers.  The computers generated a lot of heat and needed to be kept cool.  Because they were all minicomputers, there was no computer room - the computers were everywhere and so the entire building was kept cold.  I took a sweater to work even in the summer, because it was so doggone cold.  To help counter the cold, I decided to start drinking coffee.

I started with everything to hid the tast of the coffee:  creamer and sugar.  The creamer and sugar helped to cut the acidity.  It was powdered creamer because we had no refrigerator for dairy products.  Over time, I eliminated the sugar and then the creamer and became a convert to black coffee.  

This rather stunning conversion was facilitated by the fact that the coffee was Yuban in foil packets.  The brand seems to have been lost, but Yuban was considered a premium coffee at the time as the foil packaging attests.  The foil sealed the coffee well and helped keep it fresh.  At the end of the semester, I wrapped up work and returned to my university studies.  When I returned, the company was still producing computerized medical equipment, but the business was not as high flying as when I had left: the development engineering of the new products was costing more than expected and competition had entered the market to grab for those sweet profits.  While I am sure there were many things done to control costs, the one that struck me as a co-op was the change in coffee.  From Yuban in foil packets, the supply changed to Folgers in plastic packets.  The corresponding change in coffee quality was noticecable, but I was not deterred and I resumed drinking black coffee.  After the semester passed, I returned to university, and then came back to work.  Competition was fierce in the medical computing business and more belt-tightening had been applied.  The coffee was still provided by the company, but it had been changed from Folgers in plastic bags to Mr. Nick-L-Cup in paper bags.  It was tough.  The coffee was not bad, but it really needed help.  I think I kept drinking it black, but I cut back.  By the time I returned to my studies, I had pretty much abandoned coffee and stayed that way for several years.  I went back to tea and did not return to coffee until I was able to grind and brew it fresh in my own kitchen.

The business metric in the title is a simple observation.  Companies are generous when the times are good, but when the quality and quantity of the benefits start dropping, it is a sign that the company is not doing well.

When I graduated, the company was doing well enough to make me an offer for a permanent position, but it was the lowest offer I received.  And, by that time, I was concerned about the future success of the company, so I took another offer.

Management by Objectives (MBO) replaced by Management by Skills (MBS) - 7 December 2022

Management By Objectives, MBO, is the traditional way to evaluate employees at ratings time, usually annually.  MBO might work well for routine work such as clerical situations, and it may work well for sales and support, but it fails when managing a research and development team.  For R&D, we need an evaluation framework that accounts for creativity, innovation, and unpredictability.  I have used Management by Skills for this purpose.

In the traditional MBO plan, the employee writes down a series of objectives for the rating period, about half a dozen.  Often the employee will be asked for four objectives, one per calendar quarter.  These objectives are "SMART" - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, and are usually written in the third-person voice.  Thus, an example might be "complete 100% of incoming requests within two working days".  The typical MBO embeds a lot of assumptions.  In this example, we assume the incoming work is enough to fill 40 hours per week, the individual tasks are not onerous (can be completed in a few hours), the incoming work is evenly distributed in time, how to resolve incoming tasks is well understood, and there is little or no prioritization of the incoming requests.  This simply does not describe an R&D environment.  In a research group or product development group, the tasks vary dramatically in scope and difficulty, some require invention while others are routine. The tasks usually arrive in clumps, and some tasks are much more important than others.  This variety is very difficult to oversee using MBO methods and metrics.

Furthermore, R&D is a career position and individuals want to grow, to get promoted.  It is not wise to promote someone for "just doing their job" - the manager will want to encourage people to learn and demonstrate new skills.  The skills can be specific, such as learning a particular technique, or the can be general, such as leadership or planning.  I addressed this by focusing on skills rather than objectives.

Management by Skills, MBS, defines a set of skills that are to be mastered and demonstrated by employees.  These skills are usually on a spectrum, from simple and small growing to complex and large as the employee's career advances.  The newly graduated employee cannot be expected to perform at the level of a 20-year veteran, at least not until that have had a chance to develop their skills.  The skills I identified for my team were derived from HR-provided documents and can be summarized as: flexibility, communications and listening, technical depth, technical breadth, scope of influence, leadership, and impact of decisions.  These may overlap in some situations but they describe important skills in an R&D workplace.  We take them one at a time.

Flexibility is required to survive the rapid pace of change in research and development.  The requirements for a project often change during the project as new information is uncovered.  Someone who is slow to adapt will fall behind as they work on tasks no longer relevant.  Someone who resists change will be eternally dissatisfied.  Those who embrace change and flex with it will focus on the right tasks and have the greatest success.  There is no convenient metric of flexibility and this skill is usually best measured using examples, both pro and con.

Communications and listening.  This is usually listed as "communications" and that can cause one to lose sight of the fact that communications is two-way.  A one-way communications method has a name - broadcast.  Communications also comes in many forms - written & spoken, formal & informal, in person and electronicly, individual and in groups of varying sizes.  In today's world,  a successful researcher cannot only publish and a successful developer cannot only use email.  One must learn to use successfully a variety of forms.  An employee who communicates only with peers may succeed but they will not likely advance until they learn to speak with management.  Finally, success at the highest tiers requires the ability to work with large groups, and someone who communicates a lot but has little effect will be left behind.  As before, there is no convenient metric for communications and listening; it is not sufficient to count papers, technical reports, pages written, or talks given.  This skill is usually best measured using examples where the communications had an impact.

Technical depth is usually what the more junior employees focus on, identifying all the clever tasks they completed.  Technical depth remains an important skill, but it must be evaluated in the larger context of the full set of skills.  In other words, the employee will not be promoted if they lack technical skills, but they will not be promoted if they show only their technical skills.  Technical depth has no easy metric and can be best evaluated with comparisons to (anonymized) colleagues and peers.  Technical depth can sometimes be measured using feedback from peers, such as from talks or papers, or using independent counts such as patents or peer-reviewed publications.

Technical breadth is often paired with technical depth.  An employee who is "a kilometer wide and a millimeter deep" will not succeed.  One needs to show a willingness to take on tasks that require one to learn new skills, and build on those skills.  As a positive feedback loop, skills in a new area can often be applied to familiar problems and generate new solutions.  Technical breadth has no easy metric and can be best evaluated with comparisons to (anonymized) colleagues and peers.

Scope of influence is an important skill to demonstrate.  Presentations given and papers published must be converted into research and development results.  An idea that never leaves the lab has little or no value.  This skill goes beyond simple formulas or techniques - the ability to influence another often depends on communications skills.  A good idea presented badly is unlikely to be adopted in practice.  Influence ultimately comes back around.  When people seek out the employee for advice and ideas, that employee has a broad influence on the organization.  The metric to use here is typically based on examples, especially when the employee causes existing practice to be changed.

Impact of decisions is closely related to scope of influence, but focuses more on the magnitiude of the resulting changes.  The metric can measure efficiency changes (e.g., process improvements), dollar impact on the business, or the scale of the change (local to a group or product to across an entire corporation or product suite).

Leadership is probably the hardest and most dynamic skill to measure.  It is even hard to define.  Early in one's career, leadership is often assigned by management, but later in one's career, leadership is earned.  In one's early career, an employee can be assigned to oversee an intern or a more junior employee.  As one's career advances, the employee will identify opportunies that need addressing and assemble the required skills and team members.  While the junior leader is assigned by management, the senior leader tells managers what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Evaluating employees is a difficult task and changes with the environment and the individuals participating.  This note summarizes some techniques that can be used for effective evaluations in a research and development environment.

Domestic Terrorism in the US - 6 December 2022

Headlines are buzzing with fragmentary reports of an attack on power substations in Moore County, North Carolina.   It could have happened anywhere, but the reports out of NC say that one or more people broke down a fence and shot up a power substation.  Well, two power substations.  This has resulted in power outages for 40,000 customers of Duke Power.  The exact methods of the attack are not very surprising.  It feels like every year a squirrel takes out a power substation, so using guns and trucks is not a major advance.  That it is human-done seems to be the surprise this time.

We should not be surprised.  In fact, we should have been prepared.

On 12 September 2001, we were back at work and wondering what could happen next.  What could the international terrorists do after the attacks on the Pentagon in Washington DC and the Twin Towers of New York?  My regular lunch crowd was sure that 9/11 was but the first of a series of attacks and we debated what would come next.  Perhaps someone would drive a truck of explosives half-way across a major hydro dam and blow up the dam, depriving Las Vegas and LA of power and drowning anyone downstream?  Perhaps someone would ship checked bags in airlines - good thing that airlines were grounded.  Perhaps someone would dump a truck full of chemicals into a reservoir and poison a city?  Trains, planes, trucks, cars, chemicals, nukes, gas clouds - we came up with quite a list.   After a bit of debate, because that is what engineers approach problems, we realized that the luncheon spot had gone silent and everyone was watching us, so we quickly changed to the latest baseball scores.  In the following days, it became clear that this was a one-shot attempt and that the terrorist group did not have a sustained plan of terror.  Airplanes were again allowed to fly and security at the airports was beefed up.

The aspect we did not examine was the international terrorist.  We took that as a given.  We never considered that domestic terrorists would play this deadly game.  The Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans, to name a few, have continued to attack the United States through cyber means but no one has really tried to attack using conventional means.  We must be honest with ourselves:  in the last 20 years, if a foreign agency had been determined to execute a physical attack, they would have launched it by now and there is a good chance that at least one attempt would have succeeded in doing some damage.  I certainly do not wish for this, but no defense is perfect for 20 years.

After watching the development of self-described "militias" in the US, it is painfully clear that one or more of them are going to do something stupid.  This particular attack in NC could be the result of excessive beer by some dimwits, but the synchronization of mutiple sites simultaneously indicates some forethought and training was pursued.

So I think there are two lessons here that must lead to action plans.  First, we need to watch the militias and bring them to heel.  I would argue the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is included here, but we know that these self-described militias (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the rest) are actively seeking opportunities to do something stupid.  We must find them and stop them.

Second, we need to strengthen the digital protections of our infrastructure.  This threat is greater than a power substation.  This threat covers power, water, gas, and communications.  The SCADA systems must be upgraded to block false access,  other computer systems must be self-policing, the physical assets must be hardened to prevent access, and surveillence of the physical assets must be improved.  

Some might cry out that these steps are an imposition by an overreaching government intent on control, but these are protective acts and not offensive actions.  We must protect ourselves against enemies, foreign and domestic.