Older brothers can be very cruel to their siblings. Just ask my little sister. As kids, we often split the chore of washing the dishes after dinner. I dreaded this task, but one evening I had some fun with it at my sister’s expense.

After enjoying our mother’s chicken tetrazzini, I raced to the sink to wash my half of the dishes first. But instead of washing the dishes to perfection until half remained, I carefully washed 50% of every single dish in the sink. Each plate resembled a half-moon made of Parmesan cheese and chicken skin. Hilarious.

Sure, if I had done the job properly it would have taken less time, but you should never underestimate the wicked dedication of an older brother.

The moral of my story is that work assignments and job performances can be measured and interpreted in different ways. This is especially true with software projects.

As a software developer, I am commonly asked how “big” my applications are. (The cheeky side of me wants to answer with a physical size. “Well, I once built an iPhone app that was 2×3 inches!”) In all seriousness, when I’m asked this question I assume the person wants to hear about the scale of my software, so I tell them how long it took to build, how many concurrent users it can handle, and how large the underlying database is. Interesting stuff if you’re trying to gauge a developer’s experience, but what if you want to measure the progress of a project under development?

Some programmers measure their progress by counting how many lines of code they’ve written, but this practice makes me taste my lunch again. Why? First, the numbers aren’t isomorphic across different languages. (Twenty lines of C++ might accomplish the same as five lines of Java, or one line of Ruby.) Second, measuring progress by counting the lines of code encourages the development of bloated software. To quote Kanye West quoting Daft Punk, I’ve seen many applications that would be “harder, better, faster, stronger” if they were rewritten with half the code.

Last year this issue became an important one for my company. During negotiations with a client, I proposed that our fee be split into thirds, with the second payment due after three months. However, my customer wanted to cut the second check when “half the software was complete.”

But what does “half the software” mean? Half the lines of code? If so, then we’d have to somehow predict the final line count in advance. Since our software was web-based, it was suggested that we measure the number of pages built, but even that’s not perfect. If 75% of the pages are 65% complete, is that considered half? Besides, when web applications are measured by page count, developers are rewarded for building clunky user interfaces that use more pages than necessary.

Fortunately, I was able to convince my customer that “half the software” was too vague, but others aren’t always so lucky. I once saw a project whose members were unwittingly encouraged to ignore problems, because their success was measured by the number of bugs filed. If there’s no Dilbert cartoon for that, there really should be.

Good software developers view their work as a craft, and their software as a work of art. To them, judging software by silly metrics makes no more sense than judging the beauty of a painting by the canvas size, or the strength of a bridge by the number of rivets.

Instead of using lousy software metrics, companies should focus on what really matters: software quality. Yes, this is harder to measure because it’s more subjective, but it can be done.

What makes software good? For starters, good software isn’t bad, and bad software is easy to identify. Some of the many things that can make software bad include a lack of comments, poor formatting, mismatched naming conventions, copy-and-pasted code, deprecated method calls, and broken syntax that doesn’t even compile.

Just as it can be difficult to smell your own B.O., sometimes it’s hard to recognize when your own code stinks. That’s why my team uses an open-source Java application named Hudson. Hudson is a continuous integration tool, which is a type of program that automatically compiles, tests, and analyzes software on a recurring basis. Think of Hudson as a friend who sniffs you once an hour and tells you when it’s time to reapply the Old Spice. (To my fellow geeks: Old Spice is a form of deodorant.)

Once an hour, Hudson downloads and attempts to compile the latest source code for my team’s software projects. It then runs our code through a gauntlet of unit tests to ensure that our latest changes haven’t broken anything. Next, Hudson sends our source code through another tool named Checkstyle, which analyzes the code against a set of known bad practices.

In the end, Hudson generates a lovely web-based report that spotlights our projects’ health. Each project is summarized with an icon, showing either a shining sun for the really healthy projects, or a stormy thundercloud for the projects that should be taken out behind the shed. Clicking a report reveals more detail, including which unit tests failed and why, along with beautiful graphs that highlight the results of Checkstyle. For each issue, you can drill deeper into the reports to discover the source of the problem, along with suggestions for how to fix it.

Hudson is extremely customizable, and it does a million things I haven’t mentioned here. There are also many other tools available for measuring the quality of software, but Hudson and Checkstyle are the ones my team prefers.

I’ll admit that Hudson does a better job of telling you when software is bad, rather than telling you when software is good. For this I think you’ll always need code reviews and the opinion of an expert human being. Also, measuring the health of a project doesn’t really help you track its progress, so please don’t use tools like Hudson for this. Measuring the progress of a software project is such a difficult thing to do, that I’m going to revisit that one next time.

Project managers and developers, please stop measuring code with silly metrics.
At best they provide useless data, and at worst they encourage good people to do bad things. Instead, focus on measuring the health of your software and improving its quality. And if you’re still not convinced, just ask my dad about the time he asked me to mow half the lawn.

You can learn more about Hudson at http://hudson.dev.java.net , and Checkstyle at http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net.

Special thanks to Joe Gallo for editing and contributing to portions of this document.

I’m fortunate to live in Pittsburgh, because my city has not been affected as badly as other places. BusinessWeek labeled Pittsburgh one of the best places to ride out a recession, Smart Money magazine called Pittsburgh a recession-proof place to retire, and the New York Times said that Pittsburgh is the envy of many recession-plagued communities. In short, Pittsburgh is an awesome place to be in a horrible economy.

That said, if Pittsburgh is one of the least affected cities in the country, I can only imagine how bad things are elsewhere.

My grandfather — we called him Papa — was a big believer of investing in the stock market as the means to a comfortable retirement. When I was ten years old, he helped me purchase my first shares of a publicly traded company, and when we spoke he’d often dispense stock advice. To Papa’s delight, he met CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow at an airport a few years ago. “Michael,” he would later recount, “this man wore the sharpest pinstripe suit you’ve ever seen!”

Papa passed away two months ago, and although his death was an immensely sad and difficult thing to deal with, in a small way I am happy that he didn’t have to live out his final years struggling to get by. In just a few months, his investments lost more than a decade’s savings, and I don’t know what he would have done had he lived another twenty years.

My grandfather’s generation was sold on three ideas which my generation — I’m twenty-seven years old — has trouble believing today. The first is that investing in the stock market for the long term is the best way to save for retirement, the second is that climbing a corporate ladder is the surest way to success, and the third is that social security will be there for your golden years.

Between October 2007 and March 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 50%. I am still a believer in free market capitalism and the American economic engine, but I know that this crash has shaken the confidence of many of my friends. Tomorrow morning my company is rolling out its first retirement plan in the form of a Simple IRA. Although most of my employees are in their mid-twenties, and despite their knowledge that it’s best to buy low and sell high, some of them are hesitant to trust the stock market after what’s happened lately. Personally, I’ll be maxing out my IRA, but it’s difficult to blame them for lacking faith.

Another evaporated belief is the notion of climbing a corporate ladder to a comfortable retirement. Gone are the days of joining a company like General Motors with an entry level position, and counting on the business to take care of you for life. Many people my age couldn’t explain to you what a pension fund is, or for that matter how it differs from a mutual fund. Workers of my generation have had stability replaced with insecurity, and endurance replaced by transience.

So much doubt has been placed on the future of social security that many people my age just assume we’ll have none. Social security strikes me as a pyramid scheme that could only be stable in a world where life expectancy decreases while child bearing increases. (Octomom to the rescue!)

Faced with an unpredictable stock market, a non-existent corporate ladder, and an unlikely social security payout, I have never been more at peace with my decision to be an entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur, I have much more control over my destiny than I would if I worked for somebody else. The stock market’s success is influenced by swings of emotions outside my control, while my company’s success is influenced by the quality of service I provide my customers. This I can control.

If I were an employee of a large business, my corporate ladder could be kicked out from underneath at any time. But, in the words of former Pittsburgher Paul Graham, as an entrepreneur I can grow a corporate ladder underneath me instead of climbing someone else’s to the top.

And when it comes to retirement, rather than relying on my government for socially offered security, I feel more comfortable depending on myself.

Of course, being an entrepreneur has its drawbacks too. Two weeks ago I worked eighty hours in seven days, and in addition to worrying about putting food on my plate, I enjoy the added stress of anguishing for my employees too. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not all roses.

Despite the stresses of being an entrepreneur, I’m much happier to be running my own company in today’s economic climate than I would be working for somebody else. Past and present employees of some large companies (Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and AIG come to mind) must feel like hapless passengers aboard the Titanic. However, being an entrepreneur in a small business is like being the captain of a small speed boat. It doesn’t make the waters any safer, but at least you’re in control of navigating them.

We began by searching the woods for two dry sticks that were “thicker than our thumbs and thinner than our wrists.” After locating the ideal timber, we sat in a circle and listened to the leader explain the process of starting a fire. Well, some of the kids listened. Eager to see flames, I was too impatient to hear the instructions and began furiously rubbing my sticks together. My troop leader, dismayed that I wasn’t paying attention, asked me to stop. He set down his sticks and asked all of the kids to do the same. Seizing the opportunity, our leader took a moment and shared the story of the Magpie’s Nest.

The Magpie’s Nest is a story from the late 1800’s, published by Joseph Jacobs in English Fairy Tales. More parable than fairy tale, the Magpie’s Nest tells the story of how different birds learned to build their nests. Here’s an abbreviated version of the tale:

All the birds of the air came to the magpie and asked her to teach them how to build nests. For the magpie is the cleverest bird of all at building nests. So she put all the birds round her and began to show them how to do it. First of all she took some mud and made a sort of round cake with it.

“Oh, that’s how it’s done,” said the thrush; and away it flew, and so that’s how thrushes build their nests.

Then the magpie took some twigs and arranged them round in the mud.

“Now I know all about it,” says the blackbird, and off he flew; and that’s how the blackbirds make their nests to this very day.

Then the magpie put another layer of mud over the twigs.

“Oh that’s quite obvious,” said the wise owl, and away it flew; and owls have never made better nests since.

After this the magpie took some twigs and twined them round the outside.

“The very thing!” said the sparrow, and off he went; so sparrows make rather slovenly nests to this day.

Well, then Madge Magpie took some feathers and stuff and lined the nest very comfortably with it.

“That suits me,” cried the starling, and off it flew; and very comfortable nests have starlings.

So it went on, every bird taking away some knowledge of how to build nests, but, none of them waiting to the end.

My troop leader was making the point that you should always be patient when learning something new. If you run off and start applying new knowledge too early, it can come back to bite you. Sometimes you’ll even be downright dangerous putting partial knowledge to use. (Imagine trying to fly an airplane after reading a manual for an hour.)

I often think of the Magpie’s Nest when I deliver corporate training seminars. Some of the courses that I teach are prerequisites for other classes, and I worry that my students will be overconfident with the partial knowledge that I’m able to share in just a few days.

For example, in Introduction to Java I teach students how to connect to a database with JDBC. Unfortunately, I can only afford to spend four hours on this topic in a typical five-day course. This is plenty of time to explain the basics, but not nearly enough time to cover good style and best practices. I do my best to explain that in the “real world” developers should consider using a database pooling manager, a JNDI registry, and even an Object Relational Mapping framework such as Hibernate. These are all topics that I teach in more advanced courses.

I do my best to emphasize that what I’m teaching is a necessary prerequisite but a horrible real-world practice. Despite my emphasis, I still worry that students will act as I once did, and start rubbing their sticks together too soon.

It’s a difficult problem to solve. On one hand, I believe that a solid foundation needs to be laid before students can learn best practices. On the other hand, I fear that my students will never get around to learning more robust techniques. Part of my fear is fueled by ego. I worry that a person who knows better might see the handiwork of one of my students and ask who taught them how to build such shoddy software. (I also worry that their software will be slow, inefficient and insecure, but I’d be lying if I said egotism didn’t play a large role.)

I’ve learned that the best way to solve this problem is to set realistic expectations. When I begin to deliver a new topic that I know I won’t have time to cover deeply, I simply explain the situation. I tell my students that the topic they are about to learn is complex, and that we won’t have time to discuss all of its nuances.

After covering the topic as well as time allows, I ask my students to come up with ideas for how they could improve upon what they learned. Rather than explicitly pointing out the shortcomings of what I just showed them, I believe it’s important for my students to realize them on their own. I want them to understand that it’s important to learn more about the topic before they go to work. If they arrive at this conclusion on their own, then they will be more likely to take the initiative to learn more.

This advice applies to teachers and students alike. Trainers should set realistic expectations, and put their students down the path toward learning more. Students should be patient as they learn, and resist the urge to apply their knowledge too soon. Impatience is often a sign of passion, and passion is great for learning. However, it’s important that passion be channeled and patience be exercised when learning something new. Remember the tale of the Magpie’s Nest, and don’t rub your sticks too soon.

[William Strunk] scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong. I remember a day in class when he leaned far forward, in his characteristic pose — the pose of a man about to impart a secret — and croaked, “If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!” This comical piece of advice struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?

Confidence is the spackle of social interaction. It can smooth over blemishes and make strengths of shortcomings. Confidence can make the weak appear mighty, and the confused seem clear. I’ve seen it work firsthand.

In high school I competed on the Forensics (a.k.a. Speech and Debate) team. My specialties were Impromptu and Extemporaneous speech. Both categories required participants to give a five to seven minute speech on a surprise topic. We were given less than thirty minutes to prepare.

At the 1998 national qualifying tournament, I was asked to give a seven minute speech that answered the following question: “Why is Abortion the Third Rail of Politics?” My heart sank when I read the topic. It wasn’t that I feared discussing abortion — many of the topics we had to debate were controversial — rather, my fear was caused by the fact that I had never heard the “third rail” metaphor used before. I had no idea what it meant. Today I understand that a third rail refers to a topic so taboo that politicians try to avoid it, lest they suffer political damage. The phrase originates with the third rail on a train track that carries high voltage current. If you touch it you die.

I had half an hour to prepare a seven minute speech dealing with abortion and third rails, whatever those were. As my palms sweated and my heart raced, my brain swirled for the meaning behind this unknown metaphor. What type of rails did the phrase refer to? Train rails? Guard rails? Hand rails? I decided on hand rails.

With only a few minutes left to prepare, I still needed to figure out how third rails differed from the first and second variety. I closed my eyes and imagined the hand rail that lead up the steps of my childhood home. It had three horizontal, cast iron rails. I decided that the one on top, the one you hold, must be the third rail. Clearly a “third rail” was something that you lean on for support, something that guides you toward your destination.

“Speaker number thirty-four! Speaker number thirty-four! You’re up!” It was my turn to present in front of the panel. I walked down the hall toward the waiting judges, still a little unsure if I correctly understood the metaphor. I decided to compensate for my nervousness by standing taller, smiling bigger and speaking a lot louder.

It worked. I won first place.

I don’t remember exactly what I said during those seven minutes, but I’m sure I had it all wrong. My guess about the third rail metaphor couldn’t have been more incorrect. The speech I gave was premised on a misunderstanding, but in the end it didn’t matter. My confidence made up for my ignorance, and my volume made up for my white lie. I tricked the judges into thinking I knew what I was talking about, and perhaps I even fooled them into doubting their own understanding of the meaning behind “third rails.”

Whether it be at a speech competition, a boardroom, or a poker table, confidence can conceal weaknesses like no mask ever could. As Strunk and White agree, it’s better to be wrong than irresolute. So, the next time you’re feeling a little unsure of yourself, remember to say it loud!

First of all, Circuit City is not necessarily going out of business. Chapter 11 bankruptcy provides companies with legal protection against creditors while they reorganize. Many companies survive Chapter 11 bankruptcy and live to see more solvent days. If Circuit City were filing for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, then their assets would be liquidated and the company would cease to operate. Since this is not the case, it is unfair to say that Circuit City is going out of business.

A better question is, am I happy to see that Circuit City is suffering financially? The answer is no.

I certainly have good reason to be unhappy with Circuit City. After all, they detained my family and me after I refused a bag search in their Brooklyn Heights, Ohio store. After the incident, rather than apologizing they tried to confuse the public about what happened by blurring their detention of my family with the largely unrelated driver’s license refusal between me and a police officer. Instead of changing their policies and educating their employees, I’m told that their anti-consumer practices are still in place.

Although I no longer shop at Circuit City, I can’t say that I’m happy to hear that they’re on the verge of collapse. Circuit City employs over 45,000 people, and their livelihoods are now at stake. With more than 650 stores in the United States, a number of real estate companies stand to lose a big tenant if Circuit City closes its doors for good. Despite my unpleasant history with this company, it would be petty and vindictive of me to celebrate the threat of so many jobs.

Instead of wishing for Circuit City to collapse, here’s what I would like to see happen:

• I hope that Circuit City is able to restore itself financially and emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a healthier company.
• I hope that Circuit City’s creditors get repaid in full.
• I hope that Circuit City is able to limit the number of stores it has to close and the number of employees it has to let go.
• I hope that Circuit City learns from its mistakes and adopts a friendlier approach with its customers. This would involve adopting loss prevention methods that don’t require their customers to endure bag searches. Not trusting your own cashiers at check-out is a poor reason to treat your customers like criminals.
• Although I’m not holding my breath, it would still be nice to receive a written apology from Circuit City. I think some companies either underestimate the power of an apology, or are afraid that issuing an apology exposes them to a lawsuit. In all honesty, if Circuit City apologized and pledged to change their loss prevention policies, I would consider becoming a customer with them again.

In their reorganization efforts, I wish Circuit City well. They’ve been around since 1949, and it would be a shame to see such an old company disappear. Hopefully this bankruptcy will give them a blank slate, and allow them to emerge as a more financially sound and customer-friendly company.

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

This brain teaser is often referred to as the Monty Hall Problem, or the Monty Hall Paradox, because of its obvious resemblance to the game show Let’s Make A Deal. (On a quick tangent, a friend from high school was named Adeel. I’ve always joked that on the night he was conceived his parents said to one another, “Let’s Make Adeel!” He never found this as funny as I did.)

This puzzle was most recently made famous in the movie 21, when it was posed by Kevin Spacey’s character to one of his students. The student gives the correct answer, which I’ll point out in a moment. Before I do, let me tell you about my initial reaction to this problem. A few years ago I was reading a math book that brought up the Monty Hall question. My first response to the question of whether it was better to switch doors or stick with your first choice was, “it doesn’t matter.” After all, if it always comes down to two doors in the end then isn’t it always going to be a fifty-fifty chance?

The answer that the book provided, and the answer that the student gives in 21, is that you are better off switching doors every time. In fact, you double your chances of winning if you switch doors!

When I read this answer I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make any sense to me. In fact, I decided that the only way I would believe it was if I saw it with my very own eyes. So, I did what any geeky programmer would do. I opened up a text editor and whipped together a quick little Java program that simulated the game. I had the program play the game 2,000 times, simulating a game where the contestant switches 1,000 times and doesn’t switch the other 1,000 times. Sure enough, when the player switched doors they won approximately 66% of the time, and when they didn’t switch doors they won only 33% of the time.

At this point I was convinced that you were better off switching doors, but it took me a little while to grok the reason for why. Here’s how I now like to explain it…

Let’s imagine a scenario where the contestant picks door number one. There are now two sets of doors: The set of chosen doors (a set containing one door) and the set of unchosen doors (a set containing two doors.) (BTW, “unchosen” isn’t a real word, but don’t you think it should be?) Which set has a better chance of winning? Well, the first set (the set containing one door) has a 1/3 chance of winning, while the second set (the set containing two doors) has a 2/3 chance of winning. Obviously, the set with two doors is more likely to contain the winning door.

Think of it this way: If you buy one lottery ticket, and I buy two lottery tickets, who has the better chance of winning? Of course, with lottery tickets neither one of us has a good chance of winning, but the person with two lottery tickets is twice as likely to win as the person with only one ticket.

When Monty asks if you would like to switch doors, what he’s really asking is, “would you like to leave the set that has a 1/3 chance of winning and move to the set that has a 2/3 chance of winning?” When framed this way, of course you’d want to switch sets!

An important thing to point out is that Monty knows in advance where the car and goats are. Since Monty can’t open the winning door, he often has no choice about which door to reveal. (If you pick door number one, and the car is behind door number two, then Monty has no choice but to reveal door number three.)

When I deliver corporate training seminars, I like to conduct an “afternoon distraction” with my students every day after lunch. One of my favorite afternoon distractions is the Monty Hall Problem. Even after explaining the solution with words and visuals, some students still don’t believe the logic actually works. Remember, I was the same way when I first heard this brain teaser a few years ago. For people that simply won’t believe it until they see it, I rewrote my initial Java application in JavaScript…. see below.

Try it out, and remember, you’re always better off switching doors. (Although, with the rising cost of gas combined with the rising cost of food, I could almost understand preferring a goat to a car!)

 

Number of wins by switching doors:	0.00% (0/0)
Number of wins by not switching doors:	0.00% (0/0)

Unlike the bathrooms here in the United States, the bathrooms along the Autobahn are not free to use. In fact, it costs half a euro to answer the call of nature along the Autobahn. When I learned this, it led me to wonder if this is why so many people drive fast on their roads. Hey, if my bladder were full and I was short the requisite 50 cents I’d probably be driving 140mph too!

At first I was a little pissed off (pun intended) at having to pay to use the bathroom, but this went away once I saw how nice the facilities were. The restrooms, run by a company named Sanifair, were the cleanest and most modern public bathrooms I had ever seen. The walls were decorated with a cobalt blue tile that put my home bathroom to shame. The self cleaning toilets looked as if they had never been used. The bathroom floors were cleaner than my kitchen floors, which is especially impressive considering that I never use my kitchen. To top it off, the 50 cents it costs to use the bathrooms are refundable if you make a purchase in the rest stop restaurant. This is particularly clever since encouraging people to eat and drink is good for repeat business!

A few days after visiting Germany, the tour took us into Italy. By contrast, the bathrooms at the Italian rest stops were among the crappiest (pun intended) I have ever seen. The floors were dirty, the sinks were wet, the paper towel was often missing in action, and at one stop every single toilet seat had been removed from the stalls. On the bright side, these bathrooms were free to use.

What’s the moral of this story? German and Italian bathrooms are perfect examples that, often in life, you get what you pay for.

When running a company, it’s very important to be careful with your money. This is especially true in today’s not-so-hot economy. At my company, I do my best to watch expenses and look for ways to save money that won’t affect the happiness of my employees or the quality of our products and services. However, in some areas of the business, I’ve learned that it never pays to be cheap.

A large part of what my company does is custom software development. This makes our computers the most important tool of our trade. For this reason, I buy the top of the line computer for each new employee. The last employee I hired one month ago is now working on a MacBook Pro with 4 Gigs of Ram. The total cost of his machine, including the purchase of additional software, came to about $5,000. Sure, I could have saved a thousand dollars by purchasing a Dell, but I like to know that my developers won’t be slowed by spyware, viruses and buggy operating systems.

I also do my best to ensure that my employees are working in the most comfortable conditions. When working in the office, each of my developers sits in an extremely comfortable and ergonomic Aeron chair. On eBay, a brand new Aeron chair will cost you about $800, including shipping. This is obviously much more expensive than a “normal” office chair, but I find the price to be well worth it. The chairs are immensely more comfortable than a typical office chair, and although we’ve only owned ours for a couple of years I’m told that they will last at least a decade.

Joel Spolsky does a very good job of praising Aeron chairs in his Field Guide to Developers:

[Aeron chairs] are much more comfortable than cheap chairs. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable. The back and seat are made out of a kind of mesh that lets air flow so you don’t get sweaty. The ergonomics, especially of the newer models with lumbar support, are excellent.

They last longer than cheap chairs. We’ve been in business for six years and every Aeron is literally in mint condition: I challenge anyone to see the difference between the chairs we bought in 2000 and the chairs we bought three months ago. They easily last for ten years. The cheap chairs literally start falling apart after a matter of months. You’ll need at least four $100 chairs to last as long as an Aeron.

So the bottom line is that an Aeron only really costs $500 more over ten years, or $50 a year. One dollar per week per programmer.

A nice roll of toilet paper runs about a buck. Your programmers are probably using about one roll a week, each.

So upgrading them to an Aeron chair literally costs the same amount as you’re spending on their toilet paper, and I assure you that if you tried to bring up toilet paper in the budget committee you would be sternly told not to mess around, there were important things to discuss.

Joel was even kind enough to bring the topic full circle, back to bathrooms. Thank you, Joel. The point I’m making is that just like with European bathrooms, when it comes to office chairs you get what you pay for.

In addition to developing software, my company also provides technical training at the corporate level. As a trainer, I have the opportunity to work with software developers at a number of large business and government organizations throughout North America. I’m sad to see that many programmers in the corporate world are forced to work on old, slow computers, seated on cheap, uncomfortable chairs. I think this is being penny wise and pound foolish.

Cheap computers end up being more expensive because they slow down their well paid users. Spending an extra $1,000 on a faster computer might save a given developer twenty minutes a day in not having to wait for the compiler to return. Twenty minutes doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that’s over 83 hours per year. If a given developer makes $50,000 per year, $2,000 of their salary is being made staring at an animated hourglass. An extra $1,000 spent on a faster computer would have paid for itself in six months.

Cheap office chairs also end up being more expensive over time because they need to be replaced more often. Replacing chairs requires time ordering them, money shipping them, time assembling them, and money having the old ones hauled away. This doesn’t even include the cost of lost productivity caused by the back pain brought on by sitting in a really bad chair.

As if all of this weren’t enough, I imagine that there’s also an opportunity cost that must be paid by being cheap with your employees. If an intelligent job candidate realizes that working for your company will require them to use sub-par equipment, seated in a sub-par chair, they will seek greener pastures.

I’m not advocating wasteful spending. On the contrary, I think that companies should be cheap where they can get away with it, and “lavish” with the pocketbook when it matters. Specifically, if it effects the happiness of customers and employees, or the quality of a product or service, then liberal spending will often pay for itself many times over. The Germans seemed to have learned this lesson. Now if somebody could please translate this page into Italian, I might be able to make a big difference in this world.

One of the elements that can fuel road rage is the relative anonymity that vehicles provide. To some, cars become like Carnaval masks, allowing them to passive-aggressively express their frustrations in ways they’d never feel comfortable with face-to-face. Others experience an adrenaline rush when they drive, reveling in the power they wield while donning their Detroit or Japanese or German made exoskeletons. With the push of a toe they can excel past lines of men and women who might otherwise have control over them in social situations. With the turn of a wheel they can cut off that jerk in the minivan who was trying make his exit. There’s no need for complex dialog while exerting your power when a simple finger will suffice!

Although road rage can happen anywhere, it’s more likely to occur in some situations over others. Obviously, the more congested traffic is the more fertile the highway becomes for road rage. The hotter the temperature outside, the hotter the tempers inside. The slower the cars are moving, the faster the hearts will be pumping.

Three weeks ago I drove from Pittsburgh to Albany to visit my grandfather. On the trip there and back I witnessed a few incidents of road rage. Through astute observation I came to realize that road rage is a phenomenon so predictable that its likelihood can be expressed with the following formula:

road rage likelihood = ((number of cars in vicinity / average speed) + temperature above 80F) * (1 + number of Hummers in sight)

Notice that this formula involves dividing by the average speed of the vehicles. This means that if the vehicles come to a complete stop the number approaches infinity!

I used to be one of those people whose blood would boil when stuck in traffic, moving at a snail’s pace. I’d play the lane switching game, hoping to improve my odds with one lateral move after another. Sometimes I’d even exit the main highway, opting for the back roads even though it often took me longer to get home that way. After all, isn’t it better to be making progress on a back road driving at 45 mph rather than 5?

Then one day, stuck on I-376 between Edgewood and Squirrel Hill, I had an epiphany. Even though my Volkswagen was moving at zero miles per hour, I realized that progress was being made. Rather than measuring my progress in terms of distance, it dawned on me that a more important measure of my progress would be one that considered spacetime. If my drive home always takes about an hour regardless of which road I take, then wouldn’t it make more sense for me to simply measure time? In other words, when I’m zipping along at 60 mph, I’m traveling through time at the rate of one minute per minute. When I’m sitting in traffic, crawling along at the breakneck speed of one lone mile per hour, I’m still traveling through time at the rate of one minute per minute!

With this new outlook, traffic stopped having the same anxiety inducing effects on me. Viewing my car as a forward traveling time machine, I came to realize that I should be no more frustrated by traffic congestion than I should be with miles of open road. (Or, if you’re a pessimist, you should be just as furious with empty lanes as congested ones!)

So, the next time you’re stuck on the highway, in a construction zone, moving at glacial speeds behind a suburban tank, don’t let yourself gut frustrated. Even though it doesn’t seem like you’re making progress, you really are. If you think it would help, buy yourself a Doc Brown action figure and keep it on your dashboard. Great Scott! You’re traveling through time!

One of my most frustrating problems in life is that I too often let myself get sucked into vicious cycles of procrastination. I do my best to not fall behind with things, because once I do, a downward spiral begins with a gravitational force so strong that not even Hawking radiation could escape. (Seriously, CERN could save themselves a lot of time and money by abandoning the LHC and studying my procrastination instead!)

For example, if I’m supposed to phone a friend on a Monday but I forget to call, then calling them on Tuesday would be the next best thing. However, phoning them on Tuesday would involve having to admit to myself that I forgot to call on Monday and that makes me feel rotten. Calling them on Wednesday would be good, but that’s even harder to do because it involves having to come to grips with forgetting to call on Monday, plus the guilt of putting it off on Tuesday! Calling them on Thursday wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the anxiety that’s still fresh from Monday’s forgetfulness, not to mention Tuesday’s guilt compounded with Wednesday’s! I would rinse and repeat this broken logic for three months until I finally bump into my friend one day on the street. Only then would I allow myself to blank-slate my way out of the procrastination paradox.

A quick tangent: As you may know, I am a big fan of Benjamin Franklin. According to Walter Isaacson’s book, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, the phrase “clearing the slate” originates with Benjamin Franklin’s practice of keeping track of his virtue slip-ups on a slate tablet. Is there anything we can’t attribute to this man?

I’ve discovered a few techniques over the years that have helped me improve my problem with procrastination, and I’d like to share these with you.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

I think that a spirit of perfectionism lies at the heart of many procrastinators. One of the reasons that I haven’t posted to my blog more frequently is my insistence on only posting interesting content with perfect spelling and grammar. As a result, writing posts takes hours of time and I often decide against publishing what I write. With the exception of last year’s fifteen minutes of fame, I don’t typically have many readers. I don’t know why I hold this lousy blog up to such high standards. From this moment forward I promise to only write about boring subjects with bad spelling and horrible grammar!

Learn to run a dash

I read about this technique a few years ago from the wizard of time management, Merlin Mann, and I highly recommend that all procrastinators learn about this method straight from the source. This technique acknowledges that the hardest part about getting anything done is simply getting started. Running a dash encourages you to get a task started, and then quickly abandon it after ten minutes of working your butt off. Half of the time that you do this you’ll find yourself on such a kick that you actually won’t let yourself stop working until the task is finished. Even when this technique doesn’t trick you into completing your work, it will at least remove the anxiety associated with not having started at all.

While most U.S. citizens file their taxes on or before April 15th, this year I filed mine just before October 15th. I literally let four hours of work delay my taxes from being filed for almost six months. What finally got me past the procrastination paradox was a ten minute dash. I sat down with a text editor for ten minutes and created a bulleted list of the things that stood between me and my taxes from being completed. Then I played Warcraft for an hour. After getting my ass handed to me by a thirteen year old Brazilian (”jajaja, u suck”, he said), it was back to work. Four hours later my taxes were complete and I felt like I was one hundred pounds lighter.

Work like your hair is on fire

This piece of advice comes from Seth Godin and has also been lauded by Joel Spolsky. Timothy Ferriss gives very similar advice in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek. The advice is this: Simulate a really, really, really urgent situation for yourself (such as having hair on fire) and work yourself raw as if somehow getting your todos “todone” would end the urgency. As Timothy Ferriss puts it, pretend like you only have one hour to get an entire eight hours worth of work done.

Although this technique is new to me, I can already report it as being helpful. This method allows you to quickly triage your tasks and figure out what can be safely sacrificed in the name of getting things done. In order for this technique to be successful, it’s important to turn off your phone, avoid email, and eliminate all distractions that might prevent you from completing the task at hand.

This very blog post is proof that these techniques can work. About two hours ago I started writing this entry with a ten minute dash. After a twenty minute phone call with my girlfriend, I was back to work. Since then I’ve been writing as if my hair were on fire. I’ll be doing the same thing next Thursday, October 30th. That day has been completely blocked off on my company calendar as a “hair on fire day.” On this day I will shut myself off from the outside world until a colleague and I complete and release the new Field Expert web site.

Ten posts in ten days

I feel like I have the upper hand on procrastination lately, and I want to put myself to the test. I am hereby committing myself to writing (and more importantly, posting) ten blog posts in the next ten days. Yes, this counts as one of them.

A number of ideas have been gelling in my brain for the last few months, and I already have titles picked out for some of the things I’ll be writing about. These include:

• Highway traffic and the space time continuum
• Autobahn bathrooms and Aeron chairs
• Richard Dawkins’ selfish genes
• Brute forcing Gödel, Escher and Bach
• How DOTs can save money and improve roads

Forgive me, but I must quickly leave to run my hair under water and clear the air of that putrid, burnt dapper dan smell.

This morning I flew from the Central Wisconsin Airport (CWA) to Chicago O’Hare (ORD) on United flight 7103. About halfway through my flight I looked out the window and saw something rather startling. A large piece of what appeared to be duct tape lay across the vertical tip of the right wing. The edges along the top and bottom of the strip of tape were smooth, while the left and right edges were jagged, as if the tape had been cut off a roll. (Just like with real duct tape.)

Even more startling than the duct tape on the wing of my plane was what I could see under it. Although my iPhone’s camera wasn’t able to capture this amount of detail, I could clearly see the indentation of a hole in the wing, under the tape. I’m going to venture a guess that the hole was one inch high and eight inches wide, but it was hard to tell for sure because of its distance from my window.

Wondering if my eyes were playing a trick on me, I asked the couple sitting in the row behind to look out the window and tell me if they noticed anything unusual on the wing of the plane. “Oh my god”, said the woman. “Is that duct tape?”

It was around this time that I looked down at my feet and was reminded of what was holding together my left shoe…

After the plane landed safely in Chicago, I talked to one of the pilots about the wing. He told me that sometimes food delivery trucks or other equipment will bump into airplanes and put holes in them. Until the damage is repaired with a permanent fix, it’s often patched up with “speed tape”, which is also known as “600 mph tape” because apparently that’s the maximum wind speed the tape can endure.

I did some googling, and despite the horrific appearance of an airplane being held together with duct tape, it’s apparently a common and safe practice. Here’s what I found:

• A YouTube clip of an airplane duct tape repair in India
• Speed Tape on Wikipedia
• A Speed Tape Repair Photo
• An Airplane Duct Tape Discussion on Airliners.net

So, the next time you’re on an airplane and see tape holding together the wing, don’t panic. (Unless the tape is scotch tape, in which case you should freak the hell out.)