persons of ginger

Made gingerbread people yesterday. Well, not actually "made" - Andi had done the baking the previous night - but decorated them. So unfortunately I couldn't craft any hilariously rising bits of anatomically correct confectionary, but still had fun. And being South Africa, how could we not have a robber with an AK-47?

A time for review...

So, yesterday we had our biannual reviews at work.

They went well… as they are desperate to keep me, they could hardly give me a bad review. They commented along the lines of, “wow, this is definitely the best review you’ve had”, and I was thinking, “Hardly surprising – the only thing that’s really changed is that you need me more now”. I honestly don’t believe that my attitude or behaviour at work has changed in the slightest over the past year.

Of course, on a rating of 1-5, people give outstanding feedback and still put it at 4. And James, my boss, says (about the technical aptitude section, which was the highest score), “you know, people are never going to give 5’s – it’s just not going to happen”, and I’m thinking, “why the hell NOT?” What’s wrong with you people that you are pathologically incapable of giving an unqualified good report of someone who has only done outstanding work? I’m not saying I should necessarily have gotten that rating, you understand, I’m just taking issue with the mindset that it’s forbidden to award such positive feedback.

Idiots.

Anyway, we ran half an hour over our allotted time, mostly because I spent half an hour at the end explaining in graphic detail exactly how much I objected to the ban on music in the workplace, and making it perfectly clear exactly how much productivity it was costing them. It’s often impossible to talk to managers as humans, but hopefully if they understand the business cost which they are incurring as a result of the decision, they may reconsider it. I also pointed out (reasonably diplomatically) that they were now in a mess largely of their own making – the reason that it would be difficult to change at this juncture is mostly down to the way in which it was presented. By announcing their proclamation as an executive fiat which was not open for discussion, it will look worse for them to backtrack, but I live in (as yet unfulfilled) hope that they will one day realise that leadership is not as simple as impulsively making a decision and then sticking to it blindly, regardless of the weight of opposing evidence which may surface later.

(As a rather lengthy aside, there was a beautiful example of this at a workshop yesterday on “Embracing Diversity”, or some such rubbish. The workshop itself was mostly tosh, but they had one exercise, a sort of “Count the F’s” thing where a sentence is flashed up for a brief time and you are asked to count number of times F appears. Most people will miss a few, especially those contained in the word “of” – it’s short and pronounced like a “v”, so it slips by. The sentence in this case was something like : “Fully formulated theories are the result of many hours of scientific research of several people.” After a very short examination, we were asked to write down our number and also our level of confidence in that answer – written as a bet of R1000, R500, or R0. James was one of only three people who claimed full confidence in their figure (I actually counted six, but hadn’t finished reading it to my satisfaction so I only wagered an hypothetical R500), and his was the lowest figure of those three confident people. He spotted 3 F’s and was willing to swear by that number. The majority of people reported 5 or 6 – with one person somehow seeing 7.

Fair enough so far, except that we were then allowed a longer look at the same sentence, and then asked to give our revised number. The overwhelming majority now favoured 6 – except James, who still proudly thrust up his hand for 3. Blindly staying the course, no matter how glaring the evidence is against him… he should really chat to Dubya sometime – I’m sure they’d have loads in common. And I’m not even getting into how disturbing it is that James is the company’s accountant…)

Retention

So, I was reading SQLServerCentral.com today, and I came across the a link to Steve Jones' series of articles on Employee Retention. And it got me thinking about the experiences of the last year and half or so in my current job, so I sent on a reply to the article, and thought I'd post it here, too. and it's an interesting exercise, to consider what your over-riding criteria are in a job.

I really look for an enjoyable work environment.

I realise that I'm in an unusual position, but being single, and without dependants, I really don't have that much requirement in the way of salary. More is nice, but to be honest my material needs are relatively light and any decent developer salary is going to cut it just fine. More important to me is the workplace.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half, and it was initially a lot of fun. The projects were interesting and challenging, I was working with two other developers, we often worked late and then had LAN sessions at night, and I actively looked forward to coming in to work every day. The management gave us projects and focussed on the results. Given that the guy supposedly heading up the IT department was a chartered accountant by training, it was good that he didn't take too much of a hand in trying to influence the development process.

Over time, management became far more focussed on appearance. Dress code and punctuality seemed to be more important than the code that we were producing. The LAN sessions were banned. Internet access was clamped down on with the threat of dismissal for even opening any non-work sites (including things like e-mail or checking the news). Frustrated, the other two developers started looking for new jobs, and within six months of the changes they had both left. Neither one was looking for more in salary, they just both decided that they couldn't stand another day working for our bosses.

I persevered, mostly because I needed a solid chunk of development experience on my CV, and I didn't want anything less than a year, preferably two. And also, the offices moved close to my home, so I had a 3-minute commute. Most important to me was that this allowed me to use my evenings to the fullest, as I didn't have to waste time sitting in traffic after work. Compared to that, the nit-picking bosses and tedious timesheet requirements were pretty minor, and some of the work was still interesting enough. I was still learning.

Well, two weeks ago they banned listening to music on headphones at work. I don't know how they actually think that coding happens, but as far as I'm concerned the two essential components are caffeine and piped music. The next day, I sent off an email to a few developer friends to see if anyone had openings in a company near me. And I'm officially back in the search for my next position, despite the fact that my salary has almost doubled in the last 18 months here.

So what can we conclude? Three things from my experience:
1) Money really ISN'T everything.
2) People join companies, but they leave managers.
3) Most people would much rather stay in a job than change, but everyone has deal-breaking requirements in their expectaions of a job, and a good manager needs identify those and work around them to keep his staff happy and retained.