The sad state of corporate coding.

So I know I was doing posts on social media, and stopped, but I will get back to that.

I just recently competed in a coding competition where you had 24 hours to get an application done. We failed. We failed badly. We got a lot done sure, but we still had 3 or 4 pieces of an application that didn't play with each other. This took hours to get to this point. It took a really long time to get to a point that we could see things coming together. It took even longer to get going as a team. Teamwork, that thing you are taught from day one in school. It is drilled into you all the way up to college. Hell I had a physics teacher that took great pleasure in forming the teams, then figuring out the students that just sat idly by. Once He got that, He put those students in a team, and graded papers for the next three hours knowing they weren't going to finish.

So is that what happened? Were we the four developers that sit idly by while others did all the work? I can happily tell you, no that wasn't the case. As a matter of a fact it was the exact opposite. The four(well at least three of the four, I still feel like I could do a lot more) of us have probably been some of the most productive at our company since I have been there. Then why with our talent couldn't we finish a simple app? We have no idea how to work as a proper team.

Over the last decade the lifestyle in the workplace, specifically corporate environments, have changed to the motto that less is more. It is funny how things change over time, when it comes to accomplishing tasks.

In the beginning you had your geniuses; Newton, Tesla, Einstein. These men worked mostly to themselves, with maybe the help of an assistant to take notes. Proper geniuses that were the forerunners in their field. Then came the Manhattan project. Simple idea, one genius is good. Team up a bunch of them and magic will happen. Needless to say magic happened.

This idea can be carried into the workplace. Companies used to have teams of people working on projects. And that was teams of people in each section of the work. You would have multiple developers, multiple project managers, multiple everything. Projects could be completed faster and with better quality. Times were good,. Work was plenty and people were happy. Then something changed.

About a decade or longer ago the dot com bubble burst. Money trees stopped growing and I missed my chance to become a millionaire on an idea of a website that would tell you which cheese to pair with which wines. Then the whole country went in a recession*cough*bullshit*cough* sorry I felt sick there for a second. Companies needed to make sure that stockholders and CEO's kept getting paid. How do you do this? Eliminate teams.

The one thing that made us great, now was being fazed out because it hurt the immediate revenue. Who cares about future money spent on bug fixes, missed deadlines, outages, training due to turnover, or just overall stupidity because you kept the dumb employee. What matters is the money now. Companies and CEO's(people that make the decisions) only care about the company now. Chances are they will get a nice bonus, and can jump ship in a few years. Then it is somebody else's problem.

We went from teams of people, to single developers handling multiple projects. Not just coding back end  but also having to code front end and graphics as well. If you ever go to website that looks pretty, but works for shit. Or the opposite, everything works great, but looks like Angelfire and Geocites had a child then Myspace adopted it. You have ran into a company that is using on developer for everything. And don't think this stops at developers, this goes to PM's and BA's as well. They are multi-threaded. Now what does this lead to?

1. Longer times to get work done.
2. More bug fixes in the future
3. Having to weigh out writing tests, or writing new code.
4. Just letting thing slide through in the hopes, nobody does that.

This is unacceptable, yet this is now considered business as usual. Hell, I even drank that Kool-aid for a while. Wore it like a badge of honor. I have to do everything, and there are still some aspects where I do like knowing a little of everything. I am decent in a lot of things, not really smart in one field or another. The problem is that I am not alone with this feeling. Time and time again, you will find that your expert is just somebody who got stuck in that role years ago and feel like they have to stay. They probably hate their job just as much as you hate them for doing it. So why stay there? Why not try something else? This goes back to the bottom line.

Experts cost money, lots of money. You are not an expert, well outside of your office you aren't. So you get paid less than a proper expert. Granted an expert would make 2 to 5 times as much as you, depending on the field. You are going to take 2 to 5 times as long as the expert. Weird how that works. I know you are thinking now, but then I would be out of a job and my kids would starve. I have to work this shitty position because nobody else will have me. True, nobody would have you in your current position. But is that what you want to do? Think about what you are doing now. Are you an expert? Yes, OK fuck you for being worried. If you said no, then do you want to become an expert in that field? No, then figure out what would make you happy.

Corporate environments may have gotten lucky and hired somebody that can crank out code, design a page that looks amazing, and that won't one day open fire on the office. I have yet to see a person that is all three of these things. This mentality will not change any time soon. Most management is still being trained that a developer is like a cog. One that can be removed and replaced by another. This is just not true. Hell still to this day I find new things in the project I inherited, and I have been on it for almost a year. The point is that there are a few companies out there that use teams, and they are doing very well.

So back to the competition, we failed because we never work in teams in our day to day life. When it came time to write code, none of us knew where to start. It took 6 hours for us to finally assign tasks. Meanwhile there were two teams that had already left for the day and were done because they worked in teams already. So they were experts, and we were not. They finished 4 times faster than we could have hoped, and our code was still incomplete.

So if you are reading this, and you work with a proper team. Congratulations and have fun. The rest of us will go back to the dungeon and code away until our fingers bleed. As our work is never done, it will never finish, and it will be just a little less awesome than it could be.

Although we do have reason to drink more than you, so there is that....

Twitter:Hashtags not Hash bowls

So by a show of hands who here has a twitter? Who here thinks that it is only for posting, or rather tweeting, pics of your cat and genitals? So all of you. Here is where I am going to tell you that you are wrong. Twitter has plenty of other features that are just waiting for you to exploit. Any business lately has a twitter, and so do a lot of their employees. Right now my favorite would be Gearbox. Gearbox is a video game company that created a great game called Borderlands. Highly addictive shooter, we are not here to discuss that currently. What we are going to discuss is ways to connect to your audience using twitter and how to find a job using twitter.

So first off, Twitter is a web application that allows you to tweet 140 characters to anybody that follows you. Now why should people follow you? How do I keep followers? Theses are big questions. Unless you are a famous celeb, you have to find some way to get followers and keep them. This is where Gearbox comes in. I follow Gearbox because they will announce game news, upcoming DLC, bug fixes, new features, etc. But here is the cool thing that they do, well the president of the company does. That is right the president, Randy Pitchford, of the company is worth following. He not only will communicate with the fans, you ask a question He answers. He gives away prizes to those that follow Him, and listen. What better way to have your followers refreshing your page every 10 minutes than offering up in game codes, that last only a few hours. With that kind of force you get lots of people willing to listen to you. Dana White, president of the UFC, does the same. You live in, or visiting a city that is hosting a Pay per view. You best be following Dana White, as He will tweet tickets to the first person to find him in the city.

Now I know what you are thinking now, they have a product to give away, how does that help me? Were you not reading, they had a product to give away, you do too. Take a hobby that you have and tweet about it. Or tweet about a blog post that you just wrote. Maybe just say random things that are funny and get all the followers you can. What is so helpful about getting lots of followers? People start to pay you real money to tweet what they want. We call this advertising kids, and it is how you pay the bills. Now, just know you need something in the neighborhood of 10-100 thousand followers before this day shows up, but good luck that could be you. Or maybe you could have just one follower of your mom, and she will continue to pay your allowance. Same thing right?


Now to the important part of this, how to find a job. If you have used twitter you have seen the hashtag before. #thismothertruckerrighthere This hashtag is a very overused tool that has a very powerful ability once you filter out the crap. Job recruiters will post tweets about jobs and use #job, #hiring, #employment, #etc. Don't believe me? Go search for those hashtags and tell me what you find. I will wait. Better yet, http://www.twitjobsearch.com/ go here. A site dedicated to helping you find jobs on twitter.

Look I can teach you how to use a search engine, but then again, I could also hit you in the head with a hammer if you can't figure it out. Look, twitter can be a powerful tool if you learn how to use it. At a minimum, you should follow people in your field of work that are experts, or things you enjoy. If you have a question, ask them. You will be surprised how many people respond back to you if you are nice, or a dick. Go head, tweet Dana White a nice fuck you. Once again, I will wait. What happened?

Facebook lockdown

So part one lets talk about the one thing that about a 1/6 of the world's population has. That of course would  be Facebook. Now there are two key steps you need to now and they are very simple.

Lock & Block

So lets go over what these each mean.

Step one lock. When I say lock, I mean lock down what people can see. Facebook has privacy settings that work well for locking you down from random people. The more fine tooth stuff, iffy at best. So step one set your privacy settings to only allow friends to see your stuff. This keeps a lot of your photos and posts hidden from employers. Also a fun fact I found is to make everything have to be approved before it shows up on your timeline. This keeps random photos of your nights out hidden until you allow them to be shown. And speaking of photos, make your profile photo something that you would like others to see.

Step two is block. Facebook makes their money by selling your personal info to other companies. As a matter of a fact, each person is worth about $80 to just Facebook. Now every application has their own rules. Some just take your information, others take your info and your friends info. So how do you stop this? It is rather simple, block the application. It is simple really, you just go to the application's home page and there is a link for block application. Do that prevents them from stealing and selling your information. Now what is this information used for? Who knows, but somebody will pay for it, including future employers.


So in two simple steps you can lock and block your facebook down.

Social Networking and You

Now I know that everybody thinks that social media is something that is just used for asians to post pictures of their food. There is also the meta version of that, http://picsofaznstakingpicsoffood.tumblr.com/, so I understand why some people see it as a wasteland. I am here to say that social media and networking are your friends. Over the next week I plan on posting a series of posts about how you can use social media and networking to your advantage.

1. Facebook - Hide, Lock, and Run
2. Twitter - How can Twitter help me find a job? Shut up and listen child.
3. Reddit - Ok you're joking right?
4. Google+ - Curtis, I thought you stopped smoking crack. Did you relapse?
5. LinkedIn - Professional Facebook, also learn from my mistakes and don't repeat them.
6. Random google tricks - no seriously, this is actually cool stuff.


Facebook, I will teach you to lock down your account and make things visible that you want employers to see and hide what you don't want found. Also simple steps to keeping your information private from apps that your friends use.

Twitter - Hashtags will be your saving grace. Ever do a search for #jobs? You might be surprised.

Reddit - Why you should have at least two accounts and how to find jobs and networking on your favorite sub-reddits.

Google+ no seriously, I will cover google+ and why if you haven't set one of these up, why it is needed more than ever.

LinkedIn - This is your most valuable asset by far. You might get spammed by joining this site, spammed by people wanting to give you jobs!

Random Google Tricks - How you can use the advanced search to get information about a company that will put you ahead of the game in an interview.

I will be posting a post a day for the next six days. So stick around kids and enjoy the ride.

Tech handyman

Jack of all trades, master of none. That is a phrase that I can certainly apply to myself. Over the years I have traded professions and jobs many, many, many times. Even to this day I am not for certain that what I am doing now will be the same in the next year or two. A lot of people will go through life and work many odd jobs here and there, but can one make a career of odd jobs? There used to be a time when doing odd jobs was something that a person could making a living doing, and I think those days are coming back. Just being a handy man. Can I rebuild an engine to a car? No, but I can replace a bunch of the parts with a little bit of work. Can I build a house? No, but plumbing gas lines and running electrical I am your guy. Need me to write you a new OS? Ha! How about I just install one that works for you. I can see it already, if this job doesn't exist now, it will soon. I programming handy man.

We write scripts, applications, fix broken things, and help set up things. I am not talking about for medium to large companies either. I am talking about mom and pop, your neighbor, their friends, etc. Some of you might already be building websites for random people, and that is a good start. Why stop there? I know I like automation, you should too. You can use your knowledge of scripts to help facilitate somebodies life. But where can you automate? How about everywhere! Lets start with WiFi. It is a good idea to change your passwords every so often, but WiFi is a tough sell to update. I know for me I have the following devices that would have to be updated; Xbox, PS3, Three laptops, Two phones, and a TV. If I change the password I will have to go and update all of those devices. Suck is not the correct word to use on the amount of time and effort that takes. This leads to simpler passwords, as I don't want to type them in all those devices. I need a script that schedules a password change on all of these devices!

Well shit this blog got sidetracked, I guess I will plan this out down below and start building this thing.

First thing I will need is to have a password generator. I am sure there are plenty I can integrate with and not have to reinvent that wheel.
Set up a scheduler that will alert my apps that the password is changing and give them an encrypted version of the password.
Then decrepit the password and reset it on the scheduled time of change.
I will also need a way to reset the password on the router, hopefully I can find one with an API that I can access.


I will start this project on windows devices first, then move on to others. In my following posts, I will point you to the direction of my repository(ies) so you too can see the code.

This was in no way where I was headed with this post, but I like it.

Small Victories

I don't know about you, but I know that when I see a large task on my plate, it is easy to push away and come back to later or never. One thing that I find that is helpful is to knock out a few small tasks and then the big one seems smaller.

Take for example my day yesterday. I was having the toughest time staying focused. Then I was tasked with modifying a couple build jobs on Jenkins. They weren't hard tasks, just I am the only one in my group that can do it. Just doing these three tasks made the rest of my day go by much smoother and before I knew it, the large task was being completed and it didn't look menacing.

So now I look at large tasks and break them into a small of task as seems possible. Those that are familiar with Agile, know this is the methodology. Write a story, then create sub-tasks. I find if I take a little extra time to plan my attack, I can finish things much faster in the long run.

Motivation

Motivation and I do not get along. I try and find reasons to do things and I always struggle to keep with it. Here are a few tools that I have found to help me get work done.

1. Accountability - I just recently started going back to the gym on a regular basis. What is keeping me going is that I have about four friends that I go with. They each like to do different things, so I train with the one that shares exercise interests for that day. One friend likes to run, one likes to lift, the other likes to do classes. By the way, if you have never done a group class, holy balls those are tough depending on what you are doing. I did a core class, my abs hurt whenever I took a breath the next day. I digress, but if you can get somebody to do something with you, and even depend on you as much as you depend on them, you will create a habit. It might be a drug habit, but at least you are sticking to something right?

2. Gamification - Why is it that I am an expert at guitar hero, but people want to Dimebag me if I pick up a real guitar? It is because learning a real guitar is hard! There is no easy way to just get good at it. Unlike guitar hero where if I suck, I might still get a decent score. In real life you get told you suck. So how should I gamify life? Well for starters I use fitocracy when I work out. It is a simple tool that you can use to track your exercise and you get points, badges, and level up. There are even quests to complete to help you get in shape.

In Visual Studio there is an extension you can install called Code Hero. If gives you badges for code reviews, code checkins, etc. This makes it fun to code against other people and try to earn badges before the others.

Or even what I am doing right now, blogging. I started this blog a few months ago and that is where it just kind of stayed. Well this week we started Iron Blogging. About 5 or 6 of us now have to write one post a week, or stick $5 in the beer money jar. Once the jar reaches a certain point, you go out drinking. Simple enough right? It is good because it forces me to write things down that I would otherwise ignore.

3. Responsibility - This is strangely, for me anyway, is the most important factor in finishing work but often the most ignored. I know that it is my job to get this application fixed, yet why am I on reddit right now? Oh bills need to be payed? I would rather buy a video game. The baby crawled on the balcony? Terminal velocity isn't too high for him. It is strange to me that this factor almost has no effect on me. Need to fix that.

If there are any other factors, or you know of any other cool tools, leave a comment below. I like to try new shinny things that make life better. Especially if it delays responsibility.