Results tagged “style”

This morning I had an epiphany about a difference in project management style between the two major development jobs I’ve held. One style was like driving an empty bus and the other was like riding in a clown car. I am going to examine both as anecdotes from my perspective and try to avoid grandiose analysis.

The Empty Bus

So, I start the job and the first thing the company does is hand me the keys to the bus. Actually, they dither on what kind of bus to give me for several months before getting me a suitable one and give me a loaner to drive in the meantime. However, once on the bus driving, I am pretty much on my own. I have a destination to reach that has been vaguely described on a scribbled piece of paper. The directions are unclear and no one in the company has been there before. They keep changing the directions. But I get to drive. That is fun.

Every now and then, I pick somebody from the company up, they make changes to the directions and then they get off again before I go very far. Every six months, everybody climbs on to the bus and sits in the very back. They do a lot of yelling while I park and then they take away my scribbled directions and give me new scribbles to follow and a new destination to reach. But I get to drive. That’s usually fun.

All in all, I am asked to develop software with very little cooperation or direction. I am left on my own to make almost all the decisions. Even though I have weekly meetings with my manager, I am not really given much feedback on whether I’m going the right way. He’s not a developer, so he doesn’t really know enough about what I do to give me useful feedback. My quarterly reviews aren’t very cooperative or helpful, they are more about the manager wishing I would drive faster and make fewer mistakes (mutually exclusive goals when you think about it).

I nearly get into a wreck a couple times, but there’s no one on the bus to help me out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an excellent driver. I’m still learning, but some help should help things go faster in process, you’d think. Usually, though, my directions are so unclear and difficult to follow that I am directed to get into wrecks. This is not actually all that fun as time goes on.

The Clown Car

Clown cars are funny. They drive around in circles and then the doors pop open and an absurd number of hilarious characters hop out of the little car. This job is not quite like this. It’s actually more like a really crowded minivan, like the trip I took the other day with my wife, son, dad, mom, brother, sister, and her boyfriend, all crammed into our little Pontiac Montana. But now, imagine, that all of these people have a stake in where the van goes and have a slightly role and different idea about how to go about getting there. Now, we’ve got a good analogy. Clown cars are fun, though.

The CEO’s seat is next to mine and he gets in and out of the van whenever he feels the need. He’s a busy man: lots of vans to help. Usually, he gets in right before we wreck or near the major turns to make sure we drive carefully at those point and turn the right direction. Directly behind me sits an analyst whose job it is to navigate. He tells me where to go and annotates those instructions pretty regularly. Beside him sits another analyst whose job it is to talk to the customer and figure out what they want. He then tells the first analyst and me where we need to think about going next. I get to drive, though, they keep reaching from the back for the wheel and the pedals. That’s annoying, but still fun.

Behind the analysts sit a whole team of project managers, executives, sales people and between them and between the front seats sit a bunch of other engineers. Sometimes the other engineers help drive, make suggestions, and they often critique or commend my driving. There are a lot of people in this minivan, sometimes there’s a lot of yelling about what to do next. All the activity does make for quite a bit of fun, even if it gets a bit distracting at times.

I get to drive. As I mentioned, sometimes the analysts and engineers have their hand on the wheel and help push the pedals for me. This is pretty fun too, unlike the car though, this actually gives us a lot more control. We seem to be getting places in a much more controlled way, though we do have to control our speed much more carefully. It might take us longer, but the drive is fun along the way.

Software development in this style takes away some of my freedom as a coder. That’s a bummer in some ways, not as much fun. I like control. Yet, it also lets me focus on my strengths while others worry about talking to customers, making sure we have a plan that does what the customer wants, and while the constant feedback makes it hard to see the big picture, I usually have a lot of warning before I drive off the road or get into a wreck. Overall, this is more fun.

So far, I prefer the “clown car”/stuffed minivan to the empty bus. It’s less bipolar and more slow, steady, and directed.

Cheers.

If you ask my wife when I work, her answer would almost certainly be, "All the time." She means a couple different things by that. One, she doesn't really like it when I work away from the house, which I do when I work in my cube three days a week. Bee, she means that I work in the shower, while eating breakfast, when I'm playing with my son, when I'm relaxing in the evening, always. I eat, sleep, and breathe work. This is what I am calling, "Stream of Consciousness Work Style."

Round Peg, Cubicle Hole

The first aspect of what Terri, my wife, has described is a bad thing. When I work in the office, I'm conformed to work from my cubicle. There's no creative workspace in our finely decorated offices at Boomer Consulting. That's not a knock against the company, but a sign of the company's origin, as a department of a CPA firm. CPAs are more creative than they'll admit, but they don't always need creative workspaces. They need orderly workspaces. They need workspaces that impress clients. Boomer has posh looking, orderly workspaces.

Not only am I constrained to my cubicle, I'm constrained in my work hours. I am expected to work from 8 to 5 or 9 to 5 or 9 to 6 or 7 to 4 or something. There's something in the Human Capital arena called "flex time" which is neither flexible nor timely, in my estimation, but for a well-ordered firm with top-down management, it's the rule. You can work flexible hours (i.e., not the typical 8 to 5), but those hours should be set in a regular schedule and your coworkers/supervisors should be aware of deviations in advance, etc. For a guy who found college hours to his liking (i.e., whenever as long as you and your project team got the job done), this is hard for me. I try, but I'm very bad at it. I try not to resent it too much. I try to conform, but I seem to fail regularly.

Finally, I'm nearly always in the middle of something when five o'clock rolls around. This is because I usually finish a task around 4:15, 4:30, or 4:45 and then it's not yet 5:00. I could leave before 5pm, but appearances are what they are and where would I draw the line if not 5pm? Thus, I pick up something else I hope won't take long, if I can. That generally pushes me to 5:10, 5:30, or 6:00 before I'm done. Terri no likey. Me no likey. Fortunately, my drive home takes 12 minutes, but I still don't like working late at the office. When five rolls around, I must make one of two choices: (1) drop what I'm doing in the middle and risk the mess that leaves things in or (2) complete the task and get home after dark. I despise both of those options, but I choose one or the other regularly depending on how long I estimate the task will take or how troublesome dropping it in the middle will be.

That's the negative aspect of "working all the time." It's a bummer, but that's life and while I work to slowly move my life away from work schedules that interfere with my work process, I deal with it in the meantime. This traditional office life is traditional for useful reasons as well. It is not without value. I'm not really knocking it. I am basically saying that I, as a round peg, find the cubical hole an uncomfortable fit.

Stream of Consciousness

The other aspect of "working all the time" revolves around my creative thought process. An article I recently read from A List Apart discusses the difference between the hat heads and the bed heads
. I definitely fall into the latter category. The bad news is that I'm difficult to manage, tend to work on my own, and don't necessarily communicate clearly all the time. The good news is that I'm a creator and I get stuff done.

First, I am always thinking about something. My brain almost never shuts off. The only time it really shuts down is when I read a book right before bed. This is a habit I've cultivated to avoid insomnia. The goal of the book, even if it is intellectual or stimulating is to put my brain into the right mode to sleep. It takes about an hour for my motor to get up to speed in the morning, but after that, I'm again full on working. I begin thinking about work before I step into the shower, while I eat breakfast, when I drive to work (or walk upstairs to my home office), while I'm officially working, while I eat lunch, etc. If I'm not in front of a computer, white board, or tablet of graph paper doing what looks like work, I'm still working somewhere in the back of my mind.

Next, I'm not always working on work. I have several hobbies, most of which look like work, but aren't what I get paid to do. For example, I keep a blog, which feels the same as work since I write articles and blogs for work. I build web sites, contribute to Open Source projects, and do other computer science stuff, which feels like work, but might be projects I like on my own time rather than stuff Boomer pays me for. I study theology and my Bible, which is really not much different than studying whatever latest technology I need to know to get my job done.

As a really excellent article, The Nerd Handbook
, points out I see everything and everyone as a project. That's not far from the truth. Even wrestling with my son is something I see as a task to be completed. That doesn't at all diminish the preciousness of the experience, but after I put Gabe to bed, a little check box gets ticked off in my head next to, "Had a significant amount of quality time with the Goober Pants." (At least, it usually gets marked, sometimes I'm not satisfied and that box takes on a larger font in the tag cloud floating in my brain for tomorrow night.) The same goes for time with my wife or playing video games or any other form of fun and recreation. It all falls into the same category as work.

The interesting thing about this way of living is that work is no longer work, but it's life. I don't take a vacation from work to get away from work, but so that I don't have to structure my time to fit the needs of my coworkers. We have this mystical thing we talk about at Boomer called the "Work-Life Balance." I say "mystical," but I should say "mystifying to me" because work and life are synonyms as far as I am concerned. I will work until I die. I will live until I retire. I could say I'm a workaholic because I'm never "off", but that wouldn't really be accurate. That would be missing the point. I'm never off because I never need to be because sometimes my on-time is the same as my off-time. That really means that my vacation days are merely on-time where my time is structured according to my choice even more so than usual.

Another Boomer doctrine is that of Free Days versus Buffer Days versus Focus Days. Everyone should take Free Days (like weekends) to recharge, Buffer Days to get the crap work done, and Focus Days to get the really cool stuff done. My life doesn't work that way. That's just another set of boxes to constrain my work style. I see every day as a Freefercus Day. Part of my day is spent working on my job doing fun stuff, not fun stuff, and whatever other stuff needs to happen to keep everything moving towards my goals. I spend another part of my day working on eating while I think about my job or fun projects. I spend another part of my day focused on my family. I spend another part of my day working on paying the bills or taking out the trash. I spend another part of my day dinking around on a fun work and/or personal project, etc. All of this blends together in my brain without strict delineation.

If I really had my way, I would give myself over to this work style. I wouldn't constrain myself to a certain set of hours. I wouldn't put myself into a cubicle box. I wouldn't announce my work hours ahead of time (mostly). In order to satisfy my team members, I could seek a compromise position of having regular meetings or daily office hours or something, but even that would be part of this unstructured system of work/life I lead. The structure of my life/work would center around getting stuff done rather than following some pre-programmed formula of time management.

For the most part, I would work day or night on my job whenever it best fit to do so. I would spend time with my wife or work on fun projects or play with my son whenever it fit, even if it happened in the middle of the day. I would work in an environment that supported my creativity rather than constrained it. I would balance the work that recharges me (fun projects, hard tasks, family time, etc.) with the work that drains me (paying taxes, data entry, meetings, etc.) The nature of the structure of the time would morph over time as well.

What works to keep me organized this month rarely works six months from now. My life would be systematically unstructured, evolving from period to period depending on my current projects, team and family needs, and other factors in my life at the moment. This is what I call Stream of Consciousness Work Style. You can like my idea of work and life or not, but that's how I roll.

Cheers.