Slavery hypothesis

Today one interesting though visited my head: I noticed that a lot of countries which are performing good nowadays were based on slavery in the past. I don’t know why I thought this, maybe just because I’ve been reading quite a bit of history recently, but idea expanded itself trying to adjust this hypothesis with some reason. And the reason seems to be quite simple and shortcoming: such conutries have an experience of managing people-resources, on brutal force-ruling if needed, on more complex political and social structures than other countries which didn’t use slaves labor. Such things were imprinted into the mindset and mentality which helps these countries today to find ways to use not only own resources but to seek how to employ surrounding for getting benefits.

I’ve shared this thought with guys from my team and one of them pointed me out a Greece as a country which in the past partially has been a slavery-state but nowadays is one of the less-performing Europeans countries. I absolutely do not agree with this statement, that Greece is low-performing and low-developed. I just can’t believe the country where such huge amount of people goes for vacation and feel secure and then telling me how beatifull and secure it is out there is not well-integrated with others European countries. But I didn’t argued, just not worthy to spend the time in such way.

Later in the evening I visited my parents like I do few times per week, and we were watching a story on one of those Discovery-like channels about this bridge construction. This story just perfectly confirmed me that Greece is really European country, opposite to my own motherland. Country able to successfully complete such project 4 months faster than was initially planned is DEVELOPED and INTEGRATED. And the fact that last few days there were some mass-street-disorders and fights with a police do not show that country is not developed, when thinking in the root it just confirms more that greek society has long-lasting and ancient civilization roots and traditions.

No panic

Just a notice from yesterday work:

The amount of panic when a particular person faces some crises and tries to resolve it perfectly measures the maturity level of this person.

Emotions are good and useful things but only in case when they are positive and constructive. Panic doesn’t fit into this pattern.

I had a chance to work with both types of people: those who always stay calm and composed when some abrupt situation catches them in the open, and those who are not able to act in constructive way at all. As far as I’m not ideal in this area yet it is always fascinates me to contemplate and learn from those falling into the first category.

Artificial Intelligence

A very short post. Since I’m @work and have really a little time for posting.

A lot of people are continuously discussing and trying to make some forecasts on when exactly (always very soon) the humanity will get a priceless gift: Artificial Intelligence that will be able to think instead of us, to work instead of us, bla bla bla.

And that is all not needed. We already have this AI. Some of people surrounding us are not Intelligent, they are artificially intelligent. Truly, they are like robots who can’t distinguish “a” from “b”.

When I see a developer who has 2 contradicting tasks assigned to him and he is not even suspecting that something is wrong and doing those tasks one by one … then is he an Intelligent or Artificially Intelligent?

That’s all for now. Bye.

Let’s count to three… emmm… difficult

In my work I regularly deal with documentation produced by other people. That always enriches me with new ideas, with some fresh examples and sometimes (quite often) some funny things can be encountered.

We all can count to three I believe. That is really simple: 1, 2, 3!

Just now I’ve seen the following in one document:

1. Program status. At this stage of development we will use only three type of statuses:

· Green – everything is all right

· Red – some errors, probably related to the books or if the program schedule overlaps with another program. At this stage should be only verification on overlaps.

So, you see, some people count to three like 1,2 and enough

There are other forms of this phenomenon that can be often seen. For example you ask few questions to a person in an email in form: Question1:…, Question2:…., QuestionN. When you get a reply you expect to see Answer1…, …, AnswerN. You open the reply and there is something like @#%Q!%@^W )))

I think we need to fight with such things fiercely.

Neverending game

It’s a midnight here and I’m trying to finish the delivery documentation since was not able to do that at office this evening. As usual this non-trivial task gives me a lot of inspiration and a lot of little lessons learned. In this process I need to check everything that I’m trying to describe. And almost always this happens to be the only moment when I can actually check anything by myself. When the iteration is in progress I don’t have time to look at the intermediate results, there are always some hot tasks to perform so I should trust my guys.

But each time I find out some little things that can put onto the face of the very good functional delivery a mask of incompleteness, so the customer will have a feeling that something could be better. After analysis of a lot of such cases I can draw certain conclusions on the nature of this thing and try to choose a strategy on how to improve it.

The first reaction when you see some little inconsistencies in UI or inconsistencies between two similar tasks implemented by different people is likely to be “WTF, how could they left such things not aligned !!!”. But thinking in the context of a Team I understand that everyone is in charge and everyone shares a part of the possible blame. Today I had a chance to see once more that Murphy’s laws are working very well. What is not described in the task definition and could be implemented and perceived by different people in different way WILL definitely be done differently.

That is why there is sometimes a temptation to analyze and describe everything ideally, provide the full complete specification. And the thing is that we should not do this. Ideal is not optimal in case of software development. Complete analysis and specification are very costly and hardly to be worthy in not-quality-critical systems. The optimal analysis is the one when a developer gets enough info to implement the thing without interrupting you too much. Here you need to count on the intuition of your team. The more intuition, experience and just a common sense a person has the less ideal should be your specification.

What can be done to increase that intuition level? How is it correlated not with that person but with me? Very simple: I must talk after each delivery and point out each time even those little things. Not blame, but point out. This can’t be done off course by spending just 8 hours of your time at work, to improve other people you should sacrifice your time but maybe this is one of the main things that improves me myself.

It’s very important to have at work a person who can always review your work and provide some advices, show you your mistakes or weak areas. Unfortunately, being a project manager leaves a very little space for such things especially in the projects where feedback loop from the customer is not strong enough. I guess all PMs must find a way of learning things without a teacher. And after all, who told that a teacher is needed when you want to learn