Work

[This article was also published in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.]

Technology, media and pop culture writer Douglas Rushkoff, who’s got a guest writing slot at the uber-blog Boing Boing, points to an essay titled Riding Out the Credit Collapse. Published in the spring 2008 edition of Arthur magazine, it:

• Provides a layperson-friendly, non-drowsy explanation of how the credit crisis came about
• Suggests the single most important thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests during the credit crisis (and in fact, any crisis, including being laid off during a credit crisis)

Don’t let the article’s apparent length scare you off — read it! Yes, it’s ten screens, but it’s set in a narrow column. If you’re still skittish about reading that much, shame on you, and here’s the part on which I want to focus:

Whatever the case, the best thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests is to make friends. The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn’t necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.

If you’re sourcing your garlic from your neighbor over the hill instead of the Big Ag conglomerate over the ocean, then shifts in the exchange rate won’t matter much. If you’re using a local currency to pay your mechanic to adjust your brakes, or your chiropractor to adjust your back, then a global liquidity crisis won’t affect your ability to pay for either. If you move to a place because you’re looking for smart people instead of a smart real estate investment, you’re less likely to be suckered by high costs of a “hot” city or neighborhood, and more likely to find the kinds of people willing to serve as a social network, if for no other reason than they’re less busy servicing their mortgages.

I think Rushkoff’s got the right idea, and I’d like to torque it a little further. Forget for a moment the more fanciful ideas of printing your own “Canadian Tire Money”; when he says “local currency”, I want you think of these things:

• Reputation,
• Goodwill,
• and most importantly, Luck.

Among the many things that I’m churning in my brain right now — along with updating the resume, finding a place to put all the stuff that I used to keep at the office and getting that eye appointment with Dr. Heeney before my work-provided insurance coverage expires — is real-world testing an idea and writing about it here. That idea rests on two principles, namely:

1. Having friends and being friendly makes you lucky. I’ve always suspected it, and Marc Myers wrote a book on the topic.
2. I’d rather be lucky than smart. It’s the mantra of my all-time favourite financial planner, whom I shall refer to as “P. Kizzy”. If I get even a tenth of P. Kizzy’s business acumen, I will be a very happy man.

Watch this space, ’cause I’m going to expand on those ideas!

Tagged as: advice, Community, credit crisis, friends, how-to's, laid off, luck, Terminated

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[This article also appears in my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.]

Introduction

Hello. My name is Joey deVilla, and I am unemployed.

Hmmm. Let’s try that again.

Hello. My name is Joey deVilla, and I am between jobs.

That has a much better ring to it. An optimistic, “this too shall pass” kind of vibe. Maybe the third time will be the charm.

Hello, My name is Joey deVilla, and today is Day One of a new chapter in my career.

There we go.

The Credit Crunch and the Job Market

Many people are in the same situation.

Even if you take only my industry — the software and web industry — into account, a lot of people are feeling the same pain. The unemployment rate in our hub, Silicon Valley, has gone up for the fourth consecutive month and hit 6.6%, its highest level in four years. People who follow the industry are writing articles warning us that it’s not if you’ll get laid off, but when. Even Robert Scoble, who’s probably one of the most sunny and optimistic tech bloggers out there has recently written articles with titles like Surviving the 2008 Recession and What to Do if You’re Laid Off in the 2008 Recession.

The “Bailout Protest” march on Wall Street.

It’s bad all ’round. As I write this, a Google News search for the term “financial crisis” yields just shy of 200,000 results. There are articles with titles like:

• The Next Decade Could be Our Very Own Great Depression
• Financial Turbulence: Pass the Airsick bags
• Credit Crunch Banker Leaps to His Death in Front of Express Train
• Anger, fear and deadlock, then President Bush sums it up: ‘This sucker could go down’
• In Financial Crisis, Metaphors Fly Like Bad Analogies

When the news is filled with talk of credit crunches, bank bailouts and poorly-thought-out metaphors, you can be certain that every business is adjusting their plans to ensure that it doesn’t go under. Cutting spending is one of the most important of these adjustments, and since employee salaries are expenses, companies are laying off the employees they believe they can do without and slowing down (if not stopping) their hiring.

This is not a good time to look for a job nor lose one.

What to Do?

Losing your job is a shaming, stress-inducing, heart-rending, and even frightening experience at the best of times. Losing your job at the start of what some people in the media are calling the New Great Depression is far worse, even if you think they’re exaggerating for effect.

In the time since I posted the article in which I announced that I had been let go, I’ve received about a dozen emails from people who’ve said that they’re in the same situation. They have no idea what to do and asked me what I was doing and if I had any advice.

I have some observations and suggestions, some of it from my layoff experience back in 2002 and some of it from the past few days’ experiences, and I’ve written them below.

You Will Know When You’re Called in for “The Meeting”

I knew I was being brought in for the “your services are no longer required” meeting the moment I was invited to it.

Many people dismiss intuition, but in experience, I have found that a well-trained intuitive sense will often serve you well in those situations where the situation is murky or when rationality is following the wrong path. I susbscribe to the theory that intiuition is your brain doing some massively parallel processing, subconsciously “filling in the missing pieces” when you are presented with incomplete information. That’s why Poincare said “It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.”

It might have been something in the Director of Tech’s voice or his body language. Perhaps it was that there’d been little for me to do in the past little while because of the overlap between our jobs. Maybe the fact that the meeting had been called up out of the blue with no explanation as to what it was about was the tip-off. All these hints would be clear to a detached observer, but to someone right in the middle of the situation, they might not be so apparent. Thanks (or no thanks, perhaps?) to a flash of intuition, I had a pretty good idea of what I was in for.

A quick aside: I believe that intuition is not independent of learning and experience, but enhanced by it. When intuition “fills in the missing pieces”, it has to get those pieces from somewhere. Without learning, and even more importantly, the regular application of that learning, intuition is no better than flipping a coin.

You Have Moments to Get a Grip

Armed with that intuitive flash, I had the twenty or so seconds’ travel time between my desk and the meeting room to collect myself. At this point, I only had a vague sense that this was my termination meeting; intuition isn’t a straight-forward thing like a warning light on your car’s dashboard or a pop-up window on your computer:

“Clippy” dialog created using imageGenerator.net’s Clippy Image Generator.

Do whatever it takes to steel yourself for the bad news. Whether it’s deep breathing, couting to ten, reciting your own personal mantra or firing up your “poker face”, you want to get ready to conduct yourself at the meeting with as much grace, aplomb and professionalism as you can muster.

The Second Most Important Meeting You Might Ever Have with Your Employer

I’ll admit that my termination meeting wasn’t as uncomfortable as this one.

(In case you were wondering, the most important one is the job interview.)

I used to work as a DJ at a popular campus pub at Crazy Go Nuts University. Both the atmosphere and the vantage point offered by the DJ booth gave me the opportunities to witness many breakups from a detached third-party point of view, whether I want to see them or not. Even at their best, breakups are pretty rough; when they get ugly, you can’t help but feel shame for the couple.

No matter what you’re feeling at the meeting, you want your termination to be as good a breakup as possible. This means that you must handle the meeting professionally. The way you behave at this meeting will set the tone for your termination. If it is full of freak-outs and acrimony, they won’t be inclined to do you any favors. On the other hand, if you conduct yourself in a professional manner, you may gain some goodies such as extra negotiating leverage and a willingness on their part to do what they can for you.

If you can remember these questions through the stress of the meeting, you should ask questions like:

• When is my last day?
• What is my severance package?
• How long will my company insurance coverage last?
• When do I have to return the company laptop and Blackberry?
• How long do I have to collect my stuff from the office?
• What do you want me to do with my current projects and files?
• Can I get a letter of recommendation and use you as a reference? (Naturally, if you’re being fired rather than laid off, don’t bother asking this question.)

Don’t worry about memorizing these questions — just remember that you should leave the meeting with a clear idea of what they expect from you and what you can expect from them.

If they’ve given you papers to sign, do not sign them yet. Ask for some time to “look them over”.

Take a Walk as Soon as Possible

This is going to sound terribly touchy-feely new-agey, but I’m going to say it because it’s an important step: at your first opportunity, take a break, get out of the office and go for a walk.

When this first opportunity comes depends on the sort of place where you were and the conditions under which you’re being let go. In some cases, you’ll be asked to pack your things and leave immediately, sometimes with a minder assigned to you so that you don’t go pilfering office supplies. In my case, I was asked to say on for a few days to be debriefed and help with the transfer of responsibilities.

Since I was at the office for a few more days and since it was the sort of place where they’re pretty cool about going out for a break, I went for that walk at the first opportunity. (Besides, what were they going to do, fire me?)

The walk is important because it gets you away from the office and to clear your head. Regular readers of this blog know that I’m usually an easy-going, “go with the flow” kind of guy who’s seen and done some pretty crazy things, and even I needed that walk. I felt twitchy and drained at the same time.

The walk gives you a chance to come down from one of the most stressful experiences you’ll ever face in your working life and come to terms with what’s happened. It is not the time for figuring out what your immediate next steps are; it is the time to collect yourself for figuring out what your next steps are.

Don’t do the walk in a fugue state. Take note of your surroundings. Chances are you’ll see things that you passed by every day but never noticed before. This is good, because it’s preparation for what you’re going to be doing for the next little while: seeing things differently.

Deal with the Shame

No matter how good a job your were doing or how well you served the company, being let go will make you feel like thie cat pictured below:

It will feel as if you had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. In fact, that’s what probably happened. Perhaps you weren’t found wanting as a person or an employee, but when the bean-counters did the books, either you went or the company did.

Thanks to evolution, being let go feels terrible. It feels like getting dumped, which feels terrible because it means that you are failing your biological imperative to keep the species going. Without this feeling, we don’t have the drive to reproduce and thrive, and it’s “goodbye species”.

You deal with the shame, using whatever constructive coping mechanisms work best for you. In my case, I hit the gym, did a little writing, played a little music on the ol’ squeezebox and got involved in some very severe rocket-launcher-assisted altercations in Grand Theft Auto IV.

If you must, have a drink or two but don’t go beyond that. You want to take the edge off, not go on a binge.

You Must Come to this Realization

Crank up your computer’s speakers and enjoy the video below. It’s the Soup Dragons’ 1990 cover of the Rolling Stones’ I’m Free. Don’t be afraid to shake your booty if you feel the urge:

If you need to, play the video a couple of times just to make sure the song’s point soaks in: you’re free.

Once the initial shock of losing your job has worn off, consider this: the future has suddenly become a blank slate. That may sound scary, but you should think of it as liberating.

Think about it. That end-of-the-week progress report that management expects? Not your problem anymore! Getting a response from that contractor for the 50-page spec for that increasingly complicated e-commerce website that you’re responsible for? Somebody else has to deal with it now! Hunting down the bug in the credit card payment gateway? Rubbing an irate client’s belly? Putting new covers on the TPS reports? You’re free of all those responsibilities.

All the day-to-day stuff that you’ve been doing at work has just vanished. This frees you to stop worrying about the doing things for the company and start doing things for you. Without those things taking up your time and thoughts, both your calendar and your mind are free to concentrate on “You, Incorporated”.

In the Next Installment

The next steps, including what you can do with all that spare time.

Tagged as: advice, how-to's, laid off, Terminated

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The “Laid Off” slide from Damian Katz’s presentation at RubyFringe.

This does not bode well: Kara Swisher, author of the BoomTown blog and co-producer of the “D: All Things Digital” conference says that while the current economic downturn is hitting bank employees now, it’ll spill over into other industries, and that includes ours:

With the economic situation obviously worsening – don’t say you weren’t warned – BoomTown has no doubt now that Internet companies are in the midst of reevaluating their troop numbers to streamline themselves for the coming few months of financial winter.

There’s general agreement among advertising-supported internet companies that a slowdown in the ad market is coming, and they’re tightening their belts accordingly. This belt-tightening usually takes the form of a double-whammy: layoffs and hiring freezes, and this has led to unemployment in Silicon Valley hitting its highest rate (6.5%) in four years last month, the fourth month in a row it’s increased.

It might not be a bad idea to work on some contingency plans, just in case.

Tagged as: credit crunch, economy, layoffs

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My friend Miss Fipi Lele, who provides me with a lot of pictures for my blogs, pointed me to this photo on Shorpy, “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog”. It depicts “multi-processor computing”, circa 1924:

Click the photo to see it on its original site, Shorpy, at full size.

The caption for the photo at Shorpy is:

November 24, 1924. Washington, D.C. “Bonus Bureau, Computing Division. Many clerks figure the amount of the bonus each veteran is entitled to.”

Before the age of electronic computers, the term computer referred to someone whose profession was performing mathematical calculations by hand.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the profession’s origins (see the entry Human Computer):

The approach was taken for astronomical and other complex calculations. Perhaps the first example of organized human computing was by the Frenchman Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713–1765), when he divided the computation to determine timing of the return of Halley’s Comet with two colleagues, Joseph-Jérôme Le Lepart and Nicole-Reine Étable. For some men being a computer was a temporary position until they moved on to greater advancements. For women the occupation was generally closed, but this changed in the late nineteenth century with Edward Charles Pickering. His group was at times termed “Pickering’s Harem.” Many of the women astronomers from this era are computers with possibly the best known being Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Florence Cushman was one of the Harvard University computers from 1888 onward. Among her best known works for him was A Catalogue of 16,300 Stars Observed with the 12-inch Meridian Photometer. She also worked with Annie Jump Cannon. That said as a female computer she normally earned half of what a male counterpart would.

The Indian mathematician Radhanath Sikdar was employed as a “computer” for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in 1840. It was he who first identified and calculated the height of the world’s highest mountain, later called Mount Everest.

Tagged as: old school, Photo, women

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Found these photos while digging through my archives on the backup hard drive and thought you folks might find them interesting. They’re flipchart pages from either June 2000, back when I was working at Cory Doctorow’s startup, OpenCola. These are notes that I wrote on the GNUtella protocol; Chris Cummer and I worked off these notes to produce an app called COLAvision, which scored Gnutellanet for audio and video files, captured them and cued them up to be served as streams (oh, the assignments we got during the bubble…).

I expect to be doing a fair bit of doodling, since the b5media tech office walls are largely floor-to-ceiling whiteboards and I’ve also been diving into Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin, a book on solving problems and selling ideas with hand-drawn pictures on whiteboards, flipcharts, notepads, scrap paper or even — as the title implies — the back of a napkin (or serviette to you Brits out there).

My notes on the GNUtella protocol, part 1.

My notes on the GNUtella protocol, part 2.

Tagged as: Dry Erase Diary, GNUtella, hand-drawn notes, Joey's handwriting, old tech, visual thinking

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The development tool company Cenqua have a cute gag ad for a pair programming chair called the “PairOn” — an Aeron built for two:

They list the PairOn’s “key features” as:

• Fully unit-tested in our ego-free ergonomics lab
• Essential office furniture for any eXtreme XP Pair (XXPP)
• Fully adjustable via individual or pair control
• Can be levered to standup-meeting height
• 40-hour-week alarm buzzer built in
• Available in a range of attractive colours

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Here’s a pair programming chair that really exists: it’s a set of drawers that doubles as a stool:

These are drawer sets mounted on some very good wheels and topped with well-padded upholstery. If you wanted to pair program with someone, you’d simply pull the drawer unit out from under their desk and sit on it. These things were surprisingly comfortable; I’ve spent upwards of two hours sitting on one of these with nary a complaint.

Alas, these aren’t available in stores. They were custom-built for a startup for whom I briefly worked, whose CEOs was more in love with the idea of running a start-up than actually running a start-up. Their last programmer recently ditched them, and I’m hoping to pick up one of these in their bankruptcy sale.

Tagged as: Aeron, chairs, ergonomics, extreme programming, XP

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Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment: my current job as Tech Project Manager at b5media marks the fourth startup for which I’ve worked; if you count Mackerel Interactive Multimedia — whose story, Burying the Fish, was written by Cory Doctorow for Wired but never published — I’ve worked at five. I like the “feel” of working at a startup, and now that I’ve got experience and real-world and blog-based reputations to back me up, startups are willing to pay me not only to be part of their team but to also be the “adult supervision”. At the ripe old age of 40, I’m an elder statesman in these parts (and playing an old man’s instrument only adds to that image).

That’s why I read SitePoint’s article Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them with a sense of deja vu, going through each item in their list of mistakes and saying “yup, did that one…did that one too…”

Put together, the startups for which I worked had all but one of the diseases listed in the article except for “Marketing Blind Spot”. For some reason, there was always a marketer in our midst, drumming it into our heads that marketing was necessary.

I’ve taken their list of startup diseases and cures and summarized it in the table below. For full explanations behind each disease and cure, be sure to read the article.

Startup Disease	Cure
Imaginary User Syndrome: Your product isn’t targeted at anyone in particular.	Establish a small, defined set of users who could benefit from your product and tailor it to them.
Frenetic Distraction Pox: Wasting time on non-essential tasks that don’t bring the business closer to break-even or profit.	Focus!
Wrong Hire Infection: You’ve hired people who can’t perform or who underperform.	“The smart, brave solution in those cases is amputation. Let them go gently if you want, but let them go.”
Implicit Promise Fever: You’re assuming that there are certain promises made between you and your co-founders, but you haven’t discussed them directly or put them in writing.	“Have those discussions. Write the results down.”
Stealth Product Delusion: You’re waiting way too long to show your product to users while honing it to perfection (or as close to perfect as you can get).	Get people to look at it! They’ll have some criticism, but that feedback is going to be very valuable.
Wrong Platform Fracture: The platform on which you’re developing (language, framework, technology) keeps getting in the way of development. Maybe you think you’ve gone too far to turn around and switch platforms.	Switch platforms! ““We’ve walked this far already” isn’t a good enough reason to continue heading in that direction. Chances are, you’re much, much further from the completion of your product than you think.”
Other Interest Disorder: Other interests are pulling at you; you’re either saying “but I’m still working on my startup” and “I’ll get back to my startup soon” or working on several startups at once.	Pick the project you want to work on, and break cleanly from the others.
Perfection Hallucination: You’re spending a large amount of time getting your prodcut to the point where it’s perfect, especially close to the end of the product development cycle.	“Users are more forgiving of progress in the wrong direction than of a lack of progress. What you’ve built will never be perfect, but if it’s close enough your users will tell you how to improve it…Release early, release often.”
Marketing Blind Spot: You’re not doing any marketing.	Do some marketing! “Marketing doesn’t have to cost much, but if you don’t do enough of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

Tagged as: mistakes, startups

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A study of 106 major U.S. airports and 800 business travelers says that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Less than a third are recovered, and nearly half the travelers say their laptops contain some confidential business information. Most are lost either at security checkpoints or departure gates. How over 600,000 laptops get lost at airports each year is a mystery to me; after my passport and wallet, my laptop is the thing I guard the most when flying.

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Ten Most Densely Populated Technology Startup Regions is a list created by Valleywag by using the Google Maps mashup Startup Warrior. The regions listed are: Downtown Palo Alto, San Francisco around the 101 between McAllister and Grove, Mountain View near Google, Midtown Manhattan between 34th and 40th, Downtown Manhattan just west of South Street Seaport, Seattle near James Street, Santa Monica near where the Santa Monica Freeway turns into Palisades Beach Road, Sunnyvale near Yahoo!, Austin around Congress Avenue, Downtown Vancouver - especially around Gastown.

Tagged as: location, Startup Warrior, startups

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