[Read Part One of this interview]
Back again with more of the Bob Reselman interview.
For those of you who missed the first installment, Bob is the author of Coding Slave, a novel (book-length argument for change, really) about the software industry. His ideas, although not perfect, make for a very interesting starting point on the Road to Recovery. Basically, he lays out an argument that does a very convincing job of saying, “Hey - this isn't right. We need to fix it.” He then goes on to provide some ideas on how to go about fixing.
In this, the second part of an interview that I'm conducting with him, Bob really opens up and talks about aspects of The Industry that I never even knew existed. Even if you haven't read the book, this interview should make sense to you, and you ought to walk away with at least a few “Hm”-worthy thoughts.
Also, if you're interested in Bob's book, then be sure to go buy a copy. If you happen to be TechEd bound, then come hang out with Bob (and the other people who will be attending) on Sunday night at about 7:00 PM - location to be announced, probably within a week or so.
It's going to be good :)
Rory:
Before the story actually begins, there's a page with nothing but the following written on it: "All characters depicted in this book are purely fictional; the situations, less so." I found that statement curious before reading, and fascinating at the end. Without giving too much away, I'd like to know about some of the more "out there" events in the book. Think Ajita in the boardroom, or the episode in Boston Harbor. Things of that nature. Are you pulling these, at least in part, from experience, or are those situations the products of your imagination, through and through?
Bob:
I came into software through the back door. My BA is in musical composition. My graduate degree is in education. At one point I wanted to be a music teacher. Then I figured out that the role of music in the landscape of public education is to provide bodies to make background music for football games and pleasant entertainment episodes for parents during PTA meetings. Given that my musical sensibility can be found in the third movement of Ravel’s Trio in A minor and the Led Zeppelin song Dazed and Confused, the part when Page’s guitar lead breaks into Bonham laying off the cymbals and going full throttle on the drum heads, I figured that I was not too long destined for being Mr. Holland, with or without a life long opus to make the daily pain of meaningless musical activity bearable.
I moved on and ended up being introduced to The Box by some musician friends of mine. That I showed almost immediate understanding for computer programming is serendipity. But, it’s a good thing that I did, because at the age of thirty-three, computer programming gave me a way to be commercially viable without having to be in sales, full time anyway.
I really did not get into the full swing of commercial IT until I went to work for a Big Six Consulting Company after being at Gateway for 4 years. At Gateway I was doing cool technology in multimedia, video codec, and CD-ROM technology, stuff that I really had no business doing. But, because I was in the extreme northwest corner of Iowa, they let me do cool stuff because there wasn’t anybody else to do it and also because I displayed a certain flair and competency for software. (Yes, it is NOT coincidental that much of the book takes place in a certain state in the Midwest that begins with the letter, "I".)
Yet, after all was said and done, I was a software guy working in a hardware company. And we all know this joke:
Q: How does a software developer change a light bulb?
A: They don’t. It’s a hardware problem.
So, I got a job in Big Six Consulting.
When I worked for a Big Six Consulting Company I got to fly all over the US and parts of Europe working in medium and large IT departments in Business and Government. This really opened my eyes to situations and experiences that I never imagined. Prior to Gateway, I had worked for small companies and for myself. There are good and bad points to working small. The bad news is that usually there is not a lot of money around, one tends to overwork, and you can get into real, direct confrontation with people, maybe throw things if under enough stress. The good news is that, for better or worse, you become close to the people with whom you work and can develop lifelong friendships. Things that are food for litigation in large corporations simply don’t exist in small companies, age discrimination and sexual harassment suits for example. In my experience in small companies—and by small I mean companies with ten people—things are direct, If someone is doing things that you don’t like, you can tell them stop it or you bop them in the nose. You don’t get sued. And, even if you do get sued, there is so little money around, that if someone wins a case, there is no money to be paid on judgment. People just sort of muddle through resolving offenses: commercial, social, political and sexual.
Speaking of sexual harassment, when I worked at Big Six I was re-educated about the dangers of sexual harassment. The re-education process required that I get a lecture from the company handbook for a Human Resource employee. And then after listening to the recitation, I had to sign a letter. In fact, I had to sign letters upon two occasions. Once I told a young woman that I was supervising that she looked great, that the attire she was wearing that day would certainly impress the client. She complained to HR. That was Letter Number One. The second letter was because I forwarded an email that was sent to me from "the outside". I think that email had some sort of guy joke. I don’t even remember what it was about. My boss at the time, a really nice guy, was embarrassed when he asked me to sign the letters. The contents of the letter said that I had been informed about the dangers of sexual harassment and that I would harass no one, no more. I felt robbed in a way. I mean, when I think of harassing somebody sexually my mind wonders back to junior high school when all of us guys were trying to get as many kisses as we could from whatever girl we could. Upon reflection, I could see how a young girl really would NOT like some pubescent boy always trying to paw some part of her body or make kissy face with her in the school cloak room. That is what I call real harassment. So, I figured, if I was going to be rehabilitated, I could at least have attempted a kissy face or something. I do know of someone who got canned at Gateway for too much kissy face, the rumor being that he and his Admin did some consensual stuff in a conference room and were discovered in flagrato. However, remember it is a rumor only. I never had a chance to talk to either or the perpetrators directly. For all I know he could have been fired for being incompetent. But in all the corporations in which I have worked or visited, I have never heard of anybody in the "middle" being fired for incompetence. Thieving CEOs and CFOs get fired for incompetence. Janitors and loading dock workers get fired for incompetence. The people in the middle don’t get fired for incompetence. They get shuffled around. You do get fired, however, if you are the subject of litigation. And, the easiest types of litigation to conjure up against a corporation are age discrimination and sexual harassment suits. As for me, all I did was tell the woman that she looked great. ("Great" mind you, not just "good".) Just as well that I didn’t go out of my way to make good cause for the letters. I was married at the time, quite monogamously so.
But onto Big Six IT. Whenever I think of Big Six IT, I think of three things: multimillion dollar budgets, Ross Perot and Peter Drucker. I call it Big Six Consulting because these companies started out as the old Big Six Accounting firms—Peat Marwick, Price Waterhouse, Cooper and Lybrand, Arthur Anderson, Deloitte & Touche, and Ernst and Young. These companies moved into IT consulting through large scale accounting services and audits. These guys were not Computer Science. They came from places like the Kellogg School of Management, the Sloan School at MIT and Bentley College, a well respected accounting college in Waltham, MA. (Bentley College is the alma mater of my close friend and personal CPA for over twenty five years, James Leahy, at the time one of the youngest men to ever pass the Certified Public Accountant exam in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.)
So here is what I have come to learn about IT from working for a Big Six Consulting Company:
Imagine every year, usually around December, a man shows up at your office with a briefcase and in that briefcase is twelve million dollars. The twelve million is net profit, the money left over from income after you pay employees, the electric company, the phone company, the office supply guy, the cost of about forty laptops, a few company cars, the janitor and postage. A twelve million dollar net, before tax profit is usual for a healthy, medium size consulting branch of a Big Six Consulting Company employing a hundred consultants billing at an average rate of $100 an hour. (The superstars will bill for $200 and hour, the grunts for $75. It all averages out.)Now you might think that I am being funny about the expenses. Well I am being a little funny, but not that funny. In terms of real overheard, Big Six Consulting Companies have very little, and of the expenses they do have, the most costly is payroll and the leases on the prestigious, big ass office space that is required to make the client feel certain it is getting "professional service" and that the Big Six Consulting Company can be trusted to be competent. The reality is that in Big Six IT Consulting and Not-So-Big Six IT Consulting, the client provides everything that a consultant needs to get the job done: the computers, the software, the airplane tickets, hotel accommodations, in come cases, even the training. A friend of mine worked for a medium size consulting company in Dallas. His company’s telephone system was set up in such a way that when he had to call a client or make a telephone call on behalf of the client, he punched a special client ID code into the phone and then the number he was calling. The phone system automatically kept track of the time on the phone and made a direct entry into the billing software so that the client would be charged for the consultant’s phone time. No muss. No fuss.
Anyway, back to the 12 million bucks. Every year like clockwork, a man shows up with the money. He is usually a Regional Vice President or Managing Partner running one to four consulting branches or specialty groups within a Big Six. His job is to deliver the money every year. How he gets the money is his problem. If he sells 200,000 consulting hours at a hundred per hour, that is good. If he sells a client on a big deal and the client gives him one big check for 12 million, that is good too. If he puts together a big deal for 50 million dollars, turns it over to another company in Tulsa or Taiwan for 38 million and takes a twelve million dollar cut for his sales efforts, this is also a mark in the Good Column. The point is that his job is to show up with 12 million bucks, not to do technology. In fact, if he could make the money without doing the technology, it would be better for everybody because hiring technology people is expensive, doing technology is expensive and the risk of failing to bring a coding project in on time and on budget is significant.
So the first thing that I learned about Big Six Consulting is that it really has little or nothing to do with technology. It has to do with making money, CASH money. There is no inventory here, no deferred payments, no layaway. We’re talking hard currency, at the best exchange rates. The Big Six is getting CASH money as payment for words, code and time. If the client would buy advice on canned air and bottled water, and the man with the briefcase shows up with the 12 million, so be it. Once I understood this, I understood why Ross Perot did well with EDS. I mean, Ross does not really impress me as someone who could sit for hours slinging code and enjoying it. And yet, he made megabucks in IT, because I suspect he knew that IT had nothing to do with computer technology. It’s all about something else.
The second thing that I learned about big corporations in general and Big Six Consulting Companies in particular is that they are paramilitary. I learned this from Peter Drucker.
The modern corporation came into being around 1870. Prior to this time most companies had no more than 500 employees. A company with 500 employees can be managed by word of mouth and direct supervision. If you want to know the company mission, you go to your boss and say, "What do I work on next?" and he tells you. Back then there was no social security, health insurance, unemployment, and workmen’s comp. Income tax did not become a way of life until 1913 when the 16th Amendment was added to the Constitution. Life was simple. You worked. You got paid. You learned your skill from some guy who had been there for a while. If you messed up, everybody knew your work was crap. And, since nobody had that much money anyway, how much was there really to produce? Most of the world was still farmers and child labor was quite real. The average life span was about 50 years, ten years younger than Mick Jagger’s current age.
But with the modern corporation came large scale employment. Corporations grew beyond the 500 person threshold. Some companies had thousands of workers. Word of mouth was not a good way to make these companies work. Business processes spread geographically. The foobar that one factory used in its widgets might be made a hundred miles away in another factory owned by the same company, and this was at a time when a hundred miles was really a hundred miles. Luckily a thing called the telephone had been invented.
There were few organizations at that time that had the historical knowledge and wherewithal to manage the enterprise that the modern corporation was becoming. Drucker says that the only existing organization that had the smarts to manage these new corporations was the military. Julius Caesar had done thousands of years ago what Westinghouse, Edison and Ford where trying to do in the early twentieth century: organize a large group of human beings to perform efficiently and effectively toward a prescribed goal. Caesar knew how to move large amounts of men and supplies. He knew how to keep his warehouses filled and his workers properly equipped and fed. And, we are not talking about a few thousand men here. The historian Gibbons calculates the size Caesar army to be around 400,000 human beings. Of course women followed along too, mostly on foot, or if you were Portia, you traveled in style.
Thus in the Industrial Age, the military model for managing organizations was adopted by the corporation. So by 1950 everything fell together very nicely. The United States was the preeminent industrial producer in the world. Coca-Cola, Hughes Aircraft, GM and Mars Candy, the makers of M&Ms, were run pretty much like the US Army. In 1958 MIT, a.k.a. the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sets up MITRE, a private non-profit corporation, staffed by the US military and MIT academics, with one customer, the United States Air Force. Eisenhower warns the nation about the danger of the Military Industrial Complex and leaves the White House after two nice terms to become President of Columbia University. By 1960 it’s hard to tell where the Army ends and the corporation begins. Robert McNamara, former CEO of Ford Motor Company becomes the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. We’re all one big, happy paramilitary family.
And then comes along the PC. Scares the shit out of IBM. For five thousand bucks any rich kid with a credit card can have computing power in 1980 akin to what was available to a Cal-Tech graduate student in 1965, if he could manage to wangle time on the mainframe. (We’d have to wait another twenty years for the PC to be affordable to the working stiff.) The PC changes everything. Well, almost everything. The Big Sixes are still trying to run it like the Army. But the management techniques that are required for organizing knowledge work can’t really be found in the military, despite all the goings on at NASA. Prescribed, task directed management techniques may work well in the industrial production of Edsels, refrigerators, spaceships and TV dinners. But, in the production of pure ideas and the tools of abstract idea making? Don’t think so. IT implodes big time, in so many different ways. Luckily Y2K and that thing called the Internet kept the wolf away for a while.
Good stuff to use as a backdrop for a book about a young, female, Indian contract programmer working in the Midwest.
As I said, "All characters depicted in this book are purely fictional; the situations, less so."
But, wait a minute; I think that you were asking about my how much of this was in my imagination. I’ll have to think about that…
[Read Part Three of this interview]
After Blog Mint [?] :
Downloaded the OS X Mono package today, and can't wait to get it installed. .NET on OS X - sweet.