That Political Question

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I once had someone note that my blog wasn’t political, and that was refreshing. I can sort of get that, especially if you’ve encountered writers to A) turned “political” and B) did it for the clicks/attention/cash. “Politics” has become a dirty word in some ways, and people have made an effort to dirty it.

But that made me think. See my blog does talk politics. In fact it talks politics more than many readers may realize (and probably in some cases, than I realize). Because a lot of my blog is about organization, technology, culture, and getting things done. That’s all politics.

Ed Zitron may be the Lewis Black of technology, but if you ever heard or read his stuff, his work is political, he just doesn’t say it.

I do avoid, in some cases, making it explicitly political. Some of this is the dismal state of modern politics. A lot of it is about what I want to discuss. If I make specific political statements then that means those who automatically disagree won’t listen and those who automatically agree won’t question me. I’m fine with disagreement and agreement, but would like it to be heartfelt not automatic.

Praise me or call me a dumbass for real, not because I repeated a talking point.

When I do this consciously, I’m kind of annoyed with it, because politics should be interesting and engaging. Politics is part of society and civilization. In fact, to try to avoid politics is to avoid having a society. To emphasizes that let’s talk the Toledo Zoo and Civil Defense.

The Toledo Zoo, which I had visited many times, had some buildings made by the Works Progress Administration back in the 30s. Those lasted quite awhile, and the WPA was the result of politics. I’ve also dug up books create due to the WPA and so on. Parts of our history due to politics.

Civil Defense, for a time, interested me as well. At first for the nature of it’s communications, and later for what it meant. As a Project Manager seeing Americans come together in organized fashion intrigued me. It’s also part of my interest in disaster recovery. Yes, Civil Defense was propaganda-heavy, it was political, but it also left a legacy.

Politics can be sure we get things done. Ever go and say “someone should fix this?” Well getting it fixed is politics.

But why has it become such a dirty word? Why is it associated with screaming at each other over Thanksgiving? Why can’t we, you know, solve problems?

My short take is simply this – we’re in a media saturated culture where politics is somewhere between lousy soap opera and gladiatorial game. Some people compare it to wrestling but that’s insulting wrestling. We’ve made politics about anything but doing things, and all that does is serve entrenched interests at best. At worse (and I think we’re at worse), politics is essentially a media-industrial complex filled with people who will say and do anything for hits, money, and to release their own psychological complexes.

And while all this is going on? Terrible things are happening, only we’re not as aware of them or trying to fix them as she should be.

(I have suspected the origins of this are in Kennedy’s popularity and the mass media, but I think there’s more I need to chew over. A friend has been studying media history and his insights are depressingly useful.)

We’ve made politics not about getting anything done and politics has always had its problems. We should be engaged. We should have discussions, not arguments. We should do things for our communities of all kind. We should not be listening to some guy on YouTube who alternately argues for insane politics while pitching pills to fix erectile dysfunction or legal psychedelics.

So I may be talking politics more directly. Be the change I want to see in the world and all. Though I can’t say I won’t do a bit of a runaround before I admit something is about politics. Let’s keep things fun here – as opposed to what too much political talk is about.

Steven Savage

The Puzzle Problem

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Ages ago I was working on some scheduling software used to schedule setting up computers in data centers. This is pretty complex as you’ve got a giant building and you need the space, the power, the networking hookups, and enough ventilation. Before you schedule and do any of that you have to check if it can be done – you might be facing power limits, overheating, lack of parts, and so on. If you haven’t been in a data center, it’s a balancing act just to set things up – I can get into that in another time.

Anyway I was looking at this software which I hadn’t written but was maintaining and got ideas on how to make it more efficient. I eventually worked out a way to get scheduling tracked down to tiny increments so we’d know who was doing what at all time!

“Don’t do it, people will hate you,” is a rough summary of my boss’ reaction.

Of course I realized that my cool idea that would allow for such precision would be insufferable to the people doing the job. They’d have schedules with no wiggle room that they’d either break or have to constantly update making their jobs harder and more stressful. Plus the jobs would be less efficient because of my bright idea as the tracking tool would be the centerpiece of my life.

Besides, you know, maybe I should have thought about just trusting the people doing their damn job.

If you haven’t been a software guy or an engineer, you may figure this is obvious. But when you’re an engineer of some kind, or any other “making/solving” profession, solving a problem and making a cool solution can become paramount over anything else. Including people hating you.

It’s fun to make solutions even if they’re stupid and unrealistic in reality. If youre solutions-oriented (like me) even more so. This is also why – in part – I think our Internet Age has created so much stupid and bad stuff.

Technology also lets us solve problems quickly and at scale. You can hook up a few web frameworks and transform a web page. YOu can push a solution to A/B testing or production and people are using it right away. It’s almost enough to make you forget good QA!

(I joke, people have been always forgetting QA).

Making things happen is a rush, and technology lets us deliver it faster and get that rush. Of course it may also mean we’ve just done something dumb, quickly, and at scale.

But we might not even realize how bad our latest idea is. We made the thing fast, we got the thing working, it’s just what we wanted – and only later discover it’s a terrible concept.

Worse, the marketing department or investors may tell us it’s a great idea and we never realize our latest bright idea for a Thermos with Bluetooth is insufferably stupid.

No matter how much of the strange and stupid things spewed out of technology companies may be pandering stock-jacking ideas, part of this “joy of solving” is almost certainly part of it. Someone had a great idea – even if it’s just a way to tweak the stock price with a useless release – and implemented it. Money and power can tempt people, but that rush of a solution turn off your morals as well.

So when we look at many strange, useless, and outright immoral technologies don’t just follow the money. Somewhere in the lineage is probably more than a few people who just had so much fun “making things work” they didn’t think about it.

Steven Savage

The Wasteful Efficiency of the Large

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’ve been thinking of large, easy-to-deploy, fast-to-scale solutions can be an inefficient waste of time. Before I go into my inevitable rant-o-speculation, let me note the origin – Chinese history and Agile. Trust me, it’s worth it.

As to Chinese History, I’ve had a deep interest in the Taoists and because of that some of Chinese history and culture. The Taoists provide a body of philosophy, meditation, and sarcastic humor while focusing on simplicity, uncomplicated-ness, and a kind of mystical realism. Chinese History is replete with scholar-bureaucrats whom I deeply relate to because I’m me. This means I can read about a figure who is essentially “He was in the Department of Awesome Flowcharts and a famous Taoist scholar” and go “yeah, this dude rocks.”

Early on in philosophical Taoism there’s an emphasis on frugality, not-over reaching, and taking care of things while small. Arguably the “journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” originated in the Tao Te Ching (Chapter 64). If you focus on small things before they’re large and not overdoing it, you get a lot done without, well, doing a lot.

Now does this sound like Agile? Well now you can see where this comes in . . . and learn even more about my personality. I love Agile’s focus on small, meaningful incremental change. The tenth Agile principle even states success is what you don’t have to do. Well done Agile Projects do what is needed, no more, and thus get a lot done – and even save time by not overdoing things.

By now if you know me, you can see where this is going in the world of IT solutions, so thanks for humoring my above explanation. Now let me rant about discussions I have with my friends in IT which is . . . most of them.

Back in my day (hey, I’ve been in IT 30 years) I saw a lot of custom IT systems. I built them. Whatever you needed for your specific needs might not have an off-the-shelf solution, and if it existed it was large and expensive. So when you had to make something custom you learned the issue, solved the solution, then watched your code decay for ten years after getting a promotion. Maintenance was an issue, but at least it was small.

(Software is an expense, talent is the investment.)

In time people of course made solutions that were scalable, that were customizable, that built on layers and layers of code over the decades. We took advantage of cloud computing, of distribution systems. Any large provider of services can instantly set up your small business because of years of investment.

You can implement the same solution as the big guys, or customize a solution . . .

. . . except everything is now all so large.

You just bought, say, an infrastructure tracking tool. Sure it’s on the cloud, but only runs in this one browser. Also you have to figure which modules to activate. You have to train your team. You also have a lot of features you may not need, but everyone wants them as they’re there and easy to use (for the people who want them). You may not have to maintain the system, but you have to get everyone on board something they never participated in making and isn’t based on your specific needs.

Oh, and as soon as a certain web security company who’s name sounds like “Clown Strife” goes under your inventory system is unreachable. Well, also half your other systems are too, but I digress because I still flash back to that outage.

Now you’re using all of this stuff to ease paperwork while creating more paperwork. You are probably entering data you don’t need but it was one of the features. You now have to reconcile the new system with the old system, which is months of work and means you need a consultant. You’re trying to get everyone aligned on something that you basically dropped on them and they make workarounds.

I have met people who were still solving problems with spreadsheets because the applications didn’t work. I have been those people.

You quickly and efficiency implemented a big solution that doesn’t quite work and thus you make more work and waste more time. You have small issues to solve and maybe if you solved them first you wouldn’t be here. Plus maybe you had no gain once all the overhead is taken account of.

All that new work you added may be worse than the janky old system – and you can’t tell.

Right now in technology we can implement huge, powerful solutions easily with no concept of the small picture that makes them work. We don’t even know if they serve the small picture as the “Big Thing” becomes paramount. You can buy a solution and not solve anything and may not know.

Maybe it was worth it slowly maintaining and upgrading the system you had. Or having done it right in the first place. B Or a piecemeal migration.

This is a reminder of Agile, of the Taoists, all having a point. Solutions are often about the small things, about working on something before it’s large, of doing what’s needed – and not letting things grow into a problem. I think in the world of IT we’ve accumulated so much tech, so many solutions it’s easy to just throw a Big Thing at a problem. That may not solve the problem, it may make more of them.

There are situations that need bottom-up implementation and that’s a lot of them. Yes, you might be able to use a Big Solution, but only after you get what you need, and probably do it incrementally. You have to address the small to fix the big, not throw the Big at whatever else is Big and hope.

Also let’s face it, sometimes we get Big Solutions because we let something get out of hand and hope it’ll fix it. We forgot the lesson of starting small then repeat it.

Think small. It’s the way to do big things right as opposed to just doing a Big Thing and hoping.

Steven Savage