July 10th, 2009
Abishek Desai wrote an interesting post in April of 2008 “What Happens With People Having No Aim?” that I commented on (it appears that he has changed blogging systems and lost comments from his older posts) and I came across my answer and thought it would make a nice short blog post.
First Mr. Desai’s question
Right now my company has around 50 people on roll. We are doing development in various technologies like .NET, PHP, Facebook Applications etc. We do really interesting development which is good for company and developers.
Now for some reason we thought that our company needs some more structured technical growth and for that we need to scrap one of the holidays in month people enjoy. Right now first and third saturday are holiday here. For training we have to scrap first saturday so that we can get full day for training and at the end we can have monthly event (We do fun event once a month). The moment we announced this there was outburst in the company about scraping one holiday.
People were obviously not happy with the decision which was expected but there was something which was more disappointing. I found that most of them don’t know what they want to do in life. They think that life will just go on like this coding, developing, testing etc. Nobody wanted to be the best in whatever they are doing. They wanted to enjoy the holiday they get just like any other unambitious person.
Please note that I am not criticizing my own team. We have a very strong and dedicated team who are good in whatever they are doing and I really love my team but there is always room for improvement i.e. to become the best. Lack of this quality makes any person so lifeless, at least to me.
This kept me wondering what happens to people having no aim in life ? do they really do something important in life ? or they are just like people wandering around in zombie movies ? I love my team probably that is why I am more disappointed.
Please correct me if I am wrong somewhere, I am sure I am wrong somewhere but I am not able to find it. Regards, Abhishek
I thought this nicely captured the tension between founders/owners whose life is the company and employees, who although they be quite dedicated, have competing priorities. My answer:
No one wishes they spent more time at the office on their deathbed.
There are many kinds of excellence and accomplishment, not all of them are work related. With 50 people in the firm surely not everyone has the same stake in success as you do. Also, there are limits to how much you can improve in a given period of time. Rest, relaxation, meditation, play, time with friends and family, volunteering, arts and crafts, reading, and many other activities are required to make a well rounded person.
Your employees may have aims that are very different than yours. It seems a little aggressive to take more of their free time, especially without offering them an option to not attend or paying them more.
If they are not requesting the training I would be suspicious of imposing mandatory Saturday training sessions. If I were in your shoes I would ask folks individually and in small groups what’s holding the firm back, it could be many things that you could fix unrelated to having them work more hours.
See also
July 8th, 2009
One of the great opportunities that a conference affords is face to face conversation among knowledgeable people. It’s not that technologies for conversation and collaboration at a distance are not effective, but they are more effective if they build on face to face conversations. Conferences allow for both serendipity and structure in serious conversations. At this year’s Design Automation Conference I hope to take part in both.
Here are some of the more structured conversations I am helping to facilitate (drawing on my Irish ancestors’ ability to construct a dry stone fence out of irregular rocks they removed from the soil to be able to farm it).
The Conversation Central effort is the brainchild of Karen Bartleson (see her post on “…goodies at DAC” for more detail). Here is what I proposed to her for my three sessions:
“Global Teams and Multi-Firm Collaboration: Assessing the impact of new business models, new communication and computing paradigms on design and design automation.”
Intended audience: engineering managers and executives, system architects, design methodologists, design automation professionals, and other interested parties. Goal is to discuss changes that have already occurred and assess current trends.
I hope we explore real time information sharing of design status and configuration, shared configuration management, and what this means for business models and design methodology. One of the more interesting developments that’s not really fully appreciated are the real time multi-user PCB design environments that allow many engineers around the world to collaborate on the same design: it’s multi-processing/multi-threading of engineering activity as much as database updates and algorithms. Similar developments are taking place in simulation, verification, FPGA design, library development and verification, etc…
If you are interested in taking part please contact me, I am looking for folks willing to share stories of real practices and real issues. The format is a “kitchen table” discussion that I will facilitate to make sure that everyone has a chance to participate. I plan to blog about the sessions but any attendees are welcome to blog as well. I am still finalizing the details but it looks like we will have some interesting stories from:
- ClioSoft and the practical use of revision control in multi-site designs.
- Magma: a view from the top on running a multi-site business supporting global design teams.
- A Synopsys Lynx user on what flow management has done for multi-site collaboration
The Birds of a Feather session should also prove quite interesting. Here is the description I submitted as a part of the application:
Many design teams use project health as a way to manage trade-offs between development time, cost, and quality. Traditional methods like measure test coverage or measuring design stability are falling short because of fundamental changes that are occurring in electronic design. This session will discuss some of the top trends in design and the impact they have on tracking project health. It will include lightning talks by practitioners and a roundtable discussion by all attendees.
We will have 4-6 “Lightning Talks” that are three slides / three minutes that talk about real issues in managing the total health of a design project. Again still finalizing the details but so far it looks like we will hear from
- Runtime Design on using information from flow management to assess project health
- Achilles Test on using information from log files and other data sources to develop a holistic view of project health
- Mentor Xtreme user on what it means when teams are editing around the clock and you can login anytime to see where the PCB project stands.
Please note that all of these sessions are evolving and while the focus will not change, there may be new or different issues presented at each.
These sessions are open to anyone with a DAC badge. Entrance to Synopsys Conversation Central will be through a separate entrance from their primary booth entrance and will be on a a first come first serve basis. The capacity of the room is ten. The Birds of a Feather room can hold several dozen but please let me know if you plan to attend, or would like to give a lightning talk. We had a great Birds of a Feather on blogging at ICCAD and another one last DAC and I believe that this session highlight another set of emerging issues in an informative way.
July 6th, 2009
Excerpts from the preface to Brian Tracy’s “Eat that Frog!” (hat tip to Brad Pierce’s “You Are Never Going to Get Caught Up!”
There is never enough time to do everything you have to do.
But the fact is that you are never going to get caught up.
Forget about solving your time management problems by becoming more productive. No matter how many personal productivity techniques you master, there will always be more to do than you can ever accomplish in the time you have available to you, no matter how much it is.
You can get control of your time and your life only by changing the way you think, work, and deal with the never-ending river of responsibilities that flows over you each day. You can get control of your tasks and activities only to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few activities that can really make a difference in your life.
This has been a tough one for me to internalize but very true. I have seen it presented as “project driven” where you are working to a list of priorities and ‘interrupt driven” where you are driven by the tyranny of the urgent. I find that about one week in three I “lose the list” and have to consciously re-focus on priorities. Here are some circuit breakers I use to help me manage my priorities:
- If I am not working to a list at least for the week I know I am going to start to lose effectiveness. If I haven’t crossed something off by the end of the day I make a “list for tomorrow” of two to three key items.
- Parkinson warned that “Work expands to fill the time available.” I have to crowd out “busy work” by having non-work activities I am looking forward to.
- I try and read a few good books a month. At least for me a good novel lifts me out of my daily grind long enough to give me a better sense of perspective when I return. Three good books I read in the last month:
- “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (re-read it so I could discuss it with my son for his summer reading assignment).
- “Better” by Atul Gawande
- “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” by Michael Chabon
- Take a vacation from television (or at least television commercials). Best decision I made in 2008 was to not replace my television when it broke. Weeks turned to months and it has given me a lot more time.
- Schedule meetings or events to move strategic initiatives forward. We have an internal off-site scheduled for mid-September to review a new product offering that we have been talking about for three years. At least for me, the need to prepare and take part in a structured review of a project will often create a plan that enables forward progress.
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