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By Krishna, April 19, 2009

Slate has an article on why we have not yet seen an online subscription-based service for movies:

Couldn’t the studios just sign new deals that would give them the right to build an online service? Well, maybe—but their current deals are worth billions, and a new plan would mean sacrificing certain profits for an uncertain future. Understandably, many are unwilling to take that leap.

[...] working through these [existing] contracts in order to build the perfect streaming service will take time. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder, told the Hollywood Reporter last month that it’ll be 10 years before we see a streaming service that offers any movie at any time.

TechCrunch retorts:

how can anyone really expect any of the online movie services to flourish under such restrictions? They shouldn’t, because none of them truly will until Hollywood changes these rules. And with billions of dollars at stake, Hollywood probably isn’t going to do it anytime soon. In fact, I’d venture to guess that the only thing that will force their hands is if services like BitTorrent, which people use to distribute pirated movies, continue to gain popularity as broadband access and speeds improve.

I am not a fan of BitTorrent, but it is ridiculous how the movie and TV industry are simply leaving tons of money on the table by not going fully digital. Consider the different ways in which they can make money:

1. Subscription-based streaming movies.
2. Targeted advertising in movies based on user profile and user viewing history.
3. Extra Low-cost downloadable content such as ring tones, blooper reels, star interviews, etc.
4. Allow bloggers and websites to embed video with advertisements, or license content at inexpensive rates.
5. Monetize through greater interactivity on the site, such as games and contests.

If you really dig deep, contractual issues are not the real problem. The true culprits are the makers of poor movies and TV series, because they will not be able to make enormous revenues by slick marketing and endless repeats on TV. Quality will become more important because only it has the potential to keep selling even after people have watched the original content once. Right now, those who have less confidence in their capabilities are the ones who are holding back on full digitization.

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By Krishna, April 17, 2009

Rands in Repose has a great article about the difficulties with telecommuting. It is pretty exhaustive in explaining what kinds of personalities and work cultures can make telecommuting work or not. I suppose many of the lessons can also be applied to outsourcing or any kind of distributed systems.

Although Rands doesn’t use the term, the most important aspect of working remotely is “trust”. When managers and other employees have limited trust in the employee working remotely, there will be “friction”. And all the communication overhead is simply meant to create and maintain that trust. So the remote employee has to communicate more even if he or she does the same amount of work. It is perhaps not fair, but that is how it is.

To be fair, telecommuting has several things going for it. In many cases, it is like an instant salary hike for employees. They don’t waste hours and fuel on the road. If they have children, they save tons of money on the babysitting bills. They can work more convenient hours. Employers can also benefit by maintaining lower infrastructural overhead at the office.

But as Rands says, the long-term effects are not quite so good as he believes that within a year, the typical telecommuter is on the verge of quitting or being fired. The fact of the matter is that most people don’t have the skills to communicate well enough or consistently enough to overcome the friction. This is not a judgment, it is simply that people don’t have the experience or been trained to be able to work remotely.

I suppose the newer generation used to interacting with hundreds of virtual friends across the globe will be more used to doing this better. Problem is most managers are not of that generation. We will check again in another decade to see how this has changed.

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By Krishna, April 13, 2009

Or, translated from Australian, miscellaneous items, in this case, too small to write a long blog post on. And a bit too long for Twittering.  So here are a few of those thoughts:

1. Most newspapers have fact checkers for their articles and reports. Newspapers are dying and being replaced by bloggers and other websites. Several bloggers today have subscribes that surpass the circulation of small newspapers. How much fact checking are they doing? And how many errors are they fixing? Considering that most bloggers are preaching to the converted, that is not happening anytime soon. So the lesson is “reader beware”.
2. On that note, there is a meme that technology bloggers should worry about what they write, because they could be a bad influence on inexperienced programmers. I don’t agree because the person who doesn’t do more research on both sides of any topic will always get into trouble, regardless of the experience level. And paternalism is never a good teaching strategy.
3. Programming is like a game you want to learn, like, say, tennis. You don’t learn it by reading all the book on strategies and tactics. You go out and play (code). And then, when you read the books, it makes it much clearer how you can use those tactics better. It doesn’t mean that the books are wrong or useless. It just means that they are more valuable when you have already practiced some.
4. The saddest person is the bad programmer who genuinely wants to improve, but has no passion for his job. He doesn’t understand that you cannot be a better programmer by simply taking shortcuts. You have to possess some intrinsic traits such as being curious about new things and being excited about solving problems. If you don’t, programming is probably not the right profession.
5. People like talking about the 10x programmer – the one who is 10 times more productive than your average programmer. That’s great, but we should also talk about the 0.1x programmer who is dragging down the rest of the team. It is not even about the speed at which tasks get accomplished. It is whether they even get completed or, worst case scenario, started. The 0.1x programmer is not the actual worst programmer (because they get fired), but the person who just does enough NOT to be sacked.

[Photo licensed from CarbonNYC]

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By Krishna, April 11, 2009

James McGovern, of Enterprise Architecture, writes:

So, if quality can be lower in enterprise in-house software, then that allows for lower-quality resources from Indian outsourcing firms to maintain it. Remember that good is good enough and it doesn’t make sense for architects to expend such energy churning on better ways of developing higher quality working software.

Indian outsourcing has caused many to lower their standards and therefore the opportunity to abuse is rampant. Methodologies such as extreme programming encourage merciless refactoring while Indian outsourcing has taught us that refactoring is nothing but overhead as you have to write comprehensive documentation in order to get working software. Sometimes the effort but into documentation makes refactoring a non-starter.

McGovern’s recent posts have been pretty cynical about Indian outsourcing and I suppose it has some roots in his actual experiences. So I am not going to quibble and say he is wrong, because he will be obviously right with what he has experienced personally. That being said, I think he has a limited view of why many companies outsource outside the United States, including to Eastern Europe, India and East Asia.

What I am writing below is based on meetings and conversations with CEOs, VPs and other executives in charge of outsourcing decisions. Obviously, you cannot take any one person’s word at face value, but when you hear the same reasons cited by multiple people, you start seeing trends. Let me start with saying that cost is a major factor, but not for the common reasons you would think. No executive talks of costs in the context of replacing existing costly resources with new inexpensive resources. Instead, the typical reasons cited are as follows:

1. There is an unfulfilled project need, but the existing software development team is busy with tasks. How do we increase the development team without incurring too much additional cost?
2. The existing team is busy with maintenance tasks. How do we get them to work on new tasks and move the current maintenance work to someone else without incurring too much cost?
3. We have a project that is low on our priorities, but would be very helpful to get done. If we can get it done at a lower cost, it could go up the priority list and approved faster.
4. We are uncertain about our revenue stream and do not want to add long-term obligations on our payroll.
5. We want someone who has done this kind of work before and can therefore do this at a lower overall cost. (In many cases, the existing development team does not have any experience in the new work that is being proposed to be outsourced.)

Cost is an important (if not the most important) factor because it is the easiest and most unambiguous one to measure. The compensation of most executives is determined by how much money they could make or how much they could save. But to assume that they are only obsessed with the bottom line figure is wrong. If that were the case, every action could be taken by only considering the short-term cost analysis, where you don’t want to introduce any new costs.

But as you can see, in the above cases, although the executives are trying to save money, overall they are increasing costs. They are not shutting down the existing development team. They are augmenting the team with new members for the purpose of performing projects that add to the company’s value. This adds more costs, so what the executives are doing is not so much as reducing costs, but reducing the rate of growth of expenses.

They could do this in a variety of ways, of course: Hire permanent workers, hire consultants, hire interns, buy off-the-shelf products, outsource to a local firm, outsource to a firm somewhere in the United States, outsource to someone outside the country, automate. And each has its pros and cons. The cost of the project is affected by risks of each approach and this includes quality too, because poor quality increases maintenance costs too.

There are two arguments that cannot simultaneously exist, which is that foreign programmers are both inexpensive and of poor quality. If an inexpensive foreign programmer produces code of really poor quality, the rational thing to do for a cost-conscious executive would be to use only domestic programmers. There would be no point in outsourcing if a programmer in an outsourcing country is more expensive than one in the United States because their poor quality cancels the benefit of their lower per-hour costs. One could argue that maybe some executive are dumb, but that does not account for the tens of thousands of jobs that have been outsourced.

The assumption that Indian outsourcing is associated with low quality may be satisfying to some United States programmers, but it is a dangerous assumption for several reasons.

1. Even assuming that Indians are bad programmers and executives only outsource based on per-hour cost, there are plenty of inexpensive outsourcing destinations for software development. Eastern Europe is particularly strong in software outsourcing and they have very competitive rates combined with excellent developers coming out of first-class universities.
2. It is difficult to envision sustained low quality from any outsourced-to country. It will improve quality through greater exposure and experience, or die a quick death. Unless you think that any country is culturally indisposed to quality, which I find hard to digest. They used to say that about the Japanese in the ‘50s. Look what happened.
3. If outsourcing is ever banned, employers and executives will look to control costs through other means. If a company is not growing fast enough to exceed its costs, it will bleed people and go out of business. In any eventuality, people will lose jobs. Outsourcing is a good scapegoat, but it is only the symptom of a larger concern within the company.

I call it dangerous because it doesn’t help the displaced American programmer from understanding the high-level economic trend that is causing the job loss. Both national parties in the United States (and most parties in the Western world) are non-protectionist. They favor free markets and open trade. This means a much more competitive market for all companies. Blaming any one element that causes job losses in a particular sector is missing the bigger picture.

For instance, as Nick Carr wrote in “The Big Switch”, a trend that will cause the loss of many IT jobs is the rise of cloud computing. It will mean the end of many system and database administration jobs, as small and large companies move their data and processing to the servers of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Is it worthwhile to complain that cloud computing may perhaps have less performance than a finely-tuned Oracle machine on a Solaris box? It may be satisfying to think you (as a sysadmin) have been replaced by an inferior solution, but that satisfaction is all you get.

What is the answer for the American programmer? If you cannot lower one’s wages, you has to provide greater value. Quality is greater value, but that may not be enough to justify those higher salaries. Corporations (and smaller companies) with access to the entire globe may not agree to the monetary value you place on your existing skills and quality. So the right answer is what new portfolio of skills will appeal better to employers and executives?

Better code quality is not enough. If you improve it, there is no guarantee that the Eastern Europeans and Filipinos will not equal you tomorrow because they are learnable skills. But the American programmer will always have the strength in understanding American businesses, rules, customs and traditions. They can be better analysts and managers. Although the Internet has dulled this advantage, Americans can take greater advantage of the wealth of experience in Silicon Valley and other technology hotspots as well as the many first-class universities in the US to become better architects and designers in emerging technologies. Finally, they can embrace globalization to obtain greater value through mixing and matching development resources from across the world.

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By Krishna, April 9, 2009

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, of “The Black Swan” fame, writes:

Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

But even if you have disincentives, the incentives can distort everything. As I wrote sometime back about the reward-and-punishment methodology of management, the fundamental problem is that you are creating static rules for dynamic people. Each incentive and disincentive create many unwanted side effects. So you have to keep changing the carrots and sticks all the time to deal with these side effects making people confused. The real villains of the game always know how to get what they want.

I also find it difficult to imagine the right disincentive. Remember we are not talking about breaking the law, but for “cutting corners” like the CDOs which were perfectly legal. Would a person have to give back the incentives they earned over a period of years if the financial instrument crashed one September day? If such a contract was time-limited, it would be a perverse disincentive that would exacerbate a crash. If it was not, I cannot imagine someone signing a contract to give up their earnings several years after they have quit a firm. This is just an example, but shows the pitfalls of designing an actual reward-punishment system.

Also, since each firm can create its own incentive system, there will be rush of employees towards those companies which have the best incentives and the least disincentives. With better employees (because of the bigger pool from which it can hire), a firm can be more successful, thus encouraging the others to drop the disincentives. In general, this is the trend in every competitive industry: Employers have to offer a better deal to employees or they die.

So what is the solution? I hinted that you need passionate people and you need to find a way to keep them excited and motivated through company growth and good management practices. But you also need rules to ensure quality and prevent risks. In a competitive industry like the financial markets or medicine, you need regulation enforced by the government. Otherwise, one unscrupulous firm can start short-changing established practices and create a trend that could cause the whole industry to fall apart.

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By Krishna, April 8, 2009

In his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Neil Postman wrote

At the opening of Socrates’ defense, addressing a jury of five hundred, he apologizes for not having a well-prepared speech. He tells his Athenian brothers that he will falter, begs that they not interrupt him on that account, asks that they regard him as they would a stranger from another city, and promises that he will tell them the truth, without adornment or eloquence. […] as Socrates knew well, his Athenian brothers did not regard the principles of rhetoric and the expression of truth to be independent of each other. […]

To the Greeks, rhetoric was a form of spoken writing. Though it always implied oral performance, its power to reveal the truth resided in the written word’s power to display arguments in orderly progression. […] To disdain rhetorical rules, to speak one’s thoughts in a random manner, without proper emphasis or appropriate passion, was considered demeaning to the audience’s intelligence and suggestive of falsehood. Thus we can assume that many of the 280 jurors who cast a guilty ballot against Socrates did so because his manner was not consistent with truthful matter[.]

Postman suggests that we are different today in that we are suspicious about rhetoric. But I think it still matters how you present arguments. Rhetoric may be a dead art, although politicians make use of it all the time. However, someone who cannot present arguments properly will not be taken seriously even if he or she is speaking the truth.

Those who justify Socrates by saying that the Greeks were too dumb to understand him miss the point. Socrates was a master at creating enemies particularly through the use of the confrontational Socratic method which is highly overrated in my opinion. The problem with Socrates is that he made anyone wishing to argue with him look foolish. He wallowed in his paradoxical greatness (he was wise because he understood his ignorance) and kept antagonizing people even when he knew his methods were ineffective.

Too many people are like Socrates. And I don’t mean in a good way. Their way of winning arguments is counter-productive. They put people on the defensive and invite them to strike back. They assume bad faith on the part of others. Quite often, they end up shunned by others and not achieving what they wanted.

If you want to get things done, it is never useful to correct people. You can never teach people lessons that they have refused to learn in the past. The best way to achieve results is to ignore the past in any discussion and focus on the future. Don’t be obsessed with winning. Let people save face and get their way sometimes, if it isn’t critical. The key is building trust that will result in good things for all.

The ego-centric Socrates never understood this.

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By Krishna, April 5, 2009

I created a login on Twitter user two years ago, but I would still classify myself as a novice user. I blame Twitter for this because the folks at Twitter themselves seem to have no clue what the point of Twitter is. Almost every sentence in the Twitter homepage is an advertisement for not using Twitter.

Here is the text from Twitter’s “What? Why? and How?”

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.

• Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
• Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.
• Partying? Your friends may want to join you.

With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.

Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

This raises more questions than it answers:

1. Shouldn’t I be emailing “timely” information to (or calling) family members, friends and colleagues? Especially if they have the ability to stop following me at any time and decide not to be interrupted.
2. What are the things that I don’t want my mom to know, even if she wants to know? Same for co-workers and friends? Does this one-size-fits-all really work?
3. How can Twitter be an “antidote” to information overload when I follow hundreds or thousands of my “friends”?
4. What if some of my friends aren’t on Twitter? Consider that among online users, Facebook has more than 10 times the number of Twitter users.

The standard way of using Twitter makes little sense if you are not a celebrity with a significant number of fans. If you are somebody who is famous in the real or virtual world, there will be many people who follow you and your happenings and eagerly respond to you. The number of responses to anything you say or write is directly proportional to how easy it is to respond to you. And Twitter makes that very easy.

You are not allowed to write more than 140 characters, thus avoiding the need for people to consider your message in any length when responding to you. In any case, they are also restricted in what they can write, so there is hardly any need for deep thought. Quite a change from having to write blog posts where words are free and you would have to defend yourself from not considered a particular viewpoint.

But if you are not a celebrity, using Twitter is like shouting in a desert. Hardly anyone responds to you. So forget about being hyper-connected and effective communication. All you are doing is maintaining a small diary of your life and thoughts. It is not that different from a blog except that Twitter makes it easier in some ways, but you also have to deal with the fact that Twitter doesn’t allow you to say very much, if you wanted to. Micro-blogging seems more restrictive and straitjacketed. You cannot even post links without them being TinyURL-ized. And you have to use 3rd party services for images and videos. Is it worth the hassle?

Following friends is better, but, like I said before, if many of your real-life friends are not using Twitter (or using it infrequently), you don’t gain much benefit. In fact, Facebook and LinkedIn are better candidates for Twitter-like functionality, because your friends are already there. The context of your messages (social or formal) are clearer and people are more active there, allowing for a better “conversation”.

You could use Twitter for following noteworthy people and companies. This seems to be the most popular behavior on Twitter: you can follow your favorite actors, singers, artists, politicians, etc. Following celebrities may seem vacuous and juvenile, but many of the top Twitter users are respected leaders in their field and it is useful to follow their happenings. You can also decide to follow people whom you find interesting, even though they may not be very popular otherwise.

This provides an opportunity for you to widen your social network from your real-life friends to adding new virtual friends. So instead of talking about yourself and using Twitter as a one-way broadcast service, you use it to discuss events with others. Theoretically, the more active you are on Twitter, the more acquaintances you could make and influence behavior.

Unfortunately, a problem is that Twitter use doesn’t scale well beyond a point. There is a threshold of users whom you can follow beyond which you are simply overloaded with information (so much for “putting you in control”). This threshold may be different for different people, higher if you are a journalist or higher if you are using a tool like TweetDeck, but you will hit it at some point because as a human being, you can only process and respond to so much information.

The natural tendency of human beings when confronted with information overload is to start ignoring stuff. For example, you don’t read every page of the newspaper or click every link on your favorite news website, do you? Although several pieces of information you ignore may be useful, interesting or important to you, you don’t care if you missed them. In the same way, beyond a point, you cannot keep up with the flowing bits of the Twitter river.

One strategy is to never get to that stage. Limit the bits by only following a limited number of people that you can keep up with (or group selected people from the bigger list). Many people do that, but what happens is that you get groups of people following and talking to each other and oblivious to other conversations. This is a strange phenomenon: The discussion is happening in public and you can follow every part of the conversation, but it is still a conversation among a private group. It is very much like watching a debate on TV. You are privy to everything, but you have no influence.

In terms of marketing, this leads to the situation that if you are not part of the select group of individuals that a person “really” listens to, you have no influence over their behavior. There are a lot of marketers trying to harness followers on the assumption that they can broadcast to them. This is a fallacy as they can be easily ignored. And there are too many people fighting for the top Twitter spots that could provide sufficient publicity to be accepted into a person’s sphere of influence.

Ultimately, from an individual perspective, what Twitter boils down to seems to be following a bunch of people, responding to some of them and ignoring the rest. It doesn’t seem very special and probably something that you already do on other social networks in different ways.

So why in the world do you need Twitter? The answer is that Twitter makes little sense at the individual level, but it has a huge impact when aggregating information at the level of thousands and millions of users.

Think about this. Each Tweet by a Twitter user contains very little information. It may be interesting, more likely not. But if that information is echoed by several thousand users, its meaning completely changes. For example, if Ashton Kutcher has a cold, that may not interest you. If 1000 Twitter users from Waltham, Massachusetts Tweet about having a cold, that probably means that there is a flu going around and you have to start taking precautions. If Mary Somebody is complaining about poor ad revenues this month, you may not particularly care. If several thousand people express the same concern, you may want to take a second look at that media stock portfolio.

To change your thinking about Twitter, you have to stop thinking “who” and start thinking “what”. Twitter is not about following people or having them follow you. It is about following events and understanding trends. Each individual Tweet has little value on its own, but when aggregated can provide powerful information. What are people thinking about? Reading? Watching? Buying? Dreaming of buying? Dreading? Irritated about?

Twitter is the ultimate instant news channel with people Twittering directly from the location of the event. Of course, Twitter has not achieved its potential yet, but imagine a scenario where everyone is Twittering with geo-coding and you can filter the news from people who are right there, instead of the chatter from second-hand reporters. This could be about a natural disaster, a mass shooting or rush-hour traffic.

I talk about Twitter’s potential because not only is everyone not on Twitter, but arguably we don’t yet have the tools to use Twitter effectively. Twitter allows us to follow search keywords, but it is not very intelligent about search. For example, I may be very interested in cricket events, but I don’t have a reliable way to filter Tweets based on the type of cricket or order the information based on the user’s authority on the topic of cricket. As Twitter continues to gain popularity, we will see more powerful tools, so these issues will be temporary.

Twitter’s revenue stream may, in fact, come from better data mining tools that can make sense of the enormous flood of data and decipher trends that they can sell to marketers. For example, they may find that mentions for Cereal A is far greater than Cereal B in winter or in the Mid-West, reasons for which may be found by digging further in the individual Tweets.

A final question would be: Why should Twitter be better in this respect than Facebook or LinkedIn? I think this goes back to my original thesis: Regardless of its intentions, Twitter is very bad as a social network for the individual, while both Facebook and LinkedIn shine in this area. People wanting to have a conversation or interact with their friends and business contacts will use the latter. But people wanting to report something will use Twitter. The all-purpose nature of Twitter puts no restriction on what a person may want to say.

And in the end, that’s why Twitter matters. Because it generates meaning by aggregating all those people shouting in the desert.

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By Krishna, April 3, 2009

I am not entirely sure why I did it, but I spent a few hours going through every single blog in the Kerala Blog Roll maintained by Manoj Prabhakaran, Asst. Professor at the University of Illinois. Out of those, I looked at those public blogs related to software or technology written in English and updated in the last three months. I then selected the top 10 of them based on their content and design.

Here is the final list (in alphabetical order of their names)

1. Ajay George
2. Anil Kandangath
3. Arun Ravindran
4. Binny VA
5. Dinu
6. Milton
7. Praveen Arimbrathodiyil
8. Ranjith Antony
9. Ranjit Wilson
10. Vysnu

Kishan Thomas has a very good blog/website, but he has not been updating it recently.

If your blog was not on the Kerala Roll, drop me a comment so that I can take a look at it and consider it the next time I update the list.

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By Krishna, April 1, 2009

A friend, reading my last post about managers providing feedback to employees, asked about the reverse situation: how employees could provide feedback to managers. A counter-question is why is the question being asked at all. After all, if a person could have given a particular piece of feedback to a manager, he would have already done so and not worried about how to give it.

So the situation is that the employee does not know how the manager would receive the advice. Or, he thinks or knows that the manager would receive it in the wrong way. Perhaps, providing the feedback could lead to retaliation or retribution in some active or passive form.

My position, therefore, is if there are any risks associated with providing the feedback and if you are uncomfortable with facing the downsides of that risk, then don’t do it. As in everything you do, if the cost-benefit analysis does not work into your favor, then let it go.

Now, the next counter-question is: why did you want to give the feedback in the first place? If you are not personally benefiting in any way, the solution becomes even more of a slam dunk. There is no point in helping someone who is in the habit of beating down people who want to help them. It is just not worth it.

But what if the manager’s fault is something that affects your work? Maybe you are being less productive because of the manager’s antics. There is no single correct way to address this, but here are a few possible courses of action:

1. Try to understand if there is a misunderstanding between yours and the manager’s points of view.
2. Buy more time from the manager to do your work. This can reduce pressure and reduce tensions between the two of you.
3. Accept the manager’s faults and try to work around them. If they cannot change their ways, maybe you can ignore them and try a different approach.
4. Maybe some problems are not worth correcting if they are only minor irritants. Ignore them if you can.
5. Gain the manager’s confidence and trust and thus be in a position where you can talk to them frankly.

Sometimes, of course, nothing works especially if your boss is an incorrigible jerk. There is always an option of changing your boss by leaving to a different company or within the same company to a different department. Practically, changing jobs may not be feasible presently for various reasons (economy, family, etc.), but it is something that should not be discounted.