Category: Humility

Like Going Through Old Pictures, Good Memories and Embarrassing Memories: Old Emails, Part 1

Advice Which Occasionally Comes Back To Bite Me

I sometimes talk to small business owners who tell me that they are planning to get a computer inventory system “someday.” Usually I tell them to regularly take a look at all their inventory in one place, physically. It’s easy to look at a spreadsheet or database and not realize how much is actually there.

Well, today I got to tell myself that when I went through some old emails. It was the emails from a content subscriber platform. I had thousands of emails going back five and a half years, to January 2018. I didn’t realize it had been that long, or that I had that many emails from this platform.

(There will be a part 2 to this, where I talk about “Content Is King and Email is God.”)

The Good, The Bad, And The Embarrassing

Right now, I’m still bemused by the old memories. On this platform, I mainly subscribed to and supported podcasts. There were some visual artists and writers, but mostly it was podcasts.

I had the same feeling as when looking through old photographs. Some now-defunct podcasts were like old friends who had drifted away. Life had gotten busy for them and they didn’t have time to record. And I missed those. There were a few where the podcast had multiple hosts and it was pretty clear at the end that those hosts would not be working together again. Those still had some good memories, but I also knew those were moments in time which can’t be recovered. And there were a few that were like looking at a part of my life I’ve grown beyond. Damn, I really used to listen to that? I spent time and money on that?? Really?

There’s a joke about there’s two types of people when it comes to email. One type has only a handful of emails in their inbox. The other type has thousands. I am definitely a “thousands” type. I’m trying to get better at getting the old emails sorted out and either deleted or put into a subfolder. I’m working through one of David Allen’s Getting Things Done workbooks. That’s what lit a fire under me to start cleaning out old emails.

And Here’s Where It Bit Me

And just like I’ve told other people, computers fooled me into not realizing how much stuff I had squirreled away.

Footnote

* When a musical group breaks up, there’s ownership and rights to to band names, recordings, and residuals. What it’s like for podcasts with multiple creators?

Khan Academy, First Impressions, First Lessons

I mentioned a while back that I wanted to learn more about how websites are built and how they work. And that I’d chosen Khan Academy as a place to start.

Well, I signed up. After spending an hour going through some beginner lessons, here are my impressions.

  • It’s easy to sign up as an adult. They do ask for birth date. I’m assuming for younger ages there may be more restrictions or requirements for signing up.
  • It’s free, although they do politely ask for donations.
  • They have a lot for adult learners, but it’s clearly aimed at school and college students.
  • Their lessons on website programming are under “Computer Programming,” not under anything with “web” or “internet” in the name. (Is this because they felt a good way to get kids interested in programming in general was through website construction?)
  • Their Computer Programming course starts with Javascript. That surprised me. After going through some lessons, I can see why it would be a good introduction for kids and new learners. They focus on using Javascript to draw, with ellipses, rectangles, and arcs. And they use that as a way to introduce concepts such as syntax, parameters, checking documentation, and relying on documentation instead of personal memory.
  • They regularly have exercises to use newly learned concepts. The exercises do have some hints for students who might not be sure how to start. (Memories of C/C++: a semicolon has to go at the end of every line. It’s nice to be told right away that a semicolon is missing, not after the entire thing is written out and compiling is attempted. That used to irritate me greatly with C/C++.)

Overall, I’m very favorably impressed.

Choices, Part 1: 15 dollars per hour Versus 150 dollars per hour

This is based on a speech I’ve seen Brian and Darren Hefty give multiple times at their farming and agronomy seminars. I’ve updated it for inflation, the original figures were $10/hour and $100/hour.

The Hefty brothers said their father would tell them to find the “$100/hour” jobs and focus on those. That most farmers would rather paint a fence themselves than pay someone else $10/hour to paint the fence. But that only saves at most $10 per hour.

It does not account for the opportunity cost, which might be much higher. So, the question becomes: can the farmer find something to do with that fence-painting time which would be worth more than $10/hour.

Can the farmer identify jobs which will make or save the farm $100/hour? If so, then someone else can be paid to do the $10/hour jobs. But likely no one else can do the $100/hours jobs.

A Good Idea Used as a Sales Pitch Is Still a Good Idea

Brian and Darren Hefty were using this speech as a sales pitch for their soil and tissue testing services. The logic is still valid. Their next part of the speech, to a room of farmers, would be to ask the audience members to consider how much they expected to spend on fertilizer over the next ten years? And if they could save even 10% of that number, how much would that be? If it took 20-30 hours of time to save that 10%, how many dollars per hour would that savings come out to be. Put that way, the figure was well over $100 per hour (this was over 10 years ago).

They went through this sales pitch because most farmers do not enjoy paperwork. Most farmers dislike paperwork. If someone enjoyed paperwork they’d get a simpler office job than the risk, complexities, and physical labor of running a farm.

So, to ask a farmer to spend the time to take multiple soil and tissue samples, keep a record of where the samples were taken from and when, and maybe what stage of the plant’s growth, to send it off to a lab for testing, then to take the results and spend another few days matching up the results to individual fields and figuring out where the soil needed to be amended and where it didn’t need to be amended, is a big request. But, is there even a chance that 10% of the current fertilizer program isn’t needed for the next five to ten years? If that answer is yes, then the savings could easily be in tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

How This Relates to Using Technology

This seems unrelated to the question of how to make a person’s technology work for them, instead of the person working for their technology.

Yet, it has everything to do with that question. If the approach to technology, whether it’s a spreadsheet program, voice recorder, or anything else, is to fight with it every step of the way, that’s a lot of lost opportunity. If the person instead steps back and asks “what is the $150/hour job I am missing?” it’s likely they’ll realize there is an easier solution. Maybe the entire tool doesn’t have to be mastered, only one function. Perhaps there’s a much simpler tool which can be used. Or maybe it is the exact right tool for the exact right purpose, so it will be worth the time to spend two to three days learning the tool extensively.

Well, Now I Feel Silly: Handles, Revisited

Just a day after I wrote a post about not finding much information on handles, handle design, or handle shape, my inbox received one of AAW’s regular emails. This was a showcase all about handles and AAW articles and videos about handles.

So, my gripe has been answered by God and cosmos, with a bit of a chuckle at my expense.

If I can get some good information about the how’s and why’s of handle design, I’ll be fine with the ironic timing.

Identify the Problem, Part 4: ADP Destroys Its Own Numbers.

My Irritation

Yes, I’ve been ranting for a while now about the need to identify the problem before going hell bent after a “solution”.

The examples keep showing up. Here is another example:

“ADP, for example, changed their methodology to try to produce a job number that would be more predictive of the NFP data. Why they would take their own unique payroll data (and manipulate it) to try to estimate the official government data is beyond me, but they did it. So, ADP isn’t really trying to analyze how many jobs were created, it is trying to produce data that helps people predict NFP (at least the Establishment Survey).”

Peter Tchir, “Sherlock Holmes on the Jobs Report“, Zerohedge, dated June 11 2023, last accessed June 29 2023. Emphasis in original.

ADP is a payroll company. Producing jobs numbers is not their main job. But their jobs report is often looked at as another indicator of employment trends in the U.S. economy.

Tchir’s whole article, “Sherlock Holmes on the Job Report” in Zerohedge, dated June 11 2023, was about trying to make sense out of numbers that didn’t always have as much sense as a person would hope for. The paragraph about ADP changing its own numbers was one of many.

But in a sea of weirdness, it stuck out to me as being particularly weird. What problem was ADP trying to solve?

  • If the attention to their payroll report was interfering with their business of providing payroll services for companies, why not say that and stop with the report entirely?
  • If they were doubting their own internal numbers . . . I can’t think of any reason why they’d doubt their own internal numbers. But if there was some reason for that, I’d expect them to put the report and almost everything else non-essential on hold until that doubt got resolved. If I doubted the numbers for a core part of my business, resolving that would be top priority.
  • So, what “problem” does that leave, that this would be a valid solution? They wanted to stop using their own numbers, while not making it obvious they were no longer using their own numbers?

How is this related to technology?

One of the primary uses of technology, of all types, is manipulating information. Gathering it, tracking it, saving it, collating it, sorting it, looking for patterns in it.

Computer software in particular is really good at manipulating information. In a way, that’s a definition of what computer software is and does: it manipulates information. It manipulates it far faster than humans can.

There’s the perennial problem of GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out. If the software starts with data that is bad or wrong, it’s output will almost certainly be bad or wrong.

But there’s a less recognized problem: solving the wrong problem.

Learning From Mistakes: Audi Jacks, TS, TRS, and TRRS.

I messed up the headphone audio jack on my laptop. It still functions, but one headphone is about half the volume of the other headphone.

That’s not ideal.

So, I looked for USB-to-audio-jack adapters, and along the way I’m getting an education in types of audio jacks. I want to be able to use a pair of headphones which also have a microphone. That means I’m looking for a TRRS — Tip, Ring, Ring, Sleeve — adapter. Other audio jack types include TS (Tip, Sleeve) and TRS (Tip, Ring, Sleeve).

It gets more complicated from there.

After a quick web search, here are two articles I’ve found so far which have been very helpful:

I’m sure there’s more out there and there’s lots more for me to learn.

I talked to someone who was running an engineering class for kids, where they worked on solving problems with small pulleys, wheels, axles, motors, and so on. The person running the class said they found 90% of engineering is troubleshooting. I agreed; that’s true of any technology. I’m going down this rabbit hole because I messed up a piece of equipment and now I’m finding ways to work around my screwup, and it’s still 90% troubleshooting.

Identify the Problem, Part 3. Eagle PCB is no more.

Impulse Buys: Can a Company Make This Mistake?

Is it possible for entire companies to make impulse buys? To buy something, like an entire other company, because “it looks cool” and “it’s a good price!” while having no idea what they actually plan to do with it? I think it is possible. I think it does happen.

But when I buy something which “looks cool” and “it’s a good price!” while having no actual idea what I plan to do with it, that’s just me. That piece of gear can sit on my shelf for years with no harm or inconvenience to anyone else. I can eventually decide to throw it away. And there will be no harm to or inconvenience to anyone else.

When a company is bought, left to molder for years, and is eventually thrown away, there’s a whole user base which is affected.

Customer Relations: Did Something Change?

It used to be a trope about customer relations and marketing that it was far easier to retain happy customers than to get new ones. And that an angry customer will tell far more people about their complaints than a satisfied customer will tell about their happinesses. What happened to these tropes? Have they been repudiated? Have they been disproven? I don’t know.

I do know customers of a company get very angry when that company is killed off by a parent organization for no good reason. And those customers generally do not see “we wanted to launch our own homegrown version” as a good reason to kill of an existing company and product which worked just fine.

So, what question was the parent company trying to answer when it originally bought the company it later killed? I don’t know, but I’m not sure the people who advocated and approved the acquisitions know either.

Maybe Caution Will Return

Way down on my list of books to read is Tepper’s The Myth of Capitalism (I might have the title wrong, I’m not going to check it right now). It’s about how many industries have become monopolies, monopsonies, or oligopolies. Meaning, how many industries have become dominate by six or four or fewer large companies who own the majority of other companies in the industry. I’ve listened to a few podcasts about the book, and one question was “what causes this?” The answer was “we’re not sure, but it seems to happen more when interest rates are low for a long time.”

And interest rates were low, for almost 15 years. They are now rising. Will we see more entrants and startups in industries dominated by a few players? I certainly hope so. Maybe the trend of buying up companies on impulse, to kill them a few years later, will cease. I certainly hope that happens too.

What generated this whole rant was the article “They Used to Be a Big Shot, Now Eagle PCB Is No More” by Jenny List, dated June 9 2023, in Hackaday. The article is informative (as List’s articles always are; I enjoy reading her work). The comments are worth reading too.

Identify the Problem Part 2

Here are the two articles I mentioned previously:

A quote from the second article, originally published in 2017:

In surveys of 106 C-suite executives who represented 91 private and public-sector companies in 17 countries, I found that a full 85% strongly agreed or agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% strongly agreed or agreed that this flaw carried significant costs.

“Are You Solving the Right Problems” by Wedell-Wedellsborg, Thomas, in Harvard Business Review, from the January-February 2017 issue (site last visited June 15 2023)

I’m slowly sidling up to expressing my own views on this topic, I know. My initial reactions are very vocal and filled with disbelief and profanity.

I’ll try to calm down a bit and be more methodical in my critiques. What are managers, whether low level, mid level, or C-suite, paid for in these companies? What are the discussions when they are promoted?

This would be like a national non-profit, closing down multiple chapters per year, with an acknowledged problem in getting members to sign up for leadership positions in chapters which are still active. And the national officers of that non-profit being most concerned with getting enough personal information from members that they can better qualify for government grants.

The bigger the problem is, the more chance there’s something about it people don’t want to acknowledge. The longer the problem exists, the more chance it spawns its own side-effect problems which will have to be dealt with, before the underlying problem can be addressed.

Bureaucrats of all types are very adept at finding what will get them promoted, what will keep their job safe, and what will threaten their job. Not what should get them promoted, keep them safe, or threaten their job. What will.

If an organization promotes people on how eagerly they follow orders, and not whether they understand the orders they give and are given, the intent, the immediate effects, and the long term effects of those orders, then the more likely this will be the result. Organizations which are much better at solving problems than identifying problems.

Life changes. These organizations will not be able to handle the change, and will die.

Identify the Problem Part 1

This is a part I because I have some more reading to do.

In the last three days, I’ve seen three different articles and posts about the importance of identifying problems. One post was on an email list I’m on, the two articles are in the Harvard Business Review.

I’ll write more about the Harvard Business Review articles in my next post. The figure that really surprised me was a survey of over 100 C-suite business executives where 85% say their companies struggle with problem diagnosis.

The email list post was about copywriting, and it wasn’t a survey of how many people think other people can’t identify problems. It was a statement that an important part of sales and marketing is identifying what customer problem your product solves.

Cattle or Pets? Hardware Maybe, Social Media Probably.

I sometimes see references to the question of “Cattle or Pets” when it comes to computer hardware. I first saw this in discussions about how server farms were administrated.

Hardware

“Pets” was the older practice: each server had its own purpose, some were unique, administrators often gave the servers names. They were cared for like pets, meaning they were treated with care and allowed to die of old age. So, there might be several different types and vintages of servers in the same location.

“Cattle” was the new hot idea. Cows don’t get named, their own personal quirks aren’t catered to. Cows don’t get babied, especially when a cow has clearly gone lame or outlived its purpose. It gets sold or put down and a new cow is brought in.* There’s a schedule and it’s better to clean out everything old and replace with new, on a schedule.

The Cattle mentality depends on a lot of assumptions. One of those assumptions is that whatever is brought in on the schedule will be at least as capable and reliable as the thing it replaces. Another assumption is computer hardware will be relatively cheap compared to the labor to administer that hardware. If labor is cheap than hardware, then it makes sense to keep whatever is still working and train people on how to work with different systems of different types.

I am not certain the “Cattle” viewpoint is as effiicient as it was portrayed. At least, it’s not as efficient when it comes to hardware and software that a business or household might depend on. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” is a rule most large software companies no longer follow, and some hardware manufacturers ignore it too.

Social Media

I think social media is in a mirror position. The social media companies want their users to see them as “Pets”: very individual, irreplaceable, dearly loved Pets.

Yet, the arc of most social media platforms seems to be the same. There’s an initial growth phase where the social media company is trying to find something which differentiates it. Growing users is more important than how the users are grown. There’s an intermediate phase, where the social media company starts trying to make some money off of their platform. If they don’t charge users a subscription fee, then it becomes trickier. Usually ads and the information harvesting for targeted ads are somewhere in the mix.

It’s also during this intermediate phase, if the social media company gets there, that “regular” users start showing up. After that there’s a long slow managed decline. Enough “regular” users are showing up that some of the quirkier things get a lot more scrutiny. Maybe the quirkier things get some legal and regulatory scrutiny too. Meanwhile, advertisers are paying more, but also expecting more responsiveness to their complaints. And the social media company will start copying rivals’ ideas.

At which point, a new social media company or two will show up with their own quirky thing which differentiates them. The die hard fans of the old social media company aren’t as loyal. Why be loyal when the old platform is no longer what it once was? The newer members of the old social media company are there because it’s useful. They will leave when it’s not; the large established social media companies all have similar features.

Conclusion: It’s All Backwards

So, social media companies are the “Cattle,” even though they are trying desperately not to be. And the hardware and programs which work and work well are the “Pets,” even though hardware and software companies desperately want them to be seen as Cattle which get replaced regularly and provide a revenue stream regularly.

The world runs on irony.

*Never mind that in the age-old tradition of the world running on irony, most of the people applying “Cattle” to various server management practices had never been on commercial ranches themselves. There are ways in which cattle are all treated the same, but there are also ways in which cattle have their own definite personalities. I’ve yet to meet a person who works with cows professionally who doesn’t acknowledge this, but I don’t think the computer programmers thought to ask.