Seeping Matter

UDC is Microsoft’s Utah Development Center in Lehi.  Here’s some fun facts about Microsoft UDC:

• Yes, the inception of UDC really did begin with a conversation between Brad Anderson and Steve Ballmer.  Brad, a Utah native and former Novell executive, now an executive at Microsoft, was apparently on a flight with Steve Ballmer wherein he suggested that Microsoft should open an office in Utah to help to attract more technical Utah talent to Microsoft.
• Microsoft UDC was started just over three years ago, in 2008.
• Microsoft UDC’s original location was in Draper and moved to Thanksgiving Point in Lehi in August of 2009.
• I was the 16th person on the UDC team when I joined in July of 2009.
• Since the day I joined UDC, I’ve seen 30 other people join our organization, not including contractors and interns.
• Since the day I joined UDC, I’ve seen three people choose to move on from Microsoft to other opportunities in the area.
• I’ve been involved in three different product releases at UDC, including MED-V v1 SP1, MED-V v2, and a currently unnamed and unannounced product that I really can’t talk any more about.
• The 43 people at UDC are an amazingly, enrichingly diverse group.  There are highly experienced employees and new college hires, people with lots of Microsoft experience and those with very little, people from other parts of the United States, India, China, Sudan, and Great Britain.
• Today was my last day as an employee of Microsoft at UDC.

Recently Forbes magazine has reiterated that Utah is one of the top places in the nation for businesses.  This is especially true in the tech industry.  The country as a whole may be struggling in recession, but things aren’t so bad here in the Beehive State, even if we have to deal with being called “the Beehive State.”

Tech is alive and well in Utah.  I don’t know about other professions, but if you are an experienced software engineer and are good at what you do, it seems you can just about fall over backwards into a good opportunity here, at least if you know what you are doing.  There’s a lot of growth in Utah.  Adobe has a sizable Utah presence and they are planning to grow.  I see their new campus taking shape every day.  My employer, Microsoft, has a site here in Utah and we own multiple Microsoft products from this location.  Symantec has a notable presence in Utah and they are also hiring.  Even Novell seems to have found their feet again and are doubling down on some of their main products and ramping up headcount.  That’s not to mention the significant number of smaller technology companies that are making their presence known and hiring people as fast as they can find them.

Recently a fellow in my neighborhood asked for some pointers for a tech person who is looking for employment or looking to improve their employment situation.  Instead of answering him directly I told him I’d blog about it.

My first suggestion is to make sure you are employable.  If you’ve been successful in the tech field for a while, you’ve probably got this one covered.  If you are a bit rusty, it might be time to learn a new language or platform.  I think everyone in the software industry — developers, test engineers, product managers, system administrators, etc. — should at least know a scripting language like Ruby or Python.  Not Perl.  Perl is lame.

If you are thinking of entering the tech sector, you need to get the right kind of education.  Think about the kind of jobs you want, and then before you choose a program, find out about their track record placing people in those types of jobs.  One thing to be aware of is that lots of educational programs claim to offer the training you need to get you into the field you are interested in, fast.  Fact is, many of those types of programs don’t adequately prepare people for certain tech jobs.  As a case in point, many tech schools offer to train you to learn to be a computer programmer.  However, in my experience, these schools do not sufficiently prepare you for a job as a software developer in a high-tech software company.  If you want to write software for a bank or an insurance company, a tech-school certificate may be good enough, but if you want to write software for a software company you’d better get a Computer Science degree from a reputable university.  Fortunately, there are several good options here in Utah so that shouldn’t be a problem for you.

My second suggestion is to make sure you are visible.  For tech companies this means that you must be visible on the Internet.  You may hate social media, but you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t have at least a cursory presence there.  I would consider a completed LinkedIn profile to be the minimum requirement.  For software engineers, I’d additionally suggest a profile on StackOverflow; other tech jobs might have a corresponding site that is like StackOverflow (for example, ServerFault for sysadmins).  Having a well-managed, thoughtfully-curated presence elsewhere, like on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog, is certainly helpful.  Employers are scouring the social sites looking for people with the skills they need, and are then following up with a Google search.  Curating your online presence is something that takes regular work over time, like gardening.  Just call it career management and make it a habit.  If you do this and you are good at your profession, you won’t even have to look for new opportunities at all.  The demand for good software engineers in Utah today is so strong that they will come looking for you.

My third suggestion is to make sure you are connected.  You need to be maintaining and nurturing your network of colleagues and professionals, as well as expanding it.  Keep tabs on your former colleagues and what they are involved in, where they are working, etc.  If you are looking for a new opportunity, make sure your network knows you are looking.

You also need to be expanding that network by meeting new people.  One way to do this is to try to get involved a bit with some of the interest groups.  In Utah County there are platform based user groups (like PLUG, the Provo Linux Users Group), technology groups (like the Utah County .NET user group), language groups (like the user groups for Ruby or Python), practice groups (like the Utah Software Craftsmanship Group), or others, like LaunchUp for tech startups.  If you look around a bit you can find some that interest you and get involved.  Even signing up for the mailing list can help.

Finally, my last suggestion is to be passionate.  Get involved in SOMETHING that you can talk openly about with other people.  Contributing to an open source project or creating your own software product are good ways to do this.  You don’t need to be working on this side project a lot.  If you are involved in it enough to talk openly and with spirited passion about it, even the most socially backwards of us tech geeks can convey that yes, we really do care about this job for more than just the money.

When I was in fourth grade in 1981, my elementary school purchased their first computer, an Apple II+.  I was one of only a handful of students selected to learn how to use the computer.  I would go down to the library, where the computer was, every so often and play some basic games designed to help people learn to use the computer.  For me, that was genesis.  My life in computers began with the Apple II+.

I never met Steve Jobs, but somehow I felt really saddened to hear about his passing yesterday.  I was reminded of that scene in the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus” where Mr. Holland learns that John Lennon had died.  Like Mr. Holland, I suddenly felt sorrow and loss to hear that Steve was gone, despite not knowing him personally.  Certainly his impact on my career has a lot to do with that.  There have certainly been ups and downs, but all told my life and career in technology has been pretty special, one I’m grateful for, and I feel that Steve Jobs and Apple have had a lot to do with that.

There’s a part of me that thinks the world will never be the same now that he is gone.  Lately I’m trying to be more optimistic, but I can’t get past this feeling.  I think the most amazing thing about Jobs’ legacy is that he seemed to believe that life should be joyous, and therefore the things that are a part of our lives should offer as much joy as possible to our lives.  So Apple didn’t just make computers, MP3 players, or smartphones — they made wonderful devices that were beyond comparison with the other devices in their category.  Using them had the effect of making your life seem better.

Steve was never willing to settle for the purely functional or for the good enough.  I think that beyond the iPad, iPhone, iPod, the Mac, and even Apple or Pixar, that is Steve Jobs’ legacy:  Life should be joyous, and only the best is good enough to maximize our joy.  With him gone, it is up to others — you and me — to carry the torch forward.

Steve, your impact on the world is beyond measure, but certainly the number of lives you’ve affected for good numbers in the billions, and this impact will persist long beyond your death.  I, with the rest of the world, am deeply grateful and we mourn your passing together.  May you rest in peace.

image source: apple.com

I hinted at this before, but I’ve started a new open source project called Zoomulus.  It’s a fun little project to product tools and libraries to help us normal people leverage the power of cloud computing more quickly.  I wrote a blog post today explaining why I started the project.

For most, it is just another open source project, but for me, it is a part of me.  There’s not much there yet, but I’m pretty pleased with it anyway.  If you are interested, take a look or even get involved; I’d love to have you onboard.

Let’s just start out by saying that I’m really glad 2010 is in the past.

I started off 2010 with some enthusiasm and even determination, you might recall.  My intentions were good, but apparently karma didn’t like it.  Maybe I came across too arrogant, I don’t know.

All I know is that in 2010 it seemed like the blows just kept coming, one right after another.  You know in those Rocky movies (just pick one, they are pretty much all the same after Rocky 1) where, at some point during the fight, he just stands there and keeps getting hit over and over and over again?  Yeah, like that.  $12000 of car repairs in a single year alone can do that to you, even if you aren’t trying to do the Dave Ramsey dance.  If you ARE trying to do the dance, that makes it worse, because it compounds the feeling of failure.  Combine with that a major misunderstanding at work plus missing a coding deadline right around the same time my daughter came down with a serious life-threatening illness causing me to miss a week of work with her in the hospital right at the time year-end evaluations were due…

It was not a very good year.

So it was early last fall when a friend of mine suggested I read Seth Godin’s book “The Dip,” which I immediately followed with “Linchpin.”  Reading these two books in that sequence changed my entire outlook on my career.

The premise of “The Dip” is very simple.  Think of a time when it has seemed to you like things just aren’t working out, when they seem harder than they should be and not nearly as fun or fulfilling as you had hoped when you began.  Maybe it is in a job or a career.  Maybe you are trying to learn to play an instrument or you are training for a marathon.  ”The Dip” that Godin is speaking of is this time — the time past the beginning, when things were new and exciting, but before the time when it becomes fun again because you are really good.  In “The Dip” he explains how to tell whether the low point is really a dip or just the beginning of the end.

To me, however, the biggest lesson was this:  If you try hard enough, you can envision what the dip will be like for any new endeavor you think of starting, and you can decide early whether you think you are interested in going through the dip.

I think it is a natural law that anything worth doing or having has a dip associated with it, where the size of the dip is proportional in depth to the value of the thing worth doing or having.  Learning Spanish was like this for me.  At first, it was interesting and novel (“Hey, check me out!  I can say an entire sentence in Spanish!”).  But then there was the long arduous time period where it just was not happening.  I’d hear people speak in Spanish but I couldn’t translate what they were saying fast enough to understand them; I’d try to reply but I couldn’t translate my thoughts to Spanish fast enough to keep their interest.  But I pushed and pushed, and suddenly one day it happened:  I was suddenly thinking in Spanish.  I could understand and speak without any problem.  I was truly bilingual, and it was fun again.

Learning to write computer software was like that.  So was learning to play the piano, and a host of other things.

Since I know that anything worth doing has a dip, and since I also believe that the size of the dip is proportional to the pursuit, I should be able to objectively analyze a new endeavor at the beginning.  I should be able to imagine how it will be to achieve excellence in this endeavor, and I should be able to envision at least some of that which will constitute the dip.  Then I can analyze up front whether I think it is worth the effort.  Then, if I so choose, I can move forward with a bit more awareness and less surprise when the dip hits.

However, there’s another perfectly good alternative:  I might be honest with myself and realize that I’m not willing to see it through.  In this case, I’m better off to focus my energy in other areas where I AM willing to make the investment.

(There is a point to all of this, really.  I’m getting there.)

For a good 15 years of my career, almost since my career began, I’ve thought about starting my own software company.  I’ve had numerous ideas for products that might be monetizable over that timeframe and have conducted various levels of research for many of them.  Eventually, every one of these ideas got shelved or abandoned.  And suddenly, after having first read “The Dip” and then “Linchpin,” with the context of the Money Flow Principle, I knew what I had been doing wrong.

See, all this time one main reason I’ve wanted to have my own company was because I’ve wanted to work on what I wanted the way I want to do it.  So I’ve had all these ideas for possible software companies.  And every time I’ve had an idea, one of the first things I start to think about is, “How can I make a business out of this?  How can this idea make money?”

It is at this point where I start exploring financial models and business plans.  I spend time thinking about how to deliver the product and how much to charge, whether it is a rich client or a web application, whether it is a product or a service, whether it is a subscription model or a license model.  I think about the customer I want to target.  I run the numbers to see if it can make money.

And I either can’t figure out how to make any money, or I simply get bored and quit.

When I read “The Dip” and thought about my career, I had a major epiphany:  I’m not sure I am actually willing to see my business through the dip.  I think I understand a little about what needs to be done.  While I don’t claim that I’ve thought of everything, I think I’ve got a fairly representative picture.  And I’m not convinced that I am interested in seeing it through.

However, I AM still interested in working on what I want to do, the way I want to do it.  But now that I realize that I may not be interested in doing it as a business, I feel relieved.  Suddenly I’m not compelled to monetize whatever I choose to do, because I’m not sure that is really what I want.  I’m free instead to just pursue something interesting and try to give society a valuable gift, and trust that if I do, the money will eventually flow in my direction.

I don’t think I can clearly express how liberating this was to me.  At a time where I was feeling somewhat trapped and beaten down, I realized I could start creating fulfillment for myself, with no obligations other than just those I make to myself, to create something that is enjoyable and satisfying and interesting to me, the way I want to do it.

So I did.  I created an open source software project, called Zoomulus.  I’ve been working on it ever since, and it has been great.  There’s not much there yet, and I’m not even sure yet what it will actually be.  But it is mine, interesting to me, done my way, and it is making a big difference in my life.

For some time now I’ve been telling friends about this concept I have which I refer to as “The Money Flow Principle.”  Despite the risk of it sounding a lot like hero-worship, I’ll let you in on the secret.

It was in 2003, when I was at Novell and was vigorously championing an open source strategy, that Novell acquired Ximian.  Since I worked in Developer Services it wasn’t long before we engaged in conversations with Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Ximian and the driving force behind the Mono project, the premier open-source C#/.NET implementation.  Since that time Miguel and I have kept somewhat in touch, or at least we have some vague awareness of each other.  It isn’t like we hang out or anything, but we have a friendlike relationship.

Since that time when we first met, I’ve given a lot of thought to Miguel and the career he’s created for himself.  I noticed, for example, that when Novell acquired Ximian (or sometime thereafter), Miguel was given a vice-president role — specifically, a role that did not exist within Novell at all prior to the acquisition.  I marveled how, due to his affiliation with Mono, Miguel was virtually un-fireable.  Even if he were to get “fired,” he would continue to be affiliated with Mono, would continue to lead the project, and would without doubt soon find employment elsewhere, still leading the Mono project.  I’ve found it interesting to think that, if Miguel and I were to both attend Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference, he would be having lunch with Microsoft executive VPs (I know this because I know he has done so in the past), while I would be sitting anonymously at some table in the cafeteria.  Yet I’m the one who works for Microsoft, not Miguel.

This is all the more interesting since it appears that Miguel didn’t strategically set out to put himself into this position.  Rather, it seems that he simply set out to do interesting and valuable work and trusted to karma to see what would come of it.  It seemed that, over time, the effort he made to create value caused money and opportunity to naturally gravitate toward him.

This leads us to the “Money Flow Principle,” which is simply this:  Money eventually flows toward he who creates value.

The premise is sound and seems to hint of truth, and Miguel’s example of this principle in action is noteworthy.  Perhaps you, like me, have come up with any of a number of ways that you could contribute to society, but you’ve withheld your contributions because you couldn’t figure out how you would be fairly compensated for what you might choose to contribute.  Perhaps you, and I, need to internalize this concept a bit more.

This, by the way, is one of the messages of “Linchpin”, the book by Seth Godin which I wrote about previously.  What gifts do you have to give?  What talents do you have to share?  What contributions do you have to make?  What if you knew you would be well compensated for offering your gift to the world?

Maybe it’s time you stop worrying about whether you will get paid and start worrying about making contributions that are highly valuable, contributions that give you intrinsic fulfillment and help you feel pleased with your place in life.  If my so-called Money Flow Principle holds true, eventually the money will flow towards you.

(By the way, I previously contacted Miguel to let him know I was thinking of writing this blog post.  He was quite gracious and seemed pleased that I would consider it.  Miguel, if you should happen to read this, I simply wish to express thanks for your friendship and example, and I hope the post doesn’t embarrass you.)

I read a lot.  A LOT.  To give you an idea, I usually start out a new year by going through my book collection and picking out a bunch of books that I’d like to re-read, you know, to get myself headed in a good direction for the new year.  This is usually a stack of some five or six books.  In addition to this I’ll add another 10-15 books or so a year.  I bet in a given year I’m reading somewhere around 20 books, somewhere between one and two a month.  Usually, these are non-fiction books.  I mostly read for information, not entertainment.  I might only read a couple of novels a year.

Given that I read so much, you’d think that I’d be finding lots of books that I rate really highly, but that isn’t the case.  I’ve read a number that are “interesting” or “valuable,” but it is rare that I find one that is really super impactful or life changing.

“Linchpin” by Seth Godin is one of those rare books.

As I’ve expressed my recommendation of Linchpin to others, they’ve asked me what it is about, so I tell this little anecdote.  It might come from Linchpin, I really can’t remember.  If it does, Mr. Godin please accept my apologies.

Imagine Bob.  It’s 1975 and Bob is a young entrepreneur in a smallish town.  He just opened his own grocery store, named Bob’s Groceries.  It’s a decently sized store that serves the needs of the people in the town.  Bob sets prices that are fair and pays a fair wage to his employees, and is still able to make a good living for himself.  It’s not a bad life.

Skip ahead 10 years.  Now it is 1985 and a statewide grocery chain (for the sake of argument, let’s call it “Macey’s”) has just opened up a new store in town.  They are a larger company, spread over dozens of local economies, allowing them to tolerate economic fluctuations more easily.  Their larger size enables them to get good deals on many grocery items.  Because of these and other reasons, they can price their groceries slightly lower than Bob’s Groceries while still paying a competitive wage.

This is a problem for Bob because they can outcompete him on price.  How will he cope?  Bob decides that, in order to remain competitive, he will have to try to match the competition both in prices and in employee compensation.  The only way he can see to do this is to cut his own salary.

Skip ahead another 10 years.  The story repeats itself, this time with a much larger regional chain (again, for discussion’s sake let’s call this one “Safeway”).  The problem is exacerbated.  What is Bob to do?  He tries to match prices again, but cutting his own employees’ salaries is not a sustainable plan.  Bob cuts his own takehome pay again.

Skip ahead another 10 years.  The story repeats itself again, this time with an enormous new store built by a national chain (call it, oh, “SuperTarget”).  The prices they can charge are so low Bob almost cannot compete.

By this time, Bob must be wondering if it was just a huge mistake, clear back in 1975, to even open the store in the first place.  He’s now been in business over 30 years but he’s working more than ever in order to avoid paying extra help.  While his costs of paying employees has gone up, he’s been trying to compete with sales prices, and thus he almost can’t even afford to stay in business anymore.  Instead of retiring rich, he wonders if he’ll ever retire at all.

This is what Seth Godin refers to as “the race to the bottom” and almost all of us are doing it.  Our business environment and economy may be different than Bob’s, but we are doing the same things:  We are all trying to survive by being willing to accept more responsibility, work more hours, and endure more stress for relatively lower and lower compensation, just trying to outcompete others who are willing to do it for even less and/or who have completely different environments or economies.

In my life, for example, this plays itself out in several ways.  I compete against software engineers from India and China, very capable and qualified software engineers, who can live like kings for less than half of my annual salary.  I compete against other local software engineers who have made tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, on stock option grants, and therefore are willing to take the really rewarding and interesting software engineering jobs for less pay.  And I compete against other software engineers who are only one-half of a dual income household and are therefore less sensitive to their income level, not to mention much more risk tolerant.

So what is Bob to do?

This is the crux of Linchpin.  The book doesn’t give you the answer, but it helps you to start asking the right question.  What Bob needs to ask himself is, what value can I offer that “Macey’s” or “Safeway” or “SuperTarget” cannot?  What unique value can I bring to my town that people would be willing to pay for — even at a premium price?  If Bob can answer that question, he has the key to not only saving his business, but to open doors to the successes he dreamed of in the beginning.

Can’t be done?  Are you sure?  Whole Foods did it, didn’t they?

So what could Bob do?  Well, what if Bob always had someone there to help you take your groceries to your car?  What if the people in the store knew you by name?  What if, when you couldn’t find something, they would take you directly to that item instead of just telling you where it was?  What if only Bob carried certain items that people in the town needed but nobody else carried?  What if Bob would accept orders over the phone or shop for you in advance, and let you come pick it up?  What if Bob provided each customer with a recliner on a platform and people who would push them around the store shopping for them?

Would any of these ideas work?  I don’t know.  Maybe they wouldn’t but another idea would.

This, friends, is the essence of Linchpin.  I read it and started asking myself the question on the front cover:  Am I indispensable?  If not, how can I become indispensable?  What can I do so that my employer, or my community, or my industry, simply cannot stand the idea that I might not be contributing to their success?

I give this book my highest recommendation.

More on this later.

Check out this little laptop stand I made out of one of our many post-Christmas cardboard boxen:

Sweet Laptop Stand

Laptop Stand - In Action

It make look simple, but I assure you it is not. As Sheryl Crow so wisely said, “It’s hard to make a stand.”

Yesterday it was just a blank brown wall, but now:

Microsoft UDC - Thanksgiving Point, Lehi, Utah

There’s something about having that sign on the side of the building that makes it feel more real.

When a mommy and a daddy love each other very very much, like my wife and I, sometimes they have a life-changing event which starts with a very simple conversation, like, “Honey, do you think we should get a new MacBook Pro?”

At least, that’s what happened in our family.

One night, we were just laying there together in bed.  All the kids were asleep.  I turned toward my wife and softly said, “What would you think if we got a new MacBook Pro?”

She got a bit of a twinkle in her eye as she turned and snuggled in toward me.  ”Why do you want one?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking, pretty much it is time for me to get a decent laptop.  Even though I don’t want to spend the money, and even though we are trying to do the Dave Ramsey Dance, I think it is holding my career back.  I don’t think it is wise to continue without one.  I think it is an investment that we need to make in my career,” I said in the most romantic way possible.

She kind of bit her lower lip, then said, “Well, why are you thinking of a MacBook Pro?”

“Their laptops are simply the best hardware available,” I explained seductively.  ”I would dual-boot it with Boot Camp so it ran Snow Leopard in one partition and Windows 7 Ultimate in the other partition.  Then I could create a domain-joined account in the Windows 7 partition with a separate virtual drive that holds all of the company data that I can protect with BitLocker.  That way I can use my laptop to work remotely and also have excellent Mac hardware.  I’m getting excited just thinking about it.”

“Oooooh, baby, I love it when you talk to me like that.  Let’s do it!” she said.  So with that, we turned off the lights and went to sleep.

Some time later, the long-awaited day came.  I was at work when my wife called.  ”Honey, it is time,” she said.  ”The MacBook Pro is here.”

I rushed home to this:

They are prettier after they are born.

I must admit it didn’t look like much. But I know that true beauty lies within. Within the box, I mean.

Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long before the laptop started making its way out.

It's crowning!

When they first come out they have this weird whitish covering on them.

Now THAT'S a good looking laptop! He (she) is so handsome (pretty)!

It's a boy (I guess)!

We decided to name him Steve, for obvious reasons.