Author Archives: billtoner1960

Republican “Priorities”

Posted on by
Reply

In the words of the oft colorful Jeff Tiedrich, Republicans appear to have their priorities upside down. As it turns out real problem is that they are bought off by the gun lobby who rakes in billions on gun sales, (even more-so after a mass shooting at a school), but be that as it may, I felt his observations are worthy of being repeated here, and I love the fact that he even provided links to actual examples.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from learning that Rosa Parks was black that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from seeing that Michaelangelo’s David has a penis that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from finding out that men can love men and women can love women that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from being read to by grownups wearing costumes that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from eating a subsidized school lunch that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from reading that Roberto Clemente experienced discrimination that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from discovering why Anne Frank had to hide that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from knowing how their own bodies work that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

Republicans were so busy protecting children from having access to healthcare that they forgot to protect them from being murdered in their classrooms.

3 Words for Elon

Posted on by
Reply

Not surprising of course, but Twitter had another major outage yesterday followed by Elon tweeting

“Ugh. The System is so fragile. The whole thing needs to be redesigned from the bottom up.”

Who pray tell, will be doing the redesigning since what’s left of your staff is repairing leaks in your sinking ship?

Gosh, the system is fragile? No shit, Sherlock

Chasing the Certs

Posted on by
1

Years ago I had a discussion with a friend and former Boeing colleague who had recently been hired by Microsoft as a developer. I asked him about the interview process. His reply was enlightening at the time and I ended up using bits and pieces of it to make future hires when I managed a small tools team at Xerox.

The crux of it was, they don’t care so much about what you’ve done in the past. They are more interested in knowing how you approach problems now. You get almost zero credit for having been involved in complex projects listed on your resume. In the interview process you’re more likely to be tested on how you would approach a real world problem. Getting the answer exactly right isn’t as important as how well you rise to the challenge and bring forth ideas and communicate them. I definitely saw the value in this.

This has nothing to do with coming up with “stump the developer” questions which are irritating as hell. It’s more about trying to figure out how a candidate’s mind works. When I started using the process myself I oftentimes walked away from an interview session getting a really good feel for if given a problem, the candidate can take the magic marker and start sketching out ideas vs. me having to lead the discussion from beginning to end. Very telling.

After about 30 years in the biz I realized that less and less of my formal education mattered at all to my career. By the end of 42 years I can easily say that < 1% of my BSEET degree from 1986 was in use as a Site Reliability Engineer in 2022. In addition to that I realized that I was having to reinvent myself every 5-10 years as technology changed and new roles opened up. This is a far cry from my father’s work world of teaching 8th grade math for 33 years. Math doesn’t change much from year to year unless the textbooks change. Must have been nice!

It certainly appears that the educational landscape has changed as far as employers are concerned. Nowadays you see more postings with Computer Science degree or equivalent. If I were newly unemployed or otherwise wanting to boost my resume I think I would focus on Cloud Certifications from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. In my view these are as valuable to an employer’s immediate needs as just about anything else you’ll put on your resume.

I don’t want to discount the value of a Computer Science Degree though. While it’s true that just having that sheepskin doesn’t necessity correlate to a more valuable employee, what it does do is tell you that the candidate had the stick-to-it mindset in order to get through something very challenging to get. And that’s definitely worth a lot.

But as far as employers are concerned, I suspect they are oftentimes looking closely at skills match for the purpose of knowing “okay, how much are we going to have to teach this person?”

Focusing solely on skills-match is a huge mistake. For one thing, people lie. Putting python on your resume might check the box but it doesn’t really tell you the level of complexity of the python programs that were developed. For that you have to rely on good interview questions and even then, you might not be getting a fair comparison.

The Certifications however tell a completely different story. For one thing, it’s necessary to have spent time hands on with the services you’re being tested on. The other thing is the tests are not easy. If you pass a certification test, you’ve done some studying and learned some things that an employer can potentially use right away.

If you’re looking to get ahead these days, chase the certs.

Pass the Baton

Posted on by
Reply

We humans have a tendency to believe if we exit our hard earned leadership positions that the world will fall apart yet nothing could be further from the truth.

On the work front, having been retired for almost a year I can assure you the positions I have left behind are in good hands. On the political front it’s just time to pass the baton to the younger generation and get out of the way. This applies to all political persuasions.

There are two main reasons that are driving this post. The first is, I have closely observed what kids today have to offer on a technical level and I couldn’t be more impressed. There is no shortage of talent and enthusiasm out there that should be tapped into, if only my generation would step aside. At Xerox I spent some on College Campuses recruiting grands and getting to learn about their projects and internships. The resumes are extremely impressive. Below the college level, kids as young as 9 are pumping out code on complex game projects and robotics, competing with peers using technologies we only dreamt of as kids. I have no worries that the kids can step up if they want to. The talent is there.

The second reason has more to do with politics. There’s never been a more convincing case for term limits than the current House, Senate, and Presidential leadership. I realize that at the core of governing this country with its constitution is by design a very slow change management system. That was put in as a feature, not a bug. The reason for mandatory turnover in politics isn’t complicated. New blood can cut old ties to lobby interests. The biggest reason of all though is my generation has had control of the wheel for much too long. It’s time to pass the baton to the people who will have to live in this world 40 years from now. They should be the ones having the conversation about Supreme Court justices, climate change, gun control, the national debt, and human rights… and from leadership positions.

Owning Mike Lee

Posted on by
Reply

Poor Mike Lee looked absolutely incredulous at last night’s State of the Union message after Biden called out the ultra conservative Tea Party group headed by Rick Scott for having formally proposed phasing out Social Security. He has this look of “what the heck could you possibly be talking about?” on him. He may have gotten away with it except Meidas Touch was clever enough to embed side-by-side videos of Lee looking stunned by the news at the SOTU and in the next panel, talking to a small group about his plans to phase out Social Security. Republicans sure like to fly under the radar with their secret plans when they can.

Bummer, Mike.

Unmasking Musk

Posted on by
3

Up until the acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk was seen as this sort of eccentric guy, a little on the weird side but nonetheless a highly successful business mogul. He had to be. How else to you get to hold the title of the world’s richest man? With the Twitter purchase though, it turns out maybe the emperor has no clothes, or perhaps just enough clothes to make you want to get the guy some sunblock.

I applauded the powers that be at Twitter after the decision was made to ban Trump after the Jan. 6th insurrection. People died as a result of his recklessness. It was the right thing to do and it didn’t matter if you were an ex-president or not.

Like many others I had concerns about the buyout of Twitter by Elon. His motives seemed suspect. He claimed twitter interfered with free speech and promised to bring back open dialog. I decided to stick around and see how things unfolded. It didn’t take long at all to unmask the real Elon. He just can’t help himself. He overestimates his sense of humor and his intelligence.

The first thing I noticed was that he seemed to be running his newly acquired $44B business from tweets in full public view. It started with some push-back from Stephen King who complained about the $20 fee for being a blue-check. Keep in mind that even at $20 for every blue-check, Twitter’s revenue shortfall would be far from resolved. That’s why I was surprised when Musk replied back to King with “How about $8?” Say what? You just dropped your price by over 50% in about 2 seconds without giving it any thought. It was one of the most puzzling and impulsive things I’ve ever seen by a company leader, in real-time no less. My thoughts were wow, this is weird. I better stick around, this could be entertaining.

The next rather odd thing Elon did was retweet a conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi (82) who had been attacked in his own home by an intruder with a hammer. For some reason Elon thought it would be wise or funny or ? to propagate the lie that Mr. Pelosi’s attacker might well have been his gay lover trying to get out of the house instead of in. It was neither wise nor funny. It was careless and sick. By this time I’m getting the sense that Mr. Musk is not only impulsive but possibly a bully and immature.

The next several days we were witness to Musk getting absolutely roasted over the coals by the vast majority of users on his own platform that he just paid $44B for (well, maybe $22B of his money and $22B from the Saudis). It turns out some of his advertisers were not amused by the Paul Pelosi retweet and decided to leave. I was definitely sticking around for this. Logging in to scan the feed for the barrage of insults as the wheels were falling off added high amusement factor to my day. One can imagine if this scenario happens to any other company they are going to step back, re-evaluate the events of the day and try to lure those advertisers back. Nope, not Elon. Someone tweeted that Elon should retaliate by organizing Twitter users to boycott the advertisers for leaving. In his infinite wisdom Musk opines in a tweet that he will go “thermo-nuclear” on the advertisers for causing him loss of revenue. Really? I’m starting to think this guy doesn’t really know that much about business or is just plain dumb.

Now faced with a significant drop in advertising dollars, Musk launches in to the next project on his agenda: Fire 1/2 the employees. In 42 years in the corporate workforce I had never heard of a company axing 50% of its payroll in one knee-jerk event. That’s a real risky number to just pick out of the air. Clearly Elon is a risk taker in a big way. One thing Elon didn’t consider is that by pissing off half his workforce by unceremoniously firing them on short notice, they might not all go quietly. Witness the new nickname he got assigned by his ex-employees the day after they were given the heave-ho: Space Karen. It wouldn’t surprise me if a fair amount of Twitter source code now lives in a private Github repo. I was waffling between him being bad at business or just plain dumb and now I’m leaning more towards dumb.

Elon, unable to sense any consequences from his actions so far, then doubles down on his emperor status and starts dictating terms of employment for the remaining employees. These include a 12×7 work schedule, no more work from home and oh, pledging allegiance to Elon The Great. As it turns out, a goodly portion of the remaining employees told Musk to pound sand and went their merry way. Now he’s down to bare bones.

Having fired most of his content moderation employees, Musk is now at risk of his platform spewing hate speech to the point of getting kicked out of the Apple store, which would be the final blow for Twitter.

The internal conflagration has been very enjoyable thus far, but I felt I’ve seen about enough. Elon as a person is no longer a mystery. He’s an impulsive, arrogant, mean spirited, risk taking fool. That’s why when he announced he intended to re-instate the account of Donald Trump I deactivated my account. No need to stick around for the rest of this clown show. I can read the highlights on my next platform. Maybe Mastodon, Tribe Social or Post. Something will work out. At this point it’s just embarrassing. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

2022 Midterm Post Mortem

Posted on by
Reply

Most pundits predicted a pretty good shellacking of Democrats in the midterm but that never materialized. The Dems held the Senate and lost only a few seats in the house. At present we see a lot of finger pointing going on within the Republican Party. Was it Trump? McConnell? Rick Scott? The Hobbs decision?

The way I see it, there were 4 main reasons. 1) Trump as kingmaker picked some terrible candidates. 2) Women broke hard for Democrats because of the Dobbs decision. 3) Gen Z turned out in big numbers which coincided with the 65+ crowd having fewer people on the voting rolls. 4) People rejected mean.

We don’t have to spend any time on the lack of candidate quality for Republican Senate races. Oz and Walker are bottom of the barrel, end of story. The Dobbs decision is a classic case of “careful what you wish for.” After 50 years of trying, republicans finally overturned Roe v. Wade at a time when 70% of the country supported abortion with some restrictions. Republicans underestimated the fallout from the Dobbs decision big time.

Gen Z turned out in big numbers and broke for Democrats 70-30. Of all the issues republicans need to deal with in their post-mortem this one has to be the most concerning. It’s not going to get any better in 2024, in fact it’ll get worse for them.

Lastly, voters rejected mean. Marjorie Taylor Green and Kari Lake and many of the election denier crowd came off as just plain mean. Nasty, nasty politics in an effort to be even more Trumpier than Trump himself. Bombastic behavior played well to the crowds in 2016, but after 6 years people are tired of it and have had enough.

High School

Posted on by
Reply

You know how it is when you’ve worked really hard to achieve something and then you feel this immense sense of accomplishment that you’ve reached the finish line? Yeah, that wasn’t my high school experience.

I literally skated for 4 years wondering what the big deal was with this place. We aren’t doing anything that challenges me in a way that makes me feel like I’ve accomplished anything. This isn’t a huge surprise since I subscribed to a strategy of taking the easiest classes available and being satisfied with a GPA that was anything north of 3.0. I was able to do that pretty much in my sleep.

Not every class was a cakewalk for me. I’m not trying to say I was too smart for the place, far from it. I don’t know what my ranking number was at the end of senior year but it couldn’t have been very high with a 3.1

That was by design though. I went in with a goal to get a 3.1 which was just high enough to keep the parental alligators at bay and also good enough to get into the JC I aspired to go to next. Mission accomplished with very little effort. I always felt like committing to a 4 year school and getting ready for SATs was just too much. After all, I really just wanted a living wage job and to go to work, come home and be able to do the things that I like to do. I never dreamed of being rich or a doctor or anything that ambitious.

I knew from just looking at the job market that the diploma itself was pretty much worthless. There was no career path ahead by just accomplishing getting out of Centennial High School with a diploma and I knew it. It was going to take at least 2 years at a JC to get a living wage job and for sure I’ll apply myself there when the time comes.

So it’s not a surprise that when graduation day came around I was ambivalent about the festivities and decided not to go. I went and played 18 holes at Glendoveer instead. I was finding it hard to put on a fake face for even one day to pretend I had actually accomplished something when in reality I hadn’t done much of anything. Let’s have a celebration after I’ve actually accomplished something hard.

I did take an interest in a challenging series of English classes my senior year because they offered college credit for them. Writing 121, 122, and 123. I admit to applying myself to those classes for sure and aced them all (took some serious effort), but only because it was going to help me the following year at Mt. Hood Community College.

By senior year I had enough credits to get away with taking a 1/2 day of classes (3) for my entire senior year. Additional classes were available but I took a hard pass. Half days are just what I had in mind to complete my 4 years of showing up. Now please hand me my participation trophy.

Another factor was I had a long term girlfriend from another school in town which affected the amount of extra curricular activities I engaged in. I probably should have spent more time in these and been more connected to my school, but that’s not how it played out.

So congratulations, you jumped through the hoops and earned a high school diploma. BFD.

One might wonder if this obvious lack of motivation hurt me at the next level. The answer is, maybe just a touch. The math classes had students in them that were ahead of me on day 1, but not necessarily at the end of the term. I had to buckle down a little bit to get through 4 terms of calculus and the courses leading up to them, but it wasn’t rocket science. I think it affected the amount of studying I had to do but not the grades I got in the end.

My college level approach to GPA was very similar to high school. I’m a lifetime 3.1 student and proud of it. Yes, I could have worked harder. No, I didn’t want to. And I was gainfully employed for 42 years as an engineer so maybe it wasn’t a horrible strategy.

But hey, kids, don’t do what I did. Find some balance with studying and having a healthy social life. Create some memories. I didn’t do that, and when I look at Facebook and see old high school acquaintances, I find it really hard to relate. For some reason it’s almost required to be a Trump supporter to be with the cool kids these days. Hard pass. I’ve never understood that, but that’s apparently how it is in SE Portland Oregon these days. Go figure.

My best advice would be to educate yourself to the point of understanding enough about The New Deal to realize it’s absolute lunacy to join the republican party. They won’t be happy until they’ve unraveled the entire safety net FDR and his democratic successors created. At least then you won’t be voting against your own self interests.

Onboarding Expectations

Posted on by
Reply

I had heard stories about brutal onboarding processes at high tech companies where basically they throw you in the deep end and see if you can swim or not. They place a really high value on self-sufficiency. About the worst thing you could have a peer say is “sure, let me google that for you.” A real no hand-holding around here approach. Man-up, let’s see whatcha got. It sounded horrible and I hoped I never had to experience it. I came pretty close to missing it, but not quite.

In the 1990’s and 2000’s I managed a team of tools engineers and we had the opposite approach. We trained new hires on the tools and sometimes the class size was 1. We did it anyway. One of the biggest compliments I received (and it was from multiple people over the years) was how much they appreciated the time we took up front to familiarize them with the tools, processes and answer their noob questions. The company (Tektronix) got it. They gave me a $1M budget for my team and said “make sure my developers are happy campers.” They gave me some general direction, enough budget to be successful, and then got out of my way.

So in the twilight of my career I ended up doing a contracting stint at Venmo to be their “interrupts” engineer. I had a good idea I’d be on a short leash most of the day and that was fine, I didn’t mind that part of it as long as there were no on-call expectations. I wondered how the onboarding process would go and was disappointed to learn it was more of a throw ’em in the deep end approach.

Venmo has a rotating shift of on-call Site Reliability Engineers and my outlets for outreach were 1) contact the SRE on-call and 2) Hit up the “SRE Team” Slack channel with my questions.

There were several problems with this. First, there are a ton of things to learn starting out and the Confluence Documentation wasn’t a reliable resource for most of my questions so I didn’t have the ability to self-service the vast majority of them. Second, not all of the on-call rotation engineers were 1) available or 2) very adept at mentoring new-hires. Some were extreme introverts who seemed put out at having to answer my questions. Third, having to ask the volume of questions I had on a daily basis to the team slack channel really sucked. Having to expose one’s ignorance publicly that often is not ideal. And more often than they might care to admit, the response was crickets.

What really saved me was a few people who didn’t seem to mind being bothered with questions that I could reach out to 1/1. I tried not to over-use that chip because I didn’t want to wear out my welcome and burn other teammates out, but I had to find someone.

I can see both sides of the issue. On one hand you don’t want to set the expectation coming in that this is going to be a real hand-holding experience every time you get stumped. The other side of it is, having no help all at leads to high stress, discouragement, and the feeling that this is not a team with good collaboration skills.

So if I were managing teams again I think I’d assign each new hire a single mentor to coach them through the first few weeks. That person would be available for questions or pointers to where they could find the info, but they would be responsible for bringing a new hire up to speed. The mentor could also gage whether too many of the questions were google-able themselves and coach the new hire in that direction too if there wasn’t enough effort going into self research before asking others. But in general, some hand-holding would be available early-on.