Blog: Work

Most of these posts were originally posted somewhere else and link to the originals. While this blog is not set up for comments, the original locations generally are, and I welcome comments there. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Standup meeting

Product manager: this resolved bug needs a severity.

Me (scrum master): would the product owner (that's a scrum role) and the developer who fixed it please handle that?

Developer: I am the product owner.

Me: I know. I assume it won't take the two of you(r roles) long to reach consensus.

Am I doing it right? :-)

Office check-in

Before the pandemic, I went to the office every day, as one does. Our office manager did what he could to make it an ok environment, but it has the usual pathologies. Pandemic-induced working from home has been good for me in oh so many ways. I'm fortunate to be at a point in my career where I am quite comfortable telling my employer "I really do insist". (There's some pressure, mild so far.) I'll go to the office if there's a specific reason to, like the group outing we had a few months ago, but most of the people I work with aren't local, so going to the office is social, not productive.

On the day of that outing, I learned -- via a coworker finding out the hard way -- that corporate security disables badges that haven't been used in 90 days. That makes sense, though doing it silently isn't so great. Fortunately for me, I last changed my domain password around the time of that outing, so the "time to change your password" reminder serves double duty.

A few days ago I changed my password, and today I went to the office to wave a badge at a sensor. While I was there I cleared out the last of my personal belongings; demonstrably, I no longer need to keep an umbrella or a spare USB charging cable in my desk drawer there.

Employers, how many of those vacation days are real?

When you're considering a new job, one of the things you'll find out as part of the package is how much vacation (or PTO, "paid time off") the offer includes. The US doesn't do as well in this regard as some other parts of the world. In tech, you can probably expect two to three weeks of vacation days per year plus six or seven designated civil holidays. In some companies, after you've been there several years you earn more days per year. (At my current company, after five full years I started earning one extra day per year.)

Next time I consider a new job, I have to remember to ask not only how much PTO is included but how much of that is actually mine. It's not mine if the company says I get X days but that I have to allocate some of them for Christmas week "because we all need time then to be with our families". That would be patronizing and presumptuous even if Christmas were my holiday! It's not, so that makes it even worse.

It's fine if an employer says "we're closed that week for business reasons". Sometimes companies do that. But in that case, they should either grant those days (as if they were civil holidays) or reduce the PTO claims in their job ads and HR policies. I use several days per year for my holidays, ones they don't grant, plus (in non-pandemic years) actual vacations that I choose. I would like employers to tell me the number of days I really have, the number that are my choice.

When I joined my current company I was told how many PTO days I get per year. Later, they started declaring mandatory shutdowns for Christmas week. I can use my vacation days or take the days unpaid.

Retracting vacation days, which is what they do when they say I can't use them freely any more, is akin to cutting salary (as is saying "then take it unpaid if you didn't save vacation days"). Employers, be honest about that: you're reducing my compensation. Do not pretend you're doing it for my well-being, for my family time, for my holiday -- you're not. How valued am I really, if you reduce my compensation so casually?

I've always found the last week of December to be a great time to get work done; I can focus on things that keep getting pushed off or interrupted, because there are few or no meetings and other interruptions. Meanwhile, I can use those days for my holidays. Everybody wins.

Companies should actually consider giving top employees more vacation days, rather than only the tenure-based allocation. When someone consistently performs above the norm, then not only should you reward that, but you're still ahead of the norm if the person takes that time off! Employers, please start considering PTO increases as part of the mix that includes salary increases, bonuses, and assorted perks that people use inconsistently.

It's 2021 and this still happens

Me: Here's a bug.

Male peer: I don't know why that happens. Not my fault.

Me: One way that can happen is if you do X.

Him: (condescendingly) Of course you could do that, but I didn't.

(Ok then! Done teaching.)

Separately, other male peer: One way that can happen is if you do X.

First male peer: Oh, you're right.

Again. In 2021.

I didn't say he did X; I'm not in his head and wasn't looking over his shoulder, so how would I know? I just offered one (common) way that this particular problem manifests, because we've seen it before. But from me it wasn't worthy of consideration.

This sort of thing happens far too often, even now, even among people who in other regards present as open-minded and inclusive.

2020

Somebody on Twitter asked:

What did you learn in 2020 (besides how to make bread)?

I responded there:

  • To grow food in pots.
  • To cut men's hair.
  • To cook more new things.
  • That my cat loves me being home all the time.
  • More about community-building.
  • How to set up a nonprofit foundation.
  • To cut people w/no morals or human decency out of my life.
  • And yes, sourdough.

I was up against a character limit there, but I'm not here. Read more…

"Blah blah blah."

Today's bit of randomness:

When I was a young programmer I worked for an AI company on a text-categorization project -- for a commercial client, all hush-hush for a while to preserve their competitive advantage and such, apparently really innovative (didn't realize then; I was just writing code to solve a problem, y'know?). Then somebody accidentally published the training dataset. And apparently it's gotten quite a lot of use in the research community, which I was completely unaware of, having never really been that kind of researcher.

For 30+ years there's been a mystery in that dataset that people have noticed, commented on, and apparently never tried to track down...until now. This podcaster got in touch with me and some others last week, and here's the result: Underunderstood: The Case of the Blah Blah Blahs. (36 minutes; has transcript).

It was neat to hear this trip down memory lane, and also to hear other parts of the story I'd never known about before, including the discussion from a researcher from the "other side" of one of the big arguments in AI in the 80s.

Our legacies are not always what we think they will be

In the mid-80s, in my first full-time position after college, I worked for a now-defunct software company doing artificial intelligence, specifically natural-language processing. The most significant project I worked on while there was a text categorization system. I was the tech lead (this was 1987ish). The client was Reuters, who at the time had literal rooms full of people whose job was to skim news stories coming over the wire, attach categories to them, and send them back out quickly. Our job was to automate that -- or, more realistically, to automate the parts that machines could do and send a much smaller set of "don't know" cases to humans. I'm writing this from memory; it's been more than 30 years and details are fuzzy.

I left that company and went on to do other things. I was vaguely aware that, at some point, the corpus of news stories we used for training data had been released publicly, by agreement between Reuters and my then-employer. I wasn't a researcher, wasn't in the NLP business any more, and lost touch. Technology moves on, and I figured our little project had long since faded into obscurity.

Tonight I got email with a question about that data set. My name is in the README file as one of the original compilers, and somebody tracked me down.

Somebody still cares about that data set.

I Googled it. Our data set was popular for close to a decade, during which time people improved the formatting (SGML, baby!) and cleaned up some other things. It spawned a child -- the original either had, or had acquired, some duplicate entries, and the new one removed them. (The question I got was actually about the child data set.) And now I'm curious about the question I was asked too, because I either don't know or don't remember how it got that way.

Neat!

Well, he asked...

A (newer) coworker asked if he could pick my brain about a certain part of our product. Sure, I said -- and I asked some questions to figure out what he already knows (or doesn't). We chatted a bit, and then I said "Ok, I have some homework for you -- please read X and Y before we talk".

He responded with "pop quiz next Wednesday at 3".

So I scheduled the meeting. I mean, wouldn't you? :-)

A day much like any other

Get up, shower (because we do not let hygiene lapse).

Make coffee. I seem to have learned to drink coffee. Between us we're going through 4-6 K-cups per day; that jumbo box isn't going to last as long as it looks like it should. And that's with tea and cold drinks as well throughout the day. Remember to drink water; it matters.

Box of tea arrived yesterday. Good.

Plug laptop into dock, start work day. Visit the "pets" chat channel. Mon/Wed/Fri, join the virtual coffee break mid-morning just to see and interact with coworkers. Try to work productively. Pay particular attention to my mentee who joined the company two weeks ago in the midst of all this. Read more…

Young coworkers

Last week the director of engineering sent email announcing prizes for an "improve our tests" hackathon. He labelled one prize (about finding and fixing the most bugs) as "write yourself a minivan".

Later, in response to questions, he sent a copy of the 24-year-old Dilbert strip.

Over the weekend our CTO, in response to questions, sent email explaining what a minivan was.

I'll be over here, weeping into my prune juice and yelling at kids to get off my lawn.