Posts by John Tornow

Steven Sinofsky also responds to the recent discussion on remote working and hiring:

Overall the big challenge in geography is communication. There just can’t be enough of it at the right bandwidth at the right time. I love all the tools we have. Those work miracles. As many comments from personal experience have talked about on the HN thread, they don’t quite replace what is needed. This post isn’t about that debate-I’m optimistic that these tools will continue to improve dramatically. One shouldn’t under estimate the impact of time zones as well. Even just coast to coast in the US can dramatically alter things.

The core challenge with remote work is not how it is defined right here and now. In fact that is often very easy. It usually only takes a single in person meeting to define how things should be split up. Then the collaboration tools can help to nurture the work and project. It is often the case that this work is very successful for the initial run of the project. The challenge is not the short term, but what happens next.

Sinofsky knows a thing or two about this. As a long-time Microsoft employee and former head of Windows and Office, he’s overseen two of the largest sustainable engineering projects of the past 30 years. He touches on an important point here that I agree with: at first, remote working can seem to work very well.

Anyone can work remotely for a few weeks, or on one small project. Sustaining a high-quality work ethic remotely over time is very difficult. I previously mentioned that my company has had good success with remote working, especially in engineering talent. The reason I think we’ve been successful: we’re a services agency and work on many new projects each year with small, focused teams. We are in the exact sweet spot Sinofsky alludes to where the workload is new, the team is typically always in the ‘initial run’ and we’re all working towards a concise common goal. Our formula and business model fit well with remote working but, as Sinofsky clearly notes, this doesn’t mean it works for every business and every model.

Collectively, I believe that we, the engineering leadership community on the Planet Earth, have done a poor job supporting each other. I think for every manager who has taken the time to find and regularly meet with a mentor, there are 20 managers who like the sound of mentorship, but haven’t done anything about it because they have no time. And even if they did, they wouldn’t know where to start.

I think that there are well-intentioned HR teams who are building leadership training without partnering with their engineers. Similarly, I think there are legions of engineering managers who have been asked very politely by their HR teams to partner on building said programs and those managers have politely and repeatedly said, “I’m too busy.”

I blame everyone. We can do better.

Rands nails it again. And, he proposes a simple survey to research and mine for solutions. I’ve filled in my response.

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Paul Graham’s latest thought-provoking essay has touched a nerve in some circles. His basic premise is spot on:

The US has less than 5% of the world’s population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US.

The solution to this dilemma according to Graham: Let’s reform immigration to “let” these programmers in so that they can be in San Francisco. I’m paraphrasing the last part a bit, and Graham doesn’t come out and say as much, but this is what is being implied.

Almost everyone agrees that immigration policies need some work in the United States. I also believe that we’re only hurting ourselves by refusing to allow talented people to legally enter our country.

Graham’s point is valid, but he misses on one mark that Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress and famously remote-only Automattic, writes this week:

If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US, and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like.

Graham’s basic premise is solid, and I completely agree with it. However, I’m with Mullenweg and most of the related Hacker News thread that people should be able to live where they are happiest, and work remotely.

Over the past year, I’ve worked with many people in our Dallas home office. In that same time period I’ve worked with people in Argentina, Germany, London, Canada and a half-dozen other states outside of Texas. We’ve sponsored visas for some and have just worked with others on a contract-basis. We use many of the technologies that Mullenweg mentions: Slack, Google Hangouts, Skype, Screenhero and good old-fashioned phone calls. It works great. We ship software, we produce great work for our clients and we don’t rely heavily on finding  perfect people just in one town of one country.

We’re lucky to have a strong base of great people in one location, but we wouldn’t be the company that we are today without great people outside of our base. One of the reasons a small shop with a quirky name in Texas can compete with much larger companies is because we’re not biased by where we find great people. We’re not limited by what’s in our backyard and we hire the best people we can find.

Immigration policy needs reform in the United States, yes. But let’s not wait for that to happen to start hiring great people from around the world. Great people are out there today and they’re ready to make companies awesome.

Speaking of Amazon, The Verge’s piece on its hardware design lab is a good look into one of the least seen aspects of the company. It also has a nice history lesson of the Kindle:

It’s been a decade since “Fiona” was first imagined, the codename Amazon gave to the first iteration of the Kindle. As recounted in The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s rollicking 2013 history of Amazon, Jeff Bezos commanded his deputies in 2004 to build the world’s best e-reader lest Apple or Google beat them to it. To Steve Kessel, who was put in charge of running the company’s digital business, Bezos reportedly said: “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”

It took three years for Kindle to come to market. The first model wasn’t particularly beautiful: a $400, off-white chunk of plastic with a full QWERTY keyboard. But before the world had ever heard of an app store, Amazon had integrated its bookstore directly into the device. For the first time, you could summon almost any book you could think of within seconds, no matter where you were.

The accompanying photography is also great. They, of course, do not reveal anything secretive or particularly groundbreaking here but a glimpse into the secret labs of large technology companies is always of interest.

I have no major complaints on the Kindle hardware, but its software still leaves much to be desired. It’s encouraging to see so much research being performed on the tiniest details of the hardware, but it would be great to know why the typography and formatting controls are still primitive at best. John Gruber put it best, back in 2012:

Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product manager for the Kindle.

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This entire interview with Jeff Bezos conducted by Henry Blodget at Business Insider is excellent. Some of my favorite parts are where Bezos discusses the public challenges to his company. For example, his viewpoint on the recently launched and less-than-stellar Amazon Fire Phone:

Again, one of my jobs is to encourage people to be bold. It’s incredibly hard.  Experiments are, by their very nature, prone to failure. A few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work. Bold bets — Amazon Web Services, Kindle, Amazon Prime, our third-party seller business — all of those things are examples of bold bets that did work, and they pay for a lot of experiments.

What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.

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According to Cards Against Humanity’s letter to participants, the company bought the island for the following reasons: “1) Because it was funny, and 2) so we could give you a small piece of it. Also, 3) we’re preserving a pristine bit of American wilderness.”

The company also contributed $250,000 raised through the campaign to the Washington, D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government.

Cool story. Also, check out the wonderful photos and writing over at Everything Will Be Noble about exploring the same island.

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Kevin Plank, CEO and Founder of Under Armour, on how the company was named:

My next idea was Body Armor, and I thought that was the perfect name. Back then, it took a couple weeks for the trademark process, and by the time those two weeks had gone by, I had told everybody I was going to name my company Body Armor.

One morning, I got a call from my friend saying we would never get Body Armor, because there were some body shops up in New Jersey and some ballistic vest manufacturers all named Body Armor. I was a bit dejected, but I had lunch plans that afternoon with my oldest brother, Bill. So, I show up to pick him up, knock on the door, and he looks down at me the way only an older brother can look at a younger brother, and he asks, “How’s that company you’re working on, uhh…Under Armor?”

Whether he was just messing with his younger brother or whether he was intentional with it, it doesn’t matter at this point. I cancelled lunch, went back to grandma’s house in Georgetown, filled out the paperwork, sent it to the patent and trademark office, and three weeks later, we were clean and clear.

Oh, and the reason we added the U in Armour is that I was skeptical at the time about whether this whole Internet thing would stick. So I thought the phone number 888-4ARMOUR was much more compelling than 888-44ARMOR. I wish there was a little more science or an entire marketing study behind it, but it was that simple.

Fun story. The entire article is a great glimpse into one of my favorite companies. Looking at today’s sports apparel market, it is hard to imagine a world with just basic cotton t-shirts and gear. What Plank and Under Armour did completely disrupted the entire industry and sent athletic giants like Nike and Adidas back to the drawing board.

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Todd Olson, writing on Medium:

The idea of disruptive technology has been with us since Clayton Christensen released The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. Since then, we have seen not only major companies disrupted, but entire industries. We have observed incredible disruption in a very short time, but can we learn from this history how to reliably cause disruption? In this regard, I want to examine the premise that:

It is design innovation – not technological innovation – that causes disruption.

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Ryan Hoover, Founder of Product Hunt:

Someone at the CMX Summit asked me how we measure the effectiveness of these efforts. It’s hard to quantify but we know these bits of delight have helped cultivate a loyal community of people who have hunted great products and given us great ideas. These small things are important and regardless of its “ROI”, we’ll continue to try to delight those that (quite literally) make Product Hunt.

I love this idea. Yes, you can’t quantify these moments of delight but they can have a profound impact on your business, your culture and how your company is viewed by the world. Being special in your business doesn’t have to be a huge thing. It can be something small like this, but even these small gestures of delight can add up to something great.

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Paul Graham:

Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you stupid. That’s why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don’t win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. Which is particularly painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.

Startups don’t win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.

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In the years following the stock market crash of 1929 and during the course of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a series of radio addresses that became known as “fireside chats.” The goals of these chats were to inform and convince the American public about various concerns of the day, new government policies and the direction of the country during an extremely difficult period of history. After Roosevelt, the radio addresses were not as prevalent or frequent until 1982 when Ronald Reagan began the longstanding practice of a weekly Presidential radio address that is continued today.

The history lesson is an important reminder, but it isn’t the moral of the story. What is the goal of a radio address or fireside chat? It was a time for everyone (with access to a radio) to listen directly to the President discussing the topics of the day. An open and candid conversation¹ with all interested parties. We can apply this same concept to the way we work with our teams and in our company.

Several times per year, and usually in 8-10 week intervals, we gather the entire company  — in-person and over video chat — to participate in company-wide fireside chats. In larger companies I’ve worked with in the past, these events are labeled as ‘all-hands’ meetings, ‘town halls’ or some other corporate name. We use the term fireside chats. We put a digital fireplace up on the television and talk about everything important to the company.

The content and direction of these chats vary. Often times, there is a new direction in the company, a new venture, a new major client or just some big news. These chats are more one-sided as we explore the vision and ideas behind a new direction. Other times, the chats are a conversation. We’ll email the team a list of questions or topics a few days before the chat, and open it up to the floor. Company news, updates and general questions often follow regardless of the opening format.

The importance of the fireside chats can’t be underestimated. We’re all incredibly busy. We’re building a business, growing steadily and forging ahead into new territories daily. The chats give us a time to — even for a few hours — work on the business instead of always working in the business. Or, put differently, we’re working on our company rather than working on our business.

Working in the business is easy: we plan, design, develop, measure and iterate on software. This is what everyone in the company is good at. This is why we’re here. There are millions of tiny details we can choose to focus on every day. We can busy ourselves with these details and get lost in their mix incredibly easy.  If we’re not careful, we wake up months (or years) later and wonder why our business is where it is. It is incredibly difficult to focus on the big picture, and overall company direction when we’re in the weeds.

By focusing during the fireside chats, and the preparation in advance, we force ourselves to focus on where the company is going. Where do we want to be? Can we clearly articulate to ourselves and the entire team what our goals are? What defines success for our business? How do we align everyone with a common goal and direction so we can achieve success?

Yes, these are all-hands meetings. Yes, they take up precious time when we could be building software. That’s exactly the point. If we don’t know what we’re building towards, what things are the most important and what defines success then we’re not aligned and moving towards a consistent vision as a company.

Comparing the day-to-day operations of a small business to the country’s economy as a whole during the Great Depression can be seen as a bit of a stretch. However, it does illustrate the extreme ends of the challenge of unity, alignment and belief in a common goal. Clear articulation of vision, open-communication and focusing ourselves on the bigger picture aren’t lofty goals. Whether it be for a business or an entire country, when we’re working together on a consistent vision, the future is brighter for us all.

“Conversation” is a stretch. These were one-sided radio addresses. ↩︎

Dina Kaplin hits the nail on the head:

Busy can become a way of life. We’re seduced by all the incoming - the emails and text messages that make us feel wanted and important - stimulating our dopamine, as research shows, but in an exhausting, ultimately empty way. Busy has a dangerous allure. If your normal is busy, it’s tough to sit quietly with your thoughts or to really feel what you’re feeling. What if, instead, everything became a choice - how we spend time, who we respond to and how much or little we write? What if we recognized the difference between accomplishing our goals for the day and responding to other people’s requests? What if we learned to say no - a lot?

One of the things that bugs me most about this so-called “Cult of Busy” is that it is a built-in excuse for inaction. Why didn’t we find an obvious bug before launch? Why didn’t we mentor someone on our team? Why haven’t we filled that open position we all know we need? All of the answers to these questions can easily be: we were too busy. If something is a priority, it will get done, regardless of our state of busy.

In other words: when someone says they didn’t do something because they were busy, I hear “it isn’t a priority.” Sometimes that’s ok, but let’s at least call it what it is.

Imagine asking “How are you?” to one of the most successful people you know or, say, Elon Musk, Sheryl Sandberg or Warren Buffet. I’ve never heard anyone at that level respond, “busy.” By most people’s definition they are, constantly making high-level strategic decisions with a large impact.

Most of the people in my personal life have no idea what I do for a living. They think I just work “in computers.” Therefore, my default answer to “how’s work?” is more often than not: “busy.” I’m selling myself and my amazing company short when I use this generic default answer. Busy should be implied. How is my work? The answer: it’s great. We’re growing, doing amazing work, breaking new ground and building a fantastic company culture of results. That sounds way more fun than just “busy.”

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President Obama:

An open Internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life. By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known.

I find it hard to believe that anyone disagrees with this.

So the time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other vital services do. To do that, I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services. This is a basic acknowledgment of the services ISPs provide to American homes and businesses, and the straightforward obligations necessary to ensure the network works for everyone — not just one or two companies.

Politics aside, the Internet should not be controlled by a few companies imposing their will on the people. Here’s hoping the President’s efforts continue and this is ultimately implemented in policy.

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Claire Cain Miller, in this Sunday’s New York Times, writing about paternity leave, and the associated stigma:

Social scientists who study families and work say that men like Mr. Bedrick, who take an early hands-on role in their children’s lives, are likely to be more involved for years to come and that their children will be healthier. Even their wives could benefit, as women whose husbands take paternity leave have increased career earnings and have a decreased chance of depression in the nine months after childbirth. But researchers also have a more ominous message.

Sounds like everyone wins, so why is this not more prevalent a practice in all companies?

Taking time off for family obligations, including paternity leave, could have long-term negative effects on a man’s career - like lower pay or being passed over for promotions.

It’s true, but it shouldn’t be. There are plenty of companies out there that support people who choose to have families. As society evolves, here’s hoping these companies become the norm, not the exception.

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Another good one from Ev Williams, on Inside Medium:

The job of leadership is to foster alignment and enthusiasm toward the right goal.

Alignment: A collection of good people does not make a good team if they’re not pushing in the same direction. Constant communication and adjustment is needed.

Enthusiasm: You’re doing something hard and against the odds. The only way to do this type of thing is to have a (realistic) positive attitude and inspire confidence.

The right goal: Where are we going? Is it big enough, but accomplishable? Is it still correct based on current data? How do we know if we’re making progress? These are questions you must constantly ask.

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