In the old days, software creation was intensively geeky. Myriad of minutiae required total concentration and focus to keep track in one’s head. One mishaps and the whole program crashes. It takes days to find that proverbial needle in the haystack: sometime a misplaced punctual mark or an extra character, else a subtle inconsistency in the logic or data format. End of the work day meant blurry eyes, sore shoulders, stiff neck, hunger, and mental exhaustion.

The concentration meant isolation: close the door, turn off the light, unplug the phone, get comfortable with the chair, and just submerge yourself into the code. A good software engineer will lose social skills and touch to the reality. As time progresses, the most talented became the most eccentric. We, the normal, tolerate them as we do weird scientists. They are the necessities of the modern society, but normal people need not play with them.

This changed around the Internet bubble time (1998~2001?), then again during the out-source craze (2004~2008). Heavy duty algorithm development is still cool, but large sum of money can be made by putting together a program with readily made modules and give it a nice skin to appeal to the mass. New tools enable amateurs to create software that looked professional, although with a crude engine. New generation of script languages encourage applets that glue together a system with many simple and single-function small programs that are easily doable by people with little or no formal programming trainings. Soon, some very serious software, such as the software behind this blog site, were done with one of those scripting languages.

Of course, those brilliant algorithm developers are still highly valued and respected. But the mainstream software engineers now thrive on communication and coordination skills and agility. They need to reach out to someone halfway across the world to understand how to interface with a module to get things done. If they try to create that module themselves, they will find the company losing the market, even with arguably better technologies.

Strangely, this blurs the lines between software engineer, engineering manager, and program manager. All of the sudden, everyone in this industry must be cross-trained for all three disciplines.

The famed Netflix competition add another twist to this topic. World-wide talents, one sponsored by AT&T, tried many approaches. It was not possible for Netflix to recruit those talents of the winning team with traditional in-house development. The entire effort would have costed Netflix far more than the $1m prize money. And the winning team demonstrated that global communication and coordination was no less important than their raw algorithm development skills.

Nerds these days are sociable and smart. These traits also give them high earning power. Isn’t that just cool!

Clayton Christensen’s book, in 2003, made the word disruptor into every managers’ vocabulary. Innovator’s Dilemma depicted the inability of a successful company to escape its own trap. The very things that made it successful are exactly the ones that will fail it. Since the company will be so well tuned to sustain its successful trajectory, all rational decisions and on-going optimizations will lead to its rigidity and eventual demise. That book gave thousands of smaller companies hope to win over the larger competitors: all they need to come up is a disruptor.

Honestly, for a couple of years, if you don’t utter the words disruption, disruptor, or disruptive technologies in an executive presentation, it is as if you picked the wrong dress code.

This is the, less popular, companion book. Many concepts are the same, but this one gave more details on how to attack with or defend against disruptions.

To summarize, Mr. Christensen presented two disruptive approaches:

• When the current product or technology have over-served the customers, the value shifts to the component suppliers and the disruption will be the integrators of modular components. Think how Dell, Intel, and Microsoft disrupted IBM and DEC.
• There are customers who cannot afford the standard products or technologies. In that case, an inferior offering can capture those non-consumers whose only other option is not having anything at all. This kind of disruption will gradually eat up the current leaders. Think Sony beating out vacuum tube stereo manufacturers.

I found the definition of capability interesting. Mr. Christensen defined it with three elements: resources, processes, and values. He observed that different companies have varied difficulty changing when their capability have different mixes.

At the end, I was less inspired than his first book. It is still a good refresher and thought provoker.

This is a common tale but true.

There was a brief moment of panic and disbelief when I found no wallet in the familiar back pocket. (Most men habitually check their pockets. They pat for the keys, cell phone, wallet, or what-not with a routine.) A search yielded nothing. I approached the United Airline counter for help. This nice Japanese woman immediately went to the plane. Fifteen minutes later, she came back empty-handed. I went back waiting for my connecting flight, powerless and frustrated in Narita Airport.

Five hours later, I arrived Taipei with no money or credit what-so-ever. I considered my options:

• I could call the credit card company and asked for emergency cash.
• Maybe the hotel concierge will lend me some?
• Do I know anyone in this city to borrow from?
• Would someone from US wire me money at this hour?
• Would my bank wire me some money?

In Taipei hotel room, I made a list of its contents: driver license, credit cards, insurance card, etc. Jet-lagged and sleep deprived, I started the tedious process of finding the phone numbers and reporting the lost. I stopped after three cards and went to sleep, depressed.

Losing several hundred dollars was the least of my concerns. I actually did not even know how many credit cards and debit cards were there. Although I am reasonably protected, canceling each of them will not be fun. I also needed to get a new driver’s license and other IDs. Worst, I faced the risk of becoming the next victim of identify theft. That experience can be hell and damages take years to repair.

Next day, I got this email message from my admin, “Someone called and claimed that he has your wallet. I think it is a fraud, but would check with you anyway. Did you lose it?” “Oh, YES!”

It turned out an Diana DeGette, US congress woman, found it in the seat pocket on her way from D.C. to Denver. She gave the wallet to a Tommy Walker, her assistant, who sent me back the wallet, well packed and with everything intact.

Yay. Happy ending. Next time, I will carry a spare credit card separately.

NPR’s Marketplace recently aired an interview with Stanford University’s Professor Nicholas Bloom on the topic of middle management. It was ridiculously hilarious to me, a professional manager for the past many years, that someone even thought of studying this topic.

Companies big or small, Indian or America, pursue pretty much one thing: profit. (There are exceptions; but we can statistically ignore them.) At the end of the day, the owners and investors of the company care just about only the bottom line. What happens in-between are inconvenient business necessities. They therefore ask only one question at the end: which way generates more profit, given the constrains the society imposed on the business (laws, social contracts, environment, etc.).

And, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, all businesses created the middle management layer for one compelling reason: it works.

Huawei tried to stay away from the spotlight. It seems New York Times found them.

Do you know that it has a sales reached about US$30 billion last year? This top technology company employs an army in China and several hundreds in the heart of silicon valley. Its ShenZhen headquarters should be renamed Huawei city that thousands of businesses — stores, restaurants, real estate agencies, taxi services, laundry services, bus operators — all depend on Huawei to thrive.

The primary competitors for Huawei are Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. These are the companies that make the cell phone towers (called base stations) for the world. They also make equipment that enable your mundane everyday phone conversations possible. Huawei has a very strong market position on third world countries: China, obviously, Africa, south-east Asia, eastern block, etc. They have their eyes set on the first world countries for years now and have started to inch toward these markets.

A gigantic company like Huawei has many subsidiaries, strategic relationships, investments, and partnerships. Most of them are well kept secrets. Information is a weapon and they intend to use it.

It is kind of scary to face a US$30 billion private company that is anything but transparent. Very few people knew what’s going on with Huawei, how it is run, what is its strategies, how much money it makes, etc. To a typical American company, this is very frustrating and unfair. “They can see everything of us. We can’t see anything of them.”

Western companies fear Huawei like western countries fear China. It is a formidable competitor and there aren’t obvious winning strategies against them. Comically, or ironically, this attributes to the westerners’ own failing. Huawei management (or China officials) went to the same MBA schools, read the same books, and had the same information. They exploit the advantages they have and avoided the pitfalls that history taught the world. They wasted little resources on anything other than the pursuit of the stated goals. They are not stupid nor uneducated. Their mistakes became lessons and they kept going.

The winning strategy is rather simple: out execute them.

I did not say it is easy. That’s just life.

This came out of a conversation I had recently, with a software engineer whose wife is a musician.

1. They both express their ideas via instruments that have hardly changed for long time, although frequently tweaked.
2. They both express the creativity under a strict set of rules that are mathematical.
3. The forms of the expression are of convention, not rules.
4. Individuals who practice the art are hardly rich. Institutions that hire many of them tend to reap most of the wealth out of their creativity.
5. Both like to spread their work freely. Both struggled to find a way to monetize.

Anything else?

HP board members should stop embarrassing themselves.

• 

  Jodie Fisher accused Mark Hurd of sexual harassment. She settled with Mark and publicly stated that they never had sexual relationship. Maybe something questionable happened, but it would have fallen into a vast gray area of “misunderstanding” and “he said, she said.” HP board investigated the matter and dismissed the case.

  Even convicted sexual harassment complaints rarely become public, let alone dismissed ones. Companies of HP’s size deal with hundreds of sexual harassment complaints. Almost all of them will be sealed, regardless of the outcome, to protect the individuals. By publicizing a double-negative non-event, HP board tried Hurd on the court of public opinion: essentially smearing Hurd and leaving him with no recourse.

• HP board fired Mark Hurd for “business misconduct,” specifically for questionable expenses in the range of $7,500 related to Ms. Fisher. This CEO received over $30 million in compensation every year. He never touched his expense reports (his admin would have taken care of it). He does not care about spending $7,500 dollars on whatever, on his own dime or not. This is like faulting Tom Wolfe for a spelling mistake. There are many ways to oust a CEO, this one sounds stupid.

• HP then entered this bidding war with Dell on 3Par. During Mark Hurd’s tenure, HP has quietly become a giant in IT space with an impressive acquisition strategy, with Mark Hurd as the architect behind it. Why would the board spend so much money on an ousted CEO’s strategy? Wouldn’t this prove that Hurd had the right strategy, vision, and plan. In that case, why fire him?

• 

  Next HP sued to keep Hurd out of Oracle. Larry Ellison already has an excellent executive team, particularly Safra Catz as the president. He was willing the disturb the existing structure for Mark: an appreciation for Mark’s skills that HP lacked. The law suit proves that HP thinks Mark matters. Why did they fire him earlier then?

There could be personal conflicts, power struggles, other behind-the-scene confrontations that we would never read about in HP’s boardroom. Public opinions are shaped by whatever revealed to the press and HP board, contrary to Oracle, handled this poorly. The public now think HP board should have never fired Mark Hurd and Larry Ellison is brilliant. No one knows which side is right. At the end, the stock prices of these company is the final judge. By that time, all of these drama would have been forgotten.

Edit on 9/11: New York Times’ Joe Nocera has a much better written piece on the same subject.

“How can you just move?” He was half unbelieving and half accusatory. I found myself searching for an answer. This is a house that I raised the family, had numerous backyard BBQs, poured in tears, sweat and blood, and spent countless hours cleaning, fixing, and repairing. It was my American dream, my land, and my home. I grew old here. How can it be possible that I would leave and sell it?

Well, it was done. Escrow closed, money changed hands, deed recorded, and addresses changed. It is no longer mine. Wife and I stared at the bank account and were amazed that our home has become a number. (That’s my agent, Jim Song.)

I cannot resist thinking it as an investment. At first glance, the sold price and the purchase price represents multiple times of increase. That seemed impressive until I checked out Dow Jones index. Both performed slightly more than 6% annually over the same period of time. (Average inflation was about 2.8%.) I guess it did OK, but not spectacularly.

And the net increase does not represent the whole truth. We remodeled about 10 years ago, changed roof twice. Re-piped. Re-landscaped. More importantly, we made mortgage payments every month. We were feeding this house all those years.

A more reasonable approach is to treat all the cash payments over the years as investments and the net gain today as the payout. I fed all those and taxes (income tax, property tax, and capital gain) into a spreadsheet and out came 3.62%. It is a lousy investment then.

Hold on. Had I not bought the house, I would have to pay rents. Over the years, the rents in our market was about the same as the mortgages. If I add back those “rent savings,” the return would have been 7.86%. It is then a significantly better investment. I feel better.

As I sit in this Seattle downtown apartment looking out to the cityscape, the thought is not whether I made a good investment decades ago. Tonight is for reminiscing all those BBQs and kids growing up and letting nostalgia fill my heart. Tomorrow is another day and I will build new memories here in Seattle.

There is a method to his madness. I was hooked by Hell’s Kitchen, again, this season. For those non-addicts, Gordon Ramsey is a Michelin Star chef doing a reality show. The winner gets to be the top cook of a world-famous restaurant. This is the American Idol for cooks.

Yet this is also a serious business. Gordon Ramsey owns those restaurants and needs the best person in the kitchen. He first looks for raw talents — people who know foods and can produce expensive and highly desirable dishes. Next he needs organization skills. In a Michelin restaurant, all foods must arrive the table at the same time; something that requires military level precision. I believe he is also looking for someone who is creative and manageable too. He wants a colonel, not a general.

TV or not, what would be the best method to select such talent?

First use high-pressure basic training to weed out those who do not have the raw skills. At the same time, the candidates learn the system: station assignment, services preparation, and, most importantly, quality expectation and processes. This period ends when half of them were out.

He then turns his attention to leadership and organization skills. He also observes their drives and competitiveness. Gordon wants a field commander that can win battles.

At the end, he gives the finalists the blank canvas: create their own menu that best show-off their skills. This step is critical since restaurants must delight patrons to keep their loyalty.

At all time, the pressure is kept high for two reasons: it boost TV rating and it amplifies weakness.

By season 7, all contestants knew the rules of the game well. We can observe their strategies — against each others and Mr. Ramsey. Of course, we all are picking our favorites and predicting the outcome. I got hooked by this reality show last season. Like his restaurants, Mr. Ramsey probably needs some new ideas for the show, otherwise, I am not sure how many more seasons it will last.

Every software engineer knew, surest to his bone, how to do it right. After all, he did the first version and fixed all those bugs that came the years. He has been bothered by all those bad decisions that caused him hours of late night work. Had he had the chance to do it from scratch. It would be perfect.

Everyday, he sees the mess that is and think of the perfection that could be. Most likely there is nothing he can do, since he has jobs to do and the code belongs to the company. If he was lucky, he got to participate the project that would actually do it. That will be like opium for the addicted.

Those who studied the history of computer would be too familiar with stories like this. They would know that the first team were as smart as the second, the third, or the fouth. Re-writing is usually like growing-up. The likely outcome is most likely the same as the previous attempt.

It is the irresponsibility of the senior manager to launch a “re-do” project without knowing what exactly would have made a difference. Re-writing is not the right way to clean-up the old mess or to save maintenance costs. It is justified only when the existing architecture has truly run of steam. Even then the project must be done with extreme caution. Backward compatibility is tricky and usually demands the same kludges that caused the original mess.