Tales from the jar side: We're #1! (or, Micro-categories FTW), Managing my micromanager, Travel fun, and Jetpack Compose goes 1.0
Best Spinx line from Mystery Men: If you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you can head off your foes with a balanced attack
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 25 - August 1, 2021. This week I taught a Kotlin Fundamentals class on the O’Reilly Learning Platform and a private Java Upgrade course in Raleigh, NC.
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Winning a Tiny Category
I have to show you something. Note the (highlight added) red box, from my book’s listing at Amazon:
Whoa, HYBHY is the #1 New Release in Business Ethics! Micro-categories (nano-categories? Pico-categories? Femto-categories?) for the win!
(Also, how did my book wind up in the Business Ethics category? I guess I can rationalize that, but would it be ethical to do so?)
All I could think of was The Sphinx, played by legendary actor Wes Studi in the movie Mystery Men. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert: they win), he said:
We’re Number One! All others are Number Two, or lower!
Yeah. What he said.
The measure above is different from the sales rank. Further down on the page there was this block:
A sales rank around 274,000 makes sense, and in terms of sales it was #57 in Business Ethics, but hey, let’s not minimize things too quickly. Especially because a couple hours later my book had fallen to #2.
(Yesterday it fell to #3. Today it’s at #4. Oh well. Fame is fleeting.)
I did manage to tweet about it, however, while it was still at the top of the list.
I immediately worried that saying, “I’ll take #1 in any category I can get” wasn’t ethical, but so be it. I also realized that HYBHY showing up in the Business Ethics category is going to make me re-evaluate every business decision I’ve ever made, but again, I’ll take it.
Finally, a box from Pragmatic Programmers arrived early in the week, so I had my wife hold my phone so I could make an “unboxing” video, which I subsequently uploaded to Amazon. You’ll find it on the Amazon page here, or linked in this tweet:
Enjoy. It’s only 47 seconds long. Eventually it will be added to the Pragmatic Programmers YouTube channel, but it’s not there yet.
Managing My Micromanager
In this week’s article on Medium, entitled When Your Boss Is A Micromanager, was started by my first regular job out of graduate school. I spent four, long years working for a person I now call a fear-driven micromanager. By that I mean that when anything made him worry a task wouldn’t get completed, he couldn’t resist the urge to take over. In the article I kept the discussion pretty general, but this is my newsletter, so I feel I can give more personal details here.
My first job was as a research scientist at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC). UTRC, as the name implied, was an industrial research lab. We did projects for other divisions of the company, which at the time consisted of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, Sikorsky Helicopters, Hamilton Standard, Otis Elevators, Carrier Air Conditioners, and a few smaller divisions. Occasionally we would get projects from outside entities, like NASA. My boss (call him Joe, since that was his name), managed to get a NASA contract for computational studies of the unsteady aerodynamics of jet engines, which was as close to pure research we ever did there.
(As an aside, one sign you’re getting older is that companies you worked for no longer exist. United Technologies merged with Raytheon and I don’t know what they call it any more. Sikorsky is now owned by Bell Helicopter, I think. Hamilton Standard became Hamilton Sundstrand became UTC Aerospace Systems became part of Collins Aerospace. The NASA Lewis division we worked for is now NASA Glenn Research Center. Heck, even Joe passed away a few years ago. Sigh.)
Joe was a classical example of a technical person who was so successful that he got promoted into management, for which he was completely unsuited, by skills or by temperament. Don’t get me wrong — I really liked the guy, but he never really did let go of the technical work, and seized any opportunity to do technical tasks over any management ones.
That’s a common problem with micromanagers who were formerly technical people. They’re faced with management issues, like budgeting, scheduling, arguing for resources and other political issues, and dealing with people. None of those were issues they were trained for or even cared all that much about, so when a technical problem comes along they know how to do, it’s very hard for them not to do the technical task ahead of everything else.
For managers like that, there’s bad news and there’s good news. The bad news is that you can’t fix it, because you’re not the problem. If you were going to do exactly what they were going to do, you’re just validating their decision to do it and they’d love to show you how it’s done. If not, they relish the opportunity to show you why they’re right, and that however much time they’ve been away from a technical job, they still haven’t lost their edge. Either way, you become a minor player in their hero’s journey.
The good news is that the forces to correct the problem are already in place, though they make take a long time to have an effect. The big problem with micromanaging is that a manager doesn’t have time to do both your job and theirs, so sooner or later somebody will notice they’re not doing the management job. Worse, while it’s hard to find good technical people, if you advertise for a low-level manager of technical people, you’ll get a hundred resumes tomorrow, mostly from people who could do that job, and if not, hey, it’s easy enough to find another one, right? Technical people who move into management go from being highly valued contributors who are hard to replace to the lowest, least important, least powerful person in the management chain. That’s another fear your manager deals with all the time, so the fact they get scared isn’t such a big surprise.
The first people to put pressure on the micromanager to stop doing technical work will be that person’s peers. Other managers will tell them they’re making what is effectively a rookie error by trying to do both. That may or may not work. Ultimately, though, the manager’s boss will give them a much more direct message, something like, “I hired you to do this management job. If you can’t or won’t do it, let me know and I’ll find somebody else.”
For Joe, we hadn’t gotten there quite yet. Whenever he got nervous, which was a lot, he took over. I had a bad habit at the time that made the situation worse, which was that while I’m really good at explaining things I understand (thus my current job), if I don’t completely understand something I can sound like I’m totally lost. Joe would hear my confusion and take over, never realizing it was part of my process of eventually understanding something new. I didn’t understand that at the time either, though, so I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on him.
My recommendations in the book are two-fold: I started sending one of the key messages you need to tell your manager, which I express colloquially as, “I got this.” By that I meant I would take responsibility for the task, and do whatever I could to make it happen. I would also let him know when I actually needed help. It took a while for that message to get through, because I needed to build up a history of successes in order for Joe to believe me, and that took time.
The other action I took was to push back. As I described in last week’s newsletter on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, I took time in our weekly one-on-one meetings to tell him I was not happy when he took over my job. It undercut my credibility and reduced me to the level of lackey, or, at best, a grad student assistant, and that’s not why I was there. I made sure he heard me, then got back to work. The message was: I see what you’re doing and I don’t like it, but this is not a crisis I’m going to resign over. But if you do it again, expect to hear me complain about it again. The goal was for him to hear me and understand me enough to take that into account the next time he was tempted to do the same thing. Joe didn’t like conflict any more than anyone else, so this discouraged him from taking over. Some times that worked. Most of the time it didn’t. Either way, it was a long-term strategy that worked better as he grew less concerned about my abilities.
Once concession I did make was not to push back during the immediate crisis. I don’t think that would have been productive, and when Joe was wrapped up in his own fears, raising an emotion issue like that wasn’t likely to result in anything good. But when the crisis was over, I brought it up, and did it again the next time, and the next.
In the end, after four years, I finally switched to a different group*.
*As the saying goes, when you don’t like where you are, change your situation, or change your situation.
I didn’t manage to change Joe’s behavior much, but I did make progress. I think I would do a better job now, but I had a lot to learn at the time. As I’ve said before, there’s a reason I know the lessons I wrote about in the book: I had to learn them the hard way.
Travel Fun
This week I took my first flight in 18 months and stayed in my second hotel (the first one was for that chess tournament I wrote about a few weeks ago). My conclusions:
Everybody I saw in all the airports wore masks. Everybody.
It was way easier for me to wear a mask on the plane than in the airport. On the plane I can direct that air stream above my seat at my face, and that helps me breathe much more easily.
I got a rental car for the first time in a long while. Unlike my Tesla at home, it needed me to manually keep it between the lines of the road, it used these weird key things to start and stop instead of just my phone, it didn’t lock and unlock the doors automatically as I approached, and — worst of all — it ran on some scary, explosive, liquid-based fuel that generated actual exhaust. How quaint! I hope that never catches on.
I’m done with Hilton HHonors properties. Both of the two I’ve experienced in the last month or so have been run down, with little to no staff or cleaning services (and those on request only), and just as expensive as before. I know the pandemic has been particularly hard on the hospitality industry, but I’ve had enough. The Marriott/Sheraton property I saw was much nicer. I’m a long term member of the HHonors loyalty program, but if it’s up to me, I’m afraid Paris Hilton’s dogs are going to have to settle for Alpo for a while.
I flew to Raleigh and had a very good class there. Unfortunately, my flight home was cancelled due to weather. Fortunately, because I’m a United 1K member, I was automatically booked on the next available flight, which was Friday morning. That flight was delayed for a reason I’ve never heard before (the baggage conveyor belt in the airport broke down), but I still made my connection. In the end, no problem, though I’m glad I’m not flying again until the NFJS season begins in earnest in September.
Jetpack Compose
The big announcement this week in the Android world was the release of version 1.0 of the Jetpack Compose library. This is a very big deal, as it completely changes how user interfaces are designed in Android. Compose is basically a Kotlin DSL (domain-specific language), meaning you write your UI in Kotlin now.
I’ve been holding off on learning Compose, beyond trying out a bit of the Jetpack Compose Tutorial at Google. That also meant Android Studio got updated as well, in order to support previewing the user interface components.
My next course on Android is August 24 and 25. I’ll make sure I go through the basics before then and see if I can incorporate at least some of the new stuff into the course. We’ll see.
I’ll say this much, though. If the LazyColumn component really does remove the need for the complicated mess that is RecyclerView, it will be worth it just for that.
Finally, Apropos of Nothing
Speaking of Mystery Men, the theme song is All Star by Smash Mouth. Conveniently, this tweet showed up in my timeline today:
Hey, you were planning to look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair anyway, right?
For jarheads only
If you decide to buy my book Help Your Boss Help You, use the coupon code 7bc968c446 at checkout for a 35% discount. The code is good until the end of September, 2021.
BTW, if you’re not a subscriber and you’re reading this anyway, that’s fine. You get to use the coupon too. :)
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Kotlin Fundamentals, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.
Java Upgrade, private class in Raleigh, NC.
This week:
Week 1 of Spring Boot in 3 Weeks, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.
Functional Java, ditto.
Try again to record the GOTO podcast (cancelled this week due to my flight delay).
Hopefully record another chapter or two for the audiobook of HYBHY.