Tales from the jar side: Your boss is not your friend, revisited, TV "families", Random numbers and baseball playoffs, Cheating in Fat Bear Week, and more
I had to fire the guy I hired to mow my lawn. He just didn't cut it. (Rimshot)
(Sorry, no audio voice-over this week. I’ve been fighting a cold all week, and my voice is too hoarse to make a decent recording. Next week for sure.)
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of October 9 - 16, 2022. This week I taught week 1 of my Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks course, my Managing Your Manager course, and my Functional Programming in Java course, all on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.
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Your Boss Is Not Your Friend
One of the biggest points I emphasize in my Managing Your Manager course (which I taught this week) is the idea that your boss is not your friend. I have an entire chapter in my Help Your Boss Help You book on this topic.
This often provokes objections, for understandable reasons. Everybody would like to be friends with the people they work with, and that hopefully includes your manager. The problem is that if your boss has true management authority, they write your performance reviews, and that impacts any raises, promotions, or even job assignments you get (or don’t get). But, some may argue, that makes it even more important to stay on good terms with your boss, right? Best to be on their good side.
Yes and no. You want to be friendly, but you’re not friends. There’s a difference. You are in a professional relationship with your boss, which should be friendly. But there’s a difference between being cordial and being good friends. Of course you should treat people with respect, listen to their concerns and try to understand them, and help out wherever you can. That’s part of your job, anyway. So why not be friends as well?
As I try to emphasize in class, the person you are protecting isn’t your boss, it’s you. If you have an emotional connection to your manager in addition to the professional one, there are two traps you can easily fall into:
Any decision that goes against you feels like a betrayal by a friend. You’re going to be surprised, and hurt. If your first thought is, “Hey, I thought you were my friend!” you fell directly into this trap.
Almost every decision a manager makes is because it fit into their own agenda for their job, their career, and the company in general. Most of the time those plans align with yours, but sometimes they don’t. It’s much easier to deal with a decision of your boss’s that hurts you if you can see it wasn’t personal. It almost never is, and if it actually is personal, it’s best if you didn’t think you were friends in the first place.
Incidentally, I once described this idea to a manager. He told me that once he had to give a reprimand to one of his employees, who literally said the words, “I thought you were my friend,” back at him. He replied, “If you really were my friend, you wouldn’t have put me in this position,” which says it all, I think.If you believe your manager is your friend, you’ll tell them things you would only tell friends. If they ask how your weekend went, you’ll tell them about problems you’re facing at home, or work/life balance issues, or other opportunities that come along in your life. The problem is, your manager is making decisions about your future tasks, promotions, and more. Do you want to have to ask them to ignore all that personal stuff when making career decisions? Good luck with that. Best to stay friendly, but at a professional distance. All your boss needs to know is that you can and will do your job to the best of your ability, and that you have their back in a pinch. Everything else is a distraction.
I harp on this because I fell into this trap repeatedly early in my career. In fact, I went out of my way to make friends with my boss. I did that partly because I liked the idea of doing so, and I knew that my habit of irregular performances tended to get me into trouble, and I thought that being friends with the boss would protect me.
Sadly, that doesn’t work. My bosses always regretted giving me a reprimand, or not giving me a promotion or raise I wanted, or pointing out my areas of weakness on a performance review, but being friends or not didn’t keep them from doing their job.
TV friends and family
I eventually realized that part of the reason I fell into this trap is that I watch a lot of TV, and on television any office-like environment eventually turns into not just friendship, but family. Even characters who start off hostile eventually moderate their behavior, and come to rely on the heroes (the main cast) and become not just friends but sympathetic characters themselves. It’s a Hollywood formula, and you can watch it happen on virtually any show.
TV actors also have a minimum level of good looks and charisma that would be stunning among normal people, or they wouldn’t have gotten a TV series job in the first place. It becomes easy to like them once you “get to know them,” in the world of the show, because that inherent likeability is part of what gives them a career.
(People who have the popularity but not the minimum threshold of good looks move to Washington, DC and become politicians. The cliché is that Washington, DC is Hollywood for ugly people, and there’s definitely something to that.)
TV officemates start as friends and evolve into family. In addition, most TV writers seem to be constitutionally incapable of putting men and women together into an office situation without eventually having them become romantically involved, which always makes me roll my eyes. Sure, sometimes life works that way, but on TV it’s inevitable. TV shows that last long enough are a never-ending series of personal relationships that merge, fracture, mix it up and do it all over again. They practically become soap operas, partly because another fact of television is that actors rarely want to leave a successful show, so they’re there forever, or if they do leave, it’s because of some major, life-altering event warranting a “very special episode.” Sigh.
Anyway, I’ve written all about this many times before (see my Help Your Boss Help You book, or this article at Medium), but I must admit that for most of the principles I’ve formulated over the years, I sometimes worry that I’m wrong. Maybe this one just applies to me, and there are plenty employees that can be friends with plenty of managers without a problem.
As often happens, my son is often a source of those exceptions. Maybe I should say he’s always been a lesson in humility to me, because every time I think I have something figured out, he demonstrates the opposite. My son’s best friend, without question, is his current boss, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon. In fact, they’re very good together, and good for each other.
Have I warned him about his boss not being his friend? Only a little, and very mildly. My son really doesn’t want to hear unasked-for advice, especially from his own father (gee, I wonder where he gets that from?). He’d only disagree, or say he’s got it handled, or something else defensive and/or dismissive.
So I leave it alone. At this point in his life, my job is to be the safety net for him when things go wrong, and let him make his own mistakes. I gave him a copy of my book, of course, but I’m under no illusion that he’s read any part of it. He doesn’t read much. Maybe I should give him the audio files, now available on the Pragmatic Bookshelf? We’ll see. He probably already knows what I think anyway. Another lesson I’ve learned from him over and over is that you never know what they hear and what they don’t.
In the meantime, I wait for a crisis. When a company is making money, pretty much anything works. But companies consume resources, and if the economy falters and the company can’t consume from outside, it starts to devour itself. That’s when life inside gets ugly. Hopefully he won’t have to go through that any time soon, but we’ll see.
Let me conclude by saying this: the mantra “your boss is not your friend” is all about protecting yourself. Keep enough emotional distance between you and your boss so that you can see their decisions as professional rather than personal. There’s no reason you can’t be friendly, but you’re not friends. Thinking otherwise leaves you vulnerable unnecessarily.
Random Number Generators FTW
I wish I knew more about probability and statistics. I’ve studied them to some degree, but there’s so much more to know. Barring that, I need to make friends with a good statistician that I can contact when I have questions. (If you are one or know one, feel free to connect me.)
I’ve been thinking about that a lot during the current baseball playoffs, which have been even more random that normal. I think I understand why, but I lack the skill to prove it, or even show it clearly. I’m going to fumble this explanation a bit, but bear with me.
Everybody has a sense of what a mean or average is, but most people need to be reminded what a standard deviation represents. Consider this figure:
All three of these are so-called “normal” distributions. The blue curve is centered at 0, the green one at -2, and the red one at 2. Those are the means or averages. The standard deviation expresses the widths of the curves. About 68% of the area under the normal distribution curve falls within one standard deviation. That means for the blue curve, 68% of the data will fall between -1 and +1, for the green curve, 68% will fall between -4 and 0, and for the red curve, 68% will fall between 1.5 and 2.5. Standard deviation is another term for variance, and is derived from it.
When my wife was pregnant, my father (a physician who specialized in obstetrics) told me the mean of the delivery distribution was 38 weeks (about 266 days), with a standard deviation of about 16 days. That meant 68% of deliveries occur between about 36 and 40 weeks, plus or minus a couple days. My boy was 10 days early, which meant he was on time, as they say. He was also over 9 pounds, which meant he was fully cooked and more that ready to be done. A goofball from the start, too, but that’s neither here nor there.
Bringing this to baseball, this year four teams won over 100 games (the Braves, the Mets, the Dodgers, and the Astros), and the Yankees won 99. Four teams also lost 100 games (the Nationals, the Reds, the Pirates, and the Athletics). So if the Braves played the Nationals in a short series, who do you expect would win?
The key phrase, of course, is “short series.” Those 100-win teams also each lost over 60 games each. The 100-loss teams also each won 60 games or more. The standard deviation on the win probability is much wider than you would expect. (I would give the exact numbers, but this is where my lack of abilities in statistics comes up.) Check out this tweet by one of my favorite baseball writers, Joe Sheehan:
According to their page at Baseball Reference, the Dodgers won 111 games, which is one of the best regular seasons ever. But from May 9 to May 14, they lost 5 out of 6. From May 30 to June 12, they went 2 - 9. They also lost 3 of their last 4 games of the season. In baseball, losing streaks happen. It’s just that the regular season is long enough (hopefully) for them to average out.
When you add playoff rounds, you’re really only adding randomness. Any team can beat any other in a best of 3 or a best of 5 series. Gambling on individual baseball games is like gambling on coin flips. Sure, there might be some edge, but as Sheehan says, in a short series, variance swamps everything.
The end result this year is that the Dodgers, the Mets, and the Braves are already eliminated, and the Yankees are on the ropes. Hey, it happens. Here’s another good way to say it:
If you’re a fan of one of those teams, it’s sad when they lose in the playoffs, but losing a short series to a good team doesn’t invalidate the entire regular season. This isn’t basketball, or even football. It can be fun to watch underdogs win (especially if your team has been long eliminated, like mine), but the playoffs are a completely different creature from the regular season and dominated by randomness, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Every added round makes it less likely that the best team will win it all. Pretending anything different is just silly.
Random Tweets
Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied
… with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think whether they should.
So much this. “Spared no expense,” my eye. Not to mention the highly questionable decision to putt Newman in charge of your IT department in the first place.
One Three-Ring-Circus To Rule Them All
And there we have, in one tweet, more humor than in the entire first season of Amazon’s Rings of Power. The series was okay, I guess. Nowhere near as good as the movies, to say nothing of the books. Some of the characters are pretty good (I especially liked Elron and Nori, but the others haven’t shown much yet), and I like the idea that mithril is so important, but it’s still too many ponderous characters doing ponderous things. Still, it’s better than not having any Lord of the Rings content, I guess. And the diversity in the cast doesn’t bother me at all, but you probably guessed that.
Incidentally, my opinion about the Game of Thrones prequel (House of the Dragon, whose name I can never remember) is that it’s hard to enjoy a show when every single character is either hateful, hopelessly ineffective, bitter, morally and ethically bankrupt, or all of the above. I’m watching it, but I really, really don’t care what happens to any of these people.
Goodbye, Angela Lansbury
So sad to lose her, but this tweet was inevitable:
(Too soon?)
I saw references to her work ranging from Murder, She Wrote to Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but nobody I saw talked about her playing Ruth in the Pirates of Penzance movie. That movie introduced me to the brilliance of Kevin Kline, but she did great as well, because of course she did.
Also, click on the following tweet to read the resulting thread:
It’s nice to know some of the people I rooted for were not just good actors, but also good people.
Early Beatles on Early TV
I spent an hour and watched the entire video, old-style commercials and all. It’s a full episode of the Ed Sullivan show, featuring the Beatles last appearance on August 14, 1965. They sang three songs and the beginning and three at the end, including I Feel Fine, Ticket To Ride, Yesterday, and Help! The funniest part is Ed trying to get the audience to calm down, all but telling them to shut the heck up, and good luck with that.
Yet Another Cheating Scandal
Someone tried to rig the Fat Bear Week competition? Heaven forfend!
In unrelated news, in the US Chess Championships, with 10 of the 13 rounds completed, Hans Niemann is sitting at 4.5 / 10. That puts him in a tie for 9th - 11th. Doesn’t look like he’ll win this year.
Is the pressure getting to him?
Yeah, not so much. More info as events warrant, which hopefully they won’t.
Have a great week, everybody! I’ll be in Las Vegas, at the JavaOne conference.
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:
Week 1 of Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Managing Your Manager, same.
Functional Programming in Java, also same.
This week:
Week 2 of Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Latest Features in Java, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
Getting Started with Spring and Spring Boot, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Two performances with the Null Pointers, the rock band of Java developers at the JavaOne conference, assuming my cold is sufficiently done for me to actually use my voice.