Back in my last term at Duke our technology strategy professor, Wes Cohen, assigned us two chapters from The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I'm reading the whole book now that I've got some time. Anyone who has the least interest in how teams work and where technology comes from should read it.
Kidder embedded himself in a team at the Data General corporation from early 1978 to late 1979 as they struggled to bring a 32-bit minicomputer to life. He describes borderline-Apergers engineers, 14-hour days, building motherboards from scratch, untested technologies, irresponsible schedules, burnout, and success—all around a computer that expressed the state of the art for perhaps six months after it came out. When Kidder wrote the book, in 1980, neither he nor any of the people he wrote about knew that minicomputers had become obsolete as a class already. None of them could see that IBM's toy computer, the PC, was about to make Data General irrelevant.
Kidder describes the team debugging prototype CPUs using oscilloscopes. He explains the near-impossibility of writing microcode—the instructions that tell a physical set of chips what to do and in what order—without using a second computer to write it on. He talks about engineers carrying around punchboard covered in blue and red wires, the red ones representing bug fixes, the blue representing the first attempt. You think it sucks figuring out which class broke the build in a modern C# development environment? Try imagining your joy at discovering that the CPU didn't work because a piece of solder came undone.
I imagine my reaction to this book might be similar to that of a modern nuclear submariner reading a contemporary account of building a state-of-the-art wooden battleship in 1862 (with only a brief mention of the Monitor and Merrimac, because almost no one understood in 1862 what those ships meant to naval combat). There are parts that made me wince, exactly as I winced in the episode of Mad Men when they showed an invitation to a wedding—to be held 22 November 1963.
About two years ago I read Pete Peterson's account of the heyday of WordPerfect Corp., which I also recommend, but for different reasons. Peterson wrote knowing the outcome, and he also had an axe to grind; but "Almost Perfect" still hits me right in the gut as a practicing software developer.
Twenty or thirty years from now, I'll look back and laugh at everything I didn't know in 2011. The Soul of a New Machine is a brilliantly-written monument to getting the job done, and advancing the profession right into a cul-de-sac.
On this day 150 years ago, the United States began its bloody civil war that left the South in ruins and 600,000 Americans dead. And on this day 50 years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave the planet and return safely.
But who, other than James Fallows, remembered that 10 years ago today, Microsoft strangled Clippy?
But what about Clippy? It's a big day for him too. Ten years ago, he was finally given the deep-six at Microsoft, or at least turned off by default as the first step to full elimination, so he would no longer automatically pop up with such helpful observations as, "It looks like you're writing a letter!" At Microsoft's Mix11 conference for web developers today in Las Vegas, Dean Hachamovitch, head of IE activities at Microsoft, announced the anniversary of Clippy's demise.
More on Anheuser-Busch's sad acquisition of Goose Island Brewery. First, Brewmaster Greg Hall told the Tribune about the trouble he's seen:
In an interview with the Tribune last month, brewmaster Greg Hall said the company’s sales had “outpaced our forecast in 2010, so that we weren’t quite ready for all of the growth we got.” Goose Island also hired an investment banker to assist the family in securing funds for expansion.
Although the Craft Brewers Alliance’s 2006 investment in Goose Island has technically exempted the brewer from craft-beer status, the company’s popular brands have shared the problem of other craft beers: increasing capacity to meet surging demand.
Goose Island is best-known for its 312 Urban Wheat Ale, and respected in craft circles for other products like Matilda and Bourbon County Stout. Goose Island has been outsourcing some production and seeking additional investment to expand capacity.
And Chicago Public Radio had some local bar owners on to wring their hands:
[B]ar owners like Phil McFarland, who runs Small Bar in Chicago's Ukranian Village neighborhood, said he's conflicted about the merger.
"I don't guess that Anheuser has bought them to make Budweiser knock offs and part of the appeal of a brewery like Goose Island is that they have the recipes they do that have the, sort of, respect in the market that they have and from a business point of view, I would have to think they'd be sort of crazy to mess with that too much, but time will tell," McFarland said.
Meanwhile, Chris Staten, the Beer Editor of Draft Magazine, said the acquisition shows Anheuser's further commitment to the craft brew market.
In other words, this is a classic "bookend" story. Goose Island has already become a major beer producer, no longer really a craft brewery, so no one can really do more than shrug. And Inbev, which owns Anheuser-Busch, is too big and stupid to make their own beer up to Goose Island's quality, so they just figured they'd buy the place. Hey, big companies buying small companies happen every day; what could go wrong?
Via Bruce Schneier, the author of How the End Begins describes how no one can ever be absolutely certain an order to destroy civilization is authentic:
Can the president start a nuclear war on his own authority—his own whim or will—alone? The way Brigadier Gen. Jack D. Ripper did in Dr. Strangelove? What if a president went off his meds, as we'd say today, and decided to pull a Ripper himself? Or what if a Ripper-type madman succeeded in sending a falsely authenticated launch order? You're about to kill 10 million people, after all.
Anyway, back down there in your launch capsule you might allow yourself to wonder: "This launch order, is this for real or for Nixon's indigestion?"
If you were asking yourself that question, you wouldn't be the only one. James Schlesinger, secretary of defense at that time, No. 2 in the nuclear chain of command, was reported to be so concerned about Nixon's behavior that he sent word down the chain of command that if anyone received any "unusual orders" from the president they should double-check with him before carrying them out.
So there you are, having just received the order to launch nuclear genocide. Should you suppress any doubts, twist your launch key in the slot simultaneously with your fellow crewman and send death hurtling toward millions of civilians halfway around the world? Without asking questions? That's what you're trained to do, not ask questions. Trainees who asked questions were supposed to be weeded out by the Air Force's "psychiatric consideration of human reliability" requirement. I've read this absurd Strangelovian document, which defined sane and reliable as being willing to kill 10 or 20 million people with the twist of a wrist, no questions asked.
Oh, yeah, I'll sleep well tonight.
On April 12th, I'm starting a new role on the Valkre Solutions development team. Valkre is a startup in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood approximately 0.13% the size of Avanade, the company I left yesterday.
Avanade would like me to remind Daily Parker readers (and those of you tuning in through Facebook) that "Avanade does not control or endorse the content, messages or information found in any public Weblog, and therefore specifically disclaims any liability with regard to this Weblog and any actions resulting from the author's participation in any Weblog."
Now that's out of the way, let me say I truly enjoyed working with every Avanade consultant I met. I'm going to miss them, especially the team I worked most closely with at [a major food and beverage company in Chicago]. Accenture, Avanade's parent company, is a different matter, which I'll leave there.
Anyway, I'm excited to start at Valkre, and in addition to the cool work, great team, and huge potential of the company, I'll be working 5 km from my apartment (about an hour's walk or 12-minute bike ride).
Sanjay Saigal, writing on James Fallow's blog today, discusses the dearth of qualified managers in India, and the failure of MBA programs to keep up with demand:
Consider, for instance, the following data from a report published last year by an Indian employment company, MeritTrac:
- Recognized MBA programs produce around 70,000 graduates each year.
- Approximately 20,000 of them may be considered "employable".
- The annual demand for MBAs is estimated to be 128,000.
To echo Woody Allen in Annie Hall, the food is terrible, and such small portions!
The deficit in 2009, the baseline year of MertTrac's study, was over 100,000 MBAs. Over the least 10 years, the Indian economy has growing at an average annual rate of 7.6%. The number of recognized MBA programs has been increasing, but the number of employable MBA graduates has not, bottlenecked by a shortage of trained faculty. Every year, the Indian industry finds itself in a deeper hole.
<plug style="shameless" format="parenthetical" >
Duke's Executive MBA programs—especially the CCMBA—address all of his concerns except for one: cost.
</plug>
Saigal points to a tremendous opportunity for good schools to provide deep management education to some of the billion Indians who'll make up the workforce there in 10 years.
I'm wrapping up in Fairfield County, Conn., today, then I get five nights at home before popping off to Boston for an indefinite series of 4-day weeks there. At least it's Boston, a city I enjoy, and one with easy access to the airport. (I expect my commute will be two hours shorter than it is to Connecticut.) Parker won't like it, though: he'll likely board from Sunday night to Thursday afternoon every week for the duration of the project.
No word yet on Internet connectivity. The client with whom I'm wrapping up this morning trades good-sized portfolios, so they have strict security. The Boston client manages securities as well, so I may not have much contact with the outside world there, either.
I'll survive, and so will Parker, if for no other reason than the regular, magical increases in my bank account twice each month....
Because of a barrage of comment spam, I've temporarily killed the comment feature of The Daily Parker. These things usually pass in a couple of days. Management apologizes for the inconvenience.
A team member who works for our client said to two of us consultants today: "You know, it's 90% of consultants that give the other 10% a bad name."
(I have to assume, of course, that he thinks we're in the other 10%...)