Surplus words

I was passing by a ground-level office– Allied Professional Services – in Midtown today. I pass the building all the time, but I think the office is quite new, perhaps only a week or so since they put in the nice frosted glass windows and a door with various services the company provides stenciled on it. Today, as I was eating a slice of pizza (another post) and walking by the building I thought, “I would not know where to go to get a nice door like that, with good stenciled icons.” Of course, my ignorance is nothing if not impressive, but I was not even sure I knew someone who would know where to call to get this work done. That put made me think of the “6 degrees of separation” problem, but with a twist. How long would my chain of contacts to an experienced door stenciler be? How strong would that chain be? Is this even a different question from the common “do I know a person problem?”

At first I thought it was different, especially between different socio-economic circles, but now I think it might be the same problem. Perhaps there is not a difference between knowing “someone by name” and “someone by skill”, at least in terms of the length of the chain. The difference may occur on the level of semantics – “good lawyer” or, in today’s headlines, “good bank” are different from “John Smith”. I’d be curious to know if people have done reaearch into this question, and what their findings were.

How does this relate to anything useful?

As I constantly think of how best to work with my teams, this is an important, but largely unmeasured consideration. When forming the teams we formally look at the person’s skills, some relevant experience with a similar type of project or industry is helpful – but rarely measured. However, I do not think I have ever heard anyone say, “we must have 40 points of X experience and 60 points of Y exposure for every project we undertake in order to have 90% confidence of success.” We do a similar calculation with technical skills, but not much else. At the same time, it is pretty obvious that the MVPs on all teams are always the multi-faceted guys who not only know how to manage java heap sizes, but also where to get a projector on short notice and can talk sports/stocks/beer with colleagues and customers.

I have always been scared to blog under my name. This fear had a few components. I did notice, recently, that most of the blogs I follow are actually not anonymous. I used to read a lot of anonymous blogs, but over time most of those have either revealed their identities or have fallen away from my frequent reading list. I suppose some of it has to do with desire to get credit (obviously, that was my intent), but I think the larger issue is that - ultimately - it is hard to trust an anonymous person. Internet, gives a great deal of anonymity to people, but that also forces us to discount anonymous posters longer than “real” ones. There are many examples and discussions on this topic, and it is not really what I wanted to write about.

No. I wanted to think through, by typing, what it was that has kept me from blogging for a better part of 4 years. It was not lack of source material - certainly these times have an overabundance of that. There is an issue of time, of course. It is pretty obvious that to build a readership, posts need to come with regularity that is well-known to journalists, but not easy to maintain on IT guys’ schedule. It is also recommended to stick to a particular topic or set of topics in which one has expertise or strong convictions. That approach was lacking as well. I like to think by typing, and I am certainly not going to be maintaining 5 different blogs for a carefully segmented presentation of my world views.

What I realized, is that the few people whose blogs I actually read with any regularity where “reasonably smart guys” who put out whatever it was that they wanted to share. That’s it. Some of them I knew personally, some I did not, some I even mostly disagreed with. In all cases; however, it was something for me to think about, to talk to someone else about - and perhaps that’s what matters to me. So, I will make the fool out of myself - writing about things I know little about, as well as risking my professional growth by writing about thing I *should* know about, but perhaps do not.

I might even, seriously now, write a bit about my biggest development challenges - my kids. I am still not sure how far to go there. They will inevitably find this blog in a couple of years and I do not want them to be scarred/horrified/overly pleased.

Anyway, I probably have to write here, since my family and co-workers cannot take any more of my soliloquies.