Isegoria

The folks at the Devver Blog have posted a piece, called Project Management with Niel Robertson, summarizing Robertson‘s recent presentation on product management for start-ups:

In fact, he went as far as saying the number one thing that goes wrong at startups might be PM. Niel described PM as a process for delivering Kstrong>the right features at the right time. He went on to discuss why PM can become stale, be ignored, and is often hated because it is associated with excessive documentation, which it shouldn’t be. Mentioning more than once that the best feature requests, requirements, and specs are often just one sentence.
[...]
His basic points about why every project can benefit from PM are:

• It takes 30 secs to write a requirement
• 2 minutes to clarify in discussion
• 5 min to for an engineer to spec
• Hours or days to prototype, write code, integrate, or deploy it

[...]
As my notes are often just a list of key points that caught my attention, I will do as I often do and share some favorites.

• How to write a good requirement… “The user should be able to…”
• How to respond with a good spec… “The user can do that by… doing X… List the exceptions”
• A spec is well written when QA can figure out how to test a feature based on the spec.
• Doesn’t encourage people to shotgun tons of things to market. “When I make spaghetti, I try not to throw all of it against the wall.”
• On gathering data, go out and talk to people getting more data points about the problem you are solving until you start hearing the same things and can’t learn more from talking. Then go work on it, knowing all this data.
• Niel doesn’t recommend a developer also taking on the role of PM, as there needs to be a tension between who represents the user and who implements the product.
• “The PM should be the most empowered employee in your company… Yes, even more than the CEO”

I’ve uploaded the actual presentation to Google Docs:

Are Amazon Kindle sales on the rise?

According to a source at Amazon, “on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles.” Amazon is notoriously tight lipped about sales data, and the new line of business that the Kindle represents for the online retail powerhouse has been especially frustrating for analysts and media to parse. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print. So Amazon appears to be selling more e-books.
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A couple of things could explain the uptick. The Kindle quickly sold out shortly after it was unveiled on Amazon at the end of 2007. However, the company recently cranked up supply to meet demand, and cut the price at the end of May from $399 to $359. Some analysts estimate Kindle sales at around 55,000 a month.

American freight trains move a ton of freight 436 miles on a gallon of fuel:

According to our calculations, which match the [Association of American Railroads]‘s tally exactly, the nation’s seven major railroad companies reported the following for 2007:

• Moving 1,770,545,245,000 ton-miles of freight
• Consuming 4,062,025,082 gallons of diesel fuel (including freight trains and trains in switching yards, but excluding passenger trains)

The average works out to be 435.88 ton-miles per gallon of fuel.
[...]
The rail industry says its fuel efficiency has increased by 85 percent since 1980. It attributes that to factors that include using new and more efficient locomotives, training engineers to conserve fuel, using computers to assemble trains more efficiently in the yard and to plan trips more efficiently to avoid congestion, and reducing the amount of time engines are idling.

Cringely says, Go Home, Bill:

The last two executive actions on the part of Bill Gates that had singular effects on the future of Microsoft were: 1) his 1995 Think Week that resulted in Microsoft shifting course to flow with the “Internet Tidal Wave,” ultimately destroying Netscape, and; 2) his 1988 decision to back Jeff Raikes’ proposal to bundle most of Microsoft’s productivity applications into what they called Microsoft Office, which effectively destroyed all Microsoft’s competitors for shrink-wrapped applications. The first action was that of a strong chief executive operating at the very top of his game while the second was that of a major shareholder who was willing to accept lower earnings in the short term for the long-term success of his investment.

These were radical and dynamic positions to take that resulted in creating thousands of millionaires in the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth since OPEC. But they were also 13 and 20 years ago, respectively. If Gates took another Think Week and determined Microsoft’s future lay in baked goods or virtualization, could he turn the entire company toward one or both of those product directions today? I don’t think so.

No one person can control Microsoft today, which has been obvious to Gates for at least eight years, since that’s how long ago he put Steve Ballmer in the CEO job. For at least eight years, then, these guys have known that their jobs are not so much to steer the Microsoft ship as to try and keep it from drifting onto the rocks. That’s the way it is with huge and successful companies. At best you can trim the sails, because to come about (to significantly shift direction) is just too dangerous for the money machine.

Joel Spolsky looks back at his time at Microsoft, during its glory days in the early 90s, when Bill Gates himself would read a spec and grill the designer:

He was flipping through my spec! (Calm down; what are you, a teenager?) And there were notes in all the margins! On every page! He had read the Whole Darn Thing!

As the conversation went on, Bill’s questions got harder and more detailed. And they seemed a little bit random. But I didn’t care. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy — a nice guy who had read my spec. In my head, I was already thinking of how I would address his comments, pronto.

Finally, the killer question. “I don’t know, you guys,” Bill said. “Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is BASIC going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?”

This was exactly the question I had spent the previous day investigating. And as I had discovered, there was a discrepancy. In both Excel and BASIC, each date was assigned a numeric code. The code for any day in 1992 that I looked up was the same in both. But when I looked up a date around the turn of the last century, Excel and BASIC were one digit apart. Huh?

When I went to find someone who might be able to help, I was directed to Ed Fries, a longtime Excel programmer famous for inventing those screen savers with the swimming fish. I hadn’t had much contact with Ed, but I used to see him every Friday afternoon as he played miniature golf in the hallways outside my office.

“Check out February 28, 1900,” he told me.

Its number in the Excel code was 59.

“Now try March 1.”

Its number was 61.

“What happened to 60?” Ed asked.

“It’s February 29!” I said proudly. “1900 was a leap year!”

“Nope,” Ed said, and left me pondering the problem for a little while longer. I eventually figured out, with some more guidance from Ed, that a group of programmers at Lotus had skipped a day in 1900 because it created a mathematical shortcut for them, and they probably figured that nobody would care about a mistake buried in the software’s internal calendar more than 90 years in the past. The people who made Excel hadn’t cared at all and built the bug into the code that the spreadsheets ran on. But the people who had written the code for BASIC had apparently been offended by the shortcut, so they set the start of their internal calendar a day earlier. That way, it would accurately reflect the actual calendar, but the solution was also practical. Because BASIC started its count a day earlier, the number that BASIC assigned to March 1, 1900, was also 61, and from that point on its date and time functions were aligned with Excel’s.

So were the date and time functions compatible?

“Yes,” I told Bill. “The dates are exactly the same, except for January and February 1900.”

Silence. The F Counter and my boss exchanged astonished glances. How did I know that?

“OK. Well, good work,” said Bill. He took his marked-up copy of the spec…wait! I wanted that…and left.

“Four,” announced the F Counter, and someone said, “Wow, that’s the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age.” He was, at the time, 36. Later, I had it all explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec,” a colleague told me. “He just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard MO is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with, because it’s never happened before.”

What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company’s software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables — and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. But often, you can’t.

The technology sector is where the jobs are:

The highest concentration of technology workers — 286 for every 1,000 workers — was in, no surprise, Silicon Valley. Boulder, Colo., came in second, with 230, and Huntsville, Ala.; Durham, N.C.; and Washington rounded out the top five in density.

Now for the answer to the question on everyone’s mind: Where are the highest salaries? That would be Silicon Valley, where the average tech worker is paid $144,000 a year. That’s nearly double the $80,000 national average for tech jobs. Runners up included San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. Austin, Tex., home of Dell came in fourth, and Seattle was fifth. San Juan, Puerto Rico, had the lowest salaries, with an average of $38,000 a year, but living expenses there are also considerably lower.