mobcode

Your job is not to “help”

Some people define their role as inflicting help on people. Don’t do this. If you are a consultant, do not define your role as helping the team. If you are a manager of a team, do not define your role as helping. If you are in business as a smart technical person do not advertise yourself as offering help. If you find yourself doing this then translate the word “help” to “annoy” and you will see more clearly.

To define your role as “helping” is condescending and passive. The ego it takes to define your role in life as helping others reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the universe. Instead, redefine your role to define what you are individually doing, what you are accomplishing (and this cannot be helping). Then as a secondary role you can be open to providing assistance to people who request it.

Suppose you are a consultant who primarily trains teams in development processes. Do not define your job as helping teams to implement good processes. Instead define your job as providing training. If in the course of providing training someone asks for your assistance then by all means help them. By focusing on providing training rather than helping, you will focus on getting your job done rather than focusing on all the deficiencies of your client and your responsibility to fix them. You will turn your critical eye on yourself to learn how you can more effectively prepare and deliver training.

While defining your role as helping sounds quite generous and charitable it actually reveals an unhealthy, egocentric attitude.

Tell the team when you mess with a shared server

You are working on a distributed team. There are a handful of other people working on the team. You are sharing a server. When you do anything disruptive on the shared server you must tell the team.

This means you must tell the team when you do things like:

• change the system configuration
• start/stop a shared server process
• run a resource intensive operation
• start/stop the server

At some point, everyone on the team is trying to understand why the server is doing what it is doing. Often it seems the server has a life of its own. There are enough wrinkles of complexity and unexpected dependencies in the operating system and the applications and in the network interactions that it can be very hard to understand what the server is doing. This problem is compounded greatly when there is a person on the other side of the world, invisibly making changes. Now the system really does appear to have a life of its own! The other person has effectively become part of the black-box everyone is trying to understand.

So whenever you are messing with a shared server tell.

Even if it is just a dev server tell the team.

Even if nobody else is online, tell the team (they are going to come online and they are going to wonder what is going on with the server).

Even if 99 times out of 100 nobody cares about your messages, tell them (you can never tell when it will be the 1 time out of 100).

Even if everyone says they don’t care about the messages, tell them (the messages are only “un-necessary because you are sending them).

The goal is to create a virtual, shared work room. In a virtual, shared work room you could see if someone stood up from their desk and walked over to the main server and started punching buttons on it. Everyone would notice this. Even if they did not care at the moment, they would still notice and have a basic situational awareness of what is going on in their world.

So tell the team when you mess with a shared server.

School is a terrible preparation for work

School trains people to think there is a predefined point of success. School trains people to place an upper bound on success. School prescribes a set of lectures to go to, a specific number of assignments to do. Tests have a limit. The best you can do is ace the test. There is a fixed number of classes needed to get a degree. School instills the notion that there is an upper limit on success and it is reached by getting the right items checked off on a predefined list.

School is antipreneurial. It opposes entrepreneurial thinking. Coding for money on the web means you are operating your own business. Entrepreneurial thinking is what you need to be successful coding for money on the web. School is a terrible preparation for working on the web.