And we are live over at AngryBear...

A couple of months ago, Scarlet suggested that I do a blog tour. My problem was that I had no idea how to go about doing that. I was, however, a fan of Mike Kimel (Cactus's) work over at Angry Bear, and he suggested that a report on the economics of self-publishing might be interesting to readers there. I wrote up my sales numbers in addition to an introduction to my book, and the post is now live. (It's posted by the owner of the blog, since it doesn't make sense to give me write permission to a blog for just one article)

Review: Adobe InDesign One-On-One

My name is still attached to some TeX macro packages on the internet. Yes, TeX, because LaTeX was too high level for me. Yet 21 years after I wrote that TeX macro package and wanted to layout a book with complex layout, I turned not to TeX but to Adobe InDesign. The reason? When I'm laying down text and graphics side by side and want word wrapping and other niceties, I will not put up with a compile/edit/debug cycle, especially not when my modern machine has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and I'm not afraid to blow it all on fancy UI just so I'm not puzzling over why this went there.

As it happened, I happened to run into this need during the regular Adobe 18-month upgrade cycle, so I downloaded InDesign CS5 and proceeded to quickly realize that this is definitely what people mean by "fat client." The UI was clearly designed for experienced users to whiz through, and anyone who's serious about needing this sort of layout tool would also have to put in some substantial committed time to learn it, just like the couple of weeks it took me to learn TeX
a couple of decades ago.

I browsed through a few InDesign books and quickly picked out Adobe InDesign CS4 One-On-One as the one that looked like it would be the most useful for a complete beginner. There wasn't a CS5 version of the book yet, and I figured that the differences wouldn't be major enough to warrant concern.

The book is laid out in 12 lessons, each covering a specific facet of InDesign. As someone who knows the basics about kerning, tracking, and ledding, many of these lessons went by really fast. Then I would hit something new to me, like tables, drawing (wow, the darn thing comes with several drawing tools --- I might not ever have to learn Illustrator), and transparency, and my learning would suddenly stutter while I picked up all the new concepts.

The book takes a task oriented approach: for every task, some starter files are provided, and then the reader is walked through a series of step-by-step exercises to execute some task. My big problem with this set-up is motivation. Very frequently, there is no motivation provided as to why you want to do a certain task. Sometimes, it's obvious during the exercise, but many times, I would be scratching my head wondering why I would want to do this. A secondary problem is that some times I would want to find out how to do something, and it's not always obvious where in the book that would be. For instance, auto-numbering figures is described in the section on style sheets. I'm sure there's a good reason for this, and I could find it in the index, but the book (and InDesign) is definitely big and complex enough that you need to do this frequently, even after you've worked through all the exercises.

As I expected, very little stuff was broken between CS4 and CS5, so I could work through almost all the exercises. Once I was done with the exercises, working on content proved to be really easy and fast: I wrote entire chapters in a matter of days in a fit of writing frenzy. It's an entirely good thing, since by the time I looked up I had almost run out of my InDesign trial license, and all I had time to do was to put up my book's kickstarter page.

All in all, it took me about 10 days or so to work through every exercise in this book, and each day was about 3 hours on average, so if you needed to you could inhale the entire book hacker-style in under a week. This included all the videos I watched, and there's about 4 hours of video in the book's DVD (along with all the data for exercises) There's not a lot of explanation as to the why of certain things (like style sheets weren't properly motivated), but since I was coming at this from about 5-6 years of pretty solid TeX and LaTeX hacking, that didn't bother me. The book is recommended as a reasonably good introduction to InDesign for someone who had never dealt with the program before. As a reference, it's serviceable, but other books might be better. That said, I'm not buying any more InDesign books until/unless I really find the need for them. So far in writing this book I really haven't found anything that I hadn't run across in One-On-One.

As for InDesign itself, you can take a look at my sample chapter. It's not complete (no page numbers, no index, no headers, no footers, no fancy per-page tabs), but even that chapter was made much easier by writing it on InDesign, rather than a word processor. I'll write a full review after I'm done writing the book (which is currently on hiatus because of the upcoming tour, and because I am awaiting the full version to ship and arrive).

Rebecca Frankel on Boston Startups

A few weeks ago, I shared something on Google Reader/Buzz about Boston Entrepreneurship. Fundamentally, during the mini-computer era, Route 128 was as much a hotbed of computer expertise and business as Silicon Valley was. If you had to bet on a region, you could easily have bet on the Boston Area rather than Silicon Valley.

Yet all through the 1980s till now, Silicon Valley has led the way in producing the companies that people talk about today. Google, Facebook, Netscape, and many others that changed the landscape basically came out of Silicon Valley. I applied to graduate school at MIT in 1992, and was accepted, but for various reasons (explained in An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups) backed out before registration, so I never truly got a good feel for the Boston area.

I met Rebecca Frankel a few years ago when she applied for a conversion from intern to full time employee at Google. At that time, I thought Google was doing something pretty nasty: they were forcing interns who wanted to convert to commit to leaving graduate school before granting an interview, which might or might not result in a full time offer. I understand why Google did this: it really wanted to make sure that the best graduate students weren't being systematically poached by Google (or some groups inside Google), thereby poisoning the well at graduate schools where professors would send us their top students. But I thought it was a pretty crummy deal.

Anyway, Rebecca has a lot to say about the Boston area, MIT, and the role of DARPA and what other sciences call "basic research" as compared to what entrepreneurship is all about, and I think whether you live in Silicon Valley or Boston (or even New York City), it's definitely worth reading what she has to say.

The next book

Many people have asked me what the next book will be. It should be no surprise to anyone that I've chosen to write about my other passion in life (outside of Software Engineering), which is bicycle touring. If you're interested, click over to the kickstarter guide or to the book's home page and check it out. Or you can just directly download the sample chapter.

This book is extremely layout heavy, and while I appreciate any feedback, while I'm waiting for my non-trial version of Adobe Indesign to arrive, I can't make any edits at all. I'm also leaving for a bicycle tour on June 15th, so if I'm not very communicative over the next few weeks please know that it's because I'm busy working on the book, not in front of the computer.

Review: The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Stieg Larsson's novel which is a part mystery, part thriller about what appears to have been a long overdue crime.

The novel begins with the protagonist, Blomkvist, a journalist and publisher for a magazine convicted of libel and false reporting against a well-known industrialist. As a result of this conviction, he is forced to depart his job. Fortuitously, another industrialist decides to hire Blomkvist to investigate a 40 year old murder: niece Harriet Vanger's mysterious disappearance. Blomkvist makes little progress at first, but then eventually makes a surprising breakthrough, and the plot's pace picks up dramatically after that.

At the same time, the novel follows the title character's story. Lisbeth Salander, computer hacker, anti-social investigator gets full development in an interspersed story segment that shows us what kind of person she is. We know that the two protagonists will eventually meet, but Larrson clearly wanted his audience to fully understand where this character comes from.

The novel is slow for the first half, picks up its pace in the middle, and towards the end jumps into triple-time action, with multiple events occupying each page. This pace seems to be deliberate, but definitely put me off for the first half or so. The mystery doesn't really seem fair: by the time the reader get to the resolution, there has been so many distractions and red herrings thrown at him that the mystery is all but forgotten! This properly puts the book into the "thriller" category rather than the usual mystery.

The writing style is stilted, and the characters stereotypes. Recommended only as an airplane novel, but as an airplane novel, it is very good.

Recognition

Google had a very cool system for allowing employees to pat each other on the back. It was called a peer bonus, and basically netted out about $100. The idea was that if you saw someone doing something above and beyond the call of duty, you would send them a peer bonus by e-mailing HR and then that person would receive a virtual certificate detailing what they had done for their peers to deserve the bonus. There were a few rules to prevent blatant gaming of the system, but by and large it was an honor system.

This was a great system, and I made it a personal goal to hand out one of these every quarter. What I loved about it was that it did two things: first of all, it gave someone a pat on the back for hard work. The average engineer made about $100/hour, so if anyone did something for me that saved me an hour of time or more, that peer bonus was well worth it. But as I handed them out, what I noticed was that people were so starved of recognition that the value of handing out these awards far exceeded any monetary gain they represented. Once I had given someone a peer bonus, the next time I asked for a favor, people would bend over backwards to get me something I needed. So handing out frequent peer bonuses made me more effective as well. I also got into the habit of writing someone an unsolicited positive peer review whenever I thought something they did was worth while. I don't know if I ever made a difference to someone's promotion, but clearly, others thought it mattered. The problem with Google was that people performed so far above their levels that folks working there took extra-ordinary performance for granted, and rarely stopped to recognize the amazing things that were getting done every day.

At one point I handed out a peer bonus to Mirit Cohen (currently at gastronauts serving the lucky folks working for twitter). Her manager got very very excited and told me, "Did you know that in the history of Google you are only the second person to hand out a peer bonus to a chef?" That blew my mind. These people worked their hearts out producing amazing food for Googlers, and yet in Google history only 2 people had ever thought to say thank you in this extremely lightweight fashion. Whenever I visit the Google campus now as a retiree, occasionally people will ask me how it was that I came to know so many chefs. My response was, "Try being one of two people who'd ever given a chef any kind of recognition for their hard work."

A year before I left, the peer bonus system got switched out. It had gone from an e-mail system to one in which you filled out a web form. The web form had all sorts of warnings on top saying, "Please do not abuse the system, make sure the bonus is really going to someone deserving!" What I saw, however, wasn't that people were abusing the system, but that people were starved for recognition, and I thought the warning should have said, "Not enough of you are thanking your peers for a job well done. You should come back here more often."

Review: The Aviator

The Aviator is Martin Scorsese's movie about Howard Hughes. I didn't know much about Howard Hughes the man, but the movie at least seemed to do a good job portraying important moments of his life, from movie-making to making aircraft, this seemed to be a man truly larger than life, able to do whatever he wanted, but subject to a dreadful mental illness that DiCarpio depicts well: at one point we see him covering his mouth to keep himself from repeatedly saying the same words that he knew he would loop into if he were not to stop himself.

Cate Blanchett won an Oscar as Katherine Hepburn, but I really did not like her in this role. Her acting seemed really contrived, and even her laughs seemed fake. It could very well be that Katherine Hepburn was really like this, but I found it really difficult to watch any segment of the film with her in it.

As far as the story goes, Scorsese avoids trying to make any editorial comments about Hughes, and I think he succeeded in this case. We learn to feel sorry for him, but we also get to see the ruthlessness and shrewdness needed to dominate an industry the way Howard Hughes did. About the only thing I dislike was that Hughes was such a penny pincher he had his aircraft company turned into a charity to avoid paying taxes, but the movie portrays him as a profligate spender, risking all in pursuit of a goal. It would have been interesting to delve into these contradictions.

It's a long movie, so it's best watched at home so you can pause it to go to the bathroom. There aren't very many action sequences, so it's not a movie where there'd be any problem pausing (or even stopping) the movie and then resuming it later. Despite the movie being on Blu-Ray, I can honestly say that this was one Blu-Ray that didn't give me the "wow, I'm watching in HD!" feeling --- the subject matter really wasn't subject to high definition, and the transfer was nothing special.

I can say I enjoyed the movie, but not enough to give it a recommended rating. I guess I'm just not enough of a Scorsese fan.

Review: Battle Royale

My review of The Hunger Games drew comments from both Hang and my brother about its similarity in plot to Battle Royale, a Japanese movie from 2000. My understanding is that works in the television industry, and so might well have had exposure to Battle Royale since it was such a well-known movie. But there are significant differences between The Hunger Games and Battle Royale:

• Battle Royale's backstory and plot is pretty unbelievable. The title sequence doesn't even provide any attempt to rationalize what the "game" was about.
  
• Battle Royale had no elements of a reality-TV show whatsoever. The opening sequence hints at it, but nowhere in the movie is there even mention of an audience, and there is not even the hint that audience participation could affect the outcome.
  
• The game setup is extremely unfair. I don't see any reason why the first guy with a ranged weapon wouldn't immediately camp out and snipe everyone else.
  
• The reactions were extremely unrealistic. At one point a bunch of girls are camped out together but they suddenly turn against each other. The lone survivor commits suicide.
  
• The one group that was smart enough to try to meta-game the situation and get everyone off the island alive was ignominiously killed off without even being allowed to execute their plan. So all that set up was wasted?!!
  

The movie wasn't a complete waste of time, but the Hunger Games is definitely a far better plot and character study than this movie.

Not recommended.

Review: Astro City Vol 1-5

Someone borrowed my entire Fables collection, and asked me if there was more. I thought of Astro City, but didn't think she'd be terribly interested in it. Then I read the first book again and got sucked in all over again. The series volume are:

1. Life in the Big City (Astro City, Vol. 1)
   
2. Astro City Vol. 2: Confession
   
3. Astro City Vol. 3: Family Album
   
4. Astro City Vol. 4: The Tarnished Angel
   
5. Astro City Vol. 5: Local Heroes
   
6. Astro City: The Dark Age Book One SC (Kurt Busiek's Astro City)
   
7. Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two
   

I've only read Volumes #1 to 5. The conceit behind Astro-City is subtle but a lot of fun: rather than tell stories directly about men (and women) in tights using them as the protagonists, let's look at them a little sideways: we'll tell the stories either from the point of view of the common man who lives in the city, or we'll tell the little side stories that you've always wondered about, like why the heck does a super-villain keep doing the same thing over and over if he keeps getting caught by the super-heroes? What's really great is that Kurt Busiek creates all the heroes in Astro-City out of whole cloth, but he taps into the knowledge of super-heroes that nearly everyone has had, built up into mythology by comic books over the last 60 years or so. That lends all his "super" characters some familiarity, but keeps them somewhat interesting still by not over-explaining everything about them, which is what tends to happen with the regular comics industry. Book 1 is exuberant, introducing the city to everyone and asking you to take nothing at face value, not the history, not even the heroes themselves. Book 2 is probably one of my favorite takes on the Batman character I've read, and even reading it today is still fresh. What I love is the layered approach. In many ways, the Batman has always been about overcoming your past, and this version takes that to an extreme. The next two volumes are weaker, but still work through the concepts well. In particular, The Tarnished Angel spends almost the entire volume on villainy, and manages to be tongue-in-cheek about it.

Having read all of these in a couple of nights, I have to say I still recommend the books highly. I still don't know whether to lend them to my friend. Maybe I'll just drop in the first couple of volumes and see if she gets hooked...

Under-estimating the impact of incentives

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As far as organizational structures are concerned, I'm a man with a hammer. That hammer is none other than #1 on Charlie Munger's list of causes of human misjudgment : Under-recognition of the power of incentives.

Take for instance, Jean Louis Gassee's criticism of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Setting aside that Gassee failed to sell to Apple at a good price, and BeOS never did very well in the market, it's not clear that any of the things Gassee would have Ballmer do was really actionable.

Microsoft is a 60,000 person company. There's a very strict limit to how much one man, even a CEO can do to move a 60,000 person company. The reality is, when you're at the stratosphere at such a company, the only thing you can do is to really set up incentives so that people do what's good for the company by doing what's good for them.

Take Vista, for example. Vista broke one of the most important rules of Microsoft Windows development: it broke backwards compatibility. Now you can rationalize that Windows' code base is better as a result. But the whole rationale behind Windows was that you can buy any $25 piece of hardware at Fry's and it would work. Windows XP, for instance did that marvelously, and I still have Windows XP boxes attached to various pieces of hardware that won't work on any other operating system. The minute Vista broke that compatibility, a customer would have to buy all new hardware for his new computer. At which point, Apple could (and did!) come along and say, "Hey, why don't you buy my shiny machine? It looks cool, it scores points with members of the opposite sex, and it can also run Windows if you have to."

But presumably Microsoft knew all that! Why despite knowing that Vista's lack of compatibility would screw with Microsoft's revenue and dominance, did it do so? I asked a current Googler who was an ex-Microsoftie this question in 2006. His response was: "The new driver model? The one that broke all your devices? Well, you don't get your promotion to Staff Engineer for being someone who keeps it compatible with the old cruft. You get your promotion for designing a whole new piece of infrastructure that has huge impact on the world. Well, whoever did that got his promotion, and who cares if it tanked the company!" Ouch. People have argued that the new model is indeed more stable, but other techniques such as MicroReboots were also available. There really was no reason for Microsoft to take the risk of defection of customers to other operating systems.

One would think that such perverse incentive systems that can cause companies billions would be fixed, but my guess is that these incentive systems lie deep in the heart of the corporate culture: inventing new things will always be better rewarded than either making existing things run faster, or keeping things compatible, despite the latter two jobs usually being far harder than inventing a new subsystem out of whole cloth. And executives, even C level executives frequently still under-estimate the power of such incentive systems. As an example in late 2008, I had a conversation with a top executive at a well-known Silicon Valley company about what these perverse incentives were doing to his company. His response? "I don't believe it all comes down to incentives. After all, if you do good work and do good things, when you leave and work for other companies or when your friends leave and work for other companies, they'll remember you and bring you new opportunities, so you always have an incentive to do good work." When I heard that response I did not know what to say.

Months later, the company unveiled a "good citizenship award" internally. It was driven by the same popularity-contest-based incentive system that had already failed to promote good behavior. Not surprisingly, things have not changed as a result. When you see repeated examples of such behavior, it becomes much less of a surprise that startups without an incentive system other than handing out stock to everyone will continue to outperform the large organizations. Which again begs the question: Why the rush to get big?

Review: Keen Cycling Sandals

One of my fellow bike club members, Harvey Wong rode around in cycling sandals all the time. The shoes looked very cool (well, Harvey's a pretty cool looking dude anyway), and so I was very excited a few years ago when the local bike shop had a sale on Shimano Men's Cycling Sandal - SH-SD66 (45-46). When I went to the store, however, I was disappointed. I found the sandals too uncomfortable for me to contemplate even wearing. Lisa found that the sandals fit her much better (no, we didn't try the same size sandals), however, so she got a pair.

When Lisa sent her cycling shoes in to get fitted for some orthotics, she rode the sandals full time. At first she raved about how nice her sandals were, and she clearly thought they were cooler and more comfortable, which was the point. But the sandal was so flexy that she had trouble clipping out, which meant that she wouldn't even contemplate riding her single, and it definitely made her decide that she did not want to wear them on the upcoming tour. She first had to flex her ankle to the point where the shoe itself would move, then she'd have to flex the sole to the point where the cleat would dis-engage.

When I saw the REI had a sale on the Keen cycling sandals, I got very excited. We went to the store and I tried on the various different sizes (they come in half size variants, which makes it critical to go to a store to try things on to get a perfect fit). They were very comfortable in the store, but since the store didn't let me stick on SPD cleats to find out how they would engage or dis-engage from the pedal, I had no way to find out except to buy a pair. Except that we were one day too early for the sale. Nevermind, I'll just bring the coupon with me and show the cashier, and maybe she'd let me have it at the sale price anyway. No dice. Well, an IM to a savvy-shopper friend brought me an on-line link (now expired, so here's the shoe with Amazon pricing) that was even cheaper than the REI sale, so there was no way I'd make a special trip just to pick up the sandals. I would have been willing to pay the REI sale price in exchange for the privilege of trying out the shoe in the store, but not full price.

The shoe arrived yesterday, and the first thing I did was to weigh it. It came in at 436g per shoe (with cleats), which is 20g heavier than my SIDI Giau Cycling Shoes! But they are incredibly comfortable, with the straps guaranteeing that I wouldn't have any hot spots on the uppers (I have a couple of bunions that make regular cycling shoes chafe a bit there).

I took them out for a longer test ride today, and the shoes are just about perfect. There's no problem engaging or dis-engaging cleats, and when I get off the bike they are perfectly walkable (though the cleat does still click on pavement). One interesting problem is that the little grooves in the sole actually grab rocks and trap them, so they're not very good for walking on gravel --- after walking through gravel, you'll have a bunch of tiny stones in your sole that you'd have to work off. There's just the barest hint of flex (much less than expected from a sandal, though now that I know the weight I'm just the slightest bit disappointed), though on the upstroke unless you cinch down the sandals really tight you'll get a bit of loose bounce, which should go away as the weather gets warmer. The sandals are easy on and easy off, but by choosing to use a draw-cord as the closure rather than velcro, you still need care: you must tuck the draw cord back into the laces or your chainrings will chew up your draw-cord like nobody's business.

I'll still wear my SIDIs for touring the alps (open toes in cold rain is no fun!), but for casual riding to the store, library, or the occasional ride to the doctor's office will be all done with these. In fact, maybe as I get used to them, I'll be encouraged to ride all over the place and even do long rides with them like Harvey does with his sandals. They certainly aren't losing much in the stiffness department. Recommended.

Review: Insomnia

I am slowly working through Christopher Nolan's movies. Insomnia [Blu-ray] was his first major film after Memento. It is so far my favorite Christopher Nolan movie.

The movie is a remake of a 1998 Norwegian film of the same name. However, the plot and characters were apparently substantially changed, so I feel justified in treating it as a completely original movie. The film features an all-star cast, with Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hillary Swank headlining the film.

The plot revolves around a girl who was beaten to death in the small Alaskan town of Nightmute. Two policemen are sent up to town from Los Angeles to assist in the investigation: Dormer (Pacino) and Eckhart. Swank plays Ellie Burr, who is the bright-eyed young cop who hero-worships Dormer.

I love the way the cops are portrayed: these aren't incompetent bumbling cops who blow the investigation and have a hard time figuring out who did it. They figure it out, and they figure it out fast. However, Dormer and Eckhart come with a history of their own, and there's definitely tension between them. In a particularly intense moment, things start to go wrong and it feels like Dormer starts to fall apart, not just from the tensions carried over from LA, but also from Insomnia from the midnight sun. I won't spoil the plot for you here, but yes, Robin Williams does play a very important role, and it is played completely against type for him, which I quite enjoyed.

The DVD by the way has a short feature about insomnia featuring William C. Dement, who wrote The Promise of Sleep. It's good to be able to attach a face to a name. Dement says that the movie is accurate in its portrayal of insomnia and its effects.

Needless to say, this movie comes highly recommended. It is rated R (mostly for language), however, so parents take note.

Review: Ash

Ash is Malinda Lo's re-telling of the Cinderella. Re-telling is too weak to describe what Lo does with the story. Eviscerated re-imagination might be about right.

This Cinderella did go to a couple of balls, did dance with a prince, and did have a wicked step-mother as well as horrible step-sisters, and there are some fairies and fairy-tales involved, but that's about all she shares with the fairy-tale you probably remember. The faeries are also the darker sort, coming out of stories like Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer., rather than Enid Blyton

The plot is fine, the story is fine, and even the characters are fine. Unfortunately, the writing doesn't line up. There's no soul there, no lyricism. Everything is written in a matter-of-fact post-modern fashion, which isn't what fairy tales should be about. Part of it is that Malinda Lo is probably trying to distance the reader from the traditional story, but another part is almost certainly because Lo just can't write that well, and is perhaps relying on a crutch of the Gay and Lesbian culture's almost certain support of this book.

Not recommended.

Organizational Thinking

I read somewhere that Google is apparently looking for a head of social. I don't know how much of the press around this is real, and whether the reports on the experience were from highly qualified candidates who were treated badly. My book, An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups described the situation when I joined Google, which was that the engineering organization not only couldn't figure out how to hire release engineers, but didn't know what it didn't know about how to hire appropriate release engineers, leading to a logjam and deadlock (not to mention some unhappy auditors).

When I gave my talk at LOLapps.com and mentioned this, someone from the audience asked me this insightful question: "How do you learn to recognize these deadlock situations? How do you hire or train someone to recognize these types of situation?" My initial response was that if the founder/executive team doesn't recognize these, you have a problem. My next response was to point him at one of my favorite organizational analysis textbooks: The Fifth Discipline. One of my favorite chapters of that book is the one on The Beer Game. It shows how given a long enough supply chain (3 tiers was enough), and a long enough feedback loop (it turns out that even 1.5 hours was enough to demonstrate this), smart, intelligent people put into a structurally untenable situation would make a hash of things, even as they were doing their darnedest to optimize their individual roles and react to the environment. The minute you see this in action you will learn to stop blaming the individuals who are acting in their roles, and start analyzing structure and decision making in organizations from a feedback/information perspective.

The Beer Game also taught me to see how important open-ness and widespread dissemination of information was inside organizations, and I think Google in particular was very good at staying open despite all the pressures to do otherwise. Everyone I spoke to knew that we had a problem, and everyone was aware that the person responsible for trying to solve the problem was trying to do their best. This made organizational change much easier than it would have been otherwise (though it still wasn't easy). When confronted with situations like this, organizations tend to want to find an outside savior: someone who can ride in on a white horse from outside the company to save it. However, this is precisely the wrong approach, because the real problem usually has to do with the organization's approach to the problem, and that's much more easily changed by an insider.

By far the thing that impressed me the most was what a skilled organizational hacker Wayne Rosing was. When he saw that the previous approaches wasn't working, Rosing decided to take the problem and hand it to an engineer with previous experience in the domain! In other words, everyone knew that if Ron Dolin came and asked you for help, this was an important situation and critical for the IPO. If Wayne Rosing was at Google today, I'm convinced he would take that approach again with respect to a "Head of Social" position, which is to take an engineer well-versed in the social world and ask him to fix the problem. I don't know who that would be (my nomination would be Matt Cutts) but I'm positive it would be a better solution than a search for an outside Head of Social. The need in this case isn't for someone with external credibility, but for someone who can hack the organization from the inside to recognize that the important problems are the unknown unknowns.

Review: Iconoclaust

I really wanted to like the book Iconoclast. It promised to explain in a neuro-scientific manner how certain people can achieve what others thought could not be done, and then show you how you can do the same for yourself.

Unfortunately, the book falls far short of the goals. Each chapter begins with a few stories about famous iconoclasts and describes in less than a page what he or she did and what brilliant insight they had, or what obstacles they overcame. Then the book goes into the neurobiology of what's going on in your brain when discovering a new idea, or confront opposition to your ideas. There's no actionable component about what you can do to make it more likely that you'll have a great idea ,though some are pretty obvious: one of the most important things to do is to learn to ignore what other people say or do, and another one is to actively seek out new experiences. Unfortunately, such topics are far better covered by Richard Wiseman's The Luck Factor.

The last chapter in particular is pretty lame. It describes various mind-enhancing drugs and what they can do for you. Someone once told me that he thought a significant percentage of Google engineers was already on Ritalin or other such medication in an attempt to get such an advantage. However, there are no studies at all to back such use of drugs, and even the author admits that many of these drugs have side-effects that can have dire health consequences.

All in all, I thought the book was barely worth the time spent reading it. Not recommended.

Review: Miracle Exclusives ME81 Stainless Steel Rice Cooker/Steamer

Lisa's been very picky about rice cooker, since she didn't like any of the ones with the non-stick coatings, which she thinks will cause poisoning as they come off and gets into the food. So she bought a VitaClay Claypot/Rice Cooker, which is a rice cooker with an inner pot made from clay, rather than aluminum. I didn't like this rice cooker: it's slow, and furthermore, fragile. As a ham-fisted engineer and chef, I tend to just fill the pot with rice, dump it into the rice cooker, and then once in a while the pot will crack and all the water will spill out.

After breaking the expensive rice cooker this way, I went on-line to look for something better that would still satisfy Lisa. I eventually found the Miracle Stainless Steel Rice cooker. A Chinese person cannot bear to live without a rice cooker for more than a day or so, so I paid the $4 rush fee to get it right away. For $74, what I got didn't look like much: the usual badly written manual, a stainless steel pot, a steamer with lid, a rice paddle, and a plastic measuring cup for rice.

I had originally planned to make something else that day, but once I saw the steamer I decided to buy some salmon and steam it. I rubbed the salmon with salt, encrusted it with pepper, stuck some ginger slices on it and then stuck a few pieces of tomatoes on it. I then stuck the whole thing into the rice cooker, with some rice and water in the pot. 25 minutes later, everything was done, which makes this the easiest cooking I've ever done! The rice was a bit soggy because I used a bit too much rice, but that got corrected the very next time I made rice. The fish was nothing short of delicious!

The Amazon reviews point out that the pot was hard to clean. That's not true. Just soak the pot in water and leave it for a bit and everything will work correctly. You can also use the rice cooker without the steamer, which is great. There are no complicated settings, just "cook" and "warm." The instructions just say to let brown rice steam for an extra 15 minutes for it to be correctly cooked. The price seemed steep for what you got, but on the other hand, nobody else seems to sell stainless steel inner pots without non-stick coatings.

Hang, by the way, told Lisa that Teflon is the most inert material out there, so even if you did ingest it, it would pass harmlessly through your body! So next time I'll buy one of the $30 non-stick coated rice cookers. In any case, if you buy into Teflon poisoning/aluminum poisoning, then I can recommend this rice cooker.

Compensation Thought Experiment

Pop Quiz to see if you've been paying attention to the past few blog posts (or better yet, read my book): Supposed you had a $250K equity offer from Google, and a $250K equity offer from Facebook, which one is more valuable? Under what circumstances would one offer be much better than the other? (These are purely hypothetical numbers and have no relation to offers being handed out at either companies today --- I just picked a nice round number out of thin air)

Both companies are handing out RSUs (Restricted Stock), so you can't play any of the tax planning games I discussed in my book. Facebook is currently valued at around $25B. Google is valued at $151B. If Facebook really succeeds in its quest to dominate social networking, monetizes it, and dominates the web, it's not inconceivable that it becomes worth $50B or $100B (which would make the final compensation $500K or $1M). What would Google have to do in order to double or quadruple? The largest market cap company in the US is Exxon Mobile at $283B. So if Google were to double it would be bigger than Exxon-Mobile. That sounds unlikely. It's not impossible, but it's unlikely. For instance, if YouTube were to dominate all of TV, we could model that by say, taking TV network market caps and adding that to Google. CBS is only worth $10B, so my guess is even if YouTube wiped out CBS/ABC/NBC, it would only add $50B to Google's market cap. This is the price of success: it takes a lot of dollars to move Google's market cap!

Now, Facebook is also much more likely to be worth $0 than Google is, so in market parlance, we say that Facebook is higher risk. Under what circumstance is the higher risk stock (represented by Facebook in this case) a better bet? Well, if you're a young engineer (fresh out of school, for instance), then you have plenty of time to recover from Facebook going to $0. If you're in your 50s or 60s and haven't saved enough to retire, you might as well roll the dice and shoot the moon, since the extra $250K wouldn't support your lifestyle anyway in retirement.

The person who should take the Google offer is someone right on the cusp of achieving his financial goals: that last $250K is much more valuable than rolling the dice and getting $2M or $0. Note that I'm making all this computation based on not knowing anything about Facebook's revenues or potential growth. In practice, the risk of taking the pre-IPO company's offer is much lower if you manage to deduce their revenue/profit/growth situation during the interview process, and the offers rarely end up being equal.

Now that you've had the chance to think about this, stories like these make a lot of sense, right? Or at least, I hope it does.

Review: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I somehow forgot to review the first season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, so I'll do both Seasons of The Sarah Connor Chronicles at once.

The premise behind the series should be familiar to everyone. Robots are sent back through time to kill John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance after SkyNet takes over the world. In the first two movies (I haven't seen any of the rest), robots known as Terminators are sent back to kill first Sarah Connor (so that John Connor wouldn't have been born), and then both Sarah and John.

Once you throw in time travel into the mix, plots become highly improbable and unless the writers are very very good, keeping consistency even within the TV series becomes very difficult. The first season focuses very much on Sarah Connor, played by Lena Heady, who manages to convey determination, but also looks too often as though she wishes she could be a soccer mom instead. Nearly every episode begins with a voice-over and some narration by Sarah, and we get a summation at the end as well. The problem was that the first season was almost all about flight and survival, with an occasional robot of the week or "possible-skynet" of the week. Nevertheless, the plots were believable and the characters were interesting, though John Connor just comes across too often as just another sullen teenager who doesn't do much of anything.

The second season complicated the plot somewhat, introducing more characters (yet another relatives of John, for instance), but felt very disjoint: episodes were frequently disconnected, and it seems as though the characters were often sent on wild chases that led nowhere, which is very frustrating. We are also led to believe that the main villain of the arc would be someone who would be dealt with, but the plot throws us for a loop that's not very believable, given the character's prior behavior. Towards the end of the season it looked like the writers finally found some courage (whether that was driven by the series cancellation), and started killing off major characters to lend a sense of devastation. The ending did seem very pat, however, so I'm not sure I was satisfied by the series.

Not recommended.

The Money Doesn't Matter Myth

In between bouts of learning Adobe InDesign, I've been helping a few engineers negotiate compensation. One of the strangest things I ran into at Google was a number of people telling me that they didn't care about their career path, their compensation, or something like that. This was usually used to justify their apathy towards promotion systems, or to justify taking on an assignment that they knew would not help their career.

Coming from an engineer towards the end of that career, I can understand that attitude. If you're in your 50s or 60s, an extra promotion might not matter very much: after all, any additional compounding effect on your income will be dwarfed by matters such as job-satisfaction, or even such fringe benefits as health insurance.

For young engineers, however, that attitude is ridiculous and stupid. First off, an incremental 15% raise at this point in your career will compound over the next 4 decades if you're in your 20s. This makes a difference of a few million dollars. Secondly, as anyone who has bought an expensive luxury item knows, spending more on something makes you value it more. There are very few people who would bad-mouth their recently-bought expensive BMW or MacBook, for instance. (Yes, and I'm aware that I am one of those who would bad-mouth something I just bought, but I'm weird that way)

One engineer I advised got a substantial counter-offer from his current employer. After the counter-offer (but before he accepted it), he mentioned that his manager and tech-lead started treating him differently. This was a natural effect: once he got his counter, he started being too valuable to spend doing crappy work and writing unit tests: he'd have to be put to work doing more highly leveraged activities. A few more cycles of this, and he'd have enough work to justify a promotion, and a virtuous cycle will start.

So even if my book doesn't make you want to work at a startup, interviewing around to seek your market value is very likely to pay off, not just in terms of compensation, but in other intangibles as well, such as job satisfaction, or just getting out from doing work you don't want to do. It always surprises me that talented engineers put up with an unsatisfying job: the Valley is as hot as I've ever seen it, and it's currently a seller's market for engineering talent. If you don't take advantage of the situation now, another such situation may not arise for another 5 years.

Review: The Big Short

The Big Short is Michael Lewis' book about the financial crisis. The book rolled out without a Kindle edition, prompting me to borrow it from the library and costing W.W. Nortin as well as the author a sale.

The book is a quick and easy read, and tells several compelling stories, mostly from the point of view of the people who saw it coming and found ways to profit from the sub-prime mortgage disaster. His ability to get into the heads of folks like Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, and several other traders makes for a fun read, and provides a way to explain the financial crisis without several chapters of what would have been boring exposition.

We really do get to see how incompetent the big investment banks were, in some cases willfully so, because the incentive structure was completely messed up: in many cases (and in the case of Wing Chau, what was good for the individual (Chau made millions running his sub-prime trades) was decidedly not good at all for the market or for the corporate sponsors (Merril Lynch) in this case. There were basic fundamental flaws in the ways the big banks viewed mortgages (such as assuming an extremely low default rate in the face of insufficient history) that makes you realized that Krugman was right in that nationalizing these institutions couldn't possibly hurt: they were so incompetently run that they did not deserve to live, and sad as the government was, it could probably have run those banks better, even if simply by liquidating them. By the way, I once brought up similar incentive problems at an employer, and the VP of Engineering dismissed my concerns, claiming that incentives were no big deal since "people would do the right thing anyway, since when they move on to other companies they'd want their reputation to stay intact. That's the kind of stupidity that hit the big investment banks, apparently simultaneously. Which begs the question, Why the Rush to get Big?

Lewis points out something sad: everyone involved in the sub-prime crisis at the financial level made huge amounts of money. The CEOs (and Wing Chau) made millions, as did Eisman and Burry. But the press did not glorify Eisman and Burry, and did not vilify the CEOs of Merril Lynch, Bear Stearns or AIG for being complete idiots. In many cases, the same guys just went ahead and started new businesses to screw people all over again. Lewis also points out what sweetheart deals Hank Paulson and other government officials offered the various investment banks with the TARP money: they were essential giveaways with no strings attached!

I definitely think that going back to strong financial regulation and making banking an extremely boring and sedate occupation is the right thing to do. The same people would probably cause a lot of social damage at other big companies, but I can't think of any other situation in which they could have caused so much misery.

This book is highly recommended for a unique perspective on the financial crisis. If enough people read it, maybe politicians wouldn't be so willing to bail out big investment banks during the next financial crisis. Or maybe I'm just being too optimistic this morning.