My talk from Ignite DC #4 is up on blip.tv and YouTube. I’ll embed the video as well. Fair warning: parts of the talk may be NSFW, so be careful out there…
–Update–
If you have some extra time after watching the clip, feel free to rate my talk.
For the Top 10 Android Business Apps. Specifically, about Tasker:
Tasker is a program which supports batch coding based on events. Tasker can be used to replicate the BlackBerry profile mechanism, as well as other scripting. For example, I have created a script that will turn GPS on for location sensitive apps (FourSquare, Google Maps) and then off once the app exits. Obviously, this involves a bit of programming, so this may not be for everyone.
More of my suggestions here.
I’ve recently converted from a BlackBerry to an Android phone. I like it, but I do miss my BlackBerry. There are some apps you can install to make your Android more like a BlackBerry. Why would you want to do that? Well, the email and messaging capabilities of a BlackBerry are probably the best on the market: I would go so far as to say a BlackBerry is basically an mobile messaging platform that just happens to make phone calls. Here are some apps I use to better replicate the BB experience on Android:
The next two apps require root access. Some users may or may not be willing to root their devices, but I believe it to be worth it.
Other Android apps which have proven useful:
As some of you know, I’ve been working on a NoSQL book for the last few months. It’s been coming along pretty well — about 8 chapters written or so — and I have been in conversations with two different publishers, one of which was almost at the signing phase about a month ago or so.
However, the project has come to an unfortunate end. The main focus of my work — namely, how to apply NoSQL to business problems for people who are accustomed to thinking of RDBMS only — has already been published by a few other people. I don’t begrudge these other folk; they wrote some good articles. I also could prove I thought of the idea before the respective articles on the web were published, but it doesn’t matter. Even a whiff of plagiarism is enough to push a publisher away. I could always self-publish, I suppose, but that’s not really attractive to me.
So, what am I going to do with the months of work I’ve already put into this? Well, I’m going to start publishing another series of articles on this site about NoSQL. The work’s already done; I’ll link to the other articles where appropriate and share what I’ve learned with everyone. Who knows; perhaps there’s enough interest either in what I say or in how I say it to justify a book even yet.
Thanks for stopping by! Hopefully, you enjoyed the “What Your Grocery List Says About Your Sex Life” talk at Ignite DC #4. Here are some additional items of information and supporting documentation that may help further explain some of the ideas found in the presentation.
[Read the rest of this entry...]
Specifically, about virtualization and chargeback. If you’re more into the dead tree version, it’s the June 4 edition (Volume 32, Issue 12) on page 43.
IT consulting has been around as long as there has been IT. Pretty much always has been and always will be. These days, consulting shops run in scale from one person out of their basement to multinational giants. As things move forwards, I believe we will see more companies on either end of the spectrum, as fewer in the middle When I originally thought of this series, I was going to make this prediction. However, it has already come true.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 3.4M out of 151M people in the US are “computer specialists” or about 2.25% of the overall population. (While I don’t want to disparage the good people at the BLS, this number seems a bit low to me, but that could be a bit of confirmation bias given that I live in the DC area and work with computers). During the same period, there were approximately 1M people consulting in the US, with 14.4% of them classified as IT-related. Of these 3.4M IT workers, it is likely that around 490k are consulting.
As mentioned previously, the spread of IT consulting firms has already come to pass:
The vast majority of establishments in the industry were fairly small, employing fewer than five workers. Self-employed individuals operated many of these small firms. Despite the prevalence of small firms and self-employed workers, large firms tend to dominate the industry. Approximately 41 percent of jobs are found in establishments with 50 or more employees, and some of the largest firms in the industry employ several thousand people.
Building on that idea, let’s say you decide you’ve had enough of your everyday, rat race job for your faceless company that just doesn’t care about you anyway. If you were to come to me and tell me you were planning on starting an IT services firm focusing on .NET, or JavaScript, or the LAMP stack, or HTML, or any relatively common technology, I’d say you were a fool. Unless you are a heavy hitter (contributor to Apache, author of a major book, Tom Kyte or the like), you basically have no chance of sustaining yourself over the long haul, let alone growing. Even if you have a handful of people ready to hand you money or a roledex full of existing clients, you will find it hard to move beyond
These skills are effectively a commodity now. Colleges churn out hundreds of people who either have taken enough LAMP classes to be sufficiently competent and/or have worked with LAMP enough on their own to provide lots of homegrown competition. Throw in globalization and China/Russia/India/Pakistan/Brazil, and the race to the bottom is on. Don’t believe me? Check out Guru, eLance, RentACoder or oDesk and see what rate the global market will bear. For some people, it’s a sobering wakeup call. Combine the abundance of people with commodity tech skills with the tolerance of user community for IT solutions that are “good enough” — because, let’s face it, if your restaurant’s website doesn’t work perfectly on the iPhone but does on the laptop, is that really worth the extra cost to make the website truly universal? — and you end up in the situation where just being “great” at JavaScript (let alone “good” or “okay”) just will not cut it in the marketplace.
The IT services industry has already shaken out into two general categories: huge conglomerates and small firms with just a few people in them. I think this trend will continue, but with a difference. Today’s huge conglomerates tend to charge jaw dropping rates (take a look at Oracle Consulting’s rates to New York State for 2008 as an example). Some of the time, those rates are justified by the skills of the consultant in question; other times, it’s just simply trading in on the name (for reasons into which we will go at another time) — “well, things must be serious now, they’ve brought in Microsoft Consulting to fix the problem.” I suppose there will always be a time and a place for such lily gilding, but I think economic pressures will soon convince decision makers otherwise.
What I believe will happen is the evolution of two tiers of service providers: one of very large firms offering everything at relatively low rates Wal-Mart style and the other of smaller firms offering highly specialized skillsets. As the lower complexity skills become more and more commodity-like in nature, only areas with comparatively low cost of living rates (for now, the aforementioned Pakistan/India/China/Russia/Brazil) or companies sufficiently large enough to leverage enough economies of scale (to both remain profitable and produce enough growth to stay viable in the market) will be able to remain sustainable in the commodity market. This will happen for the same reason that Mom-And-Pop grocery stores have disappeared in favor of large supermarket chains. By offering highly skilled, hard-to-find services, the smaller players can both survive and thrive by providing support to the more marginal cases. This model is harder from a business perspective, but potentially more lucrative.
In the next article, we’ll take a look at the history of a number of industries, technologies and companies and how their example shapes the direction in which IT services are heading.
I will be speaking on two subjects near and dear to my heart (and probably yours): Grocery Stores and Sex at Ignite-DC.
Yes, really; not kidding about the subjects. Although I might throw in a little bit about privacy, security and data mining.
Get tickets here
Yesterday, at TEDxPotomac, I was talking with some people about what I see as the future of the IT industry. I’ve been thinking more about it, and I thought I’d revise & extend those remarks a bit here.
After having written for a bit, I think I’m going to break this up into multiple pieces. It’s probably going to go like this:
Over the next week or two, I’m going to write about where I see things now, where I see things going and what I believe to be the best course(s) of action. I hope you’ll join me.
In a series on new tech skills, the Washington DC edition of the examiner.com wrote a short profile about me and the NoSQL movement.
SAP is offering 5 and a quarter billion for Sybase. Besides saving a troubled RDBMS manufacturer, it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out for SAP sales.
One of SAP’s selling points over the years has been their ability to reside in varying database platforms; sure, they had their own database, but no one really used it — Oracle, DB2 and the like were almost always chosen instead. In fact, Oracle is probably the single largest database of choice.
Assuming the merger goes through, SAP will have a large vested interest in “encouraging” customers to use Sybase over any other RDBMS vendor. If an organization has no enterprise database platform and SAP is the only enterprise application being installed, then I suppose why not. But what are the odds that any organization that needs SAP would not already have made such a choice? IT organizations are very big on homogenization these days and adding yet another vendor to the mix (particularly one with Sybase’s lack of penetration in the market — 3%) may make it a hard sell.
Laura Lederman, an analyst for William Blair & Co, chimes in:
“This decision was made because of several significant missteps by management… In our opinion, the most important reason was the company’s increase in its maintenance fees, a decision that angered many customers since they viewed it as a price increase in the midst of a recession. Second, the company has had trouble creating on-demand software, allowing many smaller vendors to take share and gain sizable installed bases. … While SAP management stated that it will continue to support other leading database vendors, our sense is that SAP will try to have customers use Sybase instead of the Oracle database. We do not expect them to be successful in this effort.”
To put it mildly.
From an ex-Googler, a must read on promotions:
To a large extent, software engineering is a field full of ambiguity and complexity, and that makes compensation hard. So incentives tend to fail or backfire. Then I tried to invert the problem. What if I tried to design a promotion system to piss off as many employees as possible? What characteristics would it have?
- No pleasant surprises. In other words, you can only be disappointed if you didn’t get a promotion, you can’t be pleasantly surprised by a promotion.
- Create unhappiness by dependence on scarce resources. In other words, gate promotions based on scarce resources so that even people who would otherwise be qualified could become disgruntled through no fault of their own.
- Eliminate accountability from people who make the promotion decisions (e.g., through a committee). That way, promotion decisions can seem arbitrary.
- Ensure that promotions are competitive races between all qualified candidates. This ensures that people who manipulate that packet in such a way as to have the best looking packets will win over people who are trying to get feedback and improve, which is supposedly the point behind all these feedback systems.
When I looked at Google’s promotion system through this lens, I was very impressed. It seemed as though the system was designed to create disgruntled employees out of people who might otherwise be perfectly happy.
…
No matter what promotion system is in use, there’ll be flaws. Worse, these flaws are insidious. Since superstars are those who get promoted frequently, they see nothing wrong with the system. In fact, they’ll usually try to torpedo any changes that don’t benefit them, and since they’re the superstars, their opinions will carry more weight. Instead, it’s the misfits who see the flaws of the system most often. Talented misfits will stick around for as long as compensation is adequate, and leave once it’s not. And any manager will tell you that once compensation is the only thing holding employees to a company, you’re in a very tenuous and dangerous situation.
Really, just go read the whole thing right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. My thoughts after the jump.
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I’ll be up front; I don’t get it. Why is there this massive affinity for Apple in the Open Source community? Apple may be many things, but they are pretty much the antithesis of open source.
A while back, I was at the NoSQL East conference. As you may imagine, this is a very open source friendly group. Extremely so. Nearing the point of religion (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). I love open source; I run Linux on all my home servers, build MySQL wherever it fits most appropriately (Oracle type stuff pays the bills, but I’m not a zealot).
What I find ironic and amusing is the allegiance these same people have to MacBooks. I understand the “it just works” argument and “it’s really Linux underneath”, but the irony of the open source crowd working with what has to be one of the single most closed vendors on the planet is rather amusing.
And it’s not just NoSQL East. Almost any open source conference will have plenty of white fruity laptops floating around.
Hardware and open source do not usually go together; most open source people are not quite that dedicated (Richard Stallman excepted). And it’s not like Microsoft is all that much on the bandwagon for open source either. Nor should someone have to be purer than Caesar’s wife and run only developer’s licensing to even start in the App Store and the Kremlinology-like “will they approve it or will they not” approval process combining to produce a “don’t you worry your pretty little head, we know better than you” attitude from the folks in Cupertino, I just don’t get why the love. Can anyone explain it to me?
– Update –
Is Apple loosing cool points with techies? According to this article from Tech Republic, yes.
In any job, there are always things things that no one wants to do. If you work on a farm, no one wants to muck the stables. If you work in a restaurant, no one wants to clean the bathrooms. If you work in IT, no one really wants to write documentation (as a hypothetical example).
When you’re manager, you can hire someone to do all the things you don’t want to do. For example, status reports or collecting timesheets. Now, I’m not going to suggest to anybody that is a better use of a manager’s time to go and collect timesheets — a thing that would no doubt be more efficiently done (from a cost-effectiveness point of view) of some admin assistant. But, if as a manager, you want to maintain the respect of the people who are work for you, then there can be no jobs that are beneath you.
This is one of my management dictums: Hire people to do things you cannot do, not the things you don’t want to do. (And, yes, that’s the title of the post, too).
Think of what it would say to the person you’ve hired to do the job you don’t want to do. “You know, Bob, I don’t think your job is all that great or fulfilling. Now, go get out there and knock yourself out!”
To give a technical example, there are certain elements of Oracle database work I either don’t know to do or I don’t do well. Now, for someone who is put himself out as knowledgeable about Oracle, you might think this to be a bad admission, but I don’t view it that way even slightly. Oracle is a huge company with thousands of products; there is no way any one person can know all of them.
For example, I was asked recently to do some work with Oracle Financials. Well, I have worked with FinApps – back in 1999 (on 10.7SC). I was revisions and revisions away from being able to do a good job on this project. Now, I could have done this; I could have taken the time to learn the latest release, maybe even get certified and go do the work. However, in this situation, I would have been much better off finding someone who already is good at Financials and letting them do it, so I would then be able to focus on the things I do well (high availability, real time/TimesTen) as better use of my time.
I interview a lot of people. A lot. And, as some of you may have noticed, there are quite a bit more people chasing fewer jobs these days. So, in the interest of helping others out, here are some suggestions of things not to do during an interview.
To preface my comments, I work in the IT field and my interviewing technique was fine tuned during a long stint at a very demanding federal client. This environment was very fast paced and very high profile (I think one of the guiding comments from the client was “just keep my name out of the Washington Post”), which lead to an unfortunately high level of stress in the job.
When I had the opportunity to interview someone, I usually have between 30 to 60 minutes to determine if the person will be a good fit. After a few times, I believe I have created an interview approach to inject as much stress as possible into the situation to evaluate a potential candidate’s response. Some of examples of this approach would be:
The types of technical questions I ask usually contain buried knowledge; meaning, while the question was plainly asking one question, it would assume detailed knowledge of four to seven things required to formulate a reasonable response. As a hypothetical from an unrelated field, “when is it appropriate to use the feminine dative case?” This assumes you know:
Here are a few of the mistakes I see from interviewees:
Of course, now that I read this, I might sound a little bitter. Really, I’m just trying to help out a people who are looking for a job and may run across someone like me.
In my opinion, the NoSQL movement is in that techie-only phase. If you want to think of it hype cycle terms, NoSQL is pretty much all the way over on the left, although not for the usual reasons (as the some of the facets of the underlying technology is quite old). A lot of techies are really into it because “oooh, it’s a shiny new toy and I want to go play with it.” It will not become a “mainstream” idea and will not break out of this area until a major company embraces it for a mission-critical situation.
What I mean by mainstream is not a web-based company. Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, all those guys; while they are big companies in their own right, they are still kind of a niche.
“What about Amazon?” you may say. Amazon is probably the most mainstream company to adopt NoSQL for some of their operations (most notably, Dynamo). However, because they are somewhat of a tech company (one of the few survivors from the .COM days), I don’t think it’s as persuasive a case as it could be. Sure, they’re on the vanguard of mainstream companies, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about in this case. “And Google?” Sure, they’re the biggest player on the block, but they are even more of a pure tech company than Amazon is…
What will break NoSQL into the mainstream is when Caterpillar, or Dow Chemicals, or JP Morgan, or basically one of the old boring, completely un-hip companies that a number of the the techies I know love to denigrate. When one of those guys embrace NoSQL that will prove to the others who are adopting a wait-and-see approach that there really is something here worth doing and not just is not just a new shiny toy that will be abandoned for the next one.
The Oracle/MySQL deal went through a little while back. 8% of 2009 Oracle revenue came from their education division. In case you didn’t notice, the economy’s in a downturn, and people (particularly out of work people) tend to turn towards education as a differentiator when it comes to hiring. Combine that with the large percentage of MySQL installations in the world, and how long do you give until Oracle adds “Certified MySQL Administrator” to their cert list?
I’ll put a marker down for summer of this year.
Over on OpenForum, Marylene provides her FAQ for startups wanting to sell to the big boys:
Question: Will a large company pay for a startup’s product/services?
Answer: Yes, if the price is justified, and if you are speaking to people who feel the pain of a real and well-identified problem, and they’re on a mission to address it.
While she has some good points, my experiences in large organizations (both corporate and government) says that she’s missing the single largest factor as to whether or not someone in that position buys from a startup — managing risk.
There used to be an aphorism “No ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/gold“. Unless your product is uniquely positioned to solve the problem of the potential customer (and even then, you still have to overcome a few things), you will have to show ways to mitigate the risk to the buyer’s standing/career/position before he or she is going to take the chance on an unknown company.
For more info, check out the 5 guys problem that every startup must be able to answer.
Thanks to Apple’s iPad, the somewhat long brewing HTML5 standard vs Flash conflict is front and center on people’s minds. Well, more people than just web developers. As Apple has made the strategic decision to not support flash (claiming that most of Mac crashes are associated with flash processing), their market position is such that they have a decent chance on forcing the adoption of HTML5 far earlier than it otherwise would have happened.
First things first; I believe that HTML5 is the correct solution for the problem and will win out in the end. Furthermore, it is better for all of us if an open standard (such as HTML5) predominates over a proprietary one (such as Adobe Flash).
The problem is that a significant portion of the web uses Flash. Want to watch House from Hulu on your iPad? Won’t be happening (or, at least, it won’t for now). Want to browse the NY Times? Parts of that won’t work either.
Although HTML5 will eventually overtake flash, bear in mind that there are a significant number of people still using IE6 who are facing an upgrade challenge with the evolving standards.
I believe Apple intentionally doesn’t want to enable Flash not because of technical reasons — if they can do it on the Mac, they almost certainly have the capability to do it on the iPhone platform. Rather, companies like the NY Times will create dedicated iPhone applications. This has two consequences:
Hitachi has a brand spankin’ new guarantee with their storage offering:
Hitachi Data Systems Storage Reclamation Guarantee Program helps reduce storage capacity by 50 percent (terms and conditions apply) if you purchase a Hitachi Universal Storage Platform® V or Universal Storage Platform VM, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software and our Storage Reclamation Service.
Now, if they are being exceedingly literal, I’ll agree with them: virtualization will reduce their overall capacity by about 50%. However, I suspect they mean something a little different than the words above (by the way, Hitachi probably should hire a better copy editor). All I have to say is those must be some awfully interesting terms and conditions.
In my experience, introducing virtualization inevitably increases the amount of storage consumed within the system rather than reducing it (most frequently through VM Sprawl). Perhaps someone from Hitachi can enlighten me as to what I’m missing here, but I’m a wee bit skeptical…
