This fairly recent obsession with metrics in the workplace is driving companies insane.

A while back, I watched a video about all the ways hotels are trying to save money by, among other things, eliminating storage space, making the bathroom less private, removing desks, and pressuring guests to work at the bar, where they can spend more money. (By the way, that bartender? They're also the receptionist.) These changes are, of course, driven by metrics like “GSS” and “ITR,” whatever the f@*k those are.

Is there a kernel of truth to all of this? Sure. Aloft Hotels are cozy, and they seem to follow this playbook. I didn't mind staying in one when I was stuck in San Francisco for one night more than ten years ago. Would I want to stay in one of their rooms during a business trip or anything else lasting more than a couple of days? Hell no. I'd like a desk and somewhere to put clothes. (I know, I'm so needy. I travel with clothes.)

Metrics are fine, sometimes, when their use is limited and their shortcomings are genuinely appreciated. Taking them too seriously and letting them make the decisions, however, is a recipe for disaster. Hard questions demand more thoughtfulness than that. “GSS” and “ITR” are meaningful until they aren't, and nobody is going to find solace in those abbreviations when generations of potential customers steer clear of your business because they actually want something good.

Sadly, I don't think most businesses think that far ahead.

Show me the metric which proves that your business isn't incurring massive risk by ignoring common sense. Until then, I don't care about “the numbers.”

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Distrobox is amazing. It's like Linux Subsystem for Linux in the best possible way. (That's a play on the name Windows Subsystem for Linux.) With one command, anyone can spin up the shell environment of another Linux distribution, and the host files will be right there. Are you using Debian because you value desktop stability, but you want to use the latest Neovim? No problem. Use Distrobox to create an Arch or Fedora environment, install Neovim, and use it. That's it!

I'm surprised, disappointed, and a bit embarrassed I didn't know about it until now.

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Progress bars—those little horizontal bars that fill from left to right as your laptop or phone updates—are notoriously unreliable. One moment, a progress bar might be 10% full. The next thing you know, the work is done. If a written estimate is provided (e.g., “10 minutes”), you might notice it change dramatically in an instant.

As it turns out, building accurate progress bars is extremely difficult. In most cases, it's almost impossible for the computer to know how long the work will take without actually doing it.

This is the problem of software project estimation in microcosm.

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Remember, if you don't pursue your own stupid idea, you'll end up pursuing someone else's stupid idea. Case in point: Liquid Glass. Someone at the top thought it was a good idea, and thousands of Apple employees were apparently too afraid to say, “This sucks.”

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About two years ago, I wrote that the Beatles never set OKRs. It was the punchline to a larger point, but at the time, I was working for a company in the music industry, and I didn't want to criticize music manager types.

Now that I've moved on from that company, and especially because my car sports a custom bumper sticker with the phrase, I've decided to share the unabridged version:

I tend to believe that working too hard to come up with a name for a brand or product is pointless. A name doesn't need to be good to stick. I could point to Facebook or Apple, but there may be no better example than The Beatles. It really is a strange name. It's a pun! It's a dad joke! And yet, I can't imagine them being called anything else.

Can you imagine what a committee would have named the band? For that matter, can you imagine The Beatles writing roadmaps and setting OKRs? Sheesh.

Now that's a t-shirt. “The Beatles never set OKRs.”

I obviously feel the same way today. Speaking of music, maybe that's why one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs, both lyrically and musically, is “Have a Cigar”. A lot of management—certainly not all, but certainly too much—is worse than pointless. It's actively harmful.

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Incentives rule the world.

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I hate to criticize an organization as wonderful as Mozilla, but I must say, Proton is the company I wish Mozilla had become. We need an alternative to Google, a suite of competing web applications that put users first and protect privacy. Proton is accomplishing exactly that.

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You get what you measure.

If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”

Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”

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“Why are there different programing languages?”

An acquaintance once asked me this shortly after taking an online programming course. I said something about how any given language can be better or worse at solving a particular problem. French is great for poetry, and Haskell is great at representing algorithms and mathematical functions.

Nonsense!

Well, no, not completely. It's true. It's just not the whole story. Consider Python and Ruby. Why do we need both? Yes, yes, sure, there are important differences, but in the grand scheme of things, are they really that different? Hardly. They're both dynamic scripting languages which work well for web development. We could save a lot of time and energy by deprecating one and only using the other.

For that matter, why do we need Billy Joel and Elton John? They're not that different. They both play piano, they both write pop songs, and they both tour internationally. Talk about a waste of recourses! We could really save a lot of time and effort by having them join forces.

Does anyone think that would work? Of course not. Elton John doesn't want to sing “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” and Billy Joel doesn't want to sing “Tiny Dancer.” Billy Joel doesn't care about fashion and Elton John doesn't care about Long Island. They don't want to work together!

In the same way, Guido van Rossum thought it would be fun to create Python, and Yukihiro Matsumoto thought it would be fun to create Ruby. Millions of programmers like using blocks and millions of others love **kwargs. Who are we to disagree with them? Do we really think they would be equally productive doing something they don't enjoy?

Music is not a utilitarian matter, and neither is computer programming. Software development is an art as much as it is a science. When we forget that, we miss some of our most important opportunities.

A bottle of red, a bottle of white It all depends on your appetite

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I just read John Gruber's blog post recommending Kagi as a replacement for Google Search when it occurred to me, for the hundredth time in the last year… what the hell happened to anti-spam efforts at Google Search?

I met Matt Cutts once in 2011. He was very kind, and he explained to me that he worked to combat search engine spam at Google. At the time, I didn't really understand what he was talking about, but boy do I understand now. Perhaps that's the best compliment I could give him; few notice anti-spam efforts when things are going well.

Matt Cutts has since left Google, and now, I get lots of results which provide very little value. What a shame. Apparently, Google needed him more than he needed Google.

#SoftwareDevelopment #Tech