Category: Monocategorized

Oh, the omnipresent deadline. I know people love them and the huge whooshing noise they make when they fly past.

Software development is tricky work and it is tricky because it is not linear. In a linear process, when you are building something that takes 10 people, you can get it done twice as fast if you add 10 more people.

In software development it is not so easy. I believe that software development is geometric in complexity and sometimes adding people or adding tasks more than doubles the risk or the effort needed to complete a project.

That being said, everyone wants to know the ETA. It is important that people realize it is an “E” and not always an “A”. There are genuine reasons to ask for an ETA and genuine reasons why it is always wrong. That does not mean it is a bad question. In fact it is a very important question.

The number one response that everyone gives to an ETA is generally an acceptance that it is imperfect. I giggle inside when someone says”I am working on it right now.” That completely does not answer the question, and since it imparts almost zero valuable information, generally sets off a cascade of events. I am guilty of this. You are guilty of this. We all need to acknowledge that this is a perfectly acceptable initial reaction to being challenged with a deadline and move past it to really answer the question.

I have developed my own personal method for dealing with this question. I understand you will read it here and throw it in my face when you hear it, but I use it anyway and it will poison my little science experiment. When people ask me for an ETA, I often just respond “Whatever I tell you will be wrong. Do you want me to just make something up or get my work done?” and then go back to doing whatever I was doing.

This is an oddly useful answer. If you asked me for an ETA because you really want me to be done RIGHT NOW, you are probably going to leave me alone. That also tells me I should really hurry up.

If you reopen the conversation with a “we need to update the management” or “but someone wants to update <insert project management device>”, that means you really want me to give you a guess and hopefully will follow up with another question.

Having an ETA is really only useful to me as a manager if it is wrong. If it is right, then I did my job so good I should be on a beach right now sipping margaritas and fist bumping all my team when I get back. They are doing an amazing job and hopefully will be in the 0.1% someday because of how awesome they are. We all know the people who are always on time with their projects also walk on rainbows, and their sneezes contain glitter and smell like cotton candy and freshly baked pie. That is to say, that the person or project that is always on time, especially in the world of startups, is a rare fiction.

When an ETA is wrong, it is really useful because it leads to a secondary conversation. “Why did it change?” Project management, software management, and team management are all about this particular question. Why was there a change? All of these things are a form of change management and that is what really makes this stuff so tricky. It is like playing hockey with a self-aware puck that has (a) a jet pack and (b) low pain tolerance. Stuff is moving and not in a way you want it to. Having an ETA and understanding when that ETA moves is only mildly helpful on your current project. It will get you to check the boxes that need to be checked before the end of the day arrives. If that is all you are getting out of your ETA, then you are missing the real value of it.

The most important part of understanding why the ETA changed, is to incorporate those inputs into your next preflight mental checklist. Every failure, every misstep, and everything that goes wrong has to make it into the playbook in some capacity.

If you can do this perfectly every time, eventually you will have that glitter-sneezing team that ships everything on time.

If you do, I want to meet them and give them a handshake or fist bump. If I duck out of the way when they sneeze, it is probably because my wife doesn’t want glitter in the house.

Thanks again for reading! Looking forward to catching up with you all again next week!

Half of the time that I start writing I worry that the end result will be too long. The other half of the time that I start writing I fear it will be too short. This week is the latter.

The longer you spend in an engineering leadership role, the more abstract and difficult the problems become. The challenge is that you are so successful in building software that solves concrete problems that you might not be aware of the gradual shift into the more abstract world of suddenly much-less-solvable problems. I know that I missed it for a couple years.

It is an unusual experience to go from closing Jira tickets and regularly submitting repo commits to sitting around in meetings having lengthy conversations about comments added to proposals for processes. The tools that make you successful at the former do not always help you solve the latter. It is easy to come in armed with a preconceived notion and a pre-existing framework for success. It is also easy to get frustrated when that framework suddenly fails to be effective.

I remember the first time I ran into this. It was over fifteen years ago and it made me very frustrated. In due fairness to the worst boss that I ever had, I think he was trying to help me understand this. Unfortunately, he was terrible at his actual job and was such a poor leader that I zeroed out anything that he told me. I doubled down on thinking about problems on my own terms. I will leave off any additional rationalizations and justifications about my conduct at that time. I have come to peace with what happened and even apologized to a number of people who were in the blast radius of the months of that unfortunate failure to communicate.

I find myself on the other side of that conversation more often than not these days. Companies grow, marketplaces change, and people who do amazingly well at one thing suddenly get asked to do something new. I have already written about being mad at the wrong thing. Today we are going to speak a little more on that subject.

I go through a variety of emotions when I find someone who is in the middle of transcending from one role to another. I feel sorrow when I see they were ill prepared for it. I feel awe for people who are self aware of it. I feel excitement when I can see people making breakthroughs in their thinking and starting to realize their world is changing. The response varies pretty widely.

I have said previously that part of this writing exercise is therapeutic for me. I have also said previously that I want to help people make different career mistakes than I have. Today I am going to give a few pieces of advice on how to help make this process go more smoothlier.

Listen

If you have gone through any amount of career transformation so far, this will come as no surprise to you. Listening to feedback is important. I have seen people who have been given direct verbal and written feedback completely ignore it in as little time as five minutes later. In some cases they sought to minimize the lack of willingness to listen by making a joke about it immediately thereafter.

Being able to listen to people around you when you are growing is really important. Whether it is superiors, peers, or subordinates, everyone is going to try to tell you something that will help you. Acknowledge their feedback when you get it. Internalize what they are trying to tell you. Follow up with people who have given you feedback to offer examples of how you have taken their feedback and ask if there is anything else you should be doing differently.

Reflect

Set aside time to reflect on what you are doing and what you should be doing. This can be in the form of a personal “do not book” window on your calendar, or a mentoring session, or an additional 1:1 meeting with someone in leadership. When you are changing roles you should have meta-conversations with yourself and others on a weekly basis, if not more frequently. In addition to taking feedback from others, take a look at your actions over a window of time and ask yourself some questions about how you are spending your day:

“What is important to success in my current role?”

“What is important for me to learn before I am ready for my next role?”

“What could I have done differently?”

“Have I set myself up for success or failure?”

“What behaviors are setting me up for failure?”

“Is there a difference in my own definition of my success and leadership’s definition of my success?”

You would be surprised how many people are thrown into new roles without good guidelines or expectations and set themselves up for failure. It happens quite a bit when you are experiencing drastic career changes and professional growth. Being able to see that and figure out how to course correct for it is really essential to grow professionally.

Just Breathe

The last piece of advice probably sounds the dumbest. It is the most important.

Just Breathe.

This is some pretty universal advice honestly. Professional athletes and military personnel actually do some level of formal training around the importance of breathing.

This is relevant to software development and leadership.

I find a lot of the frustrations for first-time leaders are exacerbated by a need for clarity and closure as fast as possible. It is really easy to get lost in that immediate need and lose the bigger picture.

I think that some of the best advice I have given people who are taking on new roles or working to build new teams is to simply slow down and breathe.

This can literally be taking ten minutes to calm down in the middle of a tense online argument, or waiting a night before hitting send on a controversial email.

The number of times you need to urgently handle something is much less than you think, and even if it is moderately urgent, you can always respond by saying “I need some time to think about this.” If you are wrong then someone will correct you. If you are right, then the added time you have just acquired to reflect and listen will serve you in getting to a more thoughtful outcome.

Even if you are urgently needing to reply to something, taking a few deep measured breaths will help. It does not have to be some kind of Wim Hof thing, or multiple minutes breathing in accordance with beeps on some kind of watch or smartphone. 

Just breathe.

In summary, if you are finding yourself in a difficult situation in a new role, ask yourself some questions.

Did I listen to everything that I should be listening to?

Am I reflecting properly on what success is?

Should I take a moment and just breathe?

You would be surprised how many people will go zero for three. You might even be surprised how many people will go one for three.

If you can get proficient with these tools, it will help you grow faster professionally .

Thank you again for reading! 

It has been a while since I have explicitly asked you to tweetsnap, bikbook, or linklank my posts, so I am going to send you off with a mental picture of me piteously begging you to help me expand the reach of my rantings and ramblings.

Please promote these articles to people who could benefit from them if you find them interesting. If you do not know anyone interesting who would benefit from these articles then please just tattoo my blog url to your forehead and scream loudly at strangers to get their attention on the off-chance that these random terrified strangers will have an ounce of curiosity after you get escorted away from them by security or law enforcement.

In either case thank you for helping me and I will write some more next week!

Sometimes I meet someone who looks at all the available evidence that is visible to them and visible to everyone else, and then makes an obvious choice. It is like going to a bank teller and saying “may I please have one hundred dollars”. Most of the time they are going to look at you and say “not exactly”. You will need to show them proof of id. If it is a big bank, you may be required to sign a piece of paper or even enter your bank PIN. Almost nobody in the profession of Bank Teller is just going to give you $100, regardless of how you dress, what you need it for, or what time of day or year it is. And yet, in some professions, that kind of decision making is a requirement. You do not have the convenience of waiting for validation by PIN, or fingerprint, or passport photo, or signature. Sometimes you have to realize that you have to make a decision based on imperfect inputs and just do something even if it goes catastrophically bad.

I love it when I meet people who make decisions on imperfect inputs. I think they are the most amazing people in the world. I also seldom meet them. Most of the time, I run into checklist-managing bank tellers who have the worst job in the world. Their job is “Not Getting Fired”.

This has become one of the most important pieces of career advice I have given people over the years, and the people who have taken it to heart have become some of the most awesome people I have ever worked with.

It is very easy to wait as long as possible to make a decision and to do something that is inherently obvious and safe and can pass agreement by committee. When I was running my own game studio, I would often be working with early publishers and there were few things I hated more than coming into a meeting to talk about upcoming projects and hearing that “we just instituted a new green-light process.” The first person who gets that job usually comes there from a larger and more comfortable company and is going to spend the next six to nine months making safe bets—probably while figuring out the machinery and sorting out how their processes work. If that doesn’t happen? That guy Gets Fired. And he was not hired to Get Fired—at least not right away. The problem is that sometimes they get stuck into that pattern and then they get really good at Not Getting Fired.

I think this is a problem. I have done a few projects with a few companies that do not make financially successful products. The people involved will say something like “I am grateful that we had the opportunity to try something different, even if the market is not interested in a game that deviates from the current crop of hidden picture games.” Sure we did not make money (I thankfully broke even on it) but that statement alone made the whole endeavor totally worth it for us because we took a risk and we tested some assumptions. We tried something different, and we learned something.

Software engineering and startups are inherently risky. Most investors like to see the entire proposition massively de-risked before they write checks. That is perfectly fair. They are playing with Other People’s Money, and quantities that Carl Sagan would appreciate. For the average entrepreneur, you are taking pretty crazy risks and persuading people to bet their livelihoods on ideas before you are putting that kind of money in the bank.

I think that there is probably a time and a place to play it safe. Software development, especially consumer-facing software development, is generally a hard place for that. I think that the bigger the risks that people take, the higher the rewards. I have been blessed to have pretty decent passive income in the past by taking some crazy risks, and I will probably do so again despite having kids to feed.

Every once in a while I run into someone and get asked “what does that guy do at that company?” I sometimes respond immediately with the statement “His job is ‘Not Getting Fired’.” I generally have to follow that up with a pretty lengthy explanation, but I think that imparting that understanding is key.

If enough people realize how sad and boring and predictable and uninteresting that job is, maybe people will catch themselves looking in the mirror as they think “If I Do What I Want To Do, I Am Going To Get Fired.” And they will do it anyway because it is likely that it could be the right thing to do in that position.

And if they don’t, they may discover that ten years have blown by them giving people $100 bills in exchange for proof of ID, entering a pin number, and going home at the end of the day. And all things being equal, on those terms, I would not want to live my life Not Getting Fired. And I seldom do.

I hope you never become the person whose job is to Not Get Fired.

One of the reasons I write these articles every week is to help people avoid mistakes in their careers. If it is not possible to avoid them, then at least they can make well informed mistakes.

Today I am going to talk about the transition between individual contributor and manager, and how terribly that is often handled.

I have often had to explain to people that when they start taking on leadership roles, they are not providing an incremental increase in value to their employer. In fact, they are providing an order of magnitude more value. The table stakes are no longer just your own salary, but the salary of your entire team. It is hard to understand this initially because your salary does not jump up to that value, and generally that is one of the more obvious yard sticks people use to measure their value to the company.

The problem is that when you first make this transition into leadership, you are going into professional freefall and it is not always clear what you are supposed to be doing.

The first time a software developer transitions into a leadership role, they are generally not given much coaching or mentoring and are not sure how to solve problems at the next level. The first time that there is a crisis in their new role they will probably reflexively resort to their default behaviors. This is the wrong thing to do, and yet, it is okay. Sometimes the only way to learn things is by making a mistake. 

If you are a really good individual contributor and you start to code your way out of all your problems, then you will not make the transition successfully into a leadership role. This is where the problem becomes sinister. The first-time-leader here will want to prove they can do the job, and when there is a crisis, they will also jump in directly and solve it individually, usually when nobody is looking. They will spend seventy-five percent of their time doing their assigned role of a leader, and seventy-five percent of their time working directly on the codebase to make sure the work gets done.

Do you see the problem here?

It takes some time to start developing leadership habits and new default behaviors. It takes longer if you are falling back onto existing default behaviors that need to be unlearned. Furthermore, if you are jumping in to directly help your teams without a direct conversation about it, then you also risk alienating or frustrating your teams. If you are cannibalizing their work and doing it yourself, they could fall into a trap of learned helplessness. After all, why should you try anything if your boss is just going to jump in and take it over the finish line for you? At the very least you will go to them before doing anything significant so they can sign off on it, rather than investing some of your own time learning.

This is a difficult place to be. Unfortunately, it is also a common phase of everyone’s careers, especially at small companies. At a larger, more mature company, you might find more support for giving new leaders some room to grow, and more structure for identifying and preventing individual contributor default behaviors.

It is definitely worse in startups. The lack of institutional support and need to have stuff built before the company runs out of money is a pretty severe issue. Finding the right balance between starting to develop leadership and management skills vs building code will require burning some dry powder reserves. What makes that worse is that most startups are run by serial entrepreneurs who have seen this pattern before and think that it is normal and acceptable.

What is fascinating is when you are in conversation for a Vice President of Engineering role at a company and the recruiter or hiring manager asks “Do you still code”? Generally that is a sign that the business is very early, the title is fictitious, or the hiring manager does not know exactly what they need in this role. Sometimes all three could be true. I have had to bite back the urge in leadership recruiting conversations to ask “How much time does the Vice President of Safeway Foods spend stocking shelves?” It is a legitimate urge I experience, and also not very constructive. For clarity, by the way, I have to reply “Yes. I. Still. Code.”

Now we get to the really interesting part of the engineering leadership dilemma. It is not wrong to ask your engineering leadership about their technical experience. In fact it is vital that your engineering leadership has a good grasp of engineering problems and engineering practices. I have seldom met an effective engineering leader who has not been a software developer themselves in the past. Just about all of them have been through that seventy-five-plus-seventy-five transition period. Given the emphasis these days on work/life balance, why is this still so prevalent?

There are a few reasons.

The first reason is the expectation outside of engineering. Right or wrong, there is something ritualistic about startups. It is some sort of crucible that people throw themselves into, to see what gets forged in the fires of possibility. The upside of a successful startup is life changing even if it is very unlikely. This translates into significant material wealth for early staff at a company, and it is also very true for leadership. I have heard more than one serial startup executive state that they do not want to pay market rate for talent because taking a pay cut is a sign of commitment. That burns my soul. Generally there is not much cash on hand in early-stage companies, so maybe this is some sort of rationalization. I do think that the average person does not negotiate enough for more stock in exchange for this trade off. I also think that most of them forget that only a fraction of a percentage of startups make that gamble worthwhile.

The second reason is the expectation inside of engineering. Let’s face it—engineers are smart people. Smart people like to work for other smart people. They want to believe that their leadership has good, well-informed plans, and that they are making well-educated decisions. The instant that they work for someone who is not making well-educated decisions or does not have well-informed plans, they immediately lose trust and confidence in their leadership and perhaps even their company.

I have experienced this. I had a boss who had a poor understanding of technology. I offered to help them be successful in their role after they made a few obvious mistakes. They rejected my offer, reasonably politely, and pointed to their title as to the reason why they did not need my help.

It did not go well after that.

So what can we do here?

For starters, we can do what I am doing now. We can talk about it.

If you are in this position, you should examine your current role, your long term expectations, and what you are getting out of it in terms of rewards.

Most of the time someone is in a transition role between being a leader and an individual contributor, there is a short window of time on it. If it is more than a year and there is no sign that this will change, then you have a problem in your hands. If you are stuck in this role, you could potentially burn out, or even more likely, your self-preservation instincts will kick in and you will find a new role elsewhere that relieves the symptoms of your pain. Everyone loves to hire someone who is stuck in this position. First of all, it gives them an opportunity to be grateful to you for rescuing you, which is an added incentive to be successful in their new role. Secondly, you just got a new leader trained up on someone else’s dime.

Before you bail out or burn out, you should have a clear conversation with leadership on where you are, where you are going, and what needs to change for you when you are stuck in this place. In that event, if you do leave, they at least understand what happened and maybe understand that they were part of the problem. If they are unable to make a substantive change due to business reasons, they should at least bump your equity as consideration for your struggles.

Alternatively, you should reach out to people who have been through this before. I am presently mentoring a couple of people who are in this position. It does help to have someone inside or outside of your organization to discuss these struggles and to come up with things to do that help make things better, or at least help you develop new habits and break through any potential cognitive dissonance.

The road to being an engineering leader is long and hard. It does not have to be lonely.

Thank you again for reading! If you are in this position and do not feel like you are in a position to talk to anyone in your company about it, please reach out. I would be happy to spend some time learning about your situation and your struggles and I am happy to share my perspective.

See you all next week!

They say people do not leave jobs, they leave bosses. I think that reflects 50% of my reactive career decisions over a 20 year span. And if you looked at my LinkedIn profile, that is an unfortunate number of bosses.

So how do you know how you have a good boss?

Is it because you get free pizza when you are hungry?

Is it because you get a good raise every year?

The sad thing is that most of the things that people like about their boss are the opposite of traits of a good boss. You might be getting a lot of things that make you comfortable, and appear to be valuable on the surface. In fact, the better the perks you are receiving, the more likely you are probably working for a bad boss.

I am going to give you the characteristics of what I see in a good boss and hopefully at the end of this short article you will sit down and ask yourself if you have a good boss or a bad boss.

For me a good boss does three things.

1. Makes sure I have the tools to do my job
2. Lets me know what his concerns are with his job
3. Grooms me for the next step in my career

That probably sounds abstract and nebulous. I will try to break it down.

Item 1: Having the tools to do my job.

Every time I have managed people and I am needed to moderate some sort of disagreement between two coworkers or two different teams, I always make a big deal about it. I always tell people “the last thing you want me to do is make this decision for you” and sometimes I have to privately sit down with a person and explain “You were hired to solve problems, and I am concerned you are spending more time making them”. That is never a pleasant conversation. When I am coming into a role I want to make sure that my boss has given me the ability to do what needs to be done. Do I have hiring authority? A budget? The right people already on a team? The right tools for me to be effective? If something is missing, I need to be able to go to my boss and make sure that I can get those things or else be empowered to create a solution on my own. This is harder than it sounds, but I have been asked a few times to join a company with constraints on my job that make success impossible. I have learned to avoid that situation.

Item 2: Lets me know what his concerns are with his job.

I am probably worse at this than I want to be, and I am sure many people are. The last thing you want to do is to let people who need to believe in your leadership know that you need anything in particular. I have learned to start trusting people with this more and more as I have evolved, and also made it clear when it is something that is a professional concern or a personal limitation. Let’s be honest—none of us are perfect. Sometimes people on our teams do not help us as much we would like them to, and sometimes the solutions to problems are not easily attainable. Being able to separate personal issues from structural business problems is hard, and it is worth having a conversation with people you are working with to make sure those get resolved. This is a lot harder than it sounds in reality but it is valuable because…

Item 3: Grooms me for the next step in my career.

A friend of mine flattered me recently when we agreed to meet for coffee. I asked him why he always makes time in his bay area visits to get together and he pointed out that he considers me a “best athlete” problem solver. I really cherish that feedback.

I often go out of my way to hire “best athletes” for most of the teams I build as opposed to “best athlete” candidates. For the work that I do there are too many unknowns to focus on “best fit”. If I go and find the best person to solve a specific problem for a specific product, nine times out of ten they are going to struggle when we have to pop the clutch and prioritize some sort of crazy emergency issue related to marketplace shifts. This may be a unique problem to startups but I have yet to regret choosing “best athletes” in hiring.

A big part of the value here is in working with the people on your team and getting them to take on more and more responsibility. There was a period of time in my career when I became very mindful about my role and my responsibilities. There was also a period of time, prior to that, when I was a ravenous bulldog intent on doing my job to the best of my ability and chewing through any obstacle in my way to get my work done, often leaving a trail of chaos and bewilderment in my wake.

To anyone who was affected by the latter, I am deeply sorry. In the case of the former, I often ask myself “how do I make sure that if I get struck by a meteor, the company I work for will continue to succeed”. I know that is dramatic, but it is valuable to ensure there is a succession plan for the organization. I have done some minor team rearranging, and also some random schedule adjustments simply for the sake of ensuring that meaningful work can happen without me. As an engineering manager, for example, I was accused (correctly, and fairly) on a few occasions of missing specific meetings on purpose, just to test that people can manage on their own. “Szeder is meddling with the warp core again” was how my peers stated it, and I cannot say it is wrong—but if you continually try to explore space at warp four, you will never need to know what happens if you urgently need to go warp ten.

I hope this was an enjoyable read. I have had some bad bosses in my time and honestly, whenever I manage people I look in the mirror some days and ask myself if I can see previous managers peering back at me. Maybe that critical self-reflection is the best feature of all for a boss to have.

So what do you think makes a boss a good boss? I would love to know!

It is interesting to look at an internet product or service on its one-year, five-year, and ten-year anniversaries. Let’s take LinkedIn for example. I have a low six-digit LinkedIn user number, which means I was in the first 150k customers. A few years into its existence, I decided I was getting enough value and that I would pay for a premium membership. A few years after that, I decided I was not getting any value for what I was paying and I cancelled my subscription. Somehow in the middle of that experience I went from being their customer to being their product.

There is a similar sort of feeling I get when I play online games. I have played World of Warcraft off and on since The Burning Crusade Expansion. We had a two-to-three season run with Fortnite in our household where even my wife would jump on the PS4 and squad up.

This weekend was the first time I reopened Fortnite to take a look at it in a long time. I gotta admit it was a pretty alien experience.

So what happened? Let’s try to figure that out.

Fortnite’s early seasons did some very interesting things. They attracted a reasonably casual audience. You could log in every day and pick up a new quest. The quests were largely simple and you had a window of multiple days to complete them. The advantage to this system was that if you were terrible with shotguns, for example, then you could let that quest time-out over a couple of days and you would still get other interesting quests on a daily basis. The threshold of risk and commitment was exceptionally low for a pretty significant payout. I think this was a magical system and if it was on Yelp, I would give it five stars.

A curious thing happened next. A competitive battle royale game that was a better “gamer game” came out called Apex Legends. It was by all of my measures a better product, except it was not as popular as Fortnite. We can only guess at the reasons for that. While the gameplay felt better, the graphics were clearly “less cartoony” than Fortnite. Also, they had a pretty rigorous meta system that I considered more challenging and required more risk and a higher degree of commitment to be successful.

I think you can probably see where this is going.

I must not be the only person who thought their meta system was better. It made itself felt a few seasons later inside of Fortnite. The more complex meta system was more “gamery”, and as a family of filthy casuals we just did not find it appealing.

While I can appreciate the thought process that went into it, on the surface you could make a snotty comment about doing “fast follows” on less successful games. I do not recommend racing another company to second place if you are already winning the race. I do know that we went from an eye-popping amount of cosmetic goods purchases each month to zero very quickly.

I mentioned World of Warcraft earlier as a business that struggles with the same issue. There is this dichotomy between the casual gamer and the core gamer. I will say that World of Warcraft has done a better job of servicing both groups at the same time than most live online games out there, which is a tremendous feat.

Believe it or not, this has something to do with LinkedIn. Much like there are casual gamers and core gamers in online games, there are also different kinds of professionals who use a service like LinkedIn. Initially LinkedIn catered more to a casual crowd and focused on empowering and rewarding people for building and maintaining networks. I remember having conversations with people about how high the bar used to be to get someone to accept an invite to your network. LinkedIn figured out that the casual network building also serviced another customer with deeper pockets: The hiring manager. At some point there was a transition inside of LinkedIn to provide greater product support for the higher margin business. 

At that point there is this weird free fall in feature development for customers you have, in favor of making features for customers you want.

It is a difficult place to be and, unfortunately, it is a common one. I have found that if you stare long and hard enough at any successful internet company, they go through a painful transition like this every three to seven years. I will tip my hat to Apple here. I think they have probably done the best job of managing their customer expectations over their multiple transitions from business to business. 

I think that most consumer internet companies struggle with this when they get to scale because of the pressures of public companies and investors. Nowadays I generally do a pretty good job  at realizing when I stop getting value from an internet company, and I turn off the cash-and-eyeballs spigot pretty quickly.

The most painful application I use today that has undergone this kind of transition is Google Maps. Before I say anything further I want to acknowledge freely that I should probably use a different Google product like Waze. There is some stubborn get-off-my-lawn part of me that refuses to use two different mapping applications from the same company. Is it a form of philosophical protest? I do not know. I do know that any time I get selected for feedback and reviews on my experience with Google Maps, I am very unkind in my feedback.

What makes Google Maps so painful for me is the street-by-street directions. I generally have a route mapped out for me on my phone when I travel. Sometimes I will very safely open up the street directions so I can figure out the exit number, or street name for my next turn. Yes, some of us do not have navigation systems built into our cars yet. You can fax me your disappointment later.

The part that burns my soul is when I do open up the application to get the listing of directions, someone inside of Google put me into some sort of A/B test group that indicates that the most important thing that I need to see is an ad for ride-sharing, a parking garage, and a nice little bar graph of how busy the destination is.

The name and number of the exit that I am looking for is accordingly buried deep under the fold (that means it is off the screen for all of you UI/UX language impaired readers).

That is correct. The most important piece of information I consistently need immediately requires an additional swipe to bring up into view.

I am cheerfully including a screenshot of this horrible state of affairs for your viewing pleasure.

Somewhere along the way Google Maps, much like Fortnite, stopped thinking about me as a customer.

I am writing about this because it is a pretty insidious problem. Not a lot of businesses think carefully enough about the customers they have while they are chasing after customers that they want.

When you get into work tomorrow I hope you sit down and think about this.

Are there applications and services you are using that used to be great products and suddenly feel frustrating?

Are you reading feedback from customers that indicate that maybe your own product is one of these?

I could argue that this is a consequence of businesses being heavily fixated on growth. I also think that this is a systemic issue that affects most companies, and that it generally does not get significant mindshare.

Now that I have made you all aware of what is wrong with your once-favorite applications and angry at the lack of mindfulness in thirsty growth-mongering businesses, I want to thank you for reading along! I try to focus on engineering leadership topics, and I cheerfully admit I went a little off topic today.

Let me know by comments, faxes, or carrier pigeon if you approve or disapprove of the randomness of this week’s conversation.

iMonopoly

I worked for a year for Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA. I really enjoyed playing many of their early titles during my formative years and I believe that playing some of the early EA games like Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, Ultima IV, and Pinball Construction Set were the foundation for my career as a game developer.

One of the things that made EA successful early on was their decision to eliminate the middleman in going to retail. There is a lot of documentation on the business innovation and technology innovation that EA did in order to generate outsized returns compared to their competitors.

I first made BREW and J2ME games in 2002 for feature phones. More recently I have worked on iPhone and Android games for smart phones. Throughout both of those eras, there are large incumbent platforms who have similar properties to the middlemen that EA circumvented.

This brings us to today and the Epic Games lawsuit against Apple. Oh yes they are probably suing Google too and everything or whatever. But let’s talk about the Epic Games vs Apple lawsuit.

I think this is going to be the games industry lawsuit of the decade.

It goes without saying that I am often an indie or startup developer, and so as a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” my sympathies lie with the content creators and my own person-of-the-year: Tim Sweeney. If you think that prejudices my opinion, I can accept that. I-yam-what-I-yam. I also think that the games industry is still formative and we are still figuring many things out. Every penny that we can keep inside of a game company is a penny that gets reinvested in better games.

Accordingly, I want to talk about thirty percent and why I am rooting for an independent games store (like the Epic Games Store) on Apple as an eventual outcome from this case.

Let’s start by asking an interesting question: What does it really cost to make a game?

The answer varies. It is like asking “what does it cost to make a wheeled vehicle?” A bicycle is cheaper than a car is cheaper than a semi-truck. They all have different material requirements, different sizes, and different assembly processes. You have teams of various size comprising varying specialties. There are games that are made by one person, and there are games that have high profile actors, hundreds of software developers, and special effects production teams similar to those of the movie industry.

It is hard to say what it truly costs to make a game because of this range. There are so many different ways for people to make games that it the best time ever to be a game developer. I am also fond of saying that because it is the best time to be a game developer, that makes it the worst time to be a game developer too. Everyone and their sibling has a studio opening up and we are blessed as players with a lot of different choices available when we sit down and want to play something.

So what does this have to do with the thirty percent cut of the platform store?

Almost nothing, unfortunately, but I wanted to break down All-Of-The-Costs that people think about so we can focus on the ones that matter: Transaction costs, security costs, and marketing costs.

I think that we can all agree that there is an intrinsic cost for doing a credit card transaction. Tim Sweeney over at Epic Games said repeatedly that fifteen percent is a good number for that, and that is what the Epic Game Store charges. I like that number. It is reasonable. Fifteen Percent is also less than Thirty Percent.

So let’s ask about that other fifteen percent.

Apple has said they provide a secure platform for players and for game developers. They have a closed ecosystem for content and safeguards to keep people in their garden. I can respect that security is worth something—when it actually works.

You can make a case that they are investing time and money from their app store profits in protecting users. You can also make a case that they are fighting a losing battle. They have created a low moat to content developers to get into the store, and also have created an attack vector potential that exposes them to bad actors like the dubious app described above.

I certainly hope, as a result of asking for 30% of app store revenue, that they will provide some recourse for the individual above who lost their life savings to an Apple Approved™ product, right? Does this work like FDIC deposits in a bank? For a trillion dollar company, it should.

I am also skeptical that this is the case.

Setting aside that one specific piece of weak empirical evidence, I want to talk about marketing costs. This is where the pain for most developers truly begins. Because we are blessed with such a golden era of game creation capabilities, we are flooded with an assault of content on a daily basis. Never have we had more choice for what to play on every platform. On mobile you are even luckier than on other platforms because you can download the vast majority of games for free. Free-to-play game developers make their revenues through repeated digital purchases on the back-end. There is such a voracious appetite for buying in-app items and currencies that the one percent of customers who do pay, pay so much that it supports the cost of the development and marketing for just about every game genre out there.

As companies get successful and as brands start to get built or enter into this space, suddenly there is a need to promote and market content to players. Of course, this is what some of that thirty percent is for, isn’t it?

Incorrect. If you asked the average top 500 mobile game developer what their budget was for marketing and user acquisition, it is not going to include any of the money that gets taken by the platform and it will generally be half or more of the developer’s margin because they are racing to outspend their competitors on acquiring eyeballs. Welcome to the red ocean, everyone!

And this is why I think that Tim Sweeney from Epic Games is talking some sense when he says fifteen percent is reasonable. If you are not getting marketing built into that thirty percent, then that is a pain point and a place to improve if you want to help developers have more money to build and promote their games.

I worked at hi5 Networks way back in the day and we tried to encourage people to come to our platform off of Facebook Canvas. We included a promotional package as a part of coming to our platform and aggressively marketed games within a framework based on expected Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU) ratios. If you had a very good game that was retaining users at a high DAU/MAU ratio, we would promote you as a platinum-level partner. If you had acceptable numbers, you were gold or silver. If you didn’t have good DAU/MAU numbers, we would put you into an experimental rotation and sit you down in the corner while you figured out what you did wrong.

Our long term goal was to find a minimum transaction cost for people, say in that fifteen percent range where we say “we will be a transaction partner for you” that would include zero marketing for zero percent revenue. We wanted to build a slider for game partners where you could ratchet that up as high as you wanted in exchange for preferred promotion.

When you launch your game you want to have the marketing percentage low while you figure out your game’s success rate. When you have figured it out, then you probably want to give a larger percentage of revenue to the platform in exchange for marketing or promotion to attract users. Once you have established a healthy audience you could drive that sliding revenue share back to “just the transactions” for new users.

In the current era everyone has to install one or more ad networks or ad network aggregators. All of this has to be done outside of existing platform fees and the developers are forced to pay extra tariffs to extra companies in order to get players into their game.

I often wonder why other platforms are not doing this. I think it makes a great deal of sense for everyone. I think if we had this today in all of the platforms, then we probably would all be better off as a game industry.

So let’s get back to the lawsuit.

I want to ask four more questions.

• What would I do if I was Apple?
• What would I do if I was Google?
• What would I do if I was Epic Games?
• What would I do if I was me?

What would I do if I was Apple?

First of all, my answer would be “What was that question? I can’t hear from atop this trillion dollar pile of money.” Oh wait—that is what they are doing. They have agreed to create a special small business program for companies that are not making any money to have fifteen percent until they are actually making money. This solves the problem for ninety-five percent of the developers out there. It is pretty clear that they understand what small percent of companies are making serious money. It is good to have thirty percent of all of the big revenue games and they do not really care about that extra fifteen percent of zero million dollars. I think that making this concession was a shrewd move and took some of the sting away from the younglings in the game developer ecosystem. The suggestion I would have for Apple is my idea from hi5 that I outline above. If you want to retain a larger percentage of revenue from developers, start giving them larger marketing value. Absorb or obsolete the inefficient third-party markets that developers are using after paying thirty percent. Heck, even make the sliding window of revenues that I suggested above. If it was effective, you would make more than thirty percent from some developers!

What would I do if I was Google?

If I was Google, I would focus on what Google does best. If you don’t know what that is, look it up on Google. Google is not a credible competitor in In-App Purchases for a variety of reasons. First, they did not train their users with years of habit-forming 99 cent purchases for music (hello there iTunes). Second, they are an ads business, and that is their core competency. Finally they have a less affluent audience, pound for pound globally, compared to their higher-priced-prestige-branded competitor.

So embrace that. Rather than do an also-ran strategy of matching fifteen percent for small app developers, go all in. Partner aggressively with your content people and make it fifteen percent for everyone. Accept that you are not winning this battle. And you already let your brand partners like carriers and handset makers offer their own store fronts. You may as well say “Yes we support this lawsuit and we support our content creators and we are going to move to fifteen percent for everyone and embrace our content partners’ success and want them to reinvest their winnings in content our users love!” What do you get out of this? For starters you are suffering some pain at the expense of creating deeper pain for a competitor. That has to count for something. You might also find that people will suddenly care more about merchandising on your platform and want to aggressively work to get you better content as a launch partner. You could also find that the halo effect of providing service to your content partners will be reciprocated by people trying to find ways to incentivize their VIPs to play on your platform. After all, some of the biggest VIP payers in these games would probably recoup the cost of a free high-end Android device over a small window of time.

I think there is a window of opportunity here for Google to outsmart a competitor and win the love of the developer community and put a “best foot forward” for becoming the platform of choice for developers. I think the long term rewards for Google would be worth it.

What would I do if I was Epic Games?

I think they are already doing many of the right things. They have a storefront created. They are giving away games that players love. They have a handful of brands and great experiences they are leveraging to break down the monopoly on content stores. They are providing tools and technology to developers to get behind their push towards greatness. They even had a contest to give away “Free Fortnite” hats as merch! Yes, I own one. Yes, I love it.

So if they already have a pretty good story, what else could they do?

I think they could probably invest some more time finding examples of Apple behaving like a monopoly. I am going to tell a story here to give an example of things to look for.

When I am talking with Apple developers I am constantly inundated with stories about how painful the process is to submit an app. There is an interesting subset of these stories that has an extra wrinkle.

Apple itself has its own content guidelines and they often reject submissions for technical reasons as a way of enforcing rejection for subjective reasons. Years ago, I had a number of friends who were working on applications that were reviewed by Apple and rejected. Sometimes they add a message to the rejection to the effect that “this might not be a suitable application for Apple for its store and you should consider maybe just sharing it with your friends using ad-hoc provisioning.

This is a curious position to take for a store. This is only half of it. Let’s talk about how insidious the process really is.

Apple has a set of submission guidelines, and generally they have a feedback system and a reasonable turnaround time for processing your application.

The majority of times that someone runs afoul of this process they will find themselves getting a single rejection reason, and it will come at a painfully slow rate.

Apple will use their technical submission process as a weapon to apply a death-of-a-thousand-cuts to an unwanted title with the hope that you finally give up and stop submitting your application over and over again.

You can generally expect that they will continue this process up to a year. For the people who had goofy apps, or stuff that was not really exciting to Apple, every one of them who persisted in submitting over and over eventually got through. This is a subset of people who attempted. Apple has done a very good job of using technical reasons to keep stuff out of their store that they do not like.

If you ask me, that sounds like a monopolistic practice. It is also one that can be means tested, or discovered, to add more fuel to the fire.

For example, what if you made a game called “Rotten Apple Smasher” and tried to submit it to the store? Or made a game called “Idle App Store Submission Process Rejector Tycoon” where you were a process reviewer for games?

You could create a technically viable application that takes cheap shots at Apple. I would wager it would not pass the subjective content smell-test and they would do their best to tell you not to submit it back to their approval process.

If your application was developed with ten “violations”, and submitted independently with a similar game with the same issues, would you find that there was subjectively different treatment for two different experiences?

I would bet money that you would.

So what would I do if I were me?

First, I would start experimenting with Progressive Web Apps. Second, I would write some articles leading towards discussing ecosystem issues as it got closer to Apple’s day in court. Third, I don’t really know. I am currently still on the second thing. 

Long term, I would love to help turn my part-time efforts to make web content outside of the app store into something bigger. This is the same elimination of the middle man strategy that EA did which helped them attain dizzying heights as a game publishing juggernaut. I believe strongly that we will see interesting innovations and iterations in mobile content in the coming five years to tackle the problem that Epic is tackling.

Thanks again for reading. I hope you enjoyed tagging along as I just crossed “Work at Apple” off of my list of potential things I could do with my life, for all the world to see. Is it a bad idea to alienate a company this way? I don’t know. I do not buy their products as a consumer and I do not believe they have my best interests at heart as a creator. Does being self interested in the advancement of content creators make me a bad person? I sure hope not.

Stay tuned for next week’s article. I doubt it will be as bombastic as this one, but it certainly cannot be worse than last week’s “John Szeder gives himself a report card and thinks he mostly did a good job last year with his writing” article.

I have dabbled on and off as a writer for a while now. It was a natural step to take for someone who enjoys storytelling. It is also probably a large part of why I love working on video games. Video games always tell a story, even if it is not a story-based game. This week’s random article is about writing and story-telling.

Last year I made a commitment to blogging weekly as a way of working on my writing skills, and I am still maintaining the habit. I never got to figuring out “the twitter”, which was the other commitment I made to myself. I may revisit that one soon. Part of the problem is that I have an extensive community on facebook and they give me plenty of social reciprocity for my limited story-telling. Also, Linkedin is a serviceable platform for broadcasting my writing.

Let’s talk a little about my goals for my blog this week. Here are the five goals.

• I wanted to get better at writing.
• I wanted to write regularly to build a habit.
• I wanted to offer some education from my career.
• I wanted to build an audience.
• I wanted to start promoting things I am working on.

As an exercise, I am going to evaluate myself on each of them.

First Goal: I wanted to get better at writing.

I would say I am  “just successful” here. The metrics week-over-week would disagree. I am blessed with a good friend who reads these articles and takes most of the cartoon stink-lines out of them. I generally get 10 corrections per page per week, split between grammatical syntax fixes (80%) and rephrasing requests for my stream-of-consciousness writing. I generally pour most of these articles out in a single session lasting thirty to seventy minutes. It is hard for me to re-read my own writing and catch the subtle errors.

Second Goal: I wanted to write regularly to build a habit.

I am going to say I am “very successful” here. I have lots of things to write about yet, and I am maintaining a pace. I get nervous every few months when my “to do” pile of articles runs dry. I think I can sustain this for at least another three to six months. Caveat: I say that to myself every three to six months.

Third Goal: I wanted to offer some education from my career.

I am going to say I am “very successful” here. I am actually humbled by the number of people who reach out to me when I write an article. It is seldom zero and it gets up to ten people sometimes. I really appreciate everyone’s feedback and validation on what I am writing. The majority of people with whom I have discussed some of my articles have been people I have worked with in the past. A smaller number are people who have read something that touched them and wanted to learn more.

Fourth Goal: I wanted to build an audience.

I am going to say I am “just successful” here. I was tempted to invent a new category of “successful” for my audience-building goals, but I stopped. It started to read like one of those long articles in an online recipe that you scroll past because it is just a random wall of text that isn’t the recipe you came to find. So let’s just say that I am pleased with the slow growth of my little writing habit, even if I am not an internet marketing guru. I am also going to skip past using this as a not-so-subtle plea to all of you to share these articles with your friends. Maybe. I am going to have to spend some time thinking about things I can do to make that “very successful”.

Fifth Goal: I wanted to start promoting things I am working on.

This is where it falls apart. I am not successful at promoting things I am working on. I have at least one hobby-project that I completed last year that needs to find its legs. I also have another project in the works that has suffered from some unrelated delays. I did write some horrible e-books I am going to link here ironically (desperately? curiously?) to see if anything happens. If nothing else, you can see how far I have come from the amusing little stories that were the genesis of my writing experiences. I also have some other things I want to promote. I have a game I am building that I want to talk to you all about when the time is right. I made some little web apps here and there. I also would like to participate (on a part time basis) in building venture studios. Perhaps these other projects have all moved a lot more slowly than I wanted them to because I am spending time focusing on my writing, working through a global pandemic, and supporting a family. Regardless, the other goals have been met so well that I do not regret being unsuccessful here.

I make myself take a local hike after I am done my weekend writing. It gives me time to reflect on what I have said and what I should do differently. I may write a follow-up post to this article if I decide that I need to revamp my writing goals for this year.
Thank you again for reading! I apologize that this is a lot shorter than usual—blah blah blah Easter. For upcoming articles I have some thoughts on the Epic Games’ monopoly lawsuit, some opinions on “ad-hoc extracurricular education” while working professionally, and more ongoing lessons-from-the-trenches about engineering-management do’s and don’ts. The rambly ranting will resume next week!

Hello everyone! I am reaching deeper into my bag of made-up-things-to-talk-about. This week I want to severely abuse the english language and the notion of metaphors to talk about imperfect teams.

Throughout the course of your leadership career you will find that you have individuals on your team that are not quite perfect for their existing role. I find that figuring out what to do in those situations is one of the biggest challenges in team management.

It reminds me sometimes of this.

I have found that it is worth it to spend a little extra time making sure that everyone has the best possible role on a team, even if it is not perfect. I wanted to talk about a small handful of specific individual types I run into pretty regularly.

The obscure specialist

As systems mature and evolve you might find that you will have one or two people with an indispensable skill set. They are very good at one specific thing, and not so great at many other tasks. If this person was not employed here, and a specific piece of technology broke, your customers or your partners are going to have a bad time. A long time ago I worked at a startup where we needed to have a Flash developer around for emergency fixes for a legacy piece of software. This was not a full time job. The individual in question was a decent developer, but was not really suited for delivering back-end software, which was primarily what the rest of the team was working on.

So what do we do here? I find that I have to do a little calculus when this situation appears. The first thing you should do is to figure out the potential frequency of issues and the resulting dollar impact to your business. In this case it was used by a large percentage of our customers. An incident happening once a year would approximately cause enough of a cost to the business that would justify a year’s salary. Flash updates or security issues happened at that frequency year over year. So even if he did nothing all day but put out fires, it was a good return on investment.

That being said, I am not a fan of keeping team members on the bench and I know that most people who love making software dislike sitting around too. So the next thing to figure out is what they should do when they are not dealing with urgent software issues. Sometimes you can give them low-hanging-fruit tasks that they may not be terribly excited about. This is risky because it distracts other team members who may be needed to help train them or spend time improving code that may be sub-optimal. Alternatively you can make up some projects that better align with their skill-set on the legacy feature they are currently supporting. There is no perfect answer here. In the end you will likely experience a regrettable loss to your team and need to figure out how to find a contractor to deal with emergencies. Unfortunately this is not very cost effective.

The butterfly programmer

Engineers love shiny. Golang, rust, kotlin, there is a new flavor of amazing technology coming out every year and it is super important to learn the latest and greatest thing. Since everything ultimately resolves down to zeroes and ones in binary, what is the downside to staying current on leading-edge software development practices? The answer is “plenty”. There is a fine line between leading edge and bleeding edge. Early on in my career I indulged far too many people in letting them play around with new technology in production environments. They come in, get everyone using new tools and suddenly learn that sometimes the technology is not quite a good fit, or it is not production ready. This is when you discover if you have a butterfly programmer on your hands. A butterfly programmer will suddenly vanish at this moment, off to the next project or company, like a delicate butterfly going daintily from flower to flower sipping only the most delicious of nectars.

When someone wants to use a brand new technology on a project I stare at them real hard before saying “yes”. I want to make sure that if they inflict a new technology on the team they will be the sort to take it over the finish line and ship it. If I am not convinced that they will get it to 100%, I will likely refuse them their request the first time. If they are a butterfly programmer they will likely leave the team before they ask me again.

The squirrel chaser

This is another variant of an easily distractible engineer. The squirrel chaser cannot stay on task. Especially if it is something they do not love to do. Sometimes you will task someone with a two hour project and five days later it is not done. It is probably because they saw a squirrel, and who does not love chasing squirrels? This is a dangerous behavior. If you have something important that needs to be done, you have to be careful about giving it to a squirrel chaser. They are masters of coming up with reasons why they should ignore their clearly-assigned task and why this other thing is more important at the moment.

Sometimes you cannot fix your squirrel chasers. It is worth it to try. Quite often reactive live operations people are squirrel chasers. They love the thrill of fixing things more than the fulfilment of creating new things. I have found that the best thing to do for squirrel chasers in the long term is a role adjustment, especially if they are amazing squirrel chasers and there is a great need for their skills.

A dog named cat

In the process of making your teams you are likely hiring people. You only have a finite number of time and tools in the hiring process to bring people in. Sometimes you may wind up hiring someone unsuitable. Despite advertising “looking for a cat”, and counting legs, checking if it has fur, and seeing if it has a tail, you might actually hire the wrong animal. Welcome to having a dog named cat. So now what do you do?

In some places, employment law gives you a thirty-day window to evaluate an employee. Unfortunately that is a horrible and cruel way to solve a problem. If you were trying to hire a cat and wound up with a dog, that is clearly a misfire on your internal tools and processes. What I prefer to do in this situation is to see why exactly we hired this person in the first place and what can they contribute effectively on a day-to-day basis. I have had great success in bringing people into teams where I discovered that they were not perfect for the position, and were a better fit in a different role.

Sometimes I have also been successful in helping transform their skillset. You originally looked for a cat and now you have a dog. That is okay! I have successfully turned dogs into cats and I am convinced that it is worth it for you to try if you are in this situation. Even if you are not successful it is a valuable leadership exercise.

The leaky tire

Finally I want to talk to you about one of the more difficult edge cases in team management: The leaky tire.

Sometimes you will have an individual on your team who has variable output week over week. You might discover eventually that their performance is directly correlated to the level of praise or visibility on their projects. A car with a leaky tire will require you to stop moving forward, get off of the road, pump it up as much as you can, and then get back to moving forward. A leaky tire employee is the same thing.

I struggle with this one because it is hard for me to relate to leaky tires. I always have intrinsic motivations for everything I do. I will invest a few months of time into a leaky tire and see what the ratio of time invested to output looks like. I still do not have a one-size-fits-all answer for what to do with a leaky tire. If I have to spend five hours a week with a leaky tire, that does not scale well. If I have to spend thirty minutes a week pumping them up, I can keep that up for a considerable window of time.

A leaky tire will sometimes maintain a steady pace. Other times, they will subconsciously realize you are giving them a steady amount of positive feedback and start to require more pumping up without realizing it. When I find that someone is an unstable leaky tire, the best thing I have done is to instill gradual self-awareness of the issue. If you tell someone directly they are a leaky tire, they are apt to blow out nearly immediately. The best thing to do is to introduce them to the notion by giving them an example and saying “Hey look at that person, they are a leaky tire” and wait for self-awareness to hit. Half of them will react positively to the indirect coaching, the other half will get mad. If you think you have the latter case on your hands, it is best to be surprised and then say “I never thought of you that way before but let’s work together to understand this better”.

I tend to spend a lot of time trying to address this one because leaky tires tend to be high performers when they are “on”. If you can make them aware of their leaky tire issue and get them to correct it, then you have helped to transform them.  This will accelerate their professional development tremendously!

So there you have five archetypes to watch out for on your teams. While not exhaustive, this is a list of engineering types that I have had the pleasure of helping over the years.

As always, thank you for reading. If you are struggling with managing some individuals and want to reach out to ask particular questions, I am always happy to help!

It is pretty easy to be mad while at work. I learned that early on in my career. Lots of things made me furious and I took it upon myself to self-righteously attempt to address each and every one of them. I cannot stress enough what a bad idea this is. Every once in a while you will take the thing you are angry about and wrestle it to the ground. The vast majority of the time you will be sitting alone in the burned out wreckage of the battle you just “won” wondering what exactly just happened.

I am about to share one of the biggest things I have learned professionally over two decades:

If you are going to be mad at something please be mad at the right thing.

Dear students, welcome to Compartmentalization 101.

Before I get into this I want to state that the vast majority of things that make you mad at work should not make you mad at all. I think that was probably the first thing I did wrong. I got mad at just about everything.

Don’t like other people’s buggy code? Get mad. Don’t like being told your feature is not a priority? Get mad. Don’t like that your recommendation to change to a more scalable server platform got rejected without justification? Get mad. You can clearly see the pattern.

Any time you find yourself mad at work, you probably should take a step back and ask yourself “should I really be mad at this?”

I assure you the majority of the time that answer should be a firm and resounding NO.

These days it takes quite a lot at work to make me mad at a situation or at a person. I will not say that it does not happen. Most of the time it happens I can catch myself before doing something dumb about it.

This is why I urge people to learn to compartmentalize their emotions at work. If you are going to get angry at work you should understand why you are angry and what you are really angry about.

If you can get to a solid place of self-reflection you will find that when you are angry at something at work you are often angry at the wrong thing. This happens quite a bit with customer service. When I have a problem with my bank or my credit card that makes me angry, I am very apologetic to the person on the phone because I want them to understand that I am not mad at them—I am mad at the situation. I think that so many people take out their frustrations on these poor customer service people that they appreciate the heartfelt acknowledgement and it feels like they are more willing and able to help me get to a good outcome accordingly.

So how can you find out what you are really mad about?

I am very sorry. I do not have any magical ideas here to help with that. It will take a lot of practice.

The best place to start is to take a look at things that you do while you are angry. If you can get in front of those with some self-reflection, that is a good first step. It is also a very important one.

If you are angrily getting into conversations or angrily writing emails, you are probably going to create drama, tension, and unfortunate outcomes—especially if you are angry at the wrong thing.

I find that the time I slip up with this the most is before I am done my first cup of coffee in the morning. I am not yet fully engaged with my plan for the day and not yet fully caffeinated. I try to spend the mornings doing a little information absorption from the world around me while getting started with my day, and it helps get me into a positive mental framework. Because I am reading and thinking, I am also not grumpily digging into things or starting angry conversations. If you find yourself starting off the day blowing stuff up all around you, I strongly suggest you consider switching your day to input-mode like I do.

There are two other things that I do that help me catch myself when I am about to do something angry.

The first is to start off my emails with something like “I apologize for the delay” or “I appreciate your time”. The cognitive dissonance of trying to write that statement while angry is nearly comical. The other one is to end as many of my emails as possible by typing “Warm regards”. It has the same effect.

The additional side effect of the latter statement is that people who receive many of my emails directly or indirectly will see this. At least once a year someone will notice when it has been omitted from an email and they know that I am in a place that is either concerned or angry. I appreciate hearing from someone when they see I have left off my “warm regards”.

It is harder to get in front of an angry conversation. Being able to catch yourself in the moment takes a considerable amount of self-awareness. I would say that there is some significant percentage of time that I do not realize I am in an angry conversation until after I have already started digging into something aggressively.

I generally become self-aware about it before the conversation is over and then I have to stop, back up, and acknowledge it to the participants.

This is another good thing to do. If you cannot catch yourself before doing something angry you should be able to catch yourself consistently in the middle of doing something angry.

I am happy to be on the receiving end of gentle mockery and good natured ribbing after having a mea culpa moment. If I can get to a place of saying “Hey folks, I just realized I am angry about this situation and I should not be. Let’s back up a second here and discuss what the problem is,” then I am more likely to get to a good outcome. It will certainly be a better outcome than if you get into a meeting, proceed to set everything on fire, and then storm out of the room smelling of tears and ashes. I, um, may know someone who was good at that.

So why is it important to process your anger in this way?

For starters, you are probably angry at the wrong thing. You just cannot see it because you are angry. I have found myself angry at people when I should have been angry at situations, and angry at situations that have been created by people.

Identifying what you are really angry at is hard. It is very easy to be angry at people. Ironically, the more easily you get mad at someone, the less likely they are the reason you are angry. Unpacking deeply layered sources of frustration is a fine art and even twenty years into your career you might not realize the grand sum of all the frustrations you are carrying. Quite often you are just lashing out at the most recent thing added to a giant pile of frustrations.

If you can get to the place where you can identify when you are angry at work, and then start unpacking the things you are really angry about, that is a good place to be.

In addition to being angry at the wrong thing plenty of times myself, I have observed it in other people and generally make an effort to unpack what they are angry about. I will try two to three times per person to try to help them see past that and unpack what they are really angry about.

Being able to reduce the amount of things you are angry about and the amount of times you are angry at the wrong thing is an important part of transcendent career changes.

I am grateful that I have grown past the vast majority of things that made me angry, even if it took me a long time to do that.

If you find that you self-identify with this post, you might have some of the same problems early in your career that I did. Now I will tell you why it took me a long time to fix them.

For starters, if you are angry about things, then people are going to avoid you. Especially if you are angry about the wrong things. You can swiftly make yourself persona non grata on your team by constantly lashing out and constantly blowing up. When I first became painfully self-aware of how much I was angry at random things, I was immediately irritated that no one helped me with that. In hindsight I understand it better because I had a very large blast radius. There was a high probability that someone trying to set me on the road to self-improvement would have accidentally set off some kind of chain reaction and have been on the receiving end of some of the damage.

The second thing to mention is that angry people are also very easy to manipulate into a box. The worst boss I have ever had was pretty good at yanking my chain and getting me to do angry things as a default behavior. While you always want to give your boss and your leaders the benefit of the doubt and do your best to do things to help, sometimes you find that out after the fact that you were being set up for failure to advance someone else’s goals. I have not ran into this many times in my career but I have ran into it enough times that I know it when I see it and I know to control my reactions far better when being told to go dance blindly in the minefield while other people are clapping and cheering.

So there you have it.

Please do not get mad at work.

If you are going to get mad at work, you had better be mad at the right thing.

If you are mad at work and mad at the wrong thing, you are likely going to find yourself lonely in the best case, and weaponized by others in the worst case.

I wish I had some more concrete steps to help you get there from here. There are so many things that happened around the time that I started calming down professionally that I cannot really ascribe causality to any one of them.

If you find yourself in this situation, you might find you are going to hit a professional ceiling at work. Of course the instant you get made aware of that, I am expecting that you will probably be angry, and probably at your boss who did not promote you.

Which begs the question: Did you even read this article?

Heyooo!

Please share this article with your friends. Especially if you think it will make them angry. 

If you just got this article from a friend and were angry at them up until this sentence, please send them a thank you note. They are probably trying to tell you something you don’t want to hear.

That is the article today. Over the past month I have managed to find another half a dozen topics working with a few people who have asked for professional mentoring. If this is something that you are interested in, please reach out. This is absolutely a shameless sales pitch.