“I hear what are you saying” and related signs of problematic management

“I hear what you are saying”

“Hmm… I usually do following in this situation”

Let me stop just after two examples. If you have heard it being said to you, start looking somewhere else for help. And there is 99% chance that you have heard this said to you before. Don’t lie – not to yourself! Remember, you HAVE heard it at one point of time or another, haven’t you?

You see, when someone faces a problem and has got no particular answer, maybe because they don’t think the problem is worth their time, or when they really think you need help and they need to be the person who helps you but have got no idea how, they will scavenge for an escapist answer while you think they are going to do something about it. Make no mistake! The correct and only correct answer is “I don’t know what you are talking about. (Because of … ) Can you please try to explain it further?”

This is something many people don’t realize. Listeners are good at listening because they have got nothing to say. And more they listen, longer they are not trying to get to an answer.

There is nothing inherently malicious or evil about it. This is just how communication goes. In a very profound way, THE problem, is still in you. And in not very profound way, the answer is out there. Its like digging a hole in ground looking for a treasure. There has to be a limit after which you need to find new location for starting anew.

And ‘I hear what you are saying’ is just one sign where it makes sense to stop expecting an answer and start looking for it some place else.

Male Chauvinism, Masculinity and Logic

I have encountered following traits as socially being interchangeable:

1. Male Chauvinism
2. Masculinity
3. Logic

If you don’t follow this list, try reading it from below. Examples:

Men are logical while women are not.
Men don’t cry.
Women are emotional.
Girls are’t good at Maths.

I mean to say, it is fairly obvious that masculinity is confused with logical thinking. This has historically been understood, and it is easy to find proofs of it in historical texts. I will not dwell into it further.

No, the point of concern here is how often masculinity and male chauvinism are confused. For example, these are sentences I have heard from my friends over time:

1. A man should control his woman’s mind. It shouldn’t be allowed to wander too much.
2. It is better if your woman sees the world through your eyes.
3. A younger girl is better because she will trust you more than herself.
4. Women crave a commanding authority.

As such, a ‘masculine’ liberal is a man who forces freedom upon the women (and not shares it). A ‘masculine’ conservative is a man who doesn’t think freedom is for women.

It is easy to digress from here into a discussion about women’s rights. But that would be missing the subtle charge laid upon men to be ‘masculine’. Or rather, accept the authority of those who are more masculine. By forcing a man to govern over a women, and thus derive masculine identity from it, one forces a man to accept an order. That the indicter, by the very fact of being a part of such an order before the latter, is proven to be more masculine becomes an essential side effect.

Of course, once indiction is completed, one needs to find another victim to boss around and include in the hierarchy.

Marketing and Technology

So I had a chat with my boss. After a massive fuck-up, where I refused to deal with constant belittling from a DTL (Domain Tech Lead in PayPal) and then started working from home instead, I was contacted by managers and architects to ask me ‘what is going on?’.

After several rounds of talk, I came up with a feeling of being used and disillusioned. I felt like not taking shit is a sign of immaturity.

This is a big deal for me because I have been constantly abused for ‘being immature’ and ‘childish’ before, and now I consider myself to be a grown-up after all these years. To have that self-image shattered and belittled by people appearing to be helpful to you is very confusing.

So lets get back to the topic in hand.

PayPal is trying to reinvent itself as a brand of high technologists. Kind of like Google. The only problem is that it is not really a technology dependent company. PayPal website is historically known to be bad and slow. PayPal as a company has inspired countless incidents of bad publicity. PayPal is a business leader because it had a first mover’s advantage and it has maintained this lead due to network effect. Only now it is getting to see some competition.

And that has PayPal board panicked. A new president, David Marcus, is on board who is all about being lean and nimble. Except that before this, the only way to the top was by sucking-it-up or moving into management. Suddenly a hammer has come down and met this age old force, naturally causing much chaos and confusion.

I am writing this from PayPal India branch (Chennai) and all anyone is talking about is what is going to happen. Everyone is scared about their job and those who aren’t are planning to leave anyway. The only people remaining are the people who have got support from the upper management. And that is where the circle is completed. The action of the president has caused blatant nepotism to be visible all over the company; something that was hidden and situated above the common workers until now.

One would wonder if this wasn’t visible to the board before. Let us consider both possibilities:

1. Yes.
   If board knew this is what was going to happen, then it means that the board doesn’t care. Which probably makes sense. A business is run on cost-price basis and not on human currency. There might be some causalities but hopefully some good is also in pipeline after this. One possibility is that PayPal had been hiring from named institutes of India all summer and by firing the old guard it will enable the new one to thrive. In such scenario one would assume that even the managers aren’t safe and are just as scared. It might very well be true.
2. No.
   Board is highly myopic in this scenario. The future of the company boils down to the power of president in changing the culture. A highly chaotic environment is to follow soon. Anybody who sees it coming will definitely leave for calmer waters.

In either case, it is a bad time to be a developer in the company. The pay isn’t that good for most people in Chennai (because almost all of them are on contract) and the only reason to remain in the company is nepotism.

This post consists and represents my and only my opinions. I have tried to avoid mentioning personal anecdotes (of which I have plenty), many other company wide directives etc.

FVWM

Just update fvwm_patches project on github, so all the patches apply on latest FVWM cvs snapshot. This has sent me back to those times when I was amply free and was full of enthusiasm. Let me tell you a story…

Those were the times when I thought installing Gentoo was an accomplishment one brags about to win a girl friend (I didn’t). It was a new world! I couldn’t understand Mandrake, I hated RedHat, SuSE was giving me graphics problems and I hadn’t heard of Debian or Slackware. So I was excited to have a functioning system after 2 days of hard work and, as a man, was probably closest to what a mother feels holding her baby.

As usual I installed KDE and for some time it was awesome.

Oops… that is not when I found out about FVWM… my memory… it stinks.

Then I completed my bachelors and went to Germany for doing an internship. I was given the “best” machine, but I had no root access on it and the sysadmin was a jerk. So KDE used to run like molasses. I tried many different window managers, including openbox, fluxbox, windowmaker and somemore. I saw fvwm and it was and intuitive as something made by Apple on opposide day. So I didn’t even consider it.

But I was still unsatisfied. Things didn’t work as much as I wanted them to. And I hated right-click and getting a menu with ‘Terminals’ and ‘Applications’ as two seperate options. I tried FVWM95

Anyway, at some point in my quest I landed at Tavis Ormandy’s config file. And it is as awesome as it is now. I have never got around to actually learning any of the fvwm commands. But I have learnt enough to modifiy it to my tastes.

In last two years I didn’t get to use Linux a lot. But some days ago I finally installed Kubuntu on my office laptop, untarred the old config files saved in my backup drive, and was surprised to learn that it was throwing many many errors and warnings, as well as not being transparent. That is easy, fix fix fix, and patch patch patch. Except this time the patches weren’t working anymore and I didn’t have Gentoo to manage it all by itself.

Which brings me back to today. I intend to maintain those patches so people like me won’t have to hunt around the internet and obscure mailing lists.

Sorting for humans

If you are anything like me, you have at least once in your life tried to sort all the cards in a deck.

Which sorting algorithm did you use?

Well, humans generally use selection sort without even thinking. But the interesting part is that selection sort actually works really really well, and is probably the best for humans.

You see, we can do mental work quickly, but moving hands is cumbersome. This translates to easy comparison and very slow swap/insert operation when doing it by hand. And selection sort just fits into this requirement!

(VisualSort has a nice sorting visualization for comparison.)