Once upon a time I had this guy who worked for me - astoundingly fast high quality coder. You know all those studies about guys on the right hand side of the productivity curve? This guy was out there. But he had a rotten temper. And he was always the smartest guy in the room. (He usually was, but that is not the point.)

I was reminded of him while watching Bewitched last night:

Isabel Bigelow: [after quitting/being fired] I can’t just walk back in there now.
Jack Wyatt: Once you show up in a golf cart, believe me, all is forgiven. I’ve done it a lot of times.

But it’s not, and after a year of constantly fixing everyone’s feelings I left him outside looking for his golf cart one day. I’m not sure our average production didn’t actually go up since everyone wasn’t playing Nina’s part:

Nina: We could electrocute him. There’s ton of wires around here.

I miss his output, but I miss him not at all as a fellow team-member. As Don said recently: it’s not like you can see an annoying habit in an interview and it’ll get better when they’re an employee!

I was reading the volokh conspiracy and ran across this fragment:

Do you know the password to the laptop?” If Boucher does know the password, he would be faced with the forbidden trilemma; incriminate himself, lie under oath, or find himself in contempt of court. Id . at 212

Roll that one around for a second - trilemma. Yummy.

I recently blogged about some desire we had for space. I guess our trilemma there was: potentially tough work environment, tough geographic distribution, or reduced flexibility.

This is neat because, while I’ve been hauling triority around for, gosh, two decades, I’ve never thought of problems in the same way.

For example, we’re launching a new service at Promote-My-Site in a few weeks. So we’re having the pricing discussion: too cheap to be taken seriously, too expensive to be adopted, too complicated to be explicable.

Handy concept, the trilemma.

We were looking to do some expansion, not so much because we’re hiring, but because finances are good and people are crammed up. We don’t want stupid SFO sytle hipster Ikea space - but I think a little elbow room and a conference room with 100ft2 of white board is a good thing. And maybe I get an office with a door. ‘Cause I talk a lot and people are tired of it.

The tricky bit is that we have a sweet sweet lease on our current space. I signed it when space was loose - we have an 18 month price protection with a 5 year right-to-renew. At $0.40/ft2 including all utilities. Very class B but we bought a lot of posters from art.com so it’s pretty cool looking.

Plus Ramen!

Anyway, our current landlord has some nice space in a building about a mile away. That sounds pretty far, but I walked it today (75 degrees - who says there are no winners in global warming?) and it took me 5 minutes by sidewalk and a cut through a parking lot.

So I guess we could put the admin/marketing/finance guys in one space and the techies in the other.

But I think we would lose a lot of team spirit, cross coordination, and just connection.

I spoke to my partner and he tried it once. His succinct answer: failure guaranteed.

Good enough for me.

Sorry, sad geek talk, but I was going through my fatter-than-Al-Gore RSS feed today and happened upon a very nice post in SEOptimise entitled: The Six Most Marketable SEO Skills. (No charge for the follow link boys! )

To summarize:
1> Analysis
2> Programming
3> Web Design
4> Social Media
5> Blogging
6> Sales

Good stuff - but only if you are not worried about getting outsourced to India or China. The problem with what I will call Type-1 skills is that someone 25% as good as you for 10% the cost will take your cake, outsource the cleaning of the plate to Malaysia, and send his kids to private school on it. And there will be a mile of people behind him trying to figure out how to take his job.

So I’d add that I was please to see sales (self-sales, really) on the list but would put:

A> Keen understanding of the clients market
B> Competitive analysis of the business
C> Focus on bottom line effects
D> Excessive client service

None of those can be outsourced. In bulk anyway.

In fact, the pyramid leverage model should inform your own push to get <1> - <6> out into a cheaper local (Des Moines? Bangalore? Saxapahaw?) so that your overall client value goes up. The trick is to provide more overall hours at the same price (and higher profit margin) rather than the obverse. The key here is your ability to create a larger client base.

I suspect that many of the people reading these posts are wondering why I seem so uninterested in SEO technology. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love the tech. A lot. But I know that the first principal of affording the time to play with the toys is to provide a client with enough value that they pay you obscenely well.

And not because bald guys who talk to their dogs are spooky. We have a LOT of Dilbert cartoons at work and I have several signed (early) books from my Palo Alto days. I get called PHB a lot, but in an affectionate way (I hope).

No, I fear the Dilbert moment - when I make a Pointy-Haired-Boss decision and nobody corrects me. Right now our culture is pretty, well, egalitarian is a mild word. Forward focused opinioneering? There is a buzz word in there somewhere.

We recently had a very long discussion about the wisdom of outsourcing servers versus dong the work inhouse. I thought the numbers would pretty much let us go either way and there might be some advantages to bringing the network back.

I should clarify that we don’t serve video, can get multiple taps into different ISP networks pretty easily, etc. And we have the capital to build out the server room, if we decided we wanted to.

Our folks made it perfectly clear to me that:

1> That is a stupid thing to do;

2> It will cost a LOT more in-house than you think it will;

3> You’re distracting us from our critical path items with this piffle (direct quote);

4> What happens when the hardware pinhead (these are developers) leaves? and

5> This will impact our bonus - are you nuts?

I’m not sure about the cost estimates being wildly wrong, but this was an experienced group of a half dozen people, so they clearly had more accumulated experience than I did, so I’m going to go with their opinion.

I was very interested in their focus on their deliverables - that impressed me.

I also liked their strategic thinking about profit sharing - more employees means a lower paycheck in the short term. We’re going to have to ponder that a bit - we do not want a culture of status quo. Maybe we need to sequester costs of expansion out two quarters or something. I suspect we have the technical ability to do that but I’ll have to ask our accountant if we need to change our costing.

What, you don’t cost your projects? We cost EVERYTHING. It’s not an obsession (I could quit anytime) but it helps us invest and understand where our profit comes from.

My final conclusion was: I was pleased that even though we’ve had a lot of expansion and a fair number of disparate projects, my team, new and old, is still willing to call me a ding-dong and get their way.

But not here - we don’t do them.

Well, we do go to the local pub and take cabs home. And eat big steaks. (Chicken or Tofu as you desire.) Not at pub, at local expense account place. With whiskey.

Why no Xmass parties? 50% likelihood of lameness.

We’re not into lame.

So we place spread bets ‘cross the festive season.

Sorta like everything else.

——
Update one: it’s 6am and I already have three emails from people who will NOT be at work today. Based on that number I’m going to assume another half dozen would probably be better off staying at home. See, I knew the good way to do a holiday party was not to do one!
——
Update two: two more people have fallen out. Wonder if it was the garlic butter popcorn someone burned in the microwave?

We just almost didn’t buy a widget that saved us at least a dozen hours of coding in the first week. Because it was too cheap ($139). If it had been open-source/free, we’d have tried it in a heartbeat - investing three days of engineering time that costs me $1,000/day.

So let’s net that back: it’s perfectly reasonable to spend $3,000 of time to try to accelerate a project but only if you don’t have to spend $139 to do so.

What. The. Frack.

When I say it has saved us a dozen hours, I should be more clear: this widget saved not only the three days (24 hours) we put into making sure it did what it needed to do, but it at the end of the fourth day (8 hours), we’d finished a task that was scheduled for 6 days (48 hours). I’d say it saved us two days (16 hours) but we had to write a bunch of new test plans (4 hours) to make sure we got good coverage.

So this $139/investment saved us $1,500 (1.5 days @ $1,000/day). In a week.

That, my friends, is a good investment.

Oh, and we own the widget now, so I’m sure when we next re-plan we can bring in a bunch of UI stuff, I betcha. Which saves even more money. And since the project will have more slack time, risk is lowered.

And we almost didn’t do this because we hesitated to spend $139.

Next team meeting maybe we’ll discuss giving everyone a budget, say $250, to buy software tools. Heck, you don’t have to find but one or two on a project. And since this one is clearly going to keep paying dividends, it’s probably “free” money.

Nota Bene: You may have noticed that I emphasized 8 hour days. That is because we believe that employees should go home unless the place is burning down. Nobody really puts in 8 hours, but if you push people towards that they may only work 10 and will be fresh when you really need a push.