For the average IT worker, getting laid off in this recession is going to be a serious problem. Many of you have invested heavily in a skillset that is very specific to the business you work for and may not transfer easily to another company. Often, IT employees are experts at technology that doesn’t have much appeal outside of the world of large, corporate IT departments. Even Java, which only a decade ago was the new hot thing, is almost never talked about as a platform for startups, software companies, or high-tech industries. Java, Cobol, DB2, CICS, etc, these are the skills that are going to flood the marketplace with excessive supply when the layoffs hit your town. Add on to that the non-technical IT peeps: PMPs, front-line and middle-managers, project management “office” robots. When crowds of these people hit the streets it becomes hard to differentiate yourself.

Here are a few of my thoughts about recessions and layoffs that I think are useful. Please note they are specific to corporate IT and may not cross over to other industries, just in case you googled your way here:

I’m a little biased. In the decade I spent working in corporate IT, half of it was spent wishing I could get out. Now that I’m finally out, it’s my hammer to every nail. If you’re happy in IT, my advice may not apply to you. But… if you’re not so happy, if you feel like your talents are being wasted, or troubled that your skills are being eroded, or frustrated that market forces don’t reach down into your little corner of the IT world then this advice might be helpful to you.

The best advice I have for corporate IT peeps in this recession is… be a SLACKER
What? A slacker? Seriously?

Yup. Be lazy. Take your time. Don’t stress about work. Don’t bring your laptop home. Don’t “rise to the occasion” and “suck it up” to make your project successful. Nope. Do none of those things, except for brief stints where it is absolutely necessary.

Instead, do the following:

Why do this stuff? Because it differentiates you. It shows that you are motivated, talented, and ingenious. It increases your attractiveness to hiring managers in and out of corporate IT. There is also potential that one of these activities will work out into something that will support you and might even make you rich. You don’t have to build an empire on the scale of Bill, Steve, or Sergei to have a happy and fruitful existence. A web site that generates $200,000 in revenue each year with a cost of about $50,000 is a pretty sweet addition to the life of three buddies who built it in their spare time.

Now, a story.

When I was in college I aced ONE class in my major (mechanical engineering). Oddly enough, it was software related: computer aided design. During the semester, I learned two things: that top students were going to be asked to interview for a high-paying summer job with a local manufacturing company, and that teaching assistants didn’t work very hard and made a relatively large amount of money. I wanted both of those jobs.

I spent a few hours each week in the CAD lab on a project that I was only interested in as a way of getting these jobs: designing a monocoque recumbent bicycle. One of my friends was into bikes, even if I wasn’t, and it seemed like an interesting design challenge, so I started. I finished it right before the interviews for the summer job, printed out an exploded assembly drawing on 4 foot wide plotter paper, rolled it up and took it to the interview with me.

We all interviewed on the same day, which meant we got to wait together. The moment I walked in with that rolled up drawing in my hand everyone knew that I had already won the first spot. It immediately became a competition for second place. Later on, another kid told me he didn’t even bother showing up for the interview because he knew I was applying and had seen what I was working on in the lab.

The average person will only do average things. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to do more than average. But what you do needs to be chosen well. It needs to have value outside of corporate IT if it is going to benefit you. Going above and beyond inside a world that is on the verge of laying you off is NOT an effective means of differentiating yourself. Think outside the cubicle. Slack your way through the recession, at least until you get an opportunity you actually want.

2) That I wasn’t being paid for my work – I was working for the dark side while collecting a salary from Collaborative Software Initiative (interesting, given yesterday’s post)

3) That it all started when I just accidentally showed up out of habit – I guess 7 years of habitual commuting is hard to break somewhere in the subconscious.

I woke up from this nightmare in a full on panic. How could I be so stupid? Mike is going to fire me! I don’t even like that job! Why in the world would I go back like that!

It took about an half an hour to calm down, to realize it was just a dream, and go back to sleep. It still makes me feel cold inside to think about this little nightmare. I hope I never have to go back to corporate IT. Ever.

As a consequence, I’ve resolved to wear pajamas all day long today, and to take a mid-afternoon break to play the Wii with my son Eli.

Wait – didn’t I do that yesterday?

Why yes I did, thank you very much.

Let’s hope tonight I have a normal recurring nightmare instead, you know, like going to school in your underwear or something like that.

A few months ago I plopped my 270 pound butt down in that thing and heard a horrible pop, accompanied by an uncomfortable drop onto the tensioning mechanism that holds the seat together. The seat pan had broken, snapping at the point at which it is cantilevered to the frame.

I wanted to cry – I call it my $250,000 chair because it is all I have left from a business venture in my twenties during which I squandered a quarter of a million dollars trying to be “smart”. I like to tell people I’d have been better off if I had acted like a typical twenty-something and bought a Ferrari or fancy skiboat instead of trying to build a consulting gig into a consulting company. Sigh. Long after the employees and clients have forgotten about me, I still had the chair, at least until it broke under the weight of my burgeoning backside.

I logged onto eBay right away and searched for Aeron seat pans. They were about $150, plus shipping. New chairs were pretty much the same price they had been when I first bought mine – about $700. I wasn’t happy, and my wife wasn’t happy about paying money to fix/replace the chair.

Though it seemed like a long shot, I decided to check out the chair’s warranty, so I went to the Herman Miller site and poked around.

Ten years, it said. I couldn’t believe it. Ten years? I read the fine print, expecting it to be prorated, like tire or mattress warranties. But it wasn’t. So I contacted the service center, and they sent me a box and a label. I sent in my chair, and, believe it or not, the very next day the chair came back with a new seat pan. THE NEXT DAY!

I couldn’t believe it. It must have cost at lest $100 to same day that chair to me, not to mention the cost of shipping the chair to them, which they had also covered.

I thought service and accountability like this were history, but Herman Miller and their service providers proved me wrong. Thanks Herman!

-Dave

Holy crap! Think about this guy’s proposal and the trust it required for

The first experience happened in the first week of the first grade. By luck, I had the same first grade teacher as I had had in Kindergarten, Ms. Knockle (sic). Like any first grader, I was in love with her, in a pure first graderly sort of way, and she seemed to recognize me as a bright kid because she took a special interest in me (but, now that I write that down and think about teachers I know, maybe she took a special interest in me because I wasn’t that bright and she felt I needed help. At any rate, she made me feel bright.)

During the first week of school, we all wore name badges to help get to know each other, attached to our shirts with stick pins. I know, I know, you can’t give stick pins to six year olds. This was 1979 though, and kids could still get BB guns before they could spell their own names (as we’ll see in a moment). Anyway, several of the boys started to chase the girls with the pins, threatening to poke them. I joined in and was the only boy to actually succeed.

Of course, I was ready with a perfect explanation. “I lost my pin when I was jumping off the rocket. It landed in ground poking straight up, and she sat on it.” Brilliant.

Five minutes later I was headed back to class, my butt still burning from the smack of the principle’s paddle on my butt cheeks. I went back to my desk and tried to do my work, but I had a hard time not crying and only stared at the assignment.

After a while, Ms. Knockle called me back to her desk and quietly asked me to tell her the truth. She was kind, and gentle, and fervently wanted me to admit what had really happened so we could put the incident behind us. I thought I had found an ally, someone who would believe me and defend me against little Susie’s accusations, so I insisted I had told the truth. My stick pin really did embed itself in her bottom without any help from me, and it was unfair to spank me for it. Ms. Knockle sent me back to my desk. Halfway there I stopped and looked back at her. She had lowered her head to her desk, sobbing.

The second incident was a little more serious. I had been given a BB gun, my very first one, with the strict admonition that I would not shoot people, animals, or, most importantly, windows. It wasn’t long before I was showing off my new gun to my friends, including little Susie (in reality, it was not the same kid, but hey, it’s better this way). At some point, little Susie and I got into an argument over something or other, and she was standing on the top of a pile of dirt shouting at me.

“You better shut up,” I said, “or I’m going to shoot you.”

“You will not!” she yelled.

You know what happened next. Susie ran home, a welt on her stomach from my BB gun, a sympathetic and affirmative parent waiting. I ran home too.

An hour later there was a knock on our door, and my mother and I found ourselves facing a large, unsympathetic police officer. He wanted to know my version of events leading up to the pelting of little Susie. I was, naturally, quick to think up a completely reasonable explanation. It had something to do with that guy who would shoot apples off peoples heads with a bow, but I don’t recall the exact details. At any rate, the point of the story was that Susie had given me permission to shoot her, a complete fabrication.

I now have a very strong aversion to lying. It is difficult for me to lie, even when it is clearly in my best interest. This frequently causes trouble for me, particularly when it comes to the way pants fit or whether I mind doing such and such. But it has also been a tremendous asset in my career. I am perfectly comfortable admitting I screwed up as a project manager and that it cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result. Yes, such an admission could get me fired, and it may be logical to try to obfuscate the truth to protect myself, but I don’t, as a general rule. I’m not going to claim I am perfectly honest all the time, but it is not natural for me to lie. I don’t do it well, a lesson I learned in the first grade. I think I just quit trying to lie, sometime after that cop walked off with my brand new BB gun.

Lying creates more problems than it solves. If you lie to cover up for a mistake, it increases your culpability for that mistake. If you get caught lying about something, the consequences are far worse than if you just tell the truth. Nobody lies well. I’ve watched hundreds of people try it, and it’s almost always obvious that someone is lying. Don’t bother with it. Instead, try something I wish I’d done, way back in the first grade.

“I did it. I’m sorry that I hurt somebody, and I don’t want this to happen again.”

It still works.

At first blush, this may seem widely off-topic. I promise it is not. The core of these blogs is about helping IT make better decisions. Some focus on empowerment and training of people. Others, like me, believe a cultural effect is the solution. Others tend to gravitate towards process improvement. Then there are some –probably masochists – want to change all three. What I observed yesterday at my garage sale provides some common anti-patterns that often plague IT decisions.

A quick tangent: Because of how I grew up, I don’t like used things. I don’t like the uncertainty of used items. I don’t like the idea of taking other people’s stuff. I don’t even like used cars, let alone socks. In my long career of conducting two garages sales, I am wholly overmatched by what I can only imagine are CIA trained garage sale ninjas. These people are pros. They stick and move. They travel in packs. After the siege, I have an empty garage and only $1.37 in nickels to show for it. I’ll be ready next time

Value is as value does

Value has a ceiling it never reaches and a floor it sinks right through

I don’t know what it more depressing, buying a $600 diamond encrusted HAM radio or selling it for $10. Like most things in life, when I make purchases, I have great plans in store. I sell these great ideas to my wife and CFO who approves the budget. I even convince myself. Invariably, I don’t get near as much value or use as I thought I would. This is especially true in IT. Refactoring may be both needed and necessary, but will almost never return your investment – especially not as much as promised. Most of the time, it is a red queen problem. We are not trying to stay ahead; we are trying to stay afloat.
Conversely, the value of your IT initiatives depreciate almost the day you deliver to production. Business and technology change to fast. The system you thought would give you at least ten years before replacement, looks soggy (a new phrase I’m trying to introduce) within two years. My $600 turned into $10 is less than three months.

Never count your money while you sitting at the table

Ok, I didn’t write line – nor did I invent delicious slow roasted chicken – but Kenny Rogers was on to something. Never count the money in the pot – it’s gone. When surveyed, people seem to understand this concept. In practice however, as Las Vegas will attest, people don’t act that way. A bad bet doesn’t get better odds just because you put money in. (And don’t be difficult and bring up “pot-odds”). Similarly a bad project doesn’t get any better just because you already spent millions. In fact, it gets worse.

I kept thinking about all the money I spent on my diamond crusted combination garlic press / DVD burner. It would be silly to sell it for $5; I spent so much on it already. But, that money is already gone. It is counter-productive to keep holding on because of that. Plus, if I pass on the offer, I’ve lost another $5.

When opportunity costs knock

After three humiliating hours of having total strangers manhandled, undervalue, insult and demean my possessions, I have almost $6 to show for it. For those who didn’t buy my diamond encrusted graphing calculator, that’s only $2 / hour. Some would consider that low.

There is such a thing as lost opportunity. (My wife for instance had the opportunity to NOT marry me. She didn’t take that opportunity and now she is stuck with me. Sucker.) While conducting my garage sale, I was unable to do other things of value. I could have been writing or painting or finding something else to encrust with diamonds. Therefore, I was losing my time and the opportunity to invest time somewhere else. In return, I was getting paid $2 / hour. It wasn’t worth it.

This is a very familiar business concept, but poorly practiced in IT. Opportunity costs are a killer. Every time you fix a defect in production, because you “saved” time in testing, you are actually costing yourself time. (You are actually costing yourself more time because of the nature of the fix required.) Now while your developers are busy fixing this defect, they are not having the opportunity to write new enhancements or improve testing. This creates a time crunch, which in turn leads to counter-productive time saving measures. These measures, of course, drive up defect rates. To keep the analogy, we lost $10 worth of productivity, paid $2 for it and think we saved $8.

After the delivery matters

Well that’s my garage sale for this year. I can’t wait for next year when I can punch myself in the face again. You know what they say, “If at first you don’t succeed, then your odds of failing again are actually higher the next time.”