I made the switch yesterday to Rogers Home Phone. It gets installed next week.

The biggest reason to switch for me is simple, to save money. For the first year, $30 a month gets us unlimited calling in North America. I now have four services with Rogers and they offer you 15% off them all if you have four. That works out to more than $30 so this is almost a freebie for us.

Now the questions remains, is the service any good?

Try this if you want to scare the pants off the average product manager at the average software company. Tell them you’re implementing 20% projects.

“Google requires engineers to spend a day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs”

Disclaimer: I know nothing of Google. I’ve never worked, visited, or otherwise been a part of the monster. All I know is bits I’ve read in the press so this is all just my take and nothing more.

Gmail began as a 20% project. Developers love to tinker with technology, it’s why they’re good at building software and this idea plays into that. Whether you admit it or not, your developers are not spending 95%, 90%, or even 80% of their time working directly on your companies deliverable software. They’re also working on projects that interest them. Endorsing this, and bringing it out in the open, allows you to tap into the knowledge they acquire in an open and meaningful way.

Turnover within software development often comes down to sheer boredom. Developers tire of the same old code base, the same old approach to the same old problems. Jumping ship, and moving to a new organization offers the excitement of new challenges, fresh ideas, and new processes.

On the other side, when you have new people join, they bring with them new ways of approaching problems, new ideas on existing processes, etc. My take, 20% projects reduces turnover and training costs while increasing overall productivity.

Truly excited, passionate developer says: “I’ve got a great idea, what if we built a foobler into our product?”

Guy in charge of his ‘hours’: “Sounds interesting. We’ll need to build a business case to demonstrate it’s ROI”

Truly excited passionate developer heads back to his desk and continues down the slope to becoming bored apathetic code jockey. After a few more exchanges like that one, no one will hear his ideas any longer. He’ll learn the real lesson, his ideas aren’t needed.

Here’s the same guy with 20% projects in place, talking to 3 other developers: “Hey, do you guys have a 20% project you’re currently working on? I want to build a foobler into our product. We could build a prototype as a 20% project and start using it internally.”

You now have excited, passionate developer taking on roles like salesman, project manager, team lead, consensus builder, support rep, etc. They’ve been given a medium to spread their passion and excitement virally throughout the organization. They have the power to act on their passions and take real action. They’re building community, they’re thinking outside the role of code implementer, they’re engaged.

“Toyota does a great job of engaging their employees. Toyota employees are required to submit two suggestions per month that they can implement themselves or with a teammate. As a result, Toyota receives about 1.5 million employee suggestions for improvement each year. More impressively, 80% of these actually get implemented! Even though many of Toyota’s employees perform repetitive manufacturing jobs, this approach fully engages employees in improving their work processes.”

20% projects are meant to facilitate the growth of your individual’s, allowing them to be creative and use their imaginations. They can actively take on new roles, make mistakes, learn by doing, take on responsibility, feel in control and capable of contributing.

Quality people quit companies when they know they lack the power to change things. 20% projects addresses that head-on. While it’s great to end up with a product like GMail, in my opinion any actual products that come out of something like this is just gravy.

People are most productive and work best when they enjoy what they’re doing and most importantly have a sense of ownership. You can ask people to be leaders, take responsibility, innovate, etc until you’re purple in the face. People learn through action not orders or lessons. 20% projects are a stepping stone to 100% projects. It allows people to enjoy their work and learn that it isn’t as important what you do as how you do it. In the beginning they may pine to work on their 20% projects but over time their passion will bleed over and infect all of their projects. If you’re lucky, in time, you’ll be unable to distinguish when people are working on 20% projects or not.

I’ve spent significant chunks of time in both Microsoft(MS) and non-Microsoft development worlds. With recently moving back to the MS world, the differences seem to be highlighted to me in stark contrast. One issue I feel I’m becoming a broken record on is MS’s approach of tying code bases to the development tool(IDE), specifically their Visual Studio tool.

What I’m referring to here is MS’s solution and project files. They are part of your code base as most projects put them under source control. If you want to move to a new version of the IDE, say VS 2005, then you must migrate your existing files to a new version. At that point, developers using VS 2003 can’t open or use the projects and solution files and must upgrade. Can you run a MS project without being tied to the MS tools? Of course but it’s a lot of work and you’ll generally irritate hardcore MS guys and are left out of some major features of the toolset.

The same issue exists with the .NET framework itself. If you want to move your code base to using 2.x of the framework then you need a new IDE, VS 2005.

So what’s the big deal? To most people entrenched in MS development, nothing. To non-MS people, this can be a big issue and surprises them. They’re used to having the freedom to use any IDE they like or maybe using several depending on what they’re working on. On every non-MS project I’ve worked on, the notion of putting anything related to a development tool into the code base is considered taboo and you do your best to avoid.

Every other technology framework I’ve worked on has little to no dependency on specific development tools or IDE’s. A new version of Java is released, you get the new version of java and it’s compilers and you’re good. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on a Java project but I’ve never had to upgrade Eclipse or VI when a new version of Java is released.

You want my conspiracy theory, or maybe this is just plain obvious economics? MS makes money selling Visual Studio not the .NET framework. Having these hard connections sells IDE’s. You want to move your code base from .NET 1.x to 2.x? Go for it, it’s “free” except of course having to upgrade every developer’s IDE.

My jaded biased view is that I seriously doubt this has anything to do with technology and is all about selling upgrades. I’m not complaining, just talking out loud.

I signed up for the trial of Mark Hurst‘s gootodo yesterday. I just paid for the upgrade today. The 10 todo limit is a joke and makes it practically impossible to truly test the app. The good news is that at $3 a month, paying for a 6 months ‘trial’ is very affordable.

Obviously I like it so far. Very simple app that works quite well. The email integration itself makes it very painless to use, allowing you to simply send your todo’s as emails to addresses like today@gootodo.com, tomorrow@gootodo.com, dec25@gootodo.com etc.

It’s official. I sold out for a windows mobile device. I don’t think I have a real need for a mobile device of any kind but it all happened so fast, we were young, it was a crazy time, we were all experimenting.

Anyway, hyperstrike is sending me a Dell mobile device in exchange for a 15 minute phone interview, they’re calling today. I think that means I’ll be featured in their November newsletter, this could get ugly. As everyone knows, I really am the poster boy for fitness.

Bloodletting, as the name indicates, was the practice of letting blood out of the patient in order to cure them. Quote from wikipedia:

“George Washington was treated in this manner following a horseback riding accident: almost 4 pounds (1.7 litres) of blood was withdrawn, contributing to his death by throat infection in 1799.”

In the context of today’s medicine, it’s difficult to imagine draining the blood out of someone to cure them for falling off their horse. So my question is what’s our bloodletting? What are we doing today which tomorrow’s generation will look back on in disbelief?

An interesting Pfeffer/Sutton quote:

“The business world is among the few places where the term guru apparently has primarily positive connotations. In religion and politics, gurus are portrayed as extraordinary but often dangerous leaders, who attract fanatical disciples who bend to their wishes, even when doing so harms themselves and others.”

The business and technical worlds I’d say.

Apparently there are some issues with renting a coder. As it relates to us, it’s the recommendations that I found interesting:

“Instead, I recommend that you find a coder that you can work with by assigning small jobs to that coder and begin to develop a relationship with that coder outside of RAC.  Once that trust is developed the coder will do a much better job because they are not being gutted by the RAC commissions.”

Or you can talk with us. We can bring a lot of the benefits of services such as rent a coder along with having done all the above already.

If you know me personally then I’m sure you’re shaking your head at this title, as in here we go again. I’m a relatively outspoken advocate against the entire model of grading employees, and for that matter possibly students as well. I’m not avoiding hurting any previous egos and I’m not opposed to firing employees or failing students.

If you’re grading employees then you’re basically following the model set out in the school system. It works in assessing students, most of our people were students, therefore why shouldn’t it work for grading our employees? So you start giving your employees grades for participation, client satisfaction, etc.

Let’s assume for now that grading students actually works, I’ll leave that one to Alfie. The main reason it doesn’t translate to the work environment is simple. In school you are independent and for the most part you succeed or fail based on you and your actions. Sure there’s group work but that’s a farce at best.

In contrast, work, and success in business, is highly interdependent. You are dependent on others actions and help in order to accomplish your job. A company only succeeds if everyone, or the majority, succeeds. Who cares how perfect your ‘scores’ have been this year if you show up to locked office doors tomorrow?

If you’re hiring recent graduates this is, in my opinion, one of your biggest tasks in terms of their development over the first few years. That is, break them of the independent success model that they’re accustomed to, having spent their entire lives in it. It’s why I’m always hesitant to hire people who did very well in the school environment straight out of school. I’m not suggesting they can’t florish in the interdependent work environment, just to keep an eye on it and help them out with it.

Ok, this is non-technology related so apologies if you’re only here for the geek stuff. States are now banning tag. That’s tag as in “you’re it” tag. It’s now too dangerous for our children to play tag, and I thought mandatory visors in hockey was stepping over the line?

I was kidding at the time but how far are we from suing nature?

Parent’s are worried about the “near collisions” they witness when kids play tag. Well get ready for the panic attacks that accompany watching your 25 year old walk a downtown sidewalk for the first time after spending their entire lives protected from ever colliding with another human. Going through that first one at 25’s going to hurt.

We really may be losing our collective minds.