Seattle Startup Weekend 2 - Why are Good Developers Hard to Find?

I had a great time at Seattle Startup Weekend 2!

It started out slow for me. I despaired at first when the three things I wanted to work on either had too few people interested, the team didn't show up, or looked to turn into a business plan-fest. But then the folks who had gathered around a Twitter follower management idea finally showed up and the rest was... well... if not history... it was at least epic. Out the end of the weekend we had tweetsum up and running. The project will live on. It has already gotten me back into thinking about writing Rails applications.

Anyway, the subject of this post is why, in my opinion, some of the teams at Seattle Startup Weekend 2 (SSW2) had trouble finding developers. In a word; engagement.

There were a couple of teams that were strongly driven by "business folks". These team did not seem to want to engage the technical folks in give and take about what the business would look like and what to build. The business folks do business things (like plan and require and direct) and the technical folks do technical things (like code and configure and follow directions).

Sweet!! A day job!

Now, I'm all for having a good business model and a way to monitize your thingie. But there were a couple of teams that clearly thought of the people with development skills as a resource to be used.

Emphasis on used.

I heard from a friend that his group was building something that the group organizer had brought to SSW2 pretty well fully formed from a "what we want it to do and look like" point of view. The team just wasn't open to input on ways to improve it.

Okay, whatever. Just go find another group, right?

People were amazed at what the tweetsum team got done in just two days. We were able to do this because everyone on the team could do, not just direct. Each and every person was able to contribute directly to getting a site up and running. There was not a single person on the tweetsum team that did not code, configure servers, or perform some other core technical function.

But this is the key thing... they were free to do it any way they wanted.

(For reference, that's tweetsum's specification and process documentation sitting on the folding chair.)

That's right. We had a wealth of developers and designers and technical folks. And we had them specifically because it felt as little like a corporate day job as was humanly possible. In psychobabble terms their locus of control was internal as much as was possible.

The next time you're trying to recruit a team and are finding developers and other technical types hard to find, offer to share control with them. You'll get a lot more interest from the technical folks if you engage them instead of direct them.

How to Disable the Confirm File Delete Dialog

The Windows Confirm File Delete Dialog may be one of the most annoying things ever.

You see there's this thing called "the recycle bin" where my files go to when I delete them in Windows. So why the heck do I need to confirm that I want to move something to a place where I can later recover it anyway.

Okay, I'll stop foaming at the mouth any minute now.

On the up side, the folks at Microsoft seem to have actually thought this one through and there's a simple solution. I thoroughly expected to have to hack the registry again. But no...


Here's how to do it:

Right-click the recycle bin and select Properties.

Lo and behold! At the bottom of the properties dialog is a checkbox for "Display delete confirmation dialog".


Sweet! Just un-check this sucka and click OK and Bob's your uncle!

The Wrong Kind of Advice

This post was inspired by The Right Kind of Advice post on the nPost blog.

While telling someone to ignore naysayers and those that say you should go back and work for someone else is all nice and touchy-feely, it is also often dead wrong.

Telling someone that they are just not cut out to be an entrepreneur could be honestly good advice.

My ex-wife was a professional ballerina. She used to get people asking for advice about dancing ballet professionally. She could often simply look at the person and tell that they were not cut out for professional ballet. They may have loved ballet, been passionate and dedicated to ballet, but there was just no way that they were going to make it because they just did not have what it takes to be a professional ballet dancer.

Similarly, there are people that are just not cut out to be an entrepreneur. Heck, I may even be one of them. Telling them to just "go for it" or "follow your dream" is REALLY taking the easy road.

In order to give really good advice about this you need to get to know the person. You need to know what their goals are and how the business they are talking about fits into (and drives) their life. This is much harder than reviewing a business or marketing plan. It is much more difficult than assessing a market or opportunity. It requires real honest knowledge of the person and their life goals. It requires a deep understanding of their likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, their vision and their blind spots.

No entrepreneur is perfect and no business model is slated for certain success. Our job is to provide assistance, insights, and even a push in the right direction.

True.

Sometimes the right direction is away from being an entrepreneur.

Gnomedex 2008

Gnomedex was fantastic!

I'm serious, this conference is like a two day, one track, SXSWi. There were great talks (and not all of them were in the conference hall itself), great food, great parties. Much like SXSW, I left the event feeling totally energized and ready to go out and DO stuff.

The theme was "Human Circuitry" and I certainly felt plugged in.

The most emotionally charged talks were Sarah Lacy's talk on the state of blogging and Scott Maxwell's Mars 3.0 presentation. The blogging talk had a bunch of tension in the room for reasons that really are not that clear. The Mars talk was one of the coolest, most hopeful things I've seen in years.

Mars is cool. I have a special warm spot in my heart for that cold dry planet. Back in 1976 my father worked on NASA's Viking project to put two landers on Mars. I was a little kid sitting in an auditorium waiting for the very first picture after the Viking 1 Lander touched down in western Chryse Planitia. When the first lines of that picture rastered out across the screen the crowd, quite literally, went wild. While not at that level of electricity, the standing ovation that Scott Maxwell received was most assuredly well deserved.

Matt Hartley posted his Top Five Gnomedex Tips which I think should be retitled Top Five Conference Tips. Number two is "Stop Twittering every so often and listen." The twitter army was out in force and I felt from time to time that it was rather impolite to the presenters to see a sea of the backs of laptop screens. Looking around I'd say that at any given time about half the people were heads down typing away. If the talk was boring I assume they were browsing for something more enterataining. If the talk was electrifying I assume they were blogging/twittering/noting that, "Wow, this is great." It seemed like a waste to me.

Entrepreneur Mark Bao did a great two person panel with Francine Hardaway (Chris Pirillo served as a kind of moderator and straight man). Mark posted some great observations about speaking and networking at Gnomedex. I got to talk to Mark at the pre-registration party on Thursday. He's a great guy and his blog is definitely worth reading. Like many others at the conference, I'm really glad to have met him.

Those were the high points for me.

The internet connectivity the first day was pretty spotty. So if you're really relying on having a solid connection get an EVDO or something like that.

Overall my first Gnomedex was a great experience. Will I be back next year? Damn right I will!

Organizational Change is like Sausage

Eric D. Brown wrote a short post on his leadership organizational change blog. While I understand the sentiment, I don’t really draw the same conclusions.

I hear a lot of other folks say many of the same things about the way the tools of leadership and change management make them feel. This often reminds me of Samuel Clemens' quote about how "[t]hose who respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made." Organizational change and true leadership cannot be apolitical simply because they fundamentally are about dealing with people and their varied interests.

His primary complaints about the book he read is that it appears to be giving the reader advice on how to play the political game to manipulate people into doing what you want. When put that way these things really sound pejorative. However without further context it is hard to tell. Motivation for manipulation is critical to understanding the ethics of persuasion, just ask the mother of any two year old trying to get them to eat something "good for them".

It is all fine and good to say that a good leader “should already have people aligned with the necessary changes and have them ready to implement change.” But how does the leader do that exactly? Well, one way is to create a sense of urgency. To say that if a leader is doing their job a sense of urgency already exists is just plain silly. That implies that a leader doing their job has created a sense of urgency. But that’s exactly the advice Eric appears to argue against.

Further, Eric posits that organizational change should be about changing the game not playing it. But implementing change within an organization in a smooth and orderly fashion requires that you work within the existing structure to gain support for your change. This is particularly true if the change is to the game itself.

The “political acumen” and “art of persuasion” that disturb him are simply tools in the toolbox of a good leader. A good leader without political acumen will get eaten alive by some jackass that out flanks them in the executive ranks. A jobless leader is not particularly effective. A good leader without mastery of “the art of persuasion” is an oxymoron since a good leader persuades (not forces) people to follow them, even when the way forward is unclear or difficult.

I suspect that there was something else about this book that set off Eric's alarm bells. I’ve had this happen several times with books where the advice they were giving was clearly “good” yet I hated (and hate is not too strong for how I felt about some of them) something about it. The tone, the subtext, something set me off. I’ll bet if Eric looks closer he’ll discover the same thing.

Eric has many great posts about change management and leadership and I think he understands how technology fits into and can help drive the very changes he advocates (that's why I read his blog). But I think that like a lot of other people before him, he went off track on this one.